Category — Uncategorized

40% of your work time is spent toggling between the task demanding your focus and a communication tool such as email or Slack.  That would be like having someone stand next to your desk and ask you a question every other minute.  Can you imagine?  (I’m sure some of you can imagine because you have someone at work who asks you a question every other minute.)

According to a study: “Once you check an email, it takes you an average of 64 seconds to resume your original task. Even worse, another study found that when an email involves doing something outside our inbox, it takes over 9 minutes to return to the original task.”

I now think about this before I send an email or Slack message.  I am dragging someone out of productive thought.  So it better be worth it; it better be an email that they need to receive vs. something I could figure out on my own.  It’s interesting to see how many fewer messages you send when you think, “I am dragging someone out of their work to see this” before writing.

Do you leave communication tools open while you work?  Have you ever tried turning off email and all notifications for stretches of time?

Which do you find scarier: zombies, clowns, or ghosts?  I ask because I was surprised reading an Atlantic article about fear.  Vote on the scariest one before clicking over to see the article.

(Click “see previous responses” if you want to see how other people are answering)

That wasn’t actually the most interesting part of the article.  Nor was learning the term “trypophobia” which is “the fear of closely clustered circles.”  It was this idea of our fears backfiring:

In the wake of 9/11, airplane ridership plummeted in the United States as many people opted to travel by car. A German psychologist estimated that in the 12 months following the attacks, 1,595 more people were killed in car accidents than would be expected in an ordinary year.

So people stopped flying, deeming it unsafe.  But they still had to get from Point A to Point B, so they circumvented their fear by taking a different mode of transportation.  And in the end, their cause of death was due to the thing they did to get around their fear.  That’s simplifying it because their cause of death was a car accident, and maybe that car accident occurred while they were driving somewhere they wouldn’t have flown.  But at least some of those accidents occurred because the person opted to drive instead of fly because they were scared to fly after 9/11.

I think about this a lot because I do many things to circumvent my irrational fears.  It is scary to think that one of them could be my undoing.

Great… now I have a new thing to fear.

Do you do things to circumvent your fears?  Or do you plow through them?

Have you played on Dollar Street?  It’s a website that imagines the world living on a single street, with poverty on one end of the block and wealth on the other end.  You can peek into the houses of the hundreds of people who currently live on the street.

Fair warning: you will go down a rabbit hole looking at other people’s pictures.  Things like power outlets and showers suddenly become fascinating as you move from house to house (which is technically sometimes country by country).  You learn a little bit about the family itself, their jobs, how they feel about their possessions or their home, their plans for the future.

It was created by Anna Rosling Rönnlund who was trying to crunch data and present it in ways that were understandable.  “Carefully selecting data to present it in colorful and moving charts made overall global trends and patterns easier to understand. But it did not make everyday life on different income levels understandable. Especially not in places far from home.”

She also explains how the monthly income numbers were calculated and converted into dollars for easy comparison.

The homes of people on one end of the block look nothing like the homes of people on the other end of the block, though it’s comforting to see that while water situations change drastically, dish soap is dish soap is dish soap wherever you go in the world.

I really didn’t want to hear the BBC’s answer to their question —  does mindfulness really improve our health? — unless it was affirmative.  I’ve kinda sorta been trying different mindfulness exercises since January.  It’s a bummer to have someone pee in your Cheerios about something that is working for you.

The article makes a fair point — there hasn’t been enough (or long enough) research done even though anecdotal evidence looks interesting.  I’m all for more research.

This is what mindfulness does (for me): it reminds me to exist in the present.  Some of the things I do — such as now writing my worry list — helps me compartmentalize the past and future so they don’t cover up the present.  That’s all they are: fences.  And when I meditate before working, that’s a gate.  I open the door and step through it and spend at least five minutes in the present moment, fully focused on the present moment, which is longer than I spent on the present moment before I started keeping lists and deep breathing.

It has been interesting to learn about myself.  I think of myself as a nostalgic person, always trying to hold onto the past.  But I’ve noticed that I spend a lot more time worrying about the future.  Like deep into the future; not worrying about upcoming events but spending hours thinking about things ridiculously far off in the distance.  Like decades down the road.

It has been eye-opening to remind myself that the world decades down the road isn’t like the world I’m living in now.  There will be global changes, societal changes, and some of the things I worry about may be a moot point because those events won’t be taking place in the same world I’m living in now.

So I’m grateful for those fences and gates.

NPR had a deep dive into parenting advice last month, covering not only what we do but what we don’t do.  Hint: other cultures deeply value people who aren’t the parent but play a critical role in the child’s life.  You can be infertile, therefore, and parent.

More on that in a second.

It begins with looking at parenting advice.  Most parenting advice — especially the stuff pertaining to raising babies — is opinion.  The stuff printed in books: opinion.  The stuff from experts: opinion.  So many of us get our knowledge about parenting from said books or the Internet, and it’s sometimes untested and not used in the rest of the non-Western world.

In many instances, what we think is “necessary” or “critical” for childhood is actually not present in any other cultures around the world or throughout time. “The list of differences is really, really long,” says Lancy… “There may be 40 to 50 things that we do that you don’t see in indigenous cultures.”

That, of course, is true of everything outside parenting, too; what is important to one culture is unimportant to another, hence why we have such a hard time successfully repeating another culture’s ideals, even when they’re spelled out to us in a how-to book in no uncertain terms.

I loved this article for the stuff that comes in closer to the end about alloparents.  Alloparents are all the adults who help out with the child — grandparents and aunts but also teachers and friends and neighbours.  Therefore, you are parenting, even if you are not the mother or father; playing a role in shaping that child.  The former teacher in me loved this idea.

In Western culture, we’ve created what NPR calls, “a mom stuck in a box, often alone, doing the job typically performed by a handful of people.”  We diminish the alloparents in the name of control, to be the leader in charge of shaping the child but if you take a step back and really look at it, we’re making this trade-off at our own expense.

I’ve written about this idea before, but I’ve never seen it summed up quite so well as this NPR post depicting WEIRD culture and the way we find the advice we hold onto so tightly.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the piece.