Jerry’s Blog

"Work Expands to the Time Allowed"

Math professor, programmer, and blogger John Cook discusses how work expands to fill the time allowed for it, and why the more trivial something is, the more time we waste discussing it.

Yesterday I found a copy of Parkinson's Law for $1 at a library book sale. This book is best known for it's opening line: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

The name "Parkinson's law" can mean at least four different things...

Read the rest of the article at lifehacker.com

Sing it, Doctor.

Focus your attention, and find peace.

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Awhile back I (a bit ironically perhaps) tweeted this message:

Consider what you give your attention to each day. It’s a precious resource, & determines the shape of your life.

This seemed to strike a chord with many people, who I think are feeling overwhelmed these days. Our attention is being pulled in too many directions, leaving us feeling overloaded, distracted, chaotic, spread thinly, without focus.

There are a million blogs, people, services, media, competing for our attention. Our attention is limited, and valuable, making it one of the most precious resources we have.

The world wants that attention. Only you can decide where it goes.

And it does determine the shape of your life: what you pay attention to becomes your reality. If you watch and read the news all the time, you will become obsessed with the latest crises. If you watch and read about celebrities, your life will revolve around them. If you socialize on social networks all day long, this will become your world.

If instead, you choose to give your attention to work you’re passionate about, that you feel is important, that will change your life and the world in some small way … this will become your life.

If you choose to give your attention to your friends, family and other loved ones — really give your attention to them instead of only half-heartedly while also checking text messages and emails and other updates — your life will be rich in many ways.

And so I urge you to reclaim your attention.

Here’s how:

1. Limit your friends. Not real-life friends, but social network and blogging and forum friends. Not that these can’t be good relationships, but having too many makes them meaningless. And each friend will take up a little bit of your attention — when you read their updates, click on their links, reply to their messages, look at their photos, and so on. The more you have, the more attention they’ll require. Limit them to just the essential.

2. Limit your feeds. Blog subscriptions, newsletters, other updates and news subscriptions and so on. Limit them to a handful of essentials, and let the rest go. The more you have, the more attention they require.

3. Limit your communication time. Going into your email inbox? Just give yourself 10 minutes to read, reply, delete, and get out. Going to do Twitter? Give yourself 5 minutes. Seriously, set up a timer. Don’t let these things take up all your attention.

4. Give up on news. It’s a never-ending cycle. And if you’ve paid attention to the news as long as I have (I’m a former journalist), you know it’s all the same, year after year. Unless your job depends on it, the news is usually a waste of your attention. Let go of the need to stay updated. Even if your job does depend on it, keep it limited.

5. Be brief. Write brief emails, tweets, updates, blog posts. With some exceptions, of course. But make brief your de facto. Read more.

6. Give your attention to the important. This is the crucial part: choose what you give your attention to, and do this choosing carefully. What is important to you? Writing? Photography? Design? Coding? Creating a new business that helps others? Your kids? Figure this out, and give this the majority of your attention.

7. Become conscious of your distractions. Once you’ve decided to focus your attention on the important, become more aware of distractions as they come up. Make note of them, and as you get the urge to be distracted, learn to pause, breathe, and return to the important.

8. Surround yourself with the positive. If you want your life to be positive, let the positive have your attention. This applies to blogs, people, projects, and more.

For more, read my new book, focus: a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction.

via zenhabits.net

Once upon a time, a wise man advised me: "What you give your attention to, grows in your life." Here's an article on the practical steps to grow the life you'd like.

Wally--a company that makes stunning modern yachts--and the French fashion house Hermes have teamed up to design a new boat: The appropriately named WHY, a full-blown solar-powered island.

Just unveiled at the Abu Dhabi Yacht Show (of course), the WHY is 190 feet long and a whopping 125 feet wide--making it a dream for any billionaire who can't find enough space off land for his phalanx of Cristal-swigging bikini babes. In all, the boat has the square footage of a mansion--some 34,000 square feet. As Wally's president, Luca Bassani Antivari, explained it to The Guardian:

Everybody's dream is to live on an island, in complete freedom, without constraint, with the independence that only self sufficiency can provide. A piece of land with a beautiful villa partly fulfils this aspiration because it is static. A yacht offers the freedom to move, but does not have the space of a property. WHY has it all.

Right you are! I'll take seven then, for each of the world's oceans.

The boat is meant to cater to 12 guests, with "master space", "guest space" and "common space." There's even an 82-foot pool and a 114-foot "beach" on the back. Supposedly, the massive fuel requirements of pushing the boat to a top speed of 14 knots will be offset by 9,700 square feet of photovoltaics on the roof. The $160 million pricetag is such a bargain.

[The Guardian via Space Invading]

via fastcompany.com

Report: Saab 9-2 plans proceeding, design influenced by brand's '50s teardrop models

by Jeremy Korzeniewski (RSS feed) on Feb 26th 2010 at 10:00AM

You wouldn't know it by looking at Saab's current automobiles, but once upon a time the Swedish marque was known for crafting almost impossibly rounded bodywork. Victor Muller, CEO of Spyker Cars, which just completed its acquisition of the Saab brand, plans to reintroduce such teardrop-shaped emotion back into the automaker's line with a new vehicle codenamed 92, or in more modern parlance, 9-2.

Don't expect to see the small, premium 9-2 before 2013 or so, when it would theoretically go up against machines like the Mini and Audi A1. According to Autocar, Saab would likely borrow a suitable set of underpinnings from GM's Opel division, as is the case with the new 2011 Saab 9-5.

