My passport is supposed to arrive today. Crazy that I ordered it just 9 days ago and it's ready. If it weren't for Veterans' Day Wednesday, it would have been only 8 days. Extremely impressive and efficient for a government branch - my only complaint is they didn't give me the tracking number for the USPS package I am to expect.
No one would fire this guy. This was several years ago when I had a colleague who just couldn’t get fired, no matter the dot.com implosion, no matter how ornery he got. I still remember it to this day and I still laugh out loud about it.
Market forces were cleansing the dot.com bloat and workers, specialists, good people, bad people were getting laid off by the bucket full. But this one, somehow, was un-fireable! He would even boast about how he would not follow process and would sometimes get a tad rough with the customer over the phone. I saw him grow this persona over time, so that as business overall got worse, the more crotchety he got. His philosophy? “Fire me now so I can get it over with and move on.” Somehow the body count kept climbing, but he kept standing.
As you’re guessing, he did have something unusual about him that made his managers want to keep him. I don’t think even he understood at first what was happening. As time progressed however, I noticed something interesting. He actually got better, much better, at his job. He lost his anxiety, really got down to business with the customer, and kept his head when everyone else was losing theirs.
Keep in mind, because of the dot.com bust, the customers themselves calling in were imploding at the same time – and they were under tremendous stress and panic. He started acting like the proverbial doctor who didn’t hesitate to verbally slap a hysterical customer into calming down so he could start operating. That’s what made him good. Processes were breaking down both internally and externally (i.e. no longer lined up to the business reality), so he took charge of each and every interaction and did rescue many a customer and many an account for their managers – simply because he was no longer afraid of the axe.
Last time I talked to him, he was still trying to get fired…but I don’t believe him anymore…he’s gotten way too friendly again J
Abstract
Policy discussions to ameliorate socioeconomic (SES) inequalities are increasingly focused on investments in early childhood. Yet such interventions are costly to implement, and clear evidence on the optimal time to intervene to yield a high economic and social return in the future is meagre. The majority of successful early childhood interventions start in the preschool years. However socioeconomic gradients in cognitive skills, socio-emotional functioning and health can be observed by age three, suggesting that preventative programmes starting earlier in childhood may be even more effective. We discuss the optimal timing of early childhood intervention with reference to recent research in developmental neuroscience. We motivate the need for early intervention by providing an overview of the impact of adverse risk factors during the antenatal and early childhood periods on outcomes later in life. We provide a brief review of the economic rationale for investing early in life and propose the ‘‘antenatal investment hypothesis’’. We conclude by discussing a suite of new European interventions that will inform this optimal timing debate
"The antenatal investment hypothesis
Current evidence on antenatal interventions, while limited, would therefore suggest that the returns to investing in this period are high, yet an explicit test of this hypothesis is lacking. By amending Fig. 2a to incorporate the antenatal period from conception to birth Fig. 2b presents a graphical illustration of the antenatal investment hypothesis. The hypothesis can be displayed as two downward sloping investment curves representing the rate of return to investment starting in the antenatal period (upper curve), and the postnatal period (lower curve). If the hypothesis is correct, the return in both cases is greatest for earlier rather than later investment. This hypothesis also indicates that the return on the antenatal investment will be higher than the postnatal investment, both initially and in the long-term, and may increase the rate of return on investment at every subsequent period. As the Nurse–Family Partnership had a greater impact on young women having their first child, the hypothesis may be further extended to investigate whether supporting women at the beginning of their reproductive life leads the benefits of the intervention to be carried over to subsequent births. An explicit study which tests the antenatal investment hypothesis and models the impact of intervening at different stages of the child’s and mother’s life is needed. Current knowledge in this area is based on a small number of predominantly US studies, and it cannot be assumed that the effectiveness of a US-style intervention can be replicated across European settings given the difference in social welfare systems and cultural contexts. For example, social welfare spending in Ireland is half that of Sweden (OECD, 2007). An optimal study design would incorporate a series of randomised interventions with programmes starting at difference ages. A longitudinal study would reveal the impact of the timing."
The same action keeps coming up in my javascript. I want to create more than one element, then bind an action on click, and then add them to some other element without ereasing the content already in that element. I know 4 ways to accomplish this.
I am very new to all of this and also very confused. There are many thigns I don't know.
Most importantly, I haven't read up on how to actually profile these cases for myself. And, even if I knew that, I don't know what test cases would yeild meaningful results. Could one method be better for small documents but terrible for big ones. I don't even know how to judge the size!
I'm an efficiency freak and love it when things get done quickly and my time isn't wasted. I honestly think one of the main reasons why I hated working in corporate jobs was because things weren't efficient. I'd get my job done, but would still have to sit around for 'face time' and be bored out of my mind. Now that we've broken away from the corporate lifestyle, I'm constantly finding ways to be even more productive. Reading Hacker News a few times a day definitely doesn't help my productivity, but I always find great articles like "The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity".
