Pick 101 - Ode to ASIMO

 

Honda’s humanoid robot is being retired. For the last 20 years, ASIMO had been performing at the Honda showroom in Tokyo, Japan, but these regular demonstrations are now at an end. 

Evan Ackerman

Honda announced back in 2018 that it was halting ASIMO development in favor of working on robots with more focused  applications for elder care and disaster relief.

The current rendition of ASIMO was released in 2011. Even then, this friendly android seemed too advanced--too human, to be a robot. It's sensing, actuation, computing, and battery power were state of the art back then. What ASIMO could demonstrate in 2011 still represents the benchmark for humanoid robots today. The design is realistic, all the movements are natural, and ASIMO would not need a proxie human actor to perform in science-fiction movies on his behalf.   Up and coming humanoid robots may match and  surpass ASIMO’s performance, but they are building upon the knowledge and technical experiences gained from a lineage of humanoid robotics research at Honda stretching back to the mid-1980s. As recently as 2017, Honda was still making improvements to ASIMO’s software and presenting that research at conferences. 

So just as human workers reach a time when their company no longer values their services, so that time has come for ASIMO.  However, humans have the benefit of being remembered by friends and family. As one of the first of his kind, poor ASIMO will only have his designers and  engineers to murn his passing. Perhaps he will have the same legacy as the father of literary androids, Isaac Asimov. If so, his child has done him proud. 

ASIMO's OBIT:

In 1986, Honda engineers set out to create a walking robot. Early models (E1, E2, E3) focused on developing legs that could simulate the walk of a human. The next series of models (E4, E5, E6) were focused on walk stabilization and stair climbing. Next, a head, body and arms were added to the robot to improve balance and add functionality. Honda’s first humanoid robot, P1 was rather rugged at 6’ 2” tall, and 386 lbs. P2 improved with a more friendly design, improved walking, stair climbing/descending, and wireless automatic movements. The P3 model was even more compact, standing 5’ 2” tall and weighing 287 lbs.  

ASIMO was the culmination of two decades of humanoid robotics research by Honda engineers. ASIMO could run, walk on uneven slopes and surfaces, turn smoothly, climb stairs, and reach for and grasp objects. ASIMO could also comprehend and respond to simple voice commands, and recognize the face of a select group of individuals. Using its camera eyes, ASIMO could map its environment and register stationary objects. ASIMO could even avoid moving obstacles as it moved through its environment. 

Over the years since his birth, ASIMO traveled extensively to encourage and inspire young students to study the sciences.  Android robots, based on ASIMO's design,  may soon serve as another set of eyes, ears, hands and legs for disabled humans. This may expand to tasks like assisting the elderly or a person confined to a bed or a wheelchair.

Pick 99 -- Kubernetes Engineer

When I first came across this job opening, I thought I had stumbled into the Want Ads for a foreign country. I had worked in a software engineering environment for many years. I had a nodding acquaintance with all the major engineering processes. This one drew a blank.

 We're looking for experienced Kubernetes engineers to help us build and maintain our managed TimescaleDB cloud services. You will have the opportunity to work with a close-knit team, building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers our platform. Your work will be instrumental in developing our Kubernetes-based clusters and infrastructure. You will interact with the Kubernetes API and codebase to build controllers and operators that power our platform. Additionally, you will work closely with and further develop our infrastructure tooling to ensure the health, stability, and maintainability of our Kubernetes cluster. 

 So I did what any knowledge worker [writer} does these days: I asked Alexa, my trusted research assistant, to get me up to speed. Here is what she found out:

Kubernetes is a container management technology developed in the Google lab to manage containerized applications in different kinds of environments such as physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. It is an open source system which helps in creating and managing containerization of application.

Kubernetes - Cluster Architecture

But here is the part that linked my prior experience with this new data management technology. 

Highly Desired:  Experience deploying, operating, and using major production-level databases. Huge bonus points for PostgreSQL and/or TimescaleDB!

 I had worked with several large scale databases over the years. They all do basically the same thing; they manage your data. Without them your knowledge base would begin to malfunction like a person in the final stages of dementia. Once that happens there is no cure and few effective treatments. In some cases it will be necessary to rebuild your database from scratch. So whatever Kubernetes does, it must be essential to avoid database dementia. Both Siri and Alexa agree with me on this point. 

So now you know.

