Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Standing Desks

Arguably not a strong selling point, Donald Rumsfeld is known to use a standing desk. You may not like the man, but anyone has to admit that he got stuff done. I read somewhere that some of the Founding Fathers also favored them. According to wikipedia, they were popular in the 1700’s, so maybe that’s true. Several times in my life, I have felt overwhelmed and behind. One way that I found a new sense of urgency and momentum was to adopt a standing desk. A box on your normal desk moves a laptop to a comfortable height for typing while standing, and it makes a reasonable kludge. There are other designs out there by some other bloggers.

If you move your chair out of your office, I suspect you will discover that random surfing-of-the-internet disappears from your life. Sitting down is appropriate for eating and masturbating. It’s much less fun to seek idle entertainment while standing. If you are standing up and your writing or programming hits a lull, the immediate impulse is to go do something rather than alt-tab to a browser and see what has happened on slashdot.

In the long term, it’s not too enjoyable. But I want to kick my life up a notch, and one quick way to do it is to ditch the office chair.

-Peter

Review of Steve Pavlina’s “Personal Development for Smart People”

S. Pavlina wrote this book, “Personal Development for Smart People,” in the same field as 7 Habits, which I reviewed earlier. The 7 Habits has a somewhat paternal tone, which I think puts off some readers. I like Steve Pavlina’s “Personal Development for Smart People” because it is written much more from the perspective of a young professional in the Internet age. It is not filled with managerial and parental anecdotes, though it does more than flirt with mysticism. I imagine that will put off a different set of readers.

Like Covey, Pavlina tries to capture some of the essential principles that produce a well lived life. The three he settles on are Love, Truth and Power. He explains each, and explains how they relate and combine to produce other important virtues.

His conception of Truth is a little strange – it borders on truthiness at times. Essentially, truth is the alignment of statements and actions with Reality (!?) and the methods of probing reality are vaguely scientific. But for things that can not be probed through empirical means, then Pavlina is perfectly happy to just be pragmatic about which ideas are “true” and which are not. “You shall know them by their fruits,” I take it. True ideas produce good results. For some more metaphysical propositions, that leads to a pretty relativistic conception of Truth. I suppose that doesn’t bother me much, but it might bother some people.

Pavlina takes Love as very broadly defined, and I’m fine with that. He relates love and connectedness in an interesting way.

Power is closely related to responsibility. I think that’s right on the money. Taking responsibility is not the same as being at fault. I think that there is a funny trick of language going on. We say “I am responsible for this situation,” and that means “I am at fault for this situation.”

I wish that there were a better way to say “I am responsible to this situation.” What I mean by that phrase is not that I am at fault, but that my responses to the situation are entirely my choice. I am not at fault for the earthquake (though if I am unprepared, I am at fault for that). I am responsible for all my actions in response to the earthquake. Only when a person is responsible to every aspect of their life (a proactive response-ability) can they hope to have any power in their own life.

My favorite part so far is his perspective on goals. This gave me a minor paradigm shift that was worth ten bucks. Covey and Pavlina both talk about the importance of goal setting. Pavlina makes an excellent point that I had never considered: the metric by which a goal is evaluated is not just whether achieving it would be good. There are lots of things that would be nice to do or have some day, but that are not necessarily good goals. For instance, I would not mind being a millionaire someday, but it is not a good goal for me because it does not excite a deep passion for me.

The litmus test for a good goal is: how does having that goal make you feel and behave right now? Goals are really most important in the immediate present. Being a millionaire would be nice, but I have no hunger for it. The possibility does not excite or motivate me. I am not pumped about it. I just don’t care that much. So it’s not an effective goal.

Finding a good goal that does excite a upwelling of passion is actually harder than it sounds.

Cheers,
Peter

From Chandler to Sunbird, Goosync and my Nokia

Some time back I posted a little review of my experience with Chandler and the Getting Things Done. I liked Chandler, but it ended up being a bit slow for my old PC. I found the Lightning add on for Thunderbird, which is an implementation of Sunbird, the Mozilla calendar. After having some installation problems with Lightning under Ubuntu, I went full Sunbird and I have not looked back. It stands alone, integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, it seems to have very little overhead. It has alarms that beep at me when I have meetings and it has a Task List that works really well for a GTD workflow.

Hard Landscape Items go in the Calendar. Tasks get added to the Task list. Subordinate task get added to the “notes” section under the current Task. I only see the 5 Next tasks for my 5 projects. The backlog of 25 other tasks that will come up later are not visible until I move them up. I like that because it makes me feel less overwhelmed by choice.

I had a problem before with my uncommon Nokia phone. There is not a super-easy to sync my phone’s calendar with my Sunbird calendar. Enter Goosync. Goosync is a paid service that (for a very small yearly fee) syncs my phone’s calendar with my Nokia calendar. My Nokia was a bit of a pain to set up, but it’s on a pay-as-you-go service and it wasn’t easy to get the data service to work. So if you have data access with your plan, I expect that Goosync can make life easy. So now my phone beeps along with my computer. Perfect. I need all the help I can get.

Cheers,
Peter

Review: Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic

The commodification of relationships hurts them. In Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy Bruce Levine discusses how the patient-psychiatrist relationship has been undermined by consumerism. On one hand, managed health care demands snappy diagnoses and generic prescriptions – not exactly a fertile scenario for deep friendships. On the other hand, exchanging money for a deep friendship feels icky (for lack of a better word).

The psychiatrist-patient relationship is particularly interesting because it is one which is nominally concerned with the healing of emotional wounds. This is something for which friendships and deep relationships are also really important. The dangers of over-commercializing or commoditizing a doctor-patient relationship are present for other kinds of relationships, too. I would suggest that virtually all relationships in the American Paradigm are seen in the context of the exchange of goods and services. Case in point: I regret something I once said to a significant other. I said that doing nice things for one another is what loving relationships are “all about.”

Doing nice things for one another is nice. Moreover, I like doing things for people who are important to me, and (of course) I like having nice things done for me. Even at the time, I didn’t think of it as a profound statement. It was just something offhand. But my point is that gifts are not what loving relationships are “all about.” In saying so, I had stumbled into a subtle and pervasive lie of our culture. The exchange of gifts (material or otherwise) is a natural consequence of a strong relationship, not the foundation.

The book explores good territory, and it’s an engaging read. It’s particularly relevant for those who want to think carefully about the kinds of professional relationships they want to build with their patients. But I think it has wider relevance, too.

Cheers,
Peter