Personal

work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

June 14, 2017 by krisis

Today, my friend and former colleague Stephanie wrote a great, brief article on productivity, procrastination, and burnout for SuperYesMore entitled “The Law of Reversed Effort.”

I tend to approach all tasks in life exactly as Stephanie describes the simple act of walking across a plank of wood on the ground.

[S]ay I put a long sturdy plank of wood on the ground in front of you and asked you to walk across it. You’d tell me “no problem” as you scurried along it. It’s such a simple task.

Let’s say I need 5 hours to accomplish something in our house. Anything. Blog writing. Exercising. Room cleaning.

I look at that personal work effort like it’s a plank of wood I have to step across. If the board is five times the length of my stride, I need to take five steps. If the work I want to do is 5 hours worth of work effort because that’s how fast I can type, exercise, or clean, I find 5 hours over the span of my week where I can accomplish said thing.

I starting thinking about the thing as already being completed if not for the formality of spending the actual 5 hours of work effort.

That’s not always the case, because work effort does not always equal work duration.

In a professional project management sense, that’s tends to result from a constraint on the schedule of the resource which puts in the effort. If you only have access to the designer on your project for an hour each day, it will take 5 days to do 5 hours of work. The work effort is 5 hours, but the work duration is 5 days.

However, let’s say your designer is available all day, every day. That 5 hours of work can be done in the next 5 hours starting at this very second, right? [Read more…] about work duration vs. work effort, and walking the (productivity) plank

she can read (much to my amazement)

June 13, 2017 by krisis

Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsong at me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Or, didn’t expect her to read, because that’s what she’s been doing for the last week. [Read more…] about she can read (much to my amazement)

Here’s the dealio…

June 12, 2017 by krisis

A brief note for those of you who have been dutifully keeping up with my Most-Wanted omnibus blogging (and everything else – I see you, Drag Racers).

Your intrepid author sitting on his front step (which is called a “stoop” in his ancestral home of South Philly), still glistening from his Monday workout in his never-ending bucket list quest for visible abs (slowly but surely) and with a little bit of a neck beard (I ain’t getting pretty just to get sweaty).

First: you are wonderful. I’ve been receiving so much awesome feedback both here in comments and on the various message boards I inhabit. This writing has been really fun to do and I am very happy you are enjoying it.

Second: As you may have noticed, I am about two weeks behind on the omnibus posts. That’s not only because they take a long time to research and write, but because I had a one-two punch of (positive!) life stuff happen for over a week that keep me from writing.

Because I am incredibly stubborn, I am still posting the Most-Wanted posts on the days they were scheduled to hit. However, also in my stubbornness I haven’t been posting any posts that would be ahead of the omnibus posts or debuting new comic guides.

I’m going to put an end to that stubbornness and get back to making more timely posts. I’ll still be filling in the Most-Wanted posts as quickly as I can – and we are absolutely going all the way to #1 – but it might run into July. Keep your eye on the slider images in the sidebar for a quick view of what’s new – or, just head to the Most Wanted Omnibus tag or the “comics” category.

I only get to make this post because you are reading, which is a great situation to be in. As a reminder, CK’s hosting expenses are now supported by readers on Patreon. If you’ve enjoyed reading this in the past month as much as you have some of your traditional favorite web sites, comics, or magazines, consider chipping in $1 a month to keep CK up and running all year round.

Spring Thing: Out on a Limb at the Morris Arboretum

May 19, 2017 by krisis

One of the most amazing things about spending the past year at home full-time with EV6 has been making so many memories.

I don’t just mean that in the glib way of, “every day together is a new memory,” although that’s certainly true.

It seems that I began my time off right on the bounds of the period of time where EV6’s long-term recall really kicked in. She has a few fleeting recollections of events prior to last April, especially ones where she’s seen many photos to reinforce them.

Yet, starting around the time I began to take trial days off from work, her recall is incredible – crisp and complete, even for adventures I didn’t capture in photos and have since all-but forgotten.

One example is Morris Arboretum. This was one of the first big new things we did together last spring in a special team-up adventure with our friend Miss Jess. At the time, EV6 was a bit too young to appreciate the rose garden and abstract structures. What stuck with her was their “Out on a Limb” setting, where you can climb from tree to tree like a bird or a monkey on a series of platforms and nets.

EV6 has brought it up from time to time in the past year, but when Spring hit us in full bloom in the past few weeks it suddenly became the only special trip she’d request!

Finally, our free day lined up with beautiful weather, and so when I woke up EV6 on Wednesday morning I announced, “It’s time to go back to the Arboretum!”

Obviously, Out on a Limb was the first thing we bolted for when we arrived. EV6 was a bit tentative on the nets last year, but this year she was like a spider crawling on a web! We spent nearly an hour clambering around, pretending to be animals, and making friends before we continued to other experiences.

Another big draw for kids at Morris is the Garden Railway, a small-scale village with a network of intersecting train tracks criss-crossing it. It doesn’t open officially until Memorial Day, but we lucked into the staff performing a check-up on some of the trains so we got to see them in action.

I’m not one for watching miniaturized trains circulate on a track, but the incredibly manicured greenery along its path is just as much as a draw. Together, they lend the feeling of peering into some sort of enchanted tiny world.

We’ve grown to be massive fans of Longwood Gardens in the past year, so it’s hard not to compare that with every garden or hike adventure. Morris Arboretum isn’t as sprawling as Longwood, or filled with as many cultivated gardens and flowers. However, there is the sense of being inside of nature at Morris, rather than just walking past it on a path or seeing it on display.

While I still say a Longwood Garden membership is the best deal for the least-crowded attraction, it’s a real commitment to drive there. If you want to stay more local and be surrounded by just as much greenery, Morris Arboretum is a wonderful substitute.

Spring Thing: s’mores in the yard!

May 12, 2017 by krisis

Last night Lindsay and J gave me the night off from cooking my elaborate bi-weekly desserts and substituted making s’mores!

It was EV6’s first time roasting marshmallows over a fire, made all the more amusing by the fact that L&J’s fire pit is actually EV6’s Nana’s old, unused fire pit, given to her by E & I as a birthday present early in our relationship, which was later upcycled by L&J after Nana abandoned it in the process of downsizing to a smaller abode!

Did you follow all of that?

Personally, I’m not really a fan of anything sticky nor made of chocolate, so I was more on marshmallow roasting duty than anything else … which I completely failed by setting our marshmallow on fire.

I shook it furiously to try to put out the flames while Girl Scout Lindsay admonished from over my shoulder, “Never shake the marshmallow! Give that to me!”

It’s good that I have people like this in my life, because honestly without them it’s likely that calamity would befall me every time I set foot outside into nature.