 

Pick 98 - Knowledge Workers as Free Agents

 I recently came across this description of a company that represents free agents. On first look, I thought it was  aimed at  MLB players who were free to seek positions on other MLB teams. It was only on the second reading that I realized it was being pitched to "knowledge workers". Unlike traditional job recruiters, this agency is hired and paid by  individual candidates seeking positions as programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".  The Agency provides Hollywood-style services and digital products designed to help clients seeking to earn their living by handling knowledge.

Free Agency is a talent startup modernizing how people find & succeed at work. We provide concierge services and digital products to knowledge workers, mirroring Hollywood-style talent representation and management. Unlike recruiters, we’re entirely paid by and motivated by the individual candidates we work with, enabling us to focus on their career outcomes

 

Photo by Michèle Eckert on Unsplash

Employees of this agency write and edit print and video materials that pitch clients "personal brand" to potential employers. This can include ghostwritten emails and cover letters that the Agency will send directly to recruiting contacts and hiring managers.seeking free agents in product management, software engineering, performance marketing, operations.

Drucker defined knowledge workers as high-level workers who apply theoretical and analytical knowledge. Perform financial forecasting, reporting, and operational metrics tracking, analyze financial data, create financial models, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services.

What was the role of knowledge workers?

Knowledge workers are those who acquire, manipulate, interpret, and apply information in order to perform multidisciplinary, complex and unpredictable work. They analyze information and apply expertise in a variety of areas to solve problems, generate ideas, or create new products and services.

 

The problem many knowledge workers have is that they are not good at promoting their own work, or determining its value. So, many either start out asking too much and remain unknown, or they ask too little leaving potential clients skeptical. 

Free Agency helps both types of knowledge workers by forcing them to define their brand in terms of the talent, skills, and carisma they would contribute to the client's project. The future matures in the present!

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Pick 97 - Navigating From the Stern

 Ever notice that most political and financial decisions are made by observing the wake of history rather the waves of the future? Some folks would say this keeps us from repeating the mistakes of the past. But is that really true? 

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash
 

The problem with observing the wake of the ship to navigate, is that it only confirms past successes but is of no help when encountering new challenges. Our fixation with the past often gives us false hope because no situation is ever the same when we encounter it in a different context. Also, this fixation keeps us from dealing with difficulties that we have never encountered before. While the wake of the ship may assure us that we made it through ok, the tidal wave in front of us makes no such promise. 

Good leaders base their judgement on past experience; highly effective leaders anticipate future  events and meet them head-on. As Robert Kennedy once explained, "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"

Pick 96 - Binary Thinking

 In our world of digital reality, there can only be one of two answers to any problem: black or white, yes or no, stop or go, love it or list it, buy or sell, now or later, fast or slow, good or bad, the right door or the left one.

 

Like the young man in Frank R Stockten's 1882 short story, The Lady or the Tiger, we are faced with issues that seem to offer only two possible solutions. All too often, both solutions have negative consequences.

 

Since computers are digital devices, they only recognize binary data. Every program, video, image, and character of text is represented in binary.

 

Is it trinary or ternary?

A ternary computer (also called a trinary computer) is a computer that uses ternary logic (three possible values) instead of the more common binary logic (two possible values) in its calculations.

 

Mathematically, ternary coding is more efficient than binary coding. It is little used in computation because technology for binary processing is already established and the implementation of ternary coding is more complicated, but remains relevant in algorithms that use decision trees and in communications. Perhaps we should add that while computers work best with binary logic, such restrictive thinking should not constrain the human mind. Otherwise, we may doom ourselves to resolving global conflicts with war or peace solutions.

  

Pick 100 - Knowledge Manager

For Educators seeking to prepare their students for opportunities that won't fade away before they graduate, here is an example of one with enduring promise:

Photo by Niklas Ohlrogge on Unsplash

The Knowledge Manager will join the Engineering Education team, which works with all the engineering teams to educate engineers inside and outside Timescale and provides the resources each team needs to communicate effectively with other teams and the public.If you love understanding how teams work, and helping them work better together in a dynamic, fast-paced, growth-minded startup environment, this is the right role for you.

The Five 21st Century Skills

Notice that this 21st Century Job Description covers four of the most desirable skills generally recognized as essential for jobs of the future. They are highlighted in bold:

• Leadership
• Team Building
• Problem Solving
• Sales
• Communications

So how do we know these are the most desirable skills in the evolving job market?

