I was mesmerized by this movie as a child; my mom got a reel-to-reel projector for a birthday party when I was just a squirt and we all watched this.
Amazing notes and examples of the animation from the film.
I was mesmerized by this movie as a child; my mom got a reel-to-reel projector for a birthday party when I was just a squirt and we all watched this.
Amazing notes and examples of the animation from the film.
I posted quickly the other night that [I love pears][1]. That’s true, and the post stands. Pears are delicious.
But I like them for another reason.
When I find myself thinking about eating something after dinner (an activity about which I am circumspect, having effectively not done that deliberately as part of a larger weight-loss strategy), the usual suspects fall into my mind: That can of Virginia peanuts in the pantry! Liccorice! A nub of chocolate!
Depending upon what FoodNoms tells me is my calorie balance for the day, I often spring for frozen blueberries, or more recently, a pear. Rhonda loves them, too.
Grabbing a pear isn’t so simple as plucking one from the crisper and chomping down, though. I have a process that involves a few curated steps:
OK, so why enumerate such quotidian steps? I like the routine. Maybe it’s a sign of middle age, or an expression of my overly-active left brain (my brain is a loud mash of language, all day. All day.) It’s a process entirely spatial and physical in its completion. It involves some work and care in its preparation, in contrast with the quick hit of dopamine you get from unwrapping something sugary. It takes a little time before you can enjoy it.
Coffee is like this, for me, too. So many people jam a plastic cylinder in a machine, pull a trigger, and ruefully gulp down tepid brew in a litany of morning ablutions. For my parent, I adore the weighing, grinding, and measuring that goes into my morning jag, via pour over. Good beans, simple tools, time, and attention.
Happy Mother’s Day! Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
I have to rise a bit earlier to stick to my am rowing routine. This pretty much how it’s going:
How do you know you’re misusing due dates in your task management app? You’re setting due dates that are I wan to do by dates but that have no externally corresponding due date. In English: you’re assigning due dates to tasks that aren’t actually hard deadlines.
And a good sign that you’re doing that is you find yourself looking over your "Today" list and moving the date to the next day. Again. And again.
What’s wrong with this?
Nothing, really. But ultimately, due dates are when something is actually due. It’s a deadline.
"But I set a deadline for myself!" you might object.
Don’t do that.
Simpler task managers don’t offer many ways to bubble a task up to your awareness outside of due dates. But apps with more robust metadata, like Todoist and OmniFocus, to name a couple, can help you focus your attention on urgent and important tasks, while not tricking yourself with due dates.
My current example: I wrote about applying the Eisenhower Matrix to Todoist here on Uncorrected a while back. My particular system is a mashup of GTD and this method. Besides organizing tasks into projects with corresponding tags (context, in GTD parlance), I apply a P1 tag to things that are urgent and important (things I should do as soon as possible), P2 to things that are urgent but not important (things i have to plan), and important but not urgent (P3, not important but urgent), and can be delegated.
That organization scheme adds another processing step when getting things out of your inbox, so there’s some friction there. But it helps you focus when you find your "Today" perspective full of things you can keep pushing off to tomorrow. Working out of your P1 or Important/Urgent perspective keeps you moving forward, while things that are actually due today can appear in Today.
How do you know you’re misusing due dates in your task management app? You’re setting due dates that are I wan to do by dates but that have no externally corresponding due date. In English: you’re assigning due dates to tasks that aren’t actually hard deadlines.
And a good sign that you’re doing that is you find yourself looking over your "Today" list and moving the date to the next day. Again. And again.
What’s wrong with this?
Nothing, really. But ultimately, due dates are when something is actually due. It’s a deadline.
"But I set a deadline for myself!" you might object.
Don’t do that.
Simpler task managers don’t offer many ways to bubble a task up to your awareness outside of due dates. But apps with more robust metadata, like Todoist and OmniFocus, to name a couple, can help you focus your attention on urgent and important tasks, while not tricking yourself with due dates.
My current example: I wrote about applying the Eisenhower Matrix to Todoist here on Uncorrected a while back. My particular system is a mashup of GTD and this method. Besides organizing tasks into projects with corresponding tags (context, in GTD parlance), I apply a P1 tag to things that are urgent and important (things I should do as soon as possible), P2 to things that are urgent but not important (things i have to plan), and important but not urgent (P3, not important but urgent), and can be delegated.
