Successfully or unsuccessfully. What's been on your mind?
Do you know what works like a charm for me? A few minute ice-cold shower. That, and a totally blacked out room during the night, not a single photon from charging cables, laptops, or half-closed curtains. But the shower is the trick. On some nights if I just can't fall asleep I'll go take one. It's a bit counterintuitive because you'd think that it would jolt you awake, but something about getting into a warm bed afterwards just brings on the sleepy vibes. My $0.02. YMMV. Edit to add: the first time I took these showers my breath became very shallow because it's just so cold! The trick, as The Iceman Wim Hof would tell you, is deep breathing.
Blacked out room for shower (hot for me, relaxes muscles) and blacked out room. Prissy as it sounds, I'm the techie of the flat with the router, printer and all so I haven't had great transitions to sleep as a result of all the lights in my room. I think about it every night... Aside from this all, I couldn't agree more on how pitch dark rooms are a plus for falling asleep.
Duct tape! Cover them indicators! Your sleep is worth it.
So as you know, I'm pretty obsessed with my sleep. Which has gotten me into some difficulty because the new place I moved to is at the intersection of crackheads and bored children off school for the summer. I just got a fan for the white noise a while ago, which helps immensely. But the biggest help has been the blinds that are installed and the heavy drapes I hung behind them. I'm also planning on installing a small hanging shelf right outside my bedroom door near an outlet at hip-level. That's where I'll leave my phone every night before entering my room. I'll have a battery-powered analog alarm clock inside. I'm at pretty near darkness.
Good move with the heavy drapes in combo with the fan, and I might take a page from your book in setting the phone away from the bed. I can relate to where the drapes and blinds come in clutch. There's a mustang without a muffler that parks outside my own and my roommates' window. His regular 5 AM drives are much easier to sleep through with a black out curtain and closed blinds on my end.
Just wanted to pop back here and say thank you for the simple suggestion. My brother came to reclaim his bedroom set that weekend. So with this in mind, I got a lower bedframe (lower than the surface of the indicators) and taped them tight. I've had a WAY easier time falling to sleep since. :)
Thanks. If I had access to a sauna, it would be that plus a cold shower. Few things feel better. I have found that just jogging about 1 mile, plus reading, does the trick. At least that keeps me from waking up. I really don't have much trouble falling asleep. It's been more about budgeting the time.
I see. Yea, I'm sure your day is full, and by default its sleep that suffers first. I thought maybe a deeper sleep might prevent midnight wakefulness, but a cold shower has its limits.
I've been trying to become a more disciplined person. I'm getting up almost 2 hours earlier than I was about a month ago and usually get straight into some productive activity, so that's a start. But I'm still easily able to slip into distracting games after the initial spurt, so that's something to work on. Though I act aloof, I secretly want to be revered for my craft. But I don't put in the time to achieve that. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the shit I don't know and it makes me feel like i'm not trying enough. Yet in other aspects I feel as though I'm working way ahead a lot of other people. It's easy to misjudge that type of thing though, when it's your own work and you have some ambiguous ideal you're working towards. Virginia Woolf wrote: I need to channel these feelings into action. But I guess that it is gradual process.Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
There's a theory as to why kids learn new things so fast. Not just because of their brain's plasticity, though there's that. It's because they're unafraid of missteps. (All much easier doled out as advice than applied.) I'll tell you what, I'm keen to see your painting.
Feeling that I'm not good enough to do what I have in mind to be tactful. I'm also not trained as a painter. I want to do a series of everyday scenes in monochrome. Can I use the same color effectively to convey value? Will the detailing look like shit? Will I get it done and know it's unsuccessful anyway? Just a laundry list of anxieties that exist in my head without form but I typed a couple out for you.
Don’t mind the output, the process is the opportunity here. Be ok with the possibility that it will look like shit, or worse, just a bit shitty. You probably have something in your mind’s eye, but I would try not to think of it as a destination, just as a suggestion. I am not a trained painter. I consider myself good, but not yet great. My advice would be to paint the light. Resist objects and form, just paint the light.