They surfaced out of a deep dive review conducted by researchers at Georgetown University in 2020. Their report, Workplace Basics, was published in 2020. It focused on the entire US Economy.

The GU researchers broke down every sector of the American economy into rankings of required skills by sector. The Top 10 desirable job skills were listed by each sector. These five skills ranked high in every sector. The top 5 skills filtered out as a high priority need for all candidates looking for work  in the modern workplace. And yet, not one of these five skills is cultivated in high school or Junior College programs. 

While still in school, every student should take a hard look at their skills and talents. How good are your leadership skills? Are you a good team builder? Do you know how to solve problems, or do you rely too much on other people? Can you sell yourself, ideas or products? And, can you communicate in many forms and on many platforms? Are you only a good writer, but not a good speaker? Can you make social media posts that people like, understand, and engage with? Or does every post you make — receive crickets?

In the Industrial Park era, most employers would develop these skills in promising employees. They could count on them being there for the long term. But it is not like that in the Global Village. They can recruit skilled and "ready to work" employees from anywhere there is an Internet connection and the ability to communicate effectively with other remote teams and the public. This is a fact of life both students and their teachers need to head if "educated in the USA" is to have any meaning in the 21st Century.

 

 

Pick 95 - Beyond Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

 For over two Centuries, America has been the beacon of light leading to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Immigrants from around the globe followed that beacon to our shores. Many brought little more than the clothes on their back. Some came with wealth that could be quadrupled by investing in a robust economy. Others came simply to join relatives who had preceded them here. All of them came to enjoy the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that their homeland failed to offer.

 Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

However, there was a hidden value in the American Way of Life that had been taken for granted. In fact, it was once so transparent that few knew it was the thread that held the other three elements of American Independence together. It was that thread that emboldened pioneers and the hope that kept us from panic during the first global Pandemic in 1918. That same thread preserved us from despair through WW1 and the Great Depression that followed too soon after. 

Although beginning to fray from this constant stress, it held us together throughout WW2 and the Cold War that followed. But our failure to acknowledge and maintain it led to a total unraveling in the second half of the 20th Century. 

Perhaps it was the loss of competent leadership in both politics and business, but by the time we became ensnared in the Vietnam War, that thread had deteriorated beyond repair. Life came to mean survival of the fittest. Liberty became the right to thrive at the expense of others. And the Pursuit of Happiness became a never-ending shopping spree. 

That thread was the love that we extended to each other. D H Lawrence portrayed the severing of that thread this way:

Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”

Pick 94 - Non-Fungible Tokins

 A non-fungible token is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work.

Photo by David Shares on Unsplash 

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work.

Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be readily interchanged for another of like kind. Like goods and assets that are not interchangeable, such as owned cars and houses, are non-fungible.

Blockchain technology offers a secure and cheap way of sending payments that cuts down on the need for verification from third parties and beats processing times for traditional bank transfers. 90% of members of the European Payments Council believe blockchain technology will fundamentally change the industry by 2025  

Pick 87 - The Gig Economy

National Association of Counties (NACo)

The Rise of the Freelance Workforce

NACo’s 2017 Annual Conference and Exposition, the Counties Futures Lab hosted a workshop on the gig economy and how the rise of the freelance workforce is affecting counties across the country. Providing their views on the Gig Economy are moderator Hon. Rich Fitzgerald, County Executive, Allegheny County, Pa., and presenter Dr. Trevor Brown, Dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University.

Pick 92 - Snapchat's Spotlight vs. The Hungar Games 🔦

In 2016, The Hunger Games took the number five spot on the American Library Association most challenged books list. The reason for this stated: “They were banned due to insensitivity, offensive language, violence, anti-family, anti-ethic and occult/satanic.”

 In 2014, the novel was also banned for reasons of inserted religious perspective. However, throughout the trilogy, a religious stance is never once mentioned by Katniss or any other character. The dominant belief throughout—the one in which Katniss dares to fight back—is that of loyalty to Panem and the suppression of the districts.

An important factor in the novels is “the nature of celebrity,” as clearly depicted in Bustle Magazine:

Celebrity has always been an important part of The Hunger Games. In the first installment, Katniss, Peeta, and the other tributes are transformed into glamorous idols before entering the Games’ slaughter, in an effort to glorify their actions for the Capitol’s benefit.

