[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:57:24 GMT ]
After two pairs of Feelmax shoes worn to shreds in four weeks of walking on pavements (which, I know, they told me not to do, but what use is a shoe I cannot walk on a pavement with?) I figured that if the aim is to “simulate going barefeet” I might as well go barefeet instead of buying an expensive pair of shoes every couple of months. So I have started to. So far, looks like moving to thin-soles and then to no shoes is one of the best shoe-decisions I’ve done in my life.
It does make me self-conscious like hell, though—especially when it is not that terribly hot and I am not in beach-compatible wear otherwise. And it gets me looks. And questions. “Hey! You are not wearing any shoes!” Thanks, genius. Do I give such a harebrained impression that it is actually likely I simply forgot to put shoes on this morning, and have not noticed since?
Here’s a little Q&A.
Why are you not wearing any shoes?
Why should I be wearing any?
Don’t your feet get cold?
When I am outside and walking, no. Finland is not actually the warmest of the countries of Western civilization, but it is still well above freezing here in July. So far, the coldest I have walked without shoes in has been 12 degrees C, and that was quite ok still. My feet do get cold when I sit still for long times, which I of course do every day at work. I wear socks then.
Don’t your feet get wet when it rains?
Yes, they do (genius). It feels nice. Wet socks and shoes is what makes wet feet feel unpleasant, not the water itself.
Don’t you get splinters and stuff in your feet?
So far, no, I don’t.
Doesn’t it hurt?
It does, some. But you get used to most of it pretty fast - two weeks ago walking on rough pavement was immediately distinctly uncomfortable, now it starts to be after 2 kilometers or so. Walking on the rubble outside our house used to be painful to the verge of impossible, now it is uncomfortable but doable. Worst spot so far is the metal stairs up to the swords salle. I got through unwounded. Whenever I can, I walk on smooth sand or grass, though today not so much to avoid pain, but simply because it feels nice. On some surfaces - rough sand, say—it does not exactly hurt, but I have to walk slower than with shoes on to be comfortable. I do not consider this a problem. (If I go with people who might consider slower speed a problem, I wear shoes.)
Don’t your feet get tired?
They do. I consider that exercise. We laugh at those quaint ideas that all women need to wear corsets because otherwise they get back pains and other horrible consequences because on their own, their backs are too weak to support them. Yet we accept without a blink the idea that everyone needs to wear shoes, because otherwise the arches of their feet collapse and they get all sorts of pains. Don’t know about you, but that sounds seriously fucked-up reasoning to me.
Don’t your feet get dirty?
I can wash them.
But what about winter?
Not wearing shoes now does in no way force me to walk without shoes in the snow. (Genius.) For to get me closer to snowy times without reverting to thick-soles, I’m still thinking giving a go to the Feelmax new model (Niesa or so), which supposedly has a tougher sole. I also have vague plans of making moccasins out of thin neoprene or something with maybe some sort of a rubber for a sole (I know how to make moccasins out of cloth or leather, so it is a material question rather than knowing how).
But what about parties and other formal occasions?
I did not throw my good shoes away simply because I do not want to use shoes every day, either.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, kengät | 10 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:29:05 GMT ]
Merriam-Webster defines “motive” as “something (as a need or desire) that causes a person to act” and motivation as “the condition of being motivated”, that is, of possessing a motive, or “a motivating [something that provides a motive] force, stimulus, or influence : incentive, drive”. I do not personally like the word much, the way it is usually used in my hearing. I am ok with the usage that emphasizes the “need or desire”, the personal reason for to do something, as in “my sole motivation to do X is that it is necessary for Y, which I really want”, though even then I would prefer “reason” or “incentive”.
Motivation seems to separate into three things:
1. a need or desire for something (motive),
2. something that causes one to act on that need or desire (incentive), and
3. the energy to stay at the task (drive).
