- Make a (prioritised) list
- Write an email to your line manager (and anyone else you should inform) giving realistic estimates of when your projects will be complete.
- Agree on a plan, and keep everyone updated
- Don’t ask forgiveness, radiate intent (Elizabeth Ayer) — "I certainly don’t need a reputation as being underhanded or an organizational problem. Especially as a repeat behavior, signalling builds me a track record of openness and predictability, even as I take risks or push boundaries."
- When will we have flying cars? Maybe sooner than you think. (MIT Technology Review) — "An automated air traffic management system in constant communication with every flying car could route them to prevent collisions, with human operators on the ground ready to take over by remote control in an emergency. Still, existing laws and public fears mean there’ll probably have to be pilots at least for a while, even if only as a backup to an autonomous system."
- For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird (The Atlantic) — "Unencumbered by a shell, cephalopods became flexible in both body and mind... They could move faster, expand into new habitats, insinuate their arms into crevices in search of prey."
- Cannabidiol in Anxiety and Sleep: A Large Case Series. (PubMed) — "The final sample consisted of 72 adults presenting with primary concerns of anxiety (n = 47) or poor sleep (n = 25). Anxiety scores decreased within the first month in 57 patients (79.2%) and remained decreased during the study duration. Sleep scores improved within the first month in 48 patients (66.7%) but fluctuated over time. In this chart review, CBD was well tolerated in all but 3 patients."
- 22 Lessons I'm Still Learning at 82 (Coach George Raveling) — "We must always fill ourselves with more questions than answers. You should never retire your mind. After you retire mentally, then you are just taking up residence in society. I do not ever just want to be a resident of society. I want to be a contributor to our communities."
- How Boris Johnson's "model bus hobby" non sequitur manipulated the public discourse and his search results (BoingBoing) — "Remember, any time a politician deliberately acts like an idiot in public, there's a good chance that they're doing it deliberately, and even if they're not, public idiocy can be very useful indeed."
- It’s not that we’ve failed to rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve not even tried. (The Guardian) — "Surveillance capitalism is not the same as digital technology. It is an economic logic that has hijacked the digital for its own purposes. The logic of surveillance capitalism begins with unilaterally claiming private human experience as free raw material for production and sales."
- Choose Boring Technology (Dan McKinley) — "The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood."
- What makes a good excuse? A Cambridge philosopher may have the answer (University of Cambridge) — "Intentions are plans for action. To say that your intention was morally adequate is to say that your plan for action was morally sound. So when you make an excuse, you plead that your plan for action was morally fine – it’s just that something went awry in putting it into practice."
- Your Focus Is Priceless. Stop Giving It Away. (Forge) — "To virtually everyone who isn’t you, your focus is a commodity. It is being amassed, collected, repackaged and sold en masse. This makes your attention extremely valuable in aggregate. Collectively, audiences are worth a whole lot. But individually, your attention and my attention don’t mean anything to the eyeball aggregators. It’s a drop in their growing ocean. It’s essentially nothing."
- You can cope on less than five hours' sleep
- Alcohol before bed boosts your sleep
- Watching TV in bed helps you relax
- If you're struggling to sleep, stay in bed
- Hitting the snooze button
- Snoring is always harmless
- The ‘Dark Ages’ Weren’t As Dark As We Thought (Literary Hub) — "At the back of our minds when thinking about the centuries when the Roman Empire mutated into medieval Europe we are unconsciously taking on the spurious guise of specific communities."
- An Easy Mode Has Never Ruined A Game (Kotaku) — "There are myriad ways video games can turn the dials on various systems to change our assessment of how “hard” they seem, and many developers have done as much without compromising the quality or integrity of their games."
- Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better (Mashable) — "For millennials who conduct so many of their conversations online, this creativity with written English allows us to express things that we would have previously only been conveyed through volume, cadence, tone, or body language."
Falling asleep on the couch watching films
I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of times I’ve fallen asleep watching a film at home. I have, however, fallen asleep watching one at the cinema.
This is perhaps for three reasons. First, I usually wear contact lenses, but not when I’m in the cinema. Second, because my wife and I can’t seem to watch a film at home without pausing it half a dozen times. Third, because I’d rather read than watch a film.
So, yeah, this article isn’t for me. But I’m sharing it because I can’t really get into the mindset of someone for whom this is a problem.
