If you are taking a picture of your children, which is to say if you are holding a camera (…) and snapping a picture, then are you, in that moment, looking at them?
Or are you anticipating a moment in the future—it is sometimes ten seconds in the future but it could well be ten years—when you will be looking at this very moment?
research shows that it doesn’t always meet expectations.
As long as we keep rereading we never have the ultimate version of a book. Whether we go back again and again to a classic (and the ability to hold up to rereading is how a book becomes a classic) or pick up an old favorite to see how it has fared or dig deep into the treasures of our youth, rereading is an experiment that is bound to change us, and to change our impressions of the books we read. Rereading can certainly surprise, it can instruct, and it can make us feel safe.
Maybe it is not indulgent to reread a book, but a way to learn; and what is any sort of reading but a way to learn, whether it is something new about the world or just something new about ourselves?
via The Millions.
or why commutes tend to average 20-30 minutes.
It’s not just limited to the United States, either. In the Netherlands, the average commute time in the early 2000s was about 28 minutes. Many European nations average about 35 minutes. What makes a half-hour so universal in terms of commuting?
Excellent discussion of the research at Per Square Mile.
A recent paper from Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford and Sanford DeVoe of the University of Toronto argues that promoting an “economic view of time” (that time is scarce and should be thought of in monetary terms) makes us less able to enjoy time off because we always think of it as losing money:
The modern employment relationship generally increases the connection between time and money with important implications for people’s choices about how to use their time, including how much to work and how much to volunteer their time in unpaid activities. Although it may not have been consciously done, modern management seems to have created a hedonic treadmill in which people want to trade time for money and because of thinking of time like money cannot enjoy leisure activities as much.
…the social status of leisure versus work has changed over time so that working is now a status symbol, signaling people’s importance to their organizations—a change that itself may derive in part from how we view time.
via Business Insider.
The [2008] crash illustrates the first reason why management matters: when it screws up everyone suffers. But why it screwed up relates to its role as a carrier of ideas.
This derives from the built-in amplifier that is the power of expectation. Well known to social science as self-fulfilling prophecy, expectation has the power to create its own reality. If managers expect subordinates to perform well, expectations tend to lead to better performance. The reverse is also true.
The consequences are profound. In management and economics, the battle of ideas is decided not by which best explain the world but which most affect it and thereby become true as a result of their influence. Companies are the battleground.
Firms whose managers act on the principle that employees are self-interested opportunists who must be forced to do their job will tend to create just that. Conversely, a company that functions on the basis of trust and co-operation creates a system in which honest, co-operative people flourish. Self-fulfilling prophecy makes every company a force for either good or ill.
Since the 1980s, the assumptions baked into the management model are the pessimistic ones. In the crash of 2008 we can see where the template based on them (incentives, compliance with letter rather than spirit, rejection of ethical considerations) leads.
If the 21st century that management makes possible is to end happily, managers will have to absorb its most important lesson from the 20th: what matters most in management is not what you make but what you believe.
via Simon Caulkin.
Yo trabajo por la mañana, cuando el soporte biológico del escritor mejor funciona. Al lado de una ventana que da a un patio interior que se llena de luz y por el que oigo cantar a las vecinas, a los pájaros, incluso al perro.
Porque por la mañana todo es posible. Es cuando encuentras la clave de todos los problemas técnicos que de noche te han parecido insolubles.
via Javier Tomeo.