When people say “I do not have the motivation” or “I do not feel motivated”, they can mean any or any combination of these. Saying that alone is not usually helpful. To figure out how to solve your “lack of motivation”, you need to figure out which of these it is, and then act on that. If you wait until you “feel motivated”, chances are it will never happen, because three such complex things will need to coincide by chance. It is possible to desire something because it is The Thing to desire, act on it simply because you expect praise or rewards from others if you succeed, and have energy simply because you are feeling energetic in general. I would guess a lot of us have managed at least a couple of major life goals simply by that, by a combination of energy of youth, strikes of luck, and the design of the society. This might be what creates the expectation that we need to “be motivated” to achieve things.
1. The motive.
First question to ask yourself when you do not feel motivated is this: do I actually really want this thing to happen? If so, why exactly? Here are two test questions: A. If I did not know any of the people I know now, would I still want it? B. If I had enough wealth that I could amuse myself in any way I wanted without the fear of ever being hungry or homeless, would I still want it? Wanting things because they bring company or security is not bad. It is, however, crucial to understand that you want something because you enjoy the company, or because you want the additional freedom that wealth brings, instead of the something itself.
Self-awareness to the level where you figure what you really want is not easy. I suppose that a lot of our stories and other escapism deal with people with Fates and Missions and stuff because it would be ever so much easier to have one given to us than it is to figure it out ourselves.
But the truth remains that if you do not have a motive, you will not have motivation, and you can as well stop wishing you did, and start doing something else.
2. The incentive
If the motive is about “why exactly do I want this in the first place”, the incentive is about “what all will I miss or lose if I do not do get off my arse and actually do this thing?” The trick is not to be stuck with the first answer, but to do a chain of so-whats.
If I do not finish this document today, then I will not finish it by the deadline, because there will not be enough time. So what? Well, then I will have to go to the team meeting and explain why it is not ready. So what? The others will be pissed off. So what? I really don’t want N.N. to be pissed off with me. Bingo—apparently N.N. being pissed off is something that you really care of. Would that be an incentive enough to actually get off your arse: “I really like N.N. and do not want her to feel angry or her work to suffer because I do not do my part”?
Or maybe there is no N.N and the chain goes on. If they are pissed off, that could reflect badly on my review. So what? These are uncertain times, and there might be layoffs. So what? If I am fired, I am not sure I can get another job. So what? I do not have enough savings to live on just social security and keep my house. So what? Well I really goddamn like that house! Would that be incentive enough? “I want to do well in this job so that I do not have to face the insecurity of having to find another one.”
Or maybe it goes on until you arrive to “oh screw it, I don’t even want this job”, in which case you are back to the motivation step. That’s ok.
3. The drive
Once you have the motive and the incentive, this step is relatively easy. Here’s how. Realize these points: A. You will never feel energetic all the time, and B. If you do fifteen minutes of it, it is more than not at all.
If you labor under the illusion (surprisingly common these days) that healthy, happy people are energetic and “motivated” and driven and light-hearted all or even most the time, get rid of that idea right now. It is simply not true. Energy levels and moods come and go. Spikes are fun, but for the most of us, they are rare. If you wait until you are highly “motivated” (with the meaning of energetic and feeling like it) before you do things, you will accomplish very little and spend a lot of time feeling bad and wrong about “not being motivated”, when in fact there is nothing whatsoever bad or wrong about you.
If you really want to do something (you have the motive and the incentive) but you do not seem to be able to find the energy, then make a deal with yourself: agree that you will do something for it for fifteen minutes, and then you are free to go and not worry about it anymore today (this morning, this evening, this week, for an hour, whatever). Fifteen minutes sounds like nothing. It is nothing. It should be easy accomplish. Think of the tiniest little thing that you can do right now to promote your pursuit, set a timer to fifteen minutes and then think about your motive and your incentive, and do that thing or nothing until the alarm goes (and when I say nothing I mean absolutely nothing: no web, no IRC, no getting up and walking around, no TV or radio, no reading a book, no drinking tea or having a sandwich or going to the toilet).