Stretch. My body is stiff as a board. Six months in to the new job, and I've been sitting at a desk typing all the time. The brain is drained at the end of the day, and I have zero inclination to do ... well ... anything, really. So my body has stiffened up badly. I need to stretch often, regularly, and increase my flexibility... so I'm not embarrassed to take up yoga again! So. More stretching for me.
Stretching is wonderful. For everything else, there's massaging (Amazon link, unaffiliated). My dad gives me a five minute back and neck massage and I turn into Elastigirl.
I've got a monthly massage with a female massage magician I have been seeing for years. I'm booked 4 months in advance, because I do it for myself and to remind myself to take care of myself... not to address a specific issue or complaint. Massage is good. Regular massages are good for your heart and soul and health!
Sleep. Thank you for this post, it has reminded me to go to bed instead of lingering online. g'night.
Sewing! I am going through all the clothing I own, seeing what fits, and tailoring what doesn't (if I want to keep it). Things like needlepoint, knitting, and sewing have always helped me de-stress, and it feels nice to have a wearable, functional final product.
Yoga - I'm incredibly inflexible, literally. It took me 3 days to get all the way through a 15-minute video (why rush myself, so to speak). I've now done yoga 4 out of the last 7 days, which is pretty good. I think I am going to do an okay job of making it into a daily practice. I also recently decided I wanted to start doing 15 push-ups a day again, and that's been surprisingly easy to start and keep up with. (Again, only since the start of the month or so, but still.) It bodes well!
It's the fucking worst. So expect that. And only go where you need to. Unless you're in Riyadh, in which case seriously only go where you need to. There's a reason peeps drive all the way to Kuwait for a fucking vacation. Or Bahrain. Really take your pick. Source: went to private school there for a semester. It waaaas shit.
Work. Got my first paycheck today from my new job, and will get my money from a summer gig I did next week. If all goes well the next months, I can probably stop loaning money for my education (or at least lower the loans). Keeping my student loans low has been going absolutely great so far. The only downside is that I miss lectures here and there, but I should be okay. I am somewhat trying to make more friends here. Since moving here I've been a bit of a recluse. But I am considering moving to a different city in a few months so I don't feel like trying too hard.
Exercising and learning statistics, mostly. The exercising part has been mostly successful, going on runs more frequently and doing core exercises once or twice a day. This week at work I've been training in statistics and have a laundry list of additional reading and playing around to do. It's nice to have definable and achievable goals.
The walk part is hard because a lot of what I'm doing is applied and involves me playing with software/R, but good suggestion on the morning run!
Learning through a class? Or on your own? I'm soon to take statistics at an undergraduate level for an economics degree and I'm really excited. Statistics seems to be best learned with an instructor for frequent guidance, though I'm certainly talking to my own preference.
Both. In college I took 20 weeks worth of statistics (theory and some engineering application for things like t tests, ANOVA, etc.). I'm currently going through the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification process, which involves stats to the level of DOEs, Multivariate statistics, non-normal distributions, etc. on a largely applied level. This has the potential to be a very hand-wavey, obtuse subject if you don't truly know what you're doing, which many people don't so you'll likely find mixed reviews on this. But if you do understand the fundamentals, it looks like an extremely powerful tool. The two weeks of training were conducted by certified Black Belts within my company, and one consultant who is also a university professor in the area who has 30+ years of experience and is absurdly knowledgeable. From here on out it's on me, though I plan on having continuous interaction with the Black Belts and have signed up for some webinars from the SAS Institute and plan on doing multiple a month to continue my learning.
Is this the same Six Sigma management philosophy? I know nothing about it, tell me more.