IMAGE VIA PINTEREST

 One has to wonder if reality is imitating art in the recent announcement by Snapchat promoting its new Spotlight feature. For those who recall the movie, spotlights were played on the combatants as they engaged in battle to the death. Instead of the Roman thumbs up or down to signal the Emperor's mercy for or condemnation of the beaten gladiator, a social media gladiator earns sustenance  from a Spotlight submission based on how many unique views it receives compared to other content submitted that day. Those who attain the most celebrity get to live big. Those who fail to attain enough celebrity must keep fighting or die trying.

Snapchat is paying out up to $1 million per day for users who submit the best content.

How Does Snapchat Curate Spotlight Content?

Snapchat is surfacing submitted content in a new section dedicated to Spotlight videos. Content is surfaced based on users’ individual preferences.

“We focus on serving the right Snaps to the right person at the right time. We do this by trying to understand your personal preferences.”

Snapchat’s algorithm also considers the following factors when curating content:

• Watch time
• Likes
• Shares
• Bounce rate

Before content is surfaced in Spotlight it gets reviewed by moderators to ensure it’s both appropriate and entertaining.

How Do Snapchat Users Earn Money From Spotlight Submissions

Snapchat notes it’s actively monitoring for fraud to ensure view counts are not artificially inflated.

Earnings will be paid out to users every day and Snapchat will send a direct message to notify people who are awarded a share of the money.

 

 

 

Pick 89 - Artificial Intelligence

 

According to Adelyn Zhou, a leading voice in AI and the Marketing Director for Chainlink, there are seven types of artificial intelligence:

 

1) Act- systems that act based off rules like a smoke detector or cruise control.

2) Predict- systems that are capable of analyzing data and producing probabilistic predictions based on the data, like targeted ads or suggested content.

3) Learn- systems that make judgments based off predictions, such as self-driving cars that act based of sensor data coming in.

4) Create- systems that create based off data, such as designing an art piece, architecting buildings, or composing music.

5) Relate- systems that pick up emotions based of facial, text, voice, and body language analysis, such as voice to text application and facial scan technology.

6) Master- systems that transfer intelligence across domains, such as recognizing that four different pictures all represent the same idea/word.

7) Evolve- systems that can upgrade themselves at the software or hardware level, such as humans in the future having the ability to download intelligence into their brain like it’s software.

In each of these seven types of AI individual humans are the clients of the service they provide. Whether that service is as simple as activating a smoke detector alarm or as complex as porting raw knowledge directly into our brains, the focus is always on us as individuals. So what happens when AI evolves to the point where that focus is turned toward a more global perspective? Who will be empowered to set the rules for an extra-human system so powerful that it can impact any or all humans on planet earth? How might the influence of AI on human life grow over the next fifty years? What is the hidden value in that growth?

Pick 90 - Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. Unlike with a distributed database, there is no central administrator

 

Peter West-- Open Innovation Team

Human intelligence is so remarkable because it’s collaborative. The social reservoir of knowledge is a result of intelligence interacting with other intelligence. Having barriers between two intelligent systems slows down growth because it inhibits connections from taking place. The more connections that happen, the more intelligent something can become. The more intelligent an AI system becomes, the more value it has.

Several concerns have been raised about using distributed ledgers within government:

1. Who decides who the ledger should be shared with? When dealing with sensitive or confidential information, somebody needs to select people to share the ledger with to ensure information does not fall into the wrong hands. However, that person could select untrustworthy individuals, or otherwise use their power in a corrupt manner, negating the advantages of distributed ledgers over a central storage solution.
2. It is impossible to retroactively change information. This makes the technology appealing to financial transactions where records should be historic, but this makes it unsuitable where information may need to be retroactively changed.
3. It may be unsuitable for large numbers of users. Larger-scale use cases should be considered on their need for growth in the number of users and interactions, because right now these may lead to poor performance and significant energy use. But, technological solutions to these scaling issues are in development.
4. It may disrupt established workflows. End-users will have different working behaviors, digital literacies, and attitudes to technology which must be factored in when considering distributed ledger use cases.
5. It is not yet mainstream. Distributed ledger technology currently lacks established standards and legislation, its conformance to existing and emerging standards is unclear. For example, it is questionable whether a hash of personal information could constitute personal information under the GDPR.
6. Is the data to be stored generated in a decentralised way? If the process generating the data has some other point where a single authority has complete say over what the data will look like, then DLT may add very little in terms of preventing tampering and imbuing trust.

 

  In order to maximize connection in society, by 2030, all of our intelligent systems will need to interact with one another. The mass of data being handled is useless if we humans do not understand its value or how to use it for the common good.. So both data and its value must be unobstructed as it moves from producers to providers around the world.