Of course, often after the first fifteen minutes or tiniest little thing you will feel like doing more, because the hardest thing is to start—and you can, if you want to. But that is not the point: this is not a trick to get you started. The point is that those fifteen minutes are more than you would do if you instead just sat around fretting about not having motivation, and so doing them you are already on the winning side: doing more than you were about to, getting better at getting it done.
And if you really end up sitting that fifteen minutes doing nothing—then either you really needed the rest, or the tiniest little thing was not tiny enough, or you were mistaken about your motive and incentive. That’s ok too. Simply retry. Today, or tomorrow.
Screw motivation. Just do it, if you want to, and don’t, if you don’t.
(Disclaimer: actually not having the energy for anything ever and/or the inability to recognize at least 1-3 real needs/desires/motives can be symptoms of burn-out and/or clinical depression. I do not mean to belittle these conditions or to discourage people potentially suffering from them from seeking medical advice.)
(Disclaimer 2: despite being posted right after several people used the “not feeling motivated” phrase on an IRC channel, this post is not aimed at them. I have planned it for a couple of weeks now—and have a todo list trace to prove that. The latest examples simply served to remind me of a pet peeve.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags unsolicited advice | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Sat, 30 May 2009 14:54:09 GMT ]
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game about spaceships, and if that sentence made your eyes glaze over you might want to skip this post, unless “sportsmanship” is interesting to you in general (in which case I recommend you read it anyway). If EVE is familiar for you, you can skip the next four paragraphs.
EVE differs from most (all?) other MMOGs in some crucial respects, most of which belong to another post (or ‘con speech) completely. For this post, what is important to understand is that EVE is not a level- or score-based game where you can measure your achievement against filling some objectives set by the game, such as reaching a particular level or completing a particular quest or raid. There is no “end game”. You cannot win the game, you cannot finish it. Instead, it is a sandbox game where you measure yourself only against other players – you fight for regions, resources, glory and fame, but the game itself rewards none of these. You get no points, no levels, no nothing. The only reward is the fame and glory themselves, and the resources you can control to produce more of those.
In EVE, you set your goals yourself, and you can go about achieving them in different ways. You can change your goals at any point (though if you have made them known first, people will spot this, and you might lose glory in their eyes). Skills and equipment help, but in the end what scores you a kill or wins you a solar system and gives you the upper hand on a regional market is player skill and dedication. While you can play this game solo or with a small band of friends, in the end, if you really want to be one of the “big players”, you have to do it by banding together with others. The biggest powerblocks in the game consist of thousands of players. Co-ordinating that is no little feat and requires real commitment. Even the tiniest alliances, in serious conflict only for the control of some small local area of space, require co-operation with tens of other players, against similar bands.
While “dying” in the game hurts (more than in most games), it does not obviously really kill you off or exclude you from the game. You can push someone out of a particular solar system, you can kill their structures there, you can make them die in horrible ways when they enter the regions you control, you can make it pretty damn close impossible for them to win that control from you, but you cannot make it completely impossible, and you cannot stop them from coming at you and being a bloody nuisance at least. The only thing that can break any player alliance in EVE is the loss of morale, the loss of interest in the fight. Competition is fierce, and the human emotional drama involved is as high as or higher than most of the players probably ever experience in their work places or other such “real life”.
If you think this a little insane, compare to competition sports and their following. Just saying.
Views regularly surface in the game that when it comes to spaceships actually shooting at each other it is not “sportsmanlike” to crush the opponent using superior numbers or otherwise superior force, such as ships specifically designed against their attack. There are several pejorative names for people who are “cowardly” enough to use superior force to crush someone “brave” enough to put up a fight in a fleet that will most likely lose. I totally disagree with these views. Fights in EVE, when they happen, are not “fair”. They are not supposed to be fair. When the shooting starts, the fight is over—the guy with best numbers, ships/modules, and discipline wins. The game is not about who can actually shoot the best. The game is not about spaceships and pretty explosions. The real game is about who can scheme, plan, co-ordinate and maneuver themselves into a position where the unfairness is on their side. It is about forcing or tricking your opponent to commit to a fight they cannot win.