I’ve watched the first half of a billion movies. This is how a typical movie night goes for me: After eating too many fries from Rocketbird and washing it down with a couple of beers, I’m swaddled in a plush blanket, horizontal on the couch, and zonked out long before Michelle Yeoh reaches the hotdog finger scene in Everything Everywhere All at Once.Source: How to Stop Falling Asleep on the Couch During Movies | WIREDMaybe your schedule is hectic, but you still want to catch every twist and turn in the Glass Onion movie. Or perhaps your significant other’s date-night selection seems like a snoozefest, and you’re attempting to roll credits on Morbius. Whatever your reason is to stay awake, keep the following advice in mind the next time you’re streaming something at home.
There are many non-essential activities, moths of precious time, and it's worse to take an interest in irrelevant things than do nothing at all
I confess to not yet having read Elizabeth Emens' book The Art of Life Admin but it's definitely on my list to read this year. A recent BBC Worklife article cites the book and the concept of 'attention residue'. This is defined as multiple tasks and obligations which split our attention and reduce our overall performance.
“If you have attention residue, you are basically operating with part of your cognitive resources being busy, and that can have a wide range of impacts – you might not be as efficient in your work, you might not be as good a listener, you may get overwhelmed more easily, you might make errors, or struggle with decisions and your ability to process information.”
Sophie Leroy (associate professor of management at the University of Washington)
Attention residue makes us procrastinate at work, and affects our sleep. And sleep, as I explained in my (unfinished) audiobook #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity (v2) is one of the three pillars of productivity.
The other two, if you're wondering, are exercise and nutrition. (While I know very talented people who don't exercise nor look after their bodies, I don't know any very productive people who aren't careful about keeping active and what they put into their bodies.)
Back to attention residue, and as the author of the BBC article points out, getting rid of life admin and the associated attention residue means you can enjoy life a little more, guilt-free:
In my case, the GYLIO experiment proved that self-care is less about carving out time to relax amid chaos, and more about removing to-dos from our crowded lives. With some life admin cleared away, I had a bubble bath and enjoyed the smug delight of a life – momentarily – in order.
Madeleine Dore
For me, sleep is extremely important As I learned when our children were very small, I really can't function properly if I have less than seven hours' sleep for two nights in a row.
As a result, I tend to go to bed early, usually before my wife, and definitely having ensured that I've avoided screens after 21:00. I'm definitely in bed by 22:00 and then read until about 22:30.
That means, as has been happening recently, if I am disturbed around 05:30, I can get up and carve out some quiet time to myself before the family awakens. Usually, though, I sleep until around 06:30 which means that, according to my smartband, I'm well-rested.
While we're on the subject of sleep and sleepiness, if you drink coffee first thing in the morning, you might want to rethink that approach:
I stopped drinking coffee about a year and a half ago, and instead drink around three cups of tea over the course of the day. Otherwise, I've found, it's very easy to use caffeine as an accelerator pedal and alcohol as a brakepedal.
Without productive routines it's easy to become overwhelmed. In an article I shared in last Friday's link roundup about communicating better at work, Michael Natkin, suggests that feeling overwhelmed is a common situation:
We’ve all been there. You’ve got so much on your plate that you don’t know where to start. Things that look like they will take fifteen minutes balloon into five-day poop-storms. Every item you cross off your list seems to spawn three more. The check engine light just went on in your car. And now your boss is chasing you down for an unexpected fire drill.
Michael Natkin
The temptation, when you're feeling overwhelmed, is to try and hide, to let no-one know that you're not coping. But that's a really dangerous approach, and the exact opposite of what you should do.
Instead, Natkin suggests an approach of 'over-communicating' which, he says, engages empathy and invites trust:
You should ask for feedback on your proposed course of action, he says, rather than giving it as a fait accompli.
I think this is a great strategy. What we all need to realise is that, usually, we were chosen for the position we're in, and therefore we should use that to fuel our confidence and self-esteem. Communicating a plan is always better than hiding.
Finally, a word about admin. Some people absolutely love spreadsheets, get a little thrill when they reconcile transactions, and don't mind filling in forms. If, like me, that sounds like the exact opposite of the things I enjoy doing, then you need some admin support.
You can pay for it, you can ask your employer to provide it, or you can call in favours. Either way, without it, you're going to eventually drown in life admin at home and work admin at the office.
My only bit of advice would be to really set your stall out for this. Don't whine or complain about your workload; instead, explain the situation and the impact of admin on your productivity. Put it in financial terms, if necessary.
What are your tips around "attention residue" and what to do when feeling overwhelmed?
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Image by Max Kleinen. Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián
Friday frustrations
I couldn't help but notice these things this week:
Image via @EffinBirds
Things that people think are wrong (but aren't)
I've collected a bunch of diverse articles that seem to be around the topic of things that people think are wrong, but aren't really. Hence the title.
