You need ergonomics and flow
When you take a walk, you make a loop, starting and ending at your home. The most efficient way (in time and energy) to get home would have been just to stay home, but walks aren’t about efficiency of locomotion; they are about walking.
If your walk has a specific destination, say if you’re walking to your favorite breakfast restaurant, you may want to take the fastest route. Or you may not, depending on whether you need a walk and have time to spend. …
Get curious and creative instead
Discussing environmental impacts and sustainable technology brings up interesting reactions in people. When I wrote a post comparing notebooks from a sustainability point of view, one of my friends praised it before wincing and saying “I’m one of those terrible people who have a Moleskine.”
This friend is not a terrible person, nor are people ‘terrible’ for buying a product that isn’t the most sustainable one available in its category. Heck, I have two Moleskines myself.
Most of the notebooks I recommended in my post are recently-developed products. People who wanted to write in notebooks before the ones I recommended…
The 20s are here to grant your wish.
Growing up reading R.L. Stevenson and Jules Verne, I wanted to be an explorer when I grew up. That dream stumbled when I learned that there weren’t any continents left to discover. Further disappointing was learning what the explorers of yore were actually trying to do — steal land, mess with people’s religion, grab a bunch of animals for zoos, and generally wreak havoc and destruction.
I had no truck with any of that nonsense, I just wanted to wear boots and tramp around in the woods. …
The first got the words flowing and the second taught me structure
I’ve made several attempts to keep a diary or journal since childhood, but I was only able to make it stick when I figured out the method that was right for me about 5 years ago. I’ve been journaling consistently and prolifically ever since.
We’ve all read a lot by now about the benefits of journaling for mental health, creativity, and organization. If you’re inspired to try it for yourself, where do you start?
There are tons of different kinds of journaling practices — gratitude journaling, bullet journaling, 5-minute journaling, and 5-year journaling. The choices can seem overwhelming. …
As I wrote recently, I’m building up my database of sustainability research sources and news, one link at a time. For this article, I’m trying something new.
I am NOT an expert on sustainability, so if you aren’t either (yet), it might be fun to follow along with me as I learn the subject. I’ll admit to being inspired by the whole ‘get ready/travel/study with me/reaction video/unboxing video’ genre on Youtube.
I’m organizing my research by questions. The questions I’m researching in this post are about greenwashing. I cover one news article in this post, which may or may not…
Grasping a vast subject requires a creative approach
Environmental sustainability is a vast subject that touches every aspect of our lives — food, fashion, and our commutes to work — as well as many elements that we don’t see behind the curtain, like the supply chains that build the trucks that ship the products we buy. It also covers multiple areas of study, like science, engineering, policy, and law. All of that makes it an intimidating field of learning.
I’d like to have a better grasp on the subject for many reasons. One, because it’s fascinating. It includes every issue I’m interested in. And because I want to…
Statistics is an instrument of truth.
You can make truer statements with statistics than without. Statements that apply to some fraction of people for some fraction of the time can be stated as such, instead of as absolutes.
No one ‘always’ does anything. If you said to someone “You always do this!” the statement can only be false.
‘All’ people of a certain demographic don’t do any one thing. “All women (or all men) behave a certain way”, is less true than a statement that specifies what fraction of men or women you mean, and how you estimated this fraction.
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Sustainable options often lead to living better
Ergonomics has been on my mind as I set up my home office after moving into a new apartment. To get a desk of the right height, I had to build my own out of a plank from a hardware store and a couple of filing cabinets. I want my books and notebooks within arm’s length, and to be able to wheel my chair from the computer desk to the writing station to the sketching station with ease, without wires getting in the way.
I’ve also been thinking about cognitive ergonomics and how a slower pace of life suits our…
Extrapolating trends too far into the future can lead to absurd conclusions
Remember when we thought we were going to become ever-more connected until we merged into a collective hive mind?
We saw ourselves become more connected than we had been, as email, texting, and social media came on the scene. Why wouldn’t this trend continue? Extrapolating, we thought we’d end up at the extreme end-state of becoming a super-organism.
I use ‘we’ loosely. I know not all of us thought that.
Consider now the extreme distaste many of us have for social media and email, the fashionable practice of ‘unplugging’ and going of the grid, technology detoxes, and digital minimalism.
Technology…
We’re just really tired of ads.
Where did this ‘goldfish’ factoid come from? The origin was a study done by Microsoft’s advertising department, which was then popularized by Time magazine. All the links I found to the pdf of the original study were broken. Microsoft has taken it off of their website, based on my search on their site for the word ‘goldfish’.
Does the finding sound plausible to anyone? We don’t read entire books in 8-second increments. A standard ‘Pomodoro’ is 20 minutes. “How are Netflix binges a thing?” …