Okay blackbootz I'm going on no sleep and a cross-country flight but here goes nothing. At least there's some coffee in front of me. Maybe? I'm not sure what your reference point is for "Six Sigma management philosophy". I don't consider it a management philosophy so much as a problem solving approach that can be used across disciplines, industries, research, and transaction issues (how business is done, infosys, etc.). It's very statistics driven, and has a central tenet of improving process capabilities and reducing variation. There are some issues with how that is measured, but that's a more technical topic. It is a management approach in the way that problems are handled, as DMAIC and DMADV are foundations of Six Sigma. How does this tie in to lean? Well, lean is all about reducing waste and non-value added activities. These two topics have a lot of overlap, which is why "Lean Six Sigma" is a catch phrase right now. Lean tools and Six sigma tools can be used with each other, such as Kaizen Events which can be used for larger, Six Sigma projects. Ultimately these two approaches combine for a similar purpose. Let me know if you have questions on any of this, or follow-ups. That's a really high-level overview and I'm unsure if it will be covered in an economics statistics course (I'm assuming it's a course within your major and not, say, an engineering stats course). This stuff has a firm grip on certain industries, such as semiconductors and electronics manufacturing in general. One of the gold standards for lean manufacturing is probably Boeing. Seriously, watch that video. It looks so simple and yet it's not at all.
That video is really something. The assembly line is just such a massive feat of engineering. I probably misunderstood what Six Sigma was when I first read about it. Jack Welch popularizing a management philosophy sounded like conflict resolution and not systems implementation. But now I understand it more. It sounds like Six Sigma is best suited for algorithmic, repeatable processes. And what's your goal in earning your belt in Six Sigma? Where do you want to go next with it?
Blackbootz : you are correct in your initial assessment of Lean. In theory it's exactly like ButterflyEffect describes it. In practice it works nothing like the theory. Lean suffers badly from bad data and bad incentives. It fails to account for people naturally wanting to cheat and cut corners thereby requiring the non value added steps it so boldly try's to eliminate. I liken lean and six sigma to being a corporate version of communism. It sounds great in theory but in practice it's poorly implemented and does not work well. Dispite that its proponents keep championing it as a magic bullet saying that all failures are a result of improper understanding of lean and all successes being a direct result. As a concequnce lean and six sigma are much like corporate versions of religion where the successful are true believers and the failed are heathans. If you want to know what lean truly looks like and not the theory that you read in text books and promo videos, stop by the cactus moon bar on a Friday after 3pm and ask some Boeing mechanics. You will get some awesome stories of spectacularly expensive failures.
I'd agree with both of these things but faulty data...that's prevalent everywhere. Research, government studies, manufacturing, that's not necessarily a shortcoming of Lean so much as a shortcoming of a person's ability to ensure data quality, which is arguably the harder part of the equation. As for human behavior, that's a tricky one. Plus, it's near-impossible to ensure consistency across people doing the same exact thing. Which is frustrating, however, I do think it can be successfully implemented if data quality and the inclusion of operators and such into it's implementation are accounted for. It shouldn't just be a tool of the engineer or equivalent.Lean suffers badly from bad data and bad incentives. It fails to account for people naturally wanting to cheat and cut corners thereby requiring the non value added steps it so boldly try's to eliminate.
Haha, is the Cactus Moon a bar by the factory? Where is the main Boeing factory? It sounds like, according to you, that lean Six Sigma and communism make faulty assumptions about human behavior and motivation. Where did you gain such insight/experience of lean Six Sigma?
Fuckin' Jack Welch. I like this (and just about only this) about the guy: Anyway. It is, it's also useful for things like process scale-up, new process implementations and qualifications, and highly repeatable processes. I'm hoping to use this as a stepping stone to get a Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma, and leveraging that in to a full-time position that can take in a more holistic business function beyond working in one factory. I'd like to work on process improvements across an entire business, across departments, and improve process capabilities while reducing waste. It's a decent way to feel okay about working in an industrial setting. If, somehow, I could get in to a more R&D oriented position which uses these principles that would be great too.Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products".[51]
I think the biggest hack would be to move next door to a gym. I've neglected any sort of weightlifting or training save for my weekly soccer games. But the latter isn't a chore for me, it's something I immensely look forward to. So there's another hack, too.