I do believe there is room for sportsmanship in EVE, however. It is just not about the tricks you use in a fight. As far as I am concerned, once you are in the game and the game is on, any trick you can pull (apart from abusing bugs that the game devs say not to abuse) goes. Some tricks are more stylish than others, granted, but still, if you score a kill you score a kill and your enemy calling you lame because they do not like your style is just them being—unsportsmanlike.
Sportsmanship is about attitude. It is not about what you do to win or lose within the game, it is about how you behave once you have.
If you pull a particularly neat trick and win, it is ok to rejoice and gloat a little. It is fine to feel good about yourself if your game is at the level where you are clearly on the top of most of the people you meet in your region. It is great to take pride in your achievements—even if this is just a game, it is a game that takes very real intelligence, dedication, and co-operation to be good at. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to jeer at your opponent who just lost, to put them down, to call them names, to question their worth as human beings and to wish they go to bed sobbing over how mean you are. It is not sportsmanlike to tell someone you just made explode how they are useless and will never amount to anything. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight” salute on the local chat, and (where you can safely do so) to offer them advice on how to get better.
If you get royally screwed, or royally screw up, or a trick is pulled on you, and you lose, it is ok to feel pissed off and to kick and throw your toys a bit—as long as you do this in the privacy of your own home. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to kick and scream where others hear. It is not sportsmanlike to make excuses or to blame your opponent of “cheating” or “cowardly tricks” (or “blobbing”, to give an example of an in-game pejorative). While I do believe in PR and publicity as parts of warfare in EVE, I still think it is not sportsmanlike to engage in a smear campaign against your opponents simply because you are upset that you cannot win them on the field. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight”, and to congratulate your opponent on a trap nicely sprung, and to express a wish to meet them on the field again another day. Be gracious – and then lick your wounds, analyze why you lost, learn from it, plot and scheme and gather allies, and then go spring a trap on them and watch those towers burn.
Sportsmanship is about the wish and ability to respect your opponent regardless of whether you win or lose, even when you pull a crazy trick at them, even when you have an inside man working on their morale or stealing their assets, even when you are doing your best to make the game not-fun for them in order to force them out of some plan they are trying to execute. There are ways of making things not-fun for the opponent and more fun for your guys that rely on disrespecting, dehumanizing, demeaning and humiliating the other guys, on robbing them of their value as a respected opponent and as a human being, and those ways are used in EVE, both in the hearing of those opponents and in internal pep talks and propaganda.
Personally, I just think those ways are lame. Not sure about “wrong”, and definitely not “against the letter of the rules”—but certainly lame. If I cannot win with sportsmanship, with respect to those who play with me, I’ll rather not win at all.
Not sure what is respectful? Here’s a rule of thumb: if you would not talk that way to/about the 12-year-old sister of your best friend, don’t talk like it to or about another player in the game, unless you know for a certain fact that the player is a friend and does not mind. (For all you know that stranger is the 12-yo little sister of your buddy – or your own grandfather, or you professor at college, or the next-door neighbor. Not that it should matter; all other players are humans and deserve courtesy, regardless of whether you personally know them or not.)
(This post is for Queneva, who first asked me the question “Do you think there is a place for sportsmanship in EVE?” in a discussion following her post about a rather disturbing subculture in the game.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags EVE online, MMOG, sportsmanship | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:14:32 GMT ]
Ok, time for a crazy confession: I actually like Los Angeles. I am not sure if I like it enough to actually want to live here, and I definitely do not like all parts of it (see case highways), but I like a lot of places in it, and I like the atmosphere. Despite the fact that I could not stop bursting into giggles every time someone local opened their mouth when I was here for the first time, on account of everyone being hyper and speaking in a movie-accent, I’ve adjusted since. LA gets a worse rep than it deserves. Yes, it is a sprawl, and yes, the smog is terrible at worst, but then again, doesn’t that go for almost all big cities? At least the people are friendly here, and the sprawl has a lot of green bits in it.