The model that’s beginning to take form is a world where data is a resource of increasing supply thanks to large data providers, IoT devices, and the Internet. The data can be leveraged by AI algorithms that refine it and use it to take intelligent actions in the real world. These actions are facilitated by DLT technology that connect everything together, trigger the reconciling of trade, and record it all in a shared ledger. Once the networks are put in place, they run themselves and can ever grow smarter over time. This is the fourth industrial revolution.

Pick 91 - Recycling Programs

Recently, the NBC News segment “Growing Number of Cities Suspending Recycling Programs Over Rising Costs” showed the example of Casa Grande, Arizona as indicative of a downward trend prevalent among American cities.

 

The segment describes how cities are struggling to finance and maintain curbside recycling programs, especially now that China has stopped buying these materials. It also hints at how and why the end of such programs is problematic. Amid concerns about climate change, there is a real need to recycle, now more than ever.

This is yet another example of substituting Conventional Wisdom (CW) for Knowledge Based Decision Making (KBDM). CW advocates surmise that dumping our garbage in landfills and sites outside of town must be a good solution. That's the way it has been done for centuries. KBDM Advocates learn from scientific studies that landfills eventually emit toxic substances and dangerous bacteria into our air and our drinking water. They learn that people who live near landfills or former dump sites are statistically more prone to disease than those who don't. They also learn of the relationship between methane gas and global warming that scientists claim is the root cause of global climate change. Armed with this information and the knowledge that landfill sites are a major emitter of methane gas, they make recycling decisions that may not be popular but may save thousands of lives in the future.

Could it be that the Chinese Government  is gradually making decisions based on verified knowledge while we are still operating from conventional wisdom?

$tokens to Tip the Pickers

1 $token - 1.00 USD3 $tokens - 3.00 USD5 $tokens - 5 USD 12345

Pick 88 - Time Value of Money

 

 

 

Pick 86 - Screen Time Burnout

 

Between video chat happy hours, birthdays, catch-ups with friends and family, along with all-day work meetings, it feels like we’re spending all day on camera. And, according to the latest research, we are.

The daily time spent on video chat apps has increased by 277% since early March 2020

With most countries still using social distancing to battle coronavirus, we need to connect more than ever. But all that time spent on video comes with serious side effects ranging from general fatigue to increased anxiety, stress, and even burnout.

The problem is that few of us have ever experienced what an effective meeting culture looks like. 

 

So how do you fix a problem when you don’t know what the solution looks like? You review to data. 

 

In interviews with close to 1,000 business leaders, in-demand freelancers, top developers, designers, and makers, we discovered what makes effective meetings work, and what turns them into a waste of time.

 

Meeting frequency and length has increased over the past 50 years. Today, most people average 9–23 hours a week on them. That's a lot of time. Especially if that time was wasted on frivolous and non-productive topics. But meetings don't have to take over our lives. Highly effective business leaders use these principles to keep meetings effective and productive. 

Remote communication is a different beast than when you’re in an office. You can’t just try to recreate the processes and policies you used in the office when your team’s at home.

 

Instead of sitting at your desk (where you are all day), take video calls on your phone and get out for a walk. As Dr. Suzanne Degges-White writes:

“It can be less stressful when you ‘show up’ in voice only. When we’re not chained into posing as a ‘living headshot,’ we can move around and step onto our porch or sit outside in the sunshine.”

Not only are non-video, video calls less stressful, but they’re a great opportunity to recover from spending all day sitting. Getting fresh air, taking a walk, and being around nature have all been shown to reduce stress and increase our happiness and productivity.

2. Embrace asynchronous communication (aka, why email isn’t as terrible as you might think)

Video chat apps help remote teams feel more connected. However, one of the best things you can do when working remotely is to actually reduce your meeting time. 

There will always be moments where you need to quickly get together and hash out a solution. However, switching your default to asynchronous communication is an easy way to increase your productivity and reduce stress.

Instead of an in-person interruption that is all-but-impossible to block asynchronous communication lets you choose when you’re available and how people can get in touch with you. 

Every communication app has some form or do-not-disturb mode (or you could just, you know, close them).

3. Set communication expectations early and often (i.e. let everyone know it’s ok to slow down)

The reason most people fail at embracing asynchronous communication is that they haven’t set shared expectations.

