I was listening to the podcast Note to Self and the guest quoted an interesting statistic: it takes on average 23 minutes to ramp back up to full productivity when we’ve been distracted from a task.

I Googled the stat, and then realized the study itself was linked to on the podcast page. (That’s what I get for being so distracted.)

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Office workers are interrupted—or self-interrupt—roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task.

What I found interesting in the study is that the quality of the work didn’t suffer. (I would beg to differ — I can tell the difference between something I wrote when email was minimized and something I wrote when I was glancing back and forth between the article and the email tab on the screen.)  It was just that our stress levels were different.  We became agitated and frustrated by work when we kept being pulled out of the moment.

The best panel I went to at BlogHer ’15 was led by Sam Horn and Danielle Faust, and it was about productivity and staying focused.  If you click on that link, you can hear the whole talk, but Googling around, I found an article that covered at least Sam Horn’s portion of the talk.  I’ve been using her techniques, especially the U (hands as blinders approach).  I combine it with staring at the Do Nothing app.  (I have the old version of that app which seems better?)  And I have been less distracted.  At least until the phone rings or someone texts me or Truman starts wheeking for a cookie.

23 minutes.  That’s a lot of time, right?

I wasn’t going to see the film version of the Fault in Our Stars.  I liked the book a lot, and I didn’t think the film version would add to the story.  But I was at the library, trying to grab a DVD, and it was the first title my eyes recognized.  So I brought it home and watched it that night, and… it may have been better than the book.  I sort of cringe writing that.

But it contained the wording of the book for a lot of the dialogue, and it stayed fairly true to the scenes in the book.  I found the actors’ versions of those characters maybe a little bit more believable than the paper versions.  I believed they were giddy teens in love, slightly awkward, definitely emotional, and just really hopeful that it would all be okay for both of them in the end.  Even if it wasn’t the traditional definition of okay.

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The word okay repeats many times in the book (and movie), and it becomes a running… sentiment… through the text.  I can’t really call it a running joke, because it isn’t funny.  But it definitely means something different every time it comes up, from mocking two other characters in the story to ironically admitting that everything is not okay.

I feel like for the last several years, society as a whole has been in a war against the word okay.  We curate our lives online to look happy.  We read books about how to gain happiness, either directly when we’re talking about Gretchen Rubin, or indirectly when we have people presenting happiness as the side effect that comes from decluttering your life like Marie Kondo.  We go on wellness retreats to regain happiness in our life and talk about finding bliss through ordering the perfect meal and hang inspirational quotes on our walls that we find in kitschy stores.

And all of that is okay.  Really, it’s okay.  I think it is wonderful to strive towards happiness.

But in this world we’ve created, okay becomes the last rung on the happiness ladder before one steps off into the abyss, the lowest appropriate thing a person is allowed to say as an answer to the question, “how are you?”

Even if you’re going to launch into the truth and give the decidedly not okay details of your current situation, you first need to reassure that you’re okay.  That you’re fine.  Even when you’re not fine.

We’ve created this lowercase version of okay to use as a buffer against reality, a soft landing into bad news, a little door we’re expected to open for people before we lead them somewhere unpleasant.

We use the word even when things are clearly not okay, so the word becomes, if not meaningless, then definitionally different like a homophone.  There is okay, which means that everything is fine, and then there is okay, which means that we wish it were fine, but it’s not.

I liked it when okay meant that things were okay.  That they may not be wonderful and exciting and drenched in happiness, but things weren’t bad.  They were, as I said, that final rung of the ladder dangling over the abyss.  Firm ground to stand on.

And maybe that is why I loved the movie: all the versions of okay that maybe were too subtle in the book.  The way the word was whispered or spat or said.  It became less about the two teenagers in the book, and more about all of us, as a culture, that clings so tightly to this word that we’ve rendered meaningless in a world where we present digital and actual smiles, even when things aren’t exactly okay.

Lest you worry, things are actually okay.  The movie just triggered this acknowledgment of how many times I’ve used that word when things were otherwise.

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

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Can we pause for a moment and discuss the website FakeaBaby.com?  It was in an article about the Michigan girl who faked her triplet pregnancy for 9 months.

There isn’t much to say about the girl, but the website?  Who created this website?  I am aware that you can find just about anything on the Web, but all of these sites are created by human beings.  Who are these human beings?

Do you ever wonder that?  I think about it all the time when I’m walking through the grocery store.  These strangers I’m seeing around me, one of them could be a troll online or a creator of a hurtful site or a seller of items that allow people to commit fraud.  All these people who create these sites or leave hurtful comments online… they all live somewhere.  They all have families or friends.  They could be standing right next to you at some point today.

Do you think about those people?

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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 posts.

I asked the question on Twitter and Facebook and got no response, so now I’m trying my blog.  Because, seriously, what information can’t be crowdsourced on the Internet?

Who is this comedian? And yes, that is a photo of the television screen. Sorry — if I could find a decent still online, it would probably be labeled with the person’s name and I wouldn’t have to ask the question.

The person was on @Midnight. And now he’s part of the countdown that happens before the show. If it helps at all, he’s number 2 on the countdown.

The saddest part of all of this?  Josh and I spent so much time trying to figure out who this was that we’ve forgotten the original reason why we were trying to figure it out in the first place.

Also, feel free to use this thread to crowdsource your own question.  Several thousand brains are better than one.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing!

Despite not being a fan of crowds or noise, I love amusement parks with the passion of a thousand suns.  Disney is at the top followed by those off-the-beaten-track-seen-better-days amusement parks where the paint is chipping from the fiberglass mascots and the rides have a look of questionable safety.

I am debating whether this park in Romania would be the best place ever to visit, or whether I’d feel as if I was suffocating being so far below ground.  Salina Turda is an underground park built in an old salt mine.

If I was in the UK, I would be going to see Dismaland. The art installation is only open until September 27th. It is everything I love in an amusement park and more. Mostly I want to go on the merry-go-round.

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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:

• “Funeral for Fun” (Lauren Kayes)
• “Bloom Where You’re Planted” (Lavender Luz)
• “It’s Not About the Costume” (A Half-Baked Life)

Okay, now my choices this week.

A+ Effort finds her line in the sand when it comes to comedy.  In this brief post she recounts a trip to see Book of Mormon and the places where she couldn’t bring herself to laugh.  It was interesting to step back and think about the places where comedy can’t go on an individual level.

There were a lot of back-to-school posts this week.  Much Ado About Nothing has a stream of thoughts about the return to school.  I like this post because it is just a day-in-the-life; the segment of parenthood that you rarely think about when you’re trying to build your family, the happily-ever-after where life is a balance of too many schedules and too little time.  It captures well the reality of parenting, much better than the grinning first-day-of-school pictures that lined Facebook.

POF and Now What? has a post about a job interview.  I think so often we’re given a lot of advice that amounts to “don’t be yourself,” so it is nice to read the opposite of that.  And yes, infertility comes up in the interview.  And yes, I am going to make you click over to read whether or not she got the job.

Lastly, Infertile Fantasies is donating her embryos and writing about the process.  Even if you don’t have plans to donate your embryos, it’s an interesting series of questions you need to consider as well as how the act of donation ties into the act of de-mothering every parent will need to go through in the future.

The roundup to the Roundup: I love amusement parks.  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 August 28th and September 4th) 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.