One specific thing about LA reputation is the public transport. It gets terrible comments from everyone – you cannot take the bus anywhere, you just have to have a car, etc etc. First time I spend a couple of days alone in the city I figured that Santa Monica must be an exception to this. Second time over, and I think the reputation is just bullshit. The buses are clean enough, and cheap, and run on schedule, and those schedules are very nice—frequent enough for a tourist to not bother checking timetables. I am sure there are commuter routes that are not covered by public transport (isn’t there always?), but the situation is not nearly as bad as you are lead to believe. The trip planner is unable to give me all routes that provably exist, and in general totally sucks compared to the Helsinki area one, but, well, considering the quality of the latter the comparison is unfair to everyone else.
The USA is its own charming self, and some things have me giggling still, such as the fact that you get frigging potato chips with your sandwich in the University cafeterias, or that the locals consider income tax rate of 25 percent “high” (though considering what they get for it, it might actually be), or that practically every public building in California seems to have a sign somewhere by its front door warning that the location “contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer”.
But I giggle less and like it more every time I visit. And this time, I did not even instantly die when temperature passed 30 degrees C, at all. Apart from it turning out that thin-sole shoes on hot pavement are a bad, bad idea (in the “blistering heat is blistering” sense), I quite enjoyed myself walking around in that heat for hours. If you have a day to kill in LA, The Griffith Observatory is a nice place to see, and I especially recommend taking the trail (on your right when exiting the observatory via the main entrance) down to the Ferndell / Griffith park, which is a very relaxing place. (Thanks to the locals for the hint.)
(What? Oh. I was working. The vacation is in August/September, and yep, I will be back in the region then. Burner readers rejoice.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags travel, USA | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:47:02 GMT ]
Stealing a glance in the streetside windows
I think I am pretty
But I can never say so
The only thing worse than being ugly
is being stupid enough
to not realize it
Posted in Plain English | Tags runot | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:42:08 GMT ]
Lately, I have wanted to scream every time I hear the term “healthy food”, or see a food or nutrient pushed as healthier than something else. (And you see it all the time, which makes me want to scream way too often.)
Here’s a newsflash to all you intellectually challenged victims of health crazes: food is healthy, by definition. If it is bad for you, it is not food. If you do not believe me, try going without for, I do not know, say a month. If you after that still refuse to eat something that is generally considered food on the grounds of it not being healthy, I will do my best to have you admitted to a psychiatric institution and they can inflict an anorexia diagnosis on you.
And no, particular foods are not healthier than other foods, either. An apple is not by some absolute default healthier than a piece of chocolate. If you eat only apples you are likely to feel like crap, just as you are if you eat only chocolate. (I do not recommend trying either, but if you do not believe me, a month is probably a good length for an experiment, again.)
Particular diets are healthier than some other diets, I have to give you that. But even there, the effect is probably less than you think. Your body is brilliantly good at transforming things into other things, with just a couple of notable exceptions (the major one being vitamin C, the metabolism of which in humans, or rather the lack of essential parts there-of, is one of the best arguments there is against intelligent design). Sure the transformation might be somewhat more inefficient than eating everything in the exact required amounts, but last I checked lack of fuel for their bodies was not a problem for most Western humans. It is also crucial to understand that just because a diet consisting of nothing but pizza, fries, and sugared soft drinks is unhealthy, pizza, fries, or sugared water are not unhealthy as such. They are food. Foods are not unhealthy. Diets are. If you generally eat your veggies and so forth, eating a pizza every now and then is very likely going to do exactly nothing to your overall well-being (if anything, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy and adds to your mental health).