The only way you get the benefits we listed above is if everyone understands how to properly communicate. Otherwise, you’ll come out of a peaceful and focused do-not-disturb-mode session to:

There are a few ways you can set proper expectations with your teammates about when you’ll be available. 

• Set “office hours” that everyone’s aware of. Discuss as a team what a reasonable time is for a response and set aside a few hours of the day where everyone is available.

• Use your status, email signature, and other tools to tell people when they should expect a response.  

• Lead by example. When we interviewed more than 700 professionals about their email habits, we found that if you check and respond to emails outside of work hours, your team will too. Set expectations and live by them. If they’re not working, talk it through and find a solution that does. 

Pick 85 - Paul Harvey Letter from God

Pick 84 - Daily Routines vs the Pandemic of 2020

Perhaps the most disruptive force of the COVID-19 pandemic was not its threat to our health, but the stress it provoked by forcing us to change our daily routines. 

In his book on the daily routines of creative people, Mason Curry informs us that  all creative people seem to depend on daily rituals and routines to remain productive. In the process of citing many examples, he forces us to consider the hidden value in the rituals we employ to keep ourselves going.

 

Daily Rituals - How Artists Work

Edited by Mason Currey

Apr 23, 2013 | ISBN 9780307273604 

 How do we do meaningful creative work while also earning a living?

 Is it better to devote ourselves wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day?   

 When there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all we hope to accomplish, must we give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can we learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to work smarter, not harder?

Are comfort and productivity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained productive work?

Whether work/learn from home was a welcomed change or a nightmare, most of us might agree that breaking routines, developed in childhood, was a treacherous experience. Being forced to do so by an enemy that seemed invincible, made it all the more so.

 

Routines simplify our busy schedules and give us structure.  Sometimes the only way to make it through the week, even in "normal" times was to switch on auto-pilot, turn off our brain, and just let routine take over.  In fact, Psychologists tell us that our brains need routines and rituals to remain well.

1. Routines help minimize uncertainty.
   • Our brains don’t like uncertainty. Uncertainty engages the fight-flight-freeze-appease part of our brains (the amygdala) which can stifle clear thinking. Routines, however, give us a greater sense of control. This creates certainty.  Our brain loves certainty and stability.
2. Routines make space for clearer thinking.
   • In the front part of our brain, the pre-frontal cortex, executive functions like planning, abstract thinking, social intuition, and emotional control occur. However, that part of our brain tires easily. The more we use it, the more it tires which can affect our ability to think clearly, make wise decisions, and relate to others well. However, when we create routines and habits, the brain stores those routines in our habit centers (basal ganglia). As a result, routines free up working space in our pre-frontal cortex so that we can think and concentrate better on new tasks and relationships.
3. Routines can reduce the drain on our daily energy.
   • Ego depletion refers to the concept that we all possess a limited pool of mental resources available for self-control and willpower. And it gets used up during the day. If we spend that resource on activities that could be routinized, we waste energy that we otherwise could dedicate to more important tasks and relationships. Routines help conserve our energy for what’s most important.
4. Routines help us focus and maintain attention.
   • The ability to pay attention to what’s important is a key to successful living, leading, and learning. When we are scattered (Where did I leave those keys?) attention gets diluted. Routines, however, can help us direct our attention toward what really matters.
5. Routines help quiet the tyranny of the urgent.  

•  The tyranny of the urgent beckons us to worry about insignificant issues that seem important at the moment. The term rumination describes the mental process of rehearsing something that happened in the past or something that might happen in the future. The tyranny of the urgent breeds such rumination. Routines help us focus on the life’s essentials rather than spending precious time trying to prioritize everything
  

Since there is hidden value in those routines and rituals that we once took for granted, we should not forsake them entirely. An effective Life Coach would assure us that realigning our daily routine doesn’t have to be difficult — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just adapt it to our current reality. We can continue to do the things we normally did before the pandemic disrupted our lives. Simple routines like waking up and going to bed at the same time each day are still under our control. The rushed breakfast and hour-long commute to work can now be replaced by a leisurely and healthy breakfast. This can be followed up with a second-cup of our favorite coffee or tea. Since we, no longer need to spend time getting appropriately dressed for work, we might just brush our teeth, wash our face, and change into a comfortable sweat  suit just in time for our AM Zoom conference.