If Saab is able to get this new entry-level model into production as planned, its inclusion would no doubt go a long way towards reaching Muller's stated goal of hitting 100,000 total sales per year for the newly acquired automaker. That's not too big a stretch considering that the brand sold 93,220 cars as recently as 2008. We wish him, along with the rest of those with a stake in Saab, lots of luck.

[Source: Autocar]

LOVE this look. A curvy Swedish model.

 

Facebook this weekend published a special Valentine's day study about romantic relationships and happiness. The company's Data Team sliced and diced the language used in millions of peoples' status messages, then looked at how they varied depending on the relationship status the people listed themselves with.

Conclusions? Married people are the happiest, people in Open Relationships are the least happy. Men are less happy than women in an open relationship (believe it or not) and more happy in marriage. These findings are interesting, but what they really indicate is that there may be a modern-day Farmers' Almanac for understanding our lives hidden behind the company's doors. Facebook needs to set that data free or at least do more with it.

 The Data Team's conclusions were written up by intern Lisa Zhang, who's relationship status isn't public on the site. Zhang explained the methodology like this:

We already have methodology for measuring the happiness of Facebook users: by considering how many positive words people use in their status updates (see the USA Gross National Happiness Index). This method allows us to see whether a person's Facebook relationship status affects how positive and negative they are. We examined the use of positive and negative words in the status updates of all English speakers over the course of one week in January. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

One of the most significant findings reported is about people who listed themselves as in an Open Relationship, meaning typically that they are committed to one person but have sex with multiple people. Those people tend to be less positive than anyone else, less positive even than widowed people!

This is truly remarkable, if you think about it. For what tiny percentage of human history has it been a common practice to publicly declare your relationship Open in such a way? It's a pretty new thing! How's it working out for people? Apparently not so well!

That could be good information to know before making certain decisions ("if I knew then what I know now..."). Of course, how does having children affect happiness in married people? How happy do people in heterosexual vs same-sex Open Relationships tend to be? Are women who are engaged to men with feminist or liberal-sympathetic interests (Fan pages) express less negativity than other engaged women or is that just a facade that in reality means nothing?

There are lots of questions raised by this data, and it's just one of an infinite combination of data points that Facebook could analyze.

It's probable that some of this data includes important observations about the human condition. Information that could help people make better-informed decisions than ever before in human history; informed not only by our own experience, and the experiences of the people we observe in our immediate lives, but by the experiences of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Other Examples of Important Advice

Remember the Farmers' Almanac? It's a book that's been published annually since 1818, filled with advice about cooking, gardening, humor and weather predictions. The mysterious Farmers' Almanac team (there's only been 7 editors in the publication's history) refuses to disclose its methods for weather prediction, but claims to have a 80 to 85% accuracy rate over its history.

Similarly, Facebook data might not be able to tell us with 100% accuracy whether people who move from Michigan to California, or who marry young, or who stop playing football and start playing basketball tend to be more happy or less happy than before - but that data could come a whole lot closer to telling us than anything we've had before has.

Of course we're all special snowflakes, with infinite complications, and free will is important - but doesn't it seem that there's an incredible opportunity for world-wide self awareness hiding inside this social network where we're typing our relationship status, our location and our interests into fields in a form?

Of course Facebook uses that data to target advertising. Why will the company tell an advertiser that I'm part of a group of college educated, white, married men, over 30 years old and living in the state of Oregon but it won't tell me that among people in those circumstances I have a particularly geographically limited set of friends and should probably get out more if I want to really understand the world? Now that would be valuable information!

Hunch, the startup lead by Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, makes that kind of data a big part of its social decision making service. The site provides a way for you to walk through various things you should consider in making decisions like what kind of car you should buy next or where you might like to go on vacation. It also asks you questions about yourself along the way.

Among 10k people Hunch asked "do you like Cilantro?" the ones that said they did were far more likely to prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate. People who said they didn't like cilantro are much more likely to prefer milk chocolate. (Probably because people who don't like cilantro don't know what's good in life.) A Hunch study last week of people who own different breeds of dogs found that German Shepherd fans tend to rely more on intuition than common sense and Pug fans particularly enjoyed the movie The Shawshank Redemption.

How about Facebook coughs up the goods on the far greater supply of user data than any other site in the world has?

Unfortunately, Facebook is going in just the opposite direction. The company's Data Team puts out some lightweight analysis like these Valentine's Day conclusions about once a month. When software engineer Pete Warden tried last week to offer up user data he'd collected from 250 million Facebook users to the Academic community for study (see The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul) the company contacted him and told him to put a hold on the release while privacy concerns were evaluated. Last week the company took down Lexicon, its public tool for comparing how often different words were being used across the streams of Facebook users.

Come on, Facebook! Set the data free. It's not about cilantro and chocolate, that's just the fun stuff. There are important observations about humanity hiding in that data. Check out, for example, Hunch's observations of hundreds of people who said they don't believe Barack Obama was born in the US and what else they have in common.

If you don't feel like you can set it free, then at least do something more serious with it. The Farmers' Almanac is a mysterious organization, maybe some more mystery would be ok if it came along with a whole lot of Facebook data.

This is a historically unique opportunity and one that I hope Facebook will take ahold of soon. Think of all the heartbreak the company could help prevent if only people knew their odds of being happy in an Open Relationship, among the countless other decisions we make that would be well informed by analysis of aggregate user data.

Fascinating.