And no, we did not evolve to survive on a particular diet. I know, I know, in the stone age we ate berries and meat and not roots and grains and all the carbohydrate crap (says you), but evolution is not about what you do in your everyday. You can do a hundred sit-ups every day and your daughter will still be born the exact same abs she would have been without you taking all that trouble. Evolution is about whose offspring survives. And while I dislike making far-gone conclusions about the effects of our evolutionary history to our current day, if I believe one theory about the evolution of human nutrition, I believe the one that says there has been a huge pressure towards being able to effectively use whatever food happens to be available. If the diet of a nation consists of potatoes and gravy for a couple of hundred of years, the people unable to utilize the potatoes will die off and the rest of us will rule the Earth. If the diet of a nation consists of whatever hell is available and occasionally nothing for a couple of tens of thousands of years, how the hell did the stone age folks who need a carefully balanced diet of carrots and beef to feel good manage to spread their genes to all of us?
There is two major ways to construct an unhealthy diet (given that you have enough to eat in the first place, which we should not forget is still the major problem about food today): eat too much, or do not eat enough veggies. Do both of those, and you end up spherical and feeling like shit. Do not overdo it, and eat your rabbit food like mom told you, and you will in most cases be just fine. Yes, there are cases where special diets and special attention to diet are needed. Some people have actual diseases that kill them off or seriously disable them if they eat the wrong things. Some people are competing athletes who train for full weekdays and compete on the weekends. Pregnant women are recommended to take certain supplements. The likelihood that most people reading this who are very conscious about their diet have any of those conditions is not very great, however.
The ones who really need the special attention should keep on paying it. The rest of us need to stop fussing about it and eat some but not too much of what’s put in front of us, and be grateful.
(I could also use this post to rip apart the YLE newspiece about how “Finns eat healthier, but get fatter” (in Finnish, sorry), but commenter Ari T. did it for me already in the comments. The gist of it is this: 1) the results of the study cited probably mean that some Finns (say) they eat healthier, while some, very likely at least partly other Finns get fatter, and 2) even if point number one does not hold, if your diet makes you fat, it is an unhealthy diet, no matter what you eat, and 3) the questionnaire used in the study does not even ask about the amount of food consumed, so using it as any sort of indicator for the general unhealthiness of anyone’s diet is plain stupid.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags ei näin, I dont want to play anymore, ruoka, unsolicited advice | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:15:38 GMT ]
This entry is for Yoe, who once asked on IRC if someone who is reasonably net-savvy and does not like Facebook and/or other new “social media” would write about why they object to those. I gave a lot of disclaimers, but she said I will do.
Here are the disclaimers. I do not know if I like Facebook or not. I have never tried it. I do not have an account. I have watched someone use it once, and did not get much out of that experience. I suspect that if I tried, I might like it well enough. I also by no means object to other people using it, and I do not find that they are potentially stupid or morally suspect if they enjoy it. (There are a lot of things that I do not object to when other people do it, even though I find them potentially stupid or morally suspect to do so, but Facebook is not one of them.)
I know some people object to Facebook because they worry about their internet privacy, because they do not like the idea of coming to contact with people they do not explicitly choose to be in contact with, because they think “virtual” socializing is (morally or in quality) inferior to “real” socializing, or because they simply do not enjoy socializing in general. I use my own name practically everywhere on the web, I have a public blog, I run IRC in a screen 24/7, I enjoy talking to people, and before the Long September I was practically addicted to Usenet News. I am not one of those people.
I also know that some people object to Facebook and the internet in general, because it is somehow “not real”. I am not one of those people, either. Internet is “really” there as much as a book, a movie, or a park is “really” there: it is something people made. I find it is very relaxing to take a cup of tea and let myself wonder into the wilds of the internet, marveling at its wondrous sights and curious inhabitants, stumbling upon fascinating knowledge and bizarre entertainment and the occasional oasis of real art. Exploration of one’s surroundings, virtual as well as real, is a sign of a healthy mind. This world humans make is a delightful place and there is nothing, nothing at all, wrong in indulging in exploring it.
