The 8-hour Workday

 "The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount fo work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actually work done in eight hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. 

We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convienience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lifes so that we continue wanting things we don't have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing."

- David Cain, from "Your Lifestyle Has Already been Designed"

Summerlicious Tab Dump

 Some interesting things I've read:

• A persuasive case that, despite its very real cultural value, no successful business makes money supporting the Long Tail
  
• So You've Decided to Bungle your Company's Flexible Work Plan. It's funny because it's true. 
• A few reads about current musical trends:
• Why Music has Lost it's Charms. Risk-adverse labels yes, but also this: "[Labels realized that] they were being paid exactly the same amount per song whether the song was brand new or 50 years old. They quickly concluded that if their customers (stations and streamers) were indifferent to the age of the content and the end users were actually looking for the older music, there was little or no reason to rock the boat and push for new material. Investing in new talent turned out to be an incremental cost which they chose to avoid." 
• The above quote is most likely at the core of why The New Numbers on Music Consumption are Very Ugly
• Umair Haque makes the case that while the above is true, technology and algorithms are a technical reason why music doesn't sound like music anymore, another factor contributing to the problem
• In The Lost Art of Looking at Nature, Rachel Reiderer astutely observes that in our current environment of terrible climate change and ecodoom stories, she appreciates the genius of David Attenborough: "The bulk of the screen time is spent shoring up this anodyne, if novel, notion: plants are sensory marvels. The beauty and strangeness acts as a spoonful of sugar, so diverting that you hardly notice the fleeting discussions of the ecological importance of plants and how they are endangered by monocultures and climate change. These less frequent passages are the series’ medicine. Attenborough’s films often end with a call to action. But it is savvy of him, both as an artist and as an activist, to make plenty of room for pleasure. ... To pause for a moment, guided by an old naturalist’s eye for curiosity and beauty, is restorative. It gives a viewer the energy to face the hard truths of the rolling crisis and serves as a reminder of the wonders outside the human world that are also at stake."
• A visual guide to the Aztec Pantheon
  
• Six Zen Buddhist livelihood guidelines
  

Related:

• Tab Dump 2021: Music
  
• Time for another Tab Dump
• Bride of Tab Dump

Last-minute Desperate Solutions to Impossible Problems

This is how I feel at work sometimes:

Casey Ryback: What made you flip like this?
William Strannix: I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fucking people.
Casey Ryback: All of your ridiculous pitiful antics aren't gonna change a thing. You and me, we're *puppets* in the same sick game. We serve the same master, and he's a lunatic and he's ungrateful. But there's nothing we can do about it. You and me, we're the same.
William Strannix: Oh, no. No. No. No. There's a difference, my man. You have faith. I don't!
[a knife fight erupts between them]

From the classic Stephen Segal flick Under Seige

Distractions - More Annoying Than You Think

The Dish points me towards an explanation of why we're dissatisfied at work, quoting Casey Schwartz writing about Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn:

We've been trained to assume that working hard means focusing on a single task to completion, then doing it again. But, says Davidson, "the new workplace requires different forms of attention than the workplace we were trained for."
The result is that we feel anxious and guilty, convinced we’re not getting enough done, not achieving an honest day’s work... As Davidson puts it, "We’ve inherited a sense of efficiency modeled on attention that is never pulled off track."
But these days, according to research, "the contemporary worker switches tasks an average of once every three minutes."

I know that after a typical day, in addition to feeling exhausted, sympathize with this view. It's probably what leads people in my generation or younger to start screening their phone calls, waiting to answer emails, etc.

The Morning Commute

One of the reasons I'm satisfied with my job at the moment is because of the small things. I like the people that I work with. The work is challenging. I get to spend more time with my kids (their day care is located in the same building where I work). But I have to say that the biggest benefit is the short commute: On a bad day, I only have to drive 10 minutes door-to-door. It's huge, especially when I think about the 2.5 hours I was on the train to and from Boston all those years. And that was just taking the train! Kevin Fanning describes what the Boston car commutes can feel like:

It’s unhealthy, sitting in traffic and wishing I’m anywhere else under the sun. What I’m doing is important to my family. What I’m doing is not worse than what so many other people do, for much less. But thinking about the clock of my life ticking away every day while I’m sitting there, just waiting to be somewhere else, I feel the gulf between my body (where I am) and brain (where I want to be) widening. The two growing further apart, until I’m only aware of the distance between them. Some mornings in the shower I hear voices left over from my dreams, and they seem to have strongly held opinions, but I have no idea what they’re saying. Sometimes at night when I am reading a book to my kids, I realize that we are halfway through the book, and my mouth has been saying the words, but I haven’t been paying attention to them whatsoever, and have in fact been thinking about something completely unrelated. I lose that time, even though I’m right there.

Not that i don't suffer from this lack of mindfulness, but it's been getting much better now that I'm not spending so much time just traveling to and from work. Pity the pour commuter's soul.

Corporate Buzzwords

My Corporate Bingo words for the week were "snippets" and "level set." A month ago it was "cycles" as in "Do you have a free cycle to help out on this project?" Sometimes it's like learning a completely different language.

So Much Failed Change

This article from AMA provides a staggering statistic: "...about 70% of changes in organizations fail." That's an incredible number!
The article details reasons why this might be, but is a bit vague in the "what can you do about it" area. I've been through a few company reorganizations and the following are a few things that seem to work to me:

- Leadership has a clear vision and transition plan for the change
- Employees are kept in the loop and every effort is made to ensure their buy-in. Often, this means involving them in the change process, or at least soliciting their feedback.
- Once the change is announced, detailed communications about everyone's new responsibilities are sent from above so that there's no ambiguity.
- Change management! How exactly will the transition occur so that nothing falls through the cracks as people move from one responsibility to the other.

I Knew It Made Me Uncomfortable... but Killing Me?

Business Weekly claims that my office chair is killing me. Yikes.

I know that I find the average chair to be really uncomfortable after a few hours. And trying to get a comfortable chair in the average office is next to impossible. At my current company, people kept stealing my comfortable chairs and replacing them with awful chairs that didn't adjust and had too much lumbar support (like most modern Honda car seats). I finally ended up with an acceptable chair, but it was a struggle.

And I can't imagine working standing up, much less walking while I worked. When I draw or paint I work on a tilted table which is nice but my back gets even more tired on my stool then it does an office chair.

Thoughts on Telecommuting

I've been pondering why it is that working from home typically inspires me to work harder then I do when I'm in the office. As I see it, there’s two factors at work here:

1. Since I’m not as tied to the clock as I am at work, I’m more motivated to get my work done early so I start doing personal things
2. There’s a fear involved that if you’re not producing or always available, your co-workers will think you’re at home watching TV in your underwear.

I’m being a tad glib with that last point but I did have a boss in an older job that seriously thought that no one ever did any work when they were at home, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, at the time I was taking the train into Boston, which ate ~2:30 out of my day, so working from home not only gave me more personal time, but also mean that I had more time to devote to my work projects as opposed to traveling.
In my current situation, my lack of inspiration at work isn’t helped by the fact that I’m surrounded by people that hold relatively loud conversations with each other, making me wear my headphones 80% of the time just so I can concentrate. Another part of the appeal of working on the home couch is the absolute quiet.