Beetle & Byte

Work Life

Making Hard Choices

Recently, I was confronted with a choice between multiple, equally good yet entirely different options. As much as I had prepared myself in the lead up to the decision, I hadn’t considered a scenario as good—or as challenging. Having exhausted all logic and reason (e.g. pro/con lists), I felt stuck and my anxiety began rising sharply.

Fortunately, my partner shared this TED Talk by Ruth Chang who discusses how to make hard choices when confronted with equally good but strikingly different paths. It helped me tremendously and I hope it will also serve you when you need it most.

A Week of Links

Last month, through extreme sacrifice and personal loss, Caitlin Boston paid off more than $200K in student loans all by her “freaking self”. She attributes a large part of her success to asking her male colleagues what they were making.

“Ask your other peers what they make — especially your male ones. It might make you feel uncomfortable but it’s the sole reason I started making an additional 41% a year.”

Caitlin Boston

Hauntingly beautiful video from Alicia Keys ft. Miguel.

I love the Secret Garden and I can’t wait to see the new remake.

I legit cried over these endangered and extinct snails.

In college, I used to use a manual version of this for Polaroid emulsion transfers.

A stark reminder of nine things women couldn’t do in 1971.

Hard to believe this train is real and in operation. First I saw it, I thought it was concept art for the Hunger Games movie trilogy.

So wrong and yet, so right.

Poodle fitness.

You gotta show up.

So much googly-eyed envy for St. Frank founder’s beautiful home.

Mind blown. There’s a real life cuckoo (clock) bird; sound included.

The Human Skills We Need in an Unpredictable World

This talk by Margaret Heffernan more intelligently and eloquently expresses the idea that’s been noodling in my mind for some time. That it isn’t an inevitability that we lose our humanity at scale. In fact, we should double down on our humanity–compassion, empathy, and attention–the larger an organization gets. Without it, we become little more than a cog in an unfeeling and uncaring machine.

Preparedness, coalition-building, imagination, experiments, bravery — in an unpredictable age, these are tremendous sources of resilience and strength. They aren’t efficient, but they give us limitless capacity for adaptation, variation and invention. And the less we know about the future, the more we’re going to need these tremendous sources of human, messy, unpredictable skills.

But in our growing dependence on technology, we’re asset-stripping those skills. Every time we use technology to nudge us through a decision or a choice or to interpret how somebody’s feeling or to guide us through a conversation, we outsource to a machine what we could, can do ourselves, and it’s an expensive trade-off. The more we let machines think for us, the less we can think for ourselves.

The more time doctors spend staring at digital medical records, the less time they spend looking at their patients. The more we use parenting apps, the less we know our kids. The more time we spend with people that we’re predicted and programmed to like, the less we can connect with people who are different from ourselves. And the less compassion we need, the less compassion we have.

What all of these technologies attempt to do is to force-fit a standardized model of a predictable reality onto a world that is infinitely surprising. What gets left out? Anything that can’t be measured — which is just about everything that counts.

Margaret Heffernan, TEDSummit 2019

A Week of Links

Missy Elliott slayed with a performance medley of her greatest hits at the VMAs.

This squirrel knows good music.

Two Swiss sisters pay homage to Homer and Lisa‘s trip to New Orleans. I’m impressed with just how many culinary scenes they recreated.

Recently dawned on me that there’s a better way to dole out honey.

Can’t wait to play Mario Kart on my phone.

Currently trying to figure out where to put this DIY living wall in my home.

Leadership is as much about the environment that one shapes as it is about the impact that follows.

A breathtaking reminder why we should all be booking our trips to Iceland.

Moving and funny TED talk by Paula Stone Williams about what she’s learned since transitioning to a woman.

Whimsical paper masterpieces.

Recent addict of Lucas’ Papaw Ointment.

More Work

Austin Kleon‘s response to the question, “Do you ever feel like no matter how much work you do, you can or should be doing more?“

Yeah, always. If you get into that productivity trap, there’s always going to be more work to do, you know?

Like, you can always make more. I think that’s why I’m a time-based worker. I try to go at my work like a banker. I just have hours. I show up to the office and whatever gets done gets done.

And I’ve always been a time-based worker. You know, like, ‘did I sit here for 3 hours and try?’ I don’t have a word count when I sit down to write. It’s all about sitting down and trying to make something happen in that time period — and letting those hours stack up.

Austin Kleon

If I’m anything, I’m a list maker. No matter how many times I’ve tried to break the habit, it seems to be permanently ingrained in me. Two of my goals this year were, a) to not define my success by the number of checkmarks on my to do list, and b) to not define my failure by the number (or lack of) checkmarks on my to do list. I’ve made no headway in addressing either goal. I’ve probably only exacerbated both.

Today, though, I changed my to do list (I use kanban boards with Trello). Instead of assigning myself a list of tasks for a given day. I commit to a period of time for a certain type of task, like chores. For that period of time, I work on my chores until the time has lapsed. This way, I’m always accomplishing the goal of doing my chores but not defining my success or failure by how many I get done. I make the investment and do what I can. I continue the investment the next day and the day after. It’s a minor shift but somehow releases me of a certain heaviness. I’ll keep with it for a while and see how it goes. Fingers-crossed it’s a happy middle ground between list making and meaningful productivity.

Rejection Rituals

Whenever Amy M. Jones, Founder of Recollect, receives a rejection she has a ritual to help her move past it quickly and avoid dwelling on the negative.

Part of her ritual includes watching Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now from the 1980s treasure, Mannequin. This is a solid and respectable choice for a much-needed pick-me-up.

She also keeps a Google Spreadsheet listing the rejections and another listing the kind words she receives about her work. All of this is designed to help her transition from the rejection and recommit to her purpose.

We all experience rejection on a pretty regular basis, though some rejection is more notable than others. For me, I’m presently job searching which is inherently mired with disappointment. I don’t have a ritual for when rejection rolls around but I need one. It would help remind me that it’s all a part of the process and that it’s all leading toward what is meant to be.

Learning to Satisfice

Recognizing that inflection point — the point at which our continuing to rework our work reaches a law of diminishing returns — is one of the hardest skills to learn, but also one of the most necessary.

Dr. Alex Lickerman, Psychology Today

via New York Times

When People Talk, Listen Completely.

“When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.”

Ernest Hemingway

via Swissmiss

The Value of Ritual in Your Workday

“What if every performance review began with a short thought about the importance of clear and open communication? If every time we worked on a spreadsheet someone else created for us, we paused to acknowledge the complexity of the work she did and the attention to detail she brought to it? If at the beginning of the day we paused to honor the work we are about to do and the people with whom we are about to do it?”

The Value of Ritual in Your Workday

via Swissmiss