Over time, we will develop routines that help us grow more comfortable working and learning in the comfort of our own homes. In fact, many of the WFH veterans have grown so used to their new routines that they do not want to return to the old ways of working. So if employers find that WFH employees are equally or more productive than those who want to gather in factories and office buildings, they may find ways to accommodate both.

 

 

Pick 83 - Gifts for People With Disabilities.

 When your child’s development does not match what is typical for their chronological age, it can be challenging to find age-appropriate gifts that they will truly enjoy. That’s especially true for tweens and teens with significant disabilities.

The Mighty

 To add some happiness and excitement back into gift shopping, look beyond toys and games to find gifts that are both age and developmentally appropriate. The best gift ideas for a teen with significant disabilities can be found in one of these areas:

• Experiences – With quarantines and shut-downs, it is challenging finding safe experiences outside of  home. But, with a little creativity, you'll find ideas that are safe, fun, and often inexpensive as well. Here are some ideas to consider:

• • Zoo pass or membership
  • Drive-in movies
  • Drive-thru Christmas light displays
  • State park pass for trail hiking and walks
  • Botanical gardens

• Room décor – What young adult doesn’t want a bedroom that reflects their personality? You can do a complete makeover that includes painting walls, setting up new organization systems, and outfitting the bed with a new comforter and sheets or a smaller scale project, such as adding a new string of lights, throw pillows or a beanbag chair. Whether it’s a total transformation or a smaller project, tweens and teens usually appreciate an update that makes their space feel more comfy and cozy.

• Personal care – Think about those little splurges that make day-to-day life a little brighter. Some ideas include: scented lotions, fuzzy socks, hair products, lip balm, massage pillows, weighted blankets, bath bombs and essential oils.

• Subscriptions – Teens and Tweens enjoy music and movies, so subscriptions to music and TV services are gifts that can be enjoyed all year round. Also growing in popularity are subscriptions to themed boxes, which can be a wonderful monthly surprise. Check out subscription boxes for items such as books, sensory kits, craft projects, and more.

Finding just the right gift for any loved-one has many hidden values. Greatest of these is finding joy in holiday shopping for friends or family members with developmental disabilities. It can put a little extra magic into your holiday season.

 

Pick 82 - Procrastination

My first find on the value of procrastination came when I started school. My teacher was a Catholic nun whom we called "Sister Janet" or "Sister".

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Sister explained that she belonged to an order of Catholic nuns. It started in Germany a long time ago. She and the other nuns at my school were teachers but other members of her order were nurses. They worked in hospitals.

Preschool or Kindergarten was not an option in those days. Every member of my first grade class was a school newbie. So Sister Janet spent the first day laying out the rules for success in her class.

Her favorite saying was "Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today." At our tender age I doubt any member of my class knew what she meant. In our world of play and simple chores, tomorrow was a place our parents often talked about. Our world only existed in the here and now.

Everything was new and puzzling on that day. It was the first time any of us had to sit still at a desk while an adult talked.

Sit still and be quiet was rule #1 in Sister's class.

Do not speak out unless Sister asks you a question. That was rule #2.

Raise your hand if you had a question or wanted permission to go to the bathroom.

Do not leave your seats until dismissed by Sister at break time or the end of the day. A bell would ring to alert Sister, but we were to ignore the bell. Only Sister could give us permission to leave.

I can't speak for my classmates but the end of that day could not come soon enough. The second I heard that bell, I wanted to run out of that classroom. I would jump in my mom's waiting car and get home to play with my neighborhood friends.

The bell rang and Sister gave us each a book to "take home and bring back covered tomorrow." I took the book and met mom. 

 

I told Mom that I had to bring back the book tomorrow. I did not tell her the covered part.

At that time we could play outside until the streetlights came on. That is what I did. I would cover the book when I came back inside. That is when I learned the dangers of procrastination. I was too tired to cover the book. I went to bed believing I could cover it in the morning. That did not go as planned. Mom wanted to leave early. So I took the naked book, and we headed off to school. What happened next programmed me to avoid procrastination for the most of my life. In later life, I discovered there is value in procrastination.

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But unless you had Sister Janet in First Grade, that may be difficult. As an adult, there are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you focus on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. At times, I am the "absent-minded professor." I may forget to shave, or eat, or even look where I am going while thinking about a writing project. My mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work on an important topic. That's the hidden value in procrastination. Putting off work on small stuff to work on big stuff.

With all due respect to Sister Janet, getting outside to play after school is bigger stuff for a 6-year-old than covering a book.

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