My worry about Facebook, Twitter, Qaiku, blogs, text messages, newsfeeds, Usenet, IRC, and the web in general is a very particular feature of them: they work on a fragmented timescale. You poll your sites, you read something, you check your feeds, you do something else, an incoming message interrupts, you poll them again, you have discussion on one of your forums, you check your email, you read a bit of a news story here, you twitter it, you check your feeds, an incoming message interrupts, you answer that, you check your email, you do a bit of something else, you poll your webforums, you go back to the discussion you started an hour ago… and whoom, there was the day.
You do not have to do it this way, of course. You can read news only in the morning with your breakfast coffee, you can poll your Facebook and Twitter only once a day when you come home from work, you can only read your emails at lunch break. But a lot of the people who extensively use these services, and especially those who sit in front of the computer for work or free time do not limit themselves that way. The services themselves encourage fragmented usage, starting from the fact that most email programs have continuous polling for new messages and alerts for them turned on by default. Pretty much every communication gimmick we are marketed these days is geared for noticing stuff now, immediately, without delay, as soon as other people do. Being in constant touch so you will not miss anything.
Many people claim this constant staying connected and polling for new comments/articles/tweets/whatever does not bother them or impede their work or their life. I know at least some of them are mistaken or lie to themselves, and I know this because I know I do. It is easy to lie, because it does not feel like continuously reading IRC or polling blogs while I work bothers me – for gods’ sake, it is not like I do it “continuously”, anyway! Just when I have a slow time in my brain work anyway. Yea, right. But let me switch to a mode where I agree with myself that I either do one thing or nothing at all, even for as short a time as for 15 or 30 minutes, and boy does my productivity improve.
No, distractions are not inherently bad. We do not really need to be super-productive or super-focused at all times, despite of what your boss or the gazillion self-help books about motivation and getting rich, beautiful, and popular on a fast track tell you. In the Western world, most of us who have access to the services mentioned also have enough of everything else to get by; we do not need to work harder to get more. We just need to be happy with it. We need to do the things we like to do, and work towards the goals we really want to achieve, and to spend time with the people we really love. With a peace of mind, and no stress.
The danger of fragmentation is that the chopped-up socialization and the constant context-switches eats so much of your time and brain power that there is very little room for anything else. You are less productive at work, less effective in realizing your dreams, less focused on people when you really meet them. Fragment your attention enough, and you completely lose the ability to tolerate slow times. Lately, I have asked myself to spend five minutes every day doing nothing. Five minutes – how hard is that? Very hard. When I started, I had to stop myself about 25 times in that time, getting an impulse to check this or that web forum, or my email, or take up a book, or (in a fit of extreme desperation from my brain) do some laundry. I have a friend (actually, several) with whom it is very weird to have a face-to-face conversation, because if you stop to think about what to say for 20 seconds, they whip up their mobile phone and check their IRC and emails.
The scariest effect of this is that if you get get wrapped up enough in these constant distractions, even peace of mind will not have room, because if your brain slows down enough to feel that peace, the constant-polling sub-process in it pops up and starts screaming “I am not doing anything! I am bored! Do something! Feed me information!” And if you follow the urge, you are not spending your time relaxing and recovering from stress. You are spending your time being distracted from the fact that you need to relax and recover.
And that is why I do not want to know if I would enjoy Facebook: I have enough to do already, and more distractions than I need, and I am not willing to give up any of them, despite actually feeling that I would benefit from less.
Your mileage may vary.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, internet, social media | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 18 May 2009 15:43:51 GMT ]
Based on exactly nothing but observation and speculation, I claim that a lot of the problems that Western-world relatively well-to-do adults experience in their lives are about vicious-circle-like downward spirals.
