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?

700 Roundups.  Okay, really 600 Roundups because the Roundups got misnumbered along the way, but it’s still an impressive feat.  I’ve only missed around 10 Roundups in the last 12 years.  And if I highlight — on average — four posts per Roundup, that means I’ve highlighted about 2,400 posts.

Remember, next week, we’re marking this milestone with a little online party.  Bring a single post (your own or someone else’s post) to share with everyone else.  You’ll add them via the comment section so you also have space to explain why you chose that particular post.  So get choosing.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “And Now We Are Four” (With Every Heartbeat)
• “No Fast Forward Button to Healing” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Alloparents” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

One of the nicest things about the Internet is finding two unrelated people both sharing the same sweet moment.  (This happens all the time with birthdays on Facebook.)  Inconceivable has a post about her 13th anniversary.  I love it for this line: “As far as creative and collaborative endeavors go, I think it’s a success so far, that we still wake up and wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else.”  Sounds like a success to me.  And then Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about her 14th anniversary.  I love it for this line: “Because before the one before the four there is almost a quarter of a lifetime’s worth of memories, crazy stories that bring about belly laughs and moments that still bring tears to my eyes.”  And for both, I love the behind-the-scenes glimpses into a life.  Congratulations!

Risakerlake answers anything about cycling again after a failed cycle.  She admits that she feels like she’s in the minority in moving on to the next cycle as quickly as possible.  She writes, “Sometimes I think I’m in the minority when it comes to this because the first thing I wanted to do after a failed cycle was get right on to the next one.”  As she says, there isn’t one way to do it — everyone needs to choose what fits their heart (and budget and body).  But it’s an interesting question — how one chooses what to do next.

Not a Wasted Word has a post about watching the Handmaid’s Tale, calling it misery porn.  I’m not watching this season — at least, not yet — though I went through a similar struggle in identifying with Serena Joy despite also despising Serena Joy in season one.  She’s infertile.  She’s a horrible human being.  It feels awful to identify with her.

Lastly, Lavender Luz opens up a discussion on the border situation with an analogy used to explain adoption, especially as adoption is offered up as a solution to the immigration crisis.  She writes, “As long as the prevailing adoption narrative leads people to believe adoption is Win/Win, we will keep acting as though parents ARE interchangeable. As we know from the switcheroo scenario above, that is not true.”  It’s a post that offers a lot of food for thought.

The roundup to the Roundup: 700 (okay, 600) Roundups! July 6th — Roundup celebration (be there or be square).  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 22nd and 29th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

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.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Today my 12th blogoversary intersects with the 200th #Microblog Monday.  I have been writing this blog for 12 years.  12 years!  200 of those posts have been Microblog Monday.  The other several thousand (because I write on average 5 posts per week, 52 weeks per year) have been random mishmash from my clotty uterus to the twins to my extreme love of quokkas to bothering Josh with my feelings at 11 pm.

About 1/4th of my life has been spent writing this site.  Isn’t that mind-blowing?  A quarter of my life.

I have no great wisdom to impart except write.  Keep at it.  The way you amass 12 years is showing up for 12 years.

Thank you for being here.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.