I'll start with something that everyone over a certain age seems to have a problem with, except for me: sleep. BBC Health lists five sleep myths:
My smartband regularly tells me that I sleep better than 93% of people, and I think that's because of how much I prioritise sleep. I've also got a system, which I've written about before for the times when I do have a rough night.
I like routine, but I also like mixing things up, which is why I appreciate chunks of time at home interspersed with travel. Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Guardian, suggests, however, that routines aren't the be-all and end-all:
Some people are so disorganised that a strict routine is a lifesaver. But speaking as a recovering rigid-schedules addict, trust me: if you click excitedly on each new article promising the perfect morning routine, you’re almost certainly not one of those people. You’re one of the other kind – people who’d benefit from struggling less to control their day, responding a bit more intuitively to the needs of the moment. This is the self-help principle you might call the law of unwelcome advice: if you love the idea of implementing a new technique, it’s likely to be the opposite of what you need.
Expecting something new to solve an underlying problem is a symptom of our culture's focus on the new and novel. While there's so much stuff out there we haven't experienced, should we spend our lives seeking it out to the detriment of the tried and tested, the things that we really enjoy?
On the recommendation of my wife, I recently listened to a great episode of the Off Menu podcast featuring Victoria Cohen Mitchell. It's not only extremely entertaining, but she mentions how, for her, a nice Ploughman's lunch is better than some fancy meal.
This brings me to an article in The Atlantic by Joe Pinsker, who writes that kids who watch and re-watch the same film might be on to something:
In general, psychological and behavioral-economics research has found that when people make decisions about what they think they’ll enjoy, they often assign priority to unfamiliar experiences—such as a new book or movie, or traveling somewhere they’ve never been before. They are not wrong to do so: People generally enjoy things less the more accustomed to them they become. As O’Brien [professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business] writes, “People may choose novelty not because they expect exceptionally positive reactions to the new option, but because they expect exceptionally dull reactions to the old option.” And sometimes, that expected dullness might be exaggerated.
So there's something to be said for re-reading novels you read when you were younger instead of something shortlisted for a prize, or discounted in the local bookshop. I found re-reading Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment recently exhilarating as I probably hadn't ready it since I became a parent. Different periods of your life put different spins on things that you think you already know.
Also check out:
The link between sleep and creativity
I’m a big fan of sleep. Since buying a smartwatch earlier this year, I’ve been wearing it all of the time, including in bed at night. What I’ve found is that I’m actually a good sleeper, regularly sleeping better than 95% of other people who use the same Mi Fit app.
Like most people, after a poor night’s sleep I’m not at my best the next day. This article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic helps explain why.
As you start to fall asleep, you enter non-REM sleep. That includes a light phase that takes up most of the night, and a period of much heavier slumber called slow-wave sleep, or SWS, when millions of neurons fire simultaneously and strongly, like a cellular Greek chorus. “It’s something you don’t see in a wakeful state at all,” says Lewis. “You’re in a deep physiological state of sleep and you’d be unhappy if you were woken up.”We’ve known for generations that, if we’ve got a problem to solve or a decision to make, that it’s a good idea to ‘sleep on it’. Science is catching up with folk wisdom.During that state, the brain replays memories. For example, the same neurons that fired when a rat ran through a maze during the day will spontaneously fire while it sleeps at night, in roughly the same order. These reruns help to consolidate and strengthen newly formed memories, integrating them into existing knowledge. But Lewis explains that they also help the brain extract generalities from specifics—an idea that others have also supported.
The other phase of sleep—REM, which stands for rapid eye movement—is very different. That Greek chorus of neurons that sang so synchronously during non-REM sleep descends into a cacophonous din, as various parts of the neocortex become activated, seemingly at random. Meanwhile, a chemical called acetylcholine—the same one that Loewi identified in his sleep-inspired work—floods the brain, disrupting the connection between the hippocampus and the neocortex, and placing both in an especially flexible state, where connections between neurons can be more easily formed, strengthened, or weakened.The difficulty is that our sleep quality is affected by blue light confusing the brain as to what kind of day it is. That's why we're seeing increasing numbers of devices changing your screen colour towards the red end of the spectrum in the evening. If you have disrupted sleep, you miss out on an important phase of your sleep cycle.
Crucially, they build on one another. The sleeping brain goes through one cycle of non-REM and REM sleep every 90 minutes or so. Over the course of a night—or several nights—the hippocampus and neocortex repeatedly sync up and decouple, and the sequence of abstraction and connection repeats itself. “An analogy would be two researchers who initially work on the same problem together, then go away and each think about it separately, then come back together to work on it further,” Lewis writes.As the article states, there’s further research to be done here. But, given that sleep (along with exercise and nutrition) is one of the three ‘pillars’ of productivity, this certainly chimes with my experience.“The obvious implication is that if you’re working on a difficult problem, allow yourself enough nights of sleep,” she adds. “Particularly if you’re trying to work on something that requires thinking outside the box, maybe don’t do it in too much of a rush.”