As an example there definitely is a subtype of burnout/depression that goes like this: you set expectations for yourself, you fail to meet them, the failure cause guilt and anxiety, you set up more expectations of the I-really-need-to-get-this-done type, the anxiousness and guilt make you perform worse, and you fail again. As another example, one of my own goes like this: I sleep too little, so I need to drink caffeine to keep my work going, lack of sleep and caffeine make my performance drop below levels I feel I am committed to, performance dropping causes stress, stress causes an evening drink and computer games, the stress, alcohol and excitement combined cause bad and diminished sleeping. I am sure you can invent your own examples – not getting physical exercise because of not being fit enough to feel comfortable at places where you could get it sounds common enough, at least.
Now the thing with such vicious cycles is that there is practically always some component in them that is not your fault. The society sets expectations on us that are hard to resist. Anxiousness causing bad sleep is a given, there’s not much anyone with a normal mind can do about it. You might not be fit because you have been lazy, but because there has been some circumstance preventing you from staying fit. The circle feeds itself: it is not a simple thing you do or do not do, it is a complex mess of variables where even if you fix one, the others keep on dragging you down. No step on the circle might seem like a major thing: your expectations are not that high, you are not that anxious; it’s just two cups of coffee and one gin and tonic a day, for gods’ sake! It is easy to start feeling like a victim, to feel like this stuff just happens to you, to feel that you are caught in a spiral not of your own making.
Yet the spiral is there, and it really is a spiral that also includes steps that are your own actions or attitudes. And the spiral is going to stay there until you do something about it. Other people can help or hinder, but unless you recognize your spirals and break them, your recurring problems are going to, well, recur. This has nothing to do with fair, and nothing to do with whose fault. It has to do with realism, and responsibility: if you do not fix it, no one else can.
When did we start thinking that you can only be responsible for something, if either it is your fault, or someone pays you to?
Posted in Plain English | Tags self, unsolicited advice | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 15 May 2009 08:37:59 GMT ]
> Dear Ms Jaana Wessman,
> I am pleased to inform you that your paper “Mixture model clustering of phenotype features reveals evidence for association of DTNBP1 to a specific subtype of schizophrenia” has been accepted for publication in Biological Psychiatry. Thank you for submitting this work.
Posted in Plain English | Tags työ | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:39:20 GMT ]
1) Hire a good secretary. This step is essential. Do not proceed without completing it. This person’s job will be to keep bureaucracy off everyone else’s backs, and in the current world they are absolutely crucial. Make sure you hire someone who understands that their job is to pro-actively make bureaucracy invisible for the team—instead of someone who thinks it is their job to wait until the team asks them to handle a particular paperwork tidbit and then meekly do as requested.
2) Advertise that you have a person whose job it is to keep bureaucracy off everyone else’s back. Agree beforehand with people you are recruiting what bureaucracy they are supposed to do and with what tools (bring in receipts of travel expenses, note down times when they arrive and leave work, make lists of participants on their courses and the grades for the secretary, agree on further appointments with customers/patients, report patient/customer meetings they went to) and what they are not required to do (fill in stupid forms about travel expenses, detail times they spend at a particular project, enter grades into database, handle billing details). Try to limit requirements to specialists to giving information to the secretary, without limitations on the format of said information, and especially avoid requirements to use a particular fancy computerized system to deliver the info. Guarantee that if further bureaucracy will become necessary for whatever reason, the secretary will handle it based on necessary information from the rest of the team, with no restrictions on the format of the information.
3) Agree beforehand with people you are recruiting what projects / teams / courses / patient groups / whatever they will work with. Be specific. Agree that they will also have the responsibility for co-ordinating and developing these things with the rest of the team. Guarantee that unless the employee requests it, this will not change before a certain time (of at least two years, preferably more), so that the people will have the chance to think long-term and to commit. Advertise that you think long-term.
4) Agree and insist on team meetings. Separate brainstorming / check-up meetings from a working meeting about a specific problem / case. Guarantee and advertise that you will be available for both, daily if necessary.
Self-evident? I wish.
Posted in Plain English | Tags työ, unsolicited advice | 1 comment
