Everyday Excellence

Bryant January 31st, 2010

Photo Credit: Trey Ratcliff

I’ve long been a big proponent of picking one thing to focus on and doing it every day, but recently I met someone who really exemplifies this technique.

A Photo a Day

Trey Ratcliff runs Stuck in Customs which is the #1 travel photography blog on the web. I’m sure there are a ton of photography blogs, so how does someone get to be #1? Because he provides a gorgeous photograph every day — including weekends and holidays. Here’s what he has to say about this:

My promise to you: one photo every day. This is very hard… to produce 365 photos that I think are worthy every year. I will probably break this promise about 10 times during the year, so it’s really not much of a promise.

He jokes that he won’t get to it every day, but from a quick look at his blog, he’s been posting a daily photo since roughly 2005 and he hasn’t skipped many days. And I’m not talking about quick photos of your kids or the dogs. I’m talking about true pieces of art worthy of framing in your house. For example, see the photo at the top of this post and imagine creating something like that every single day. It’s no wonder that his site is popular.

Everyday is Easier than Every Other

Gretchen Rubin of the The Happiness Project thinks that it’s actually easier to do something everyday than every few days:

A few days ago, I observed that it’s often easier for me to do something every day than to do it some days. I post to my blog six days a week. I take notes every day. I write in my one-sentence journal every day. Many people have told me that they find it easier to exercise when they exercise every day.

If I try to do something four days a week, I spend a lot of time arguing with myself about whether today is the day, or tomorrow, or the next day; did the week start on Sunday or Monday; etc

I have to agree with her. There’s something powerful about doing your one thing every day. You just can’t help get better at it and there’s no internal debate about whether today is the day you should be doing it.

The Best Street Sweeper

But what if your one thing isn’t that glamorous or you can’t get paid to do it? What if you love to run or draw? Can you still do it everyday and will it matter? I think you can create great art in whatever you do as long as it is a daily ritual and you do it with love. Martin Luther King jr. said it best (as usual):

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

As for myself, I’m trying to do a little bit of writing or programming every day in an attempt to improve my craft. How about you?

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Bryant January 24th, 2010

It’s a generally agreed upon fact that too much screen time is bad for kids. There are lots of studies on this, but let’s look at what the American Academy of Pediatrics says:

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that kids under 2 years old not watch any TV and that those older than 2 watch no more than 1 to 2 hours a day of quality programming.

The first 2 years of life are considered a critical time for brain development. TV and other electronic media can get in the way of exploring, playing, and interacting with parents and others, which encourages learning and healthy physical and social development.

As kids get older, too much screen time can interfere with activities such as being physically active, reading, doing homework, playing with friends, and spending time with family.

And while many parents agree that too much screen time is bad, they often have a hard time riding herd on their kids in order to limit it. I’d definitely put our busy family in this category. We would often say that the kids would have a certain amount of time on the TV or computer and then we’d get busy doing something else and forget to kick them off.

Wouldn’t it be nice if their was a timer of some kind that could be the bad guy and efficiently enforce the rules? With that in mind, I began the look for a TV Timer that might be able to help us. After doing some research, I narrowed it down to two products: BOB and Time Machine.

What About Bob?

BOB is the most sophisticated of the TV timers that I looked at and also the most costly. I have no idea why it’s called “BOB” but for about $60 you get the following features:

• 6 Unique Accounts: Each family member gets their own account and private 4-digit pin. Time is set by the parents for each account, and the time limits can be daily or weekly.
• Works for all TV devices: BOB works by shutting off power to the TV once the child has reached their daily or weekly time limit. So it will work with any device that is connected to the TV (TiVo, Wii, DVD, VHS, Xbox, etc).
• Safe for electronics: Because BOB just shuts off power to the TV rather than to the devices it doesn’t do any harm to the auxiliary devices which might not appreciate an immediate power cut off.

Overall, I liked BOB, but it seemed a little pricey. If there were not other cheaper options that fit my needs though I probably would have bought it.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine TV Timer is similar to BOB, but follows a different model of relying on tokens rather than individual accounts. The Time Machine is less than half the cost of BOB at around $25 and has the following features:

• Token-Operated: Instead of using pin codes and individual accounts, the Time Machine is token-operated like the arcades of yesteryear. It comes with 30 tokens and each token provides 30 minutes of TV time.
• RCA & Cable Connected: The Time Machine works by cutting off the connection from the TV to your device. It allows a cable and RCA device to be connected to it. This could be a limiting factor if you don’t use RCA cables to connect to your TV or if you have a large number of devices you’d like to control.
• Set Times of Operation: Similar to BOB, you can put in the times that you want the device to be active. So for the Time Machine, you can say kids can only watch TV starting at 6am and ending at 8pm. It will restrict them to those times, even if they try to add a token.

Conclusion

Ultimately we decided on the Time Machine due to its cost and token-based approach. We liked the idea that the kids could earn more tokens each day for good behavior and it could be a tangible reward or punishment.

After a few months of use, it has definitely reduced the amount of TV our kids watch though I don’t think we’re quite at AAP-recommended levels yet…

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching? 

-Nicholas Johnson

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Bryant January 21st, 2010

So many gurus of time management tell us that the best way to be effective is to rigorously schedule every minute of every day. Not only should we schedule our work activities but we also need to schedule our personal activities. Each week we should revisit that schedule to ensure we’re making progress on those activities.