That organization scheme adds another processing step when getting things out of your inbox, so there’s some friction there. But it helps you focus when you find your "Today" perspective full of things you can keep pushing off to tomorrow. Working out of your P1 or Important/Urgent perspective keeps you moving forward, while things that are actually due today can appear in Today.
Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
Sous vide ribeyes and some chicken for Joe.
How much should we shield ourselves or others from the challenges of life? Are we nurturing resilience or inadvertently fostering fragility? Maybe it’s about finding that sweet spot where we’re supported enough to thrive but still exposed enough to grow strong and resilient. Sometimes, the very things that make us feel safe can hold us back from developing the strength we truly need.
Today, during an interview (for once, I wasn’t in the hot seat) I learned about ambiverts and ambiversion. The candidate described herself this way, and I was intrigued by both the word and the concept.
It harkened back to my own second-round interview for the job I’m currently occupying. The superintendent asked me, in what he described as a strange question, whether I’d rather be a travel guide or a travel agent. I was intrigued by the question and it got me thinking, in that moment, about how I consider myself vs how I comport myself.
I do very much prize alone time and am comfortable being by myself most of the time. I’m also not likely to put myself in positions where I have to talk in front of groups of people, although I often feel better after having done so (and regret situations where I shy away from the challenge).
And I also thought about all of the times I’ve taken parents and students around to see a school they are curious about or reluctant to send their child, and I always heartily agreed to provide tours to parents. I like these situations because I often get a chance to talk about what I know, and also to exercise a little bit of persuasion.
And when I worked at the Camden County Educational Services Commission, I often found myself in a sales mode, trying to persuade customers to use our services. I was surprised by how much I got into this role, considering how little I every wanted to be in a sales position. I always considered it something I wasn’t suited to or interested in.
Anyway, ambiversion: The term was coined by Edmund Conklin, a psychologist, encompassing both extraversion and introversion. It’s not interesting, from a research perspective, because it’s normal:
In other words, ambiverts are simply healthy people, neither too extroverted nor too introverted. Some have argued that because of Conklin’s attempt to define the "normal," he’s the progenitor of positive psychology—remember that what was popular at the genesis of much psychology was defining what was going wrong in someone’s mind, not right.
Hans Eysenck [considered ambiversion](Extroversion-Ambiversion-Introversion – Arlene R Taylor PhD, Realizations Inc (arlenetaylor.org)) to account for the vast majority of people’s personality traits:
68% to 70% are estimated to fall in the middle of the continuum and are moderately alert when fully awake (Ambiverts). These individuals tend to function best with moderate or average levels of stimulation.
I like these seemingly obvious conclusions to our otherwise all-or-nothing orientation towards personality traits. Of course most people aren’t always extraverted or introverted. We’re both, depending upon the situation. I have often thought that, were we as a culture and a society less didactic about gender roles, young people would be less likely to declare a gender orientation and just be themselves. As a male brought up in a culture that celebrates extreme versions of masculinity, I don’t find the notion of switching identities personally alluring, but I have often longed for a more tolerant world.
If we can exist comfortably-normally-in between the two extremes of introversion and extraversion, we can surely understand and accept others, and ourselves, as living in between other polar opposites.
Brewing & Product Care Information
James Hoffman on The Chemex
Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
Pleased with this afternoon’s 10k. I felt strong during the whole piece, although I could feel myself getting pooped near the end. At the outset, I was pretty confident that I was going to hit my 10k in 40 minutes goal, but I gave up some seconds during the piece. I stayed focused through most of the row.
I pasted my previous PR and today’s side by side in Affinity Photo so you can see them side by side. Watts were up by 2, I shaved about six seconds off last week’s time, and got my average pace under 2:01/500k. The good news too is that I kept my stroke rate the same, so I was pulling with a hair more power than last week.
And hey: my 2023-24 season is almost at an end (the ErgData app is calculating my season as starting on May 1st of last year, which is around when we got the second Concept2 Model D). I’ve logged just over 2 million meters since then.