Source: The Atlantic
You need more daylight to sleep better
An an historian, I’ve often been fascinated about what life must have been like before the dawn of electricity. I have a love-hate relationship with artificial light. On the one hand, I use a lightbox to stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder. On the other hand, I’ve got (my optician tells me) not only pale blue irises but very thin corneas. That makes me photophobic and subject to the kind of glare on a regular basis I can only imagine ‘normal’ people get after staring at a lightbulb for a while.
In this article, Linda Geddes describes an experiment in which she decided to forgo artificial life for a number of weeks to see what effect it had on her health and, most importantly, her sleep.
Working with sleep researchers Derk-Jan Dijk and Nayantara Santhi at the University of Surrey, I designed a programme to go cold-turkey on artificial light after dark, and to try to maximise exposure to natural light during the day – all while juggling an office job and busy family life in urban Bristol.By the end of 2017, instead of having to manually install something like f.lux on my devices, they all started to have it built-in. There's a general realisation that blue light before bedtime is a bad idea. What this article points out, however, is another factor: how bright the light is that you're subjected to during the day.
Light enables us to see, but it affects many other body systems as well. Light in the morning advances our internal clock, making us more lark-like, while light at night delays the clock, making us more owlish. Light also suppresses a hormone called melatonin, which signals to the rest of the body that it’s night-time – including the parts that regulate sleep. “Apart from vision, light has a powerful non-visual effect on our body and mind, something to remember when we stay indoors all day and have lights on late into the night,” says Santhi, who previously demonstrated that the evening light in our homes suppresses melatonin and delays the timing of our sleep.The important correlation here is between the strength of light Geddes experienced during her waking hours, and the quality of her sleep.
But when I correlated my sleep with the amount of light I was exposed to during the daytime, an interesting pattern emerged. On the brightest days, I went to bed earlier. And for every 100 lux increase in my average daylight exposure, I experienced an increase in sleep efficiency of almost 1% and got an extra 10 minutes of sleep.This isn't just something that Geddes has experienced; studies have also found this kind of correlation.
In March 2007, Dijk and his colleagues replaced the light bulbs on two floors of an office block in northern England, housing an electronic parts distribution company. Workers on one floor of the building were exposed to blue-enriched lighting for four weeks; those on the other floor were exposed to white light. Then the bulbs were switched, meaning both groups were ultimately exposed to both types of light. They found that exposure to the blue-enriched white light during daytime hours improved the workers’ subjective alertness, performance, and evening fatigue. They also reported better quality and longer sleep.So the key takeaway message?
It’s ridiculously simple. But spending more time outdoors during the daytime and dimming the lights in the evening really could be a recipe for better sleep and health. For millennia, humans have lived in synchrony with the Sun. Perhaps it's time we got reacquainted.Source: BBC Future
Sounds and smells can help reinforce learning while you sleep
Apparently, the idea of learning while you sleep is actually bollocks, at least the way we have come to believe it works:
It wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers discovered the touted effects of hypnopaedia were actually not due to sleep at all. Instead these contraptions were actually awakening people. The debunkers could tell by using a relatively established technique called electroencephalography (EEG), which records the brain’s electrical signals through electrodes placed on the scalp. Using EEG on their participants, researchers could tell that the sleep-learners were actually awake (something we still do in research today), and this all but ended research into sleep as a cognitive tool. 50 years later, we now know it is possible to alter memory during sleep, just in a different way than previously expected.However, and fascinatingly, sounds (not words) and smells can reinforce learning:
In 2007, the neuroscientist Björn Rasch at Lübeck University and colleagues reported that smells, which were associated with previously learned material, could be used to cue the sleeping brain. The study authors had taught participants the locations of objects on a grid, just like in the game Concentration, and exposed them to the odour of roses as they did so. Next, participants slept in the lab, and the experimenters waited until the deepest stage of sleep (slow-wave sleep) to once again expose them to the odour. Then when they were awake, the participants were significantly better at remembering where the objects were located. This worked only if they had been exposed to the rose odour during learning, and had smelled it during slow-wave sleep. If they were exposed to the odour only while awake or during REM sleep, the cue didn’t work.Pretty awesome. There are some things still to research:
Outstanding questions that we have yet to address include: does this work for foreign-language learning (ie, grammar learning), or just learning foreign vocabulary? Could it be used to help maintain memory performance in an ageing population? Does reactivating some memories mean that others are wiped away even more quickly?Worth trying!
Source: Aeon