Don’t forget to schedule those big rocks first!

And for each commitment that we put on the schedule, we need to be sure and keep it. At face value this makes a lot of sense. But it really won’t work if you have too many activities scheduled. Thomas Edison’s plan was much simpler:

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom.

 

It’s called relentless focus or working in sprints. In other words, you don’t worry about scheduling a ton of activities and then watching the clock to ensure you are doing the right activity at the right time. His secret to time management: Just focus on ONE activity. Then there is nothing to schedule because you always know what you should be doing.

For Edison this “one activity” was his work. He was legendary for working 16 hour days and given that he has 1500+ patents, I would say that it was pretty effective for him.

Now, there can be a dark side to this. In Edison’s case he truly neglected his family to the point where one of his daughters said she didn’t even know he was her father because she barely saw him.  So, there is a balance. I like what Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of Public Speaker, has to say:

When someone tells me they have a wish, or a new years resolution, I ask what are you taking off of your plate to make room in your life for this new thing?

You can’t do everything. Period. So pick what’s important and focus on that relentlessly. And maybe, just maybe, stop staring at the clock in your office…

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Bryant January 3rd, 2010

What happens after we die? It’s the question that I think everyone has pondered at one time or another. Yet, it’s a tough one to answer. It’s not like you can easily gather evidence. There isn’t exactly a steady stream of people that we can ask about life after death and it’s not anything you want to try out.

We can look to our churches and holy texts to see what they have to say. Most would say that there is some kind of afterlife, and that there is a spirit that lives on in some form or another, but they are pretty light on the details.

Luckily, as medical technology has advanced, doctors are beginning to bring more and more people back from death’s door. Some of them are actually “clinically” dead (ie – without a steady heartbeat) before being brought back. What would they say from their experience being nearly-dead and would their stories match?

That’s the question that Dr. Raymond Moody set out to study in his now classic book Life After Life. He collected the stories of hundreds of Near Death Experience (NDE) survivors and published them in a book along with his analysis. What he found is that even though the people and the cause of their near-death varied, their actual experiences while “dead” were surprisingly similar. 

Stages

Almost all of the people he studied went through a variation of the following “stages” in their NDE roughly in this order:

• Hearing the News – Many report hearing doctors or accident spectators pronounce them dead and later (after being resuscitated) are able to repeat the exact words back.
• Feeling Peaceful – Even though many of the stories he collected were gruesome car accidents or war wounds, the people who experienced them described their first feeling as that of peace and comfort.
• The Noise – After dying, many report hearing a noise that’s most often described as a ringing or buzzing. Sometimes it takes the form of bells or something more musical.
• The Dark Tunnel – After hearing the noise, many recall being pulled through into a dark tunnel.
• Out of Body – Throughout the experience, they describe being out of their body and seeing it on the operating table or still behind the wheel of the crashed car.
• Meeting Others – Many report seeing other people such as departed family members or old deceased friends.
• Being of Light – They recall meeting a “being of light” that takes many forms (depending on a person’s religious background) and who communicates with them in a non-verbal way usually asking them to say what they had done with their life and if they were ready to die.
• The Review – After seeing the being of light, they report seeing something akin to a slideshow of their lives starting from when they were young to the present.
• Effect on Lives – After coming back to life, many report being forever changed and seeing life as deeper and more precious. They also emphasize trying to be as loving as possible to the people they interact with.

The most startling aspect of these stages is how similar they are across individuals regardless of race, geography, ethnicity or religious belief. According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS):

No significant correlation has been found between religious beliefs and the likelihood or depth of the near-death experience. No significant correlation has been found between age, race, sexual orientation, economic status and the likelihood, content or depth of the near-death experience.

So NDEs know no cultural boundaries though some stories are more fantastic than others.

Maria’s Shoe

One classic NDE story that adds validity to the out of body stage is that of “Maria’s Shoe” as described by the IANDS:

Kimberly Clark Sharp (1995) was a social worker in Harborview Hospital in Seattle when Maria was brought in unconscious from cardiac arrest. Sharp visited her the following day in a hospital room, at which point Maria described leaving her body and floating above the hospital. Desperate to prove that she  had in fact left her body and was not crazy, she described seeing a worn dark blue tennis shoe on the ledge outside a window on the far side of the hospital. Not believing her but wanting to help, Sharp checked the ledge by pressing her face against the sealed windows and found a shoe that perfectly matched the details Maria had related

Conclusions

So what can we learn from Dr. Moody’s research? The first is that even though it was published over 25 years ago it has yet to be shot down by newer research. If nothing else, further research from groups like the IANDS has helped support it.

That said, there are competing theories, such as a neurological one which states that a dying brain starved of oxygen will formulate a tunnel, show beings of light, and life reviews as coping mechanisms. The problem with this theory is that it does not explain how people report NDE’s even when their brain’s are healthy such as during childbirth and some accidents.

For those looking for some evidence of what happens after we die, this book is a great place to start. For those who have recently lost a loved one or fear death themselves, the stories of NDEs provide a measure of comfort.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place    
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish    
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down    
With patriarchs of the infant world,—with kings,    
The powerful of the earth,—the wise, the good,     
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,    
All in one mighty sepulchre.

-William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis

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