I won't recite it here, but if you want to become more productive, definitely read his blog post. The one tip I like the best is how to use your procrastination to become more productive. Procrastination usually happens when you don't really like doing a certain task (for me, it's writing test scripts). Instead of putting off the task and searching online for some sort of distraction, keep a list of other tasks that need to be done that day as well. When you feel like procrastinating, do those other tasks instead. You'll end up feeling very productive, even though you procrastinated! There's also another tip on the guide that I really should be doing. It's eating breakfast. Daishin and I try to usually meet up between 7-8, and we usually starve ourselves until lunchtime. Like, literally starve. We must complain that we're hungry about 10 times each in the morning. Putting fuel in our bodies in the morning might actually make us more productive as well!When I was in Thailand recently, I got rather sick to my stomach, some sort of bacterial issue, and while my friends were enjoying the innards of the royal palace, seeing some of the more spectacular Buddha sculptures up close, I was sitting on bench outside sweating and trying my hardest not to shit through the seat of my pants. Concentrating on the wall in front of me, I was startled a few moments later by a group of either high school or college students who were interviewing tourists in English. They wanted to ask me a few questions, and I consented because even though I didn't really feel up to the task, I didn't want to disappoint them. At the time, I was the pretty much the only tourist who had opted to sit outside of the inner sanctum, rather than remove my shoes and forfeit my camera for a chance to peak inside. They asked me a few simple questions: where I was from, what my favorite color and thai food were, why I was here, and finally, my motto. At the time, I was distracted and dehydrated-- about 30 minutes later I'd force my entire group back to the hotel as a result of sickness and exhaustion; thus, I hemmed-and-hawed and eventually recited the first motto that came to mind: "Use the force, Luke."
Now in retrospect, I realize that that motto is pretty much my own personal antithesis, and, while I partially blame George Lucas for my failure to lay down something more useful and less cliché for those kids, I realize that my inability to think of anything more relevant is mostly my fault. But it's a little silly and the anecdote is interesting enough to dust off and move out of the way while I move on to bigger and better things, here, on this blog. Now, my business, right this moment, at least, is Japanese. And when I say my business, I don't mean my job. Yes, I live and work in Japan. No, Japanese is not a linchpin of my employment. Knowing and studying Japanese in Japan is a valuable skill, yes, and a lot of my interaction with other people is smoother because of my ability to speak it, but if I were to wake up tomorrow with linguistic amnesia, I could continue to perform my job without any major issues. No, when I say Japanese is my business, I mean that learning it has done much to teach me about the value of efficiency and getting things done. It's inspired the creation of my new motto: one to replace what I told those Thai students back in Bangkok: Do anything, remember everything, and waste nothing. Five years ago, as a sophomore in college, I wasn't doing well in Japanese class. I went and talked to one of my professors about it, discussed my apprehension of the upcoming tests, and left not much more confident than I was before. I wasn't sure that I could pass the tests, nor was I even sure what I really knew in the first place. At the time, Japanese characters and their myriad readings were a puzzle I hadn't solved yet, and, because I wasn't studying efficiently, I couldn't even keep up with the (miniscule, in retrospect) class load. A lot has happened since then. I studied abroad in Japan for a year, sneaked into higher level Japanese classes after that and finally ended up graduating on time (I spent time at three major universities during the course of my undergraduate education) with a B.A. in Japanese Language and Literature. I spend most of my free time now studying Japanese and trying to improve myself. My flaws are many: I have a terrible memory. I can't recall names, or, for instance, what I had for breakfast yesterday. I want to try everything and often fail at completing tasks or sticking to deadlines because I'm trying to learn two or three new things at once. And, I still, to this day, spend a lot of time procrastinating and whiling my time away on the intertnets. However, due to my capriciousness and untamed intellectual curiosity, I've tried all sorts of things to improve some of the things I do stick to, like Japanese, for instance, and I've seen the fruits of my labor trickle down and ultimately streamline and improve even the most banal, everyday duties I'm tasked with. This series of articles, of which this is part one, is going to focus on building and maintaining an organizational toolset so that you can do anything you want to do, remember everything you have to do, and waste no time doing it. Lastly, before I touch on any specifics or outline any of the tools I use, I think it's important to outline the details of my basic philosophy-- the theories and attitudes that govern my behavior and to do this, I'm not sure there's anything more succinct than a passage from the Introduction of a book I read recently, a "self-help guide based on proper research."Both the public and business world have bought into modern-day mind myths for years and, in doing so, may have decreased the likelihood of achieving their aims and ambitions. Worse still, such failures often encourage people to believe they cannot control their lives. This is especially unfortunate, as even the smallest loss of perceived control can have dramatic effects on people's confidence, happiness, and lifespan. In one classic study by Ellen Langer at Harvard University, half the residents in a nursing home were given a houseplant and asked to look after it, while the other half were given an identical plant but told that the staff would take responsibility for it. Six months later, the residents who were robbed of even this small amount of control over their lives were significantly less happy, healthy and active than the others. Even more distressingly, 30 per cent of residents who had not looked after their plant had died, compared to 15 per cent of those who had been allowed to exercise such control. Similar results have been found in many areas, including education, career, health, relationships, and dieting. The message is clear-- those who do not feel in control of their lives are less successful, and less psychologically and physically healthy, than those who do feel in control.
59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot
I'm writing this short series of articles with two primary goals in mind: education and introduction. I've spent the past year studying Japanese almost religiously and as a result of this experience, I've changed the way I do everything, from reading the news to remembering birthdays. I've transformed my embarrassing memory into one that is a more ironclad, and I haven't been late to anything as long as I can remember. I'm no great success, not yet anyway-- but I am happy and healthy. With that in mind, I want to share some of the simple tools and tactics I use to keep myself on task and organized. I'm going to talk about Google Calendar next-- some reasons why it's better to have your calendar in the cloud, how to nap productively, and how to combine these things in order to have the time to do anything.
Until next time...
I use a little Text Replacement utility to bring consistency to project naming, file naming, correspondence, and date and version control. I started using it when I worked the tech support line years ago to bring consistency and speed to documenting problems and resolutions. It provides personal structure on how to ask or provide information.
I typically type ## as the trigger for the utility to start the text replacement, though you can set the triggers to be what you want.
Examples:
# #fcon – “As a follow-up to our conference call, “
# #zn gives me “(No Action Needed From You)”
# #+d = [inserts tomorrow’s date]
The utility I’ve used for a long time is by Shortkeys.com
