August 2019 | Leave the excess behind
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RECLAIM THE WEEKEND
Do you ever arrive at work Monday morning feeling as harried and exhausted as if you hadn’t just enjoyed two days off—that tiny vacation granted once a week? Perhaps said tiny vacation was stuffed to the gills with faux-important things to do, such as shopping and binge-watching and folding laundry and scrolling the dark abyss of the internet. (One must keep oneself fed and clothed and informed, after all.)
Our lives are full of things vying for our attention. Guard your time. Trim away the excess. Do something that feels good. And be vigilant. You are the porter; stay strong, stand fast, live well, and reclaim the weekend.
My favorite tiny vacations (obviously I’m rebranding the term “weekend”) consist of a mix of focused play (thank you, children and magnet tiles), useful output (gardening and baking fall in this category), real-life connection with adults (on the phone or face-to-face), and quiet time reading from a book (a physical book made of paper and ink).
What about you?
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EDIT, EDIT, EDIT
Benjamin Dreyer, editor extraordinaire, presents a well-written (of course) list of how to improve your writing. In short: Be descriptive. Vary your vocabulary. Eliminate unintentional rhymes. Simplify.
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BETTER MEETINGS
How are wild dogs and good meetings connected? Leave it to Freakonomics to connect the dots.
Let’s start with meetings. There are an estimated 55 million meetings held every day in the US (and I thought my calendar was full). Meetings are called, generally, to solve a problem—to bring together the group of people whose essential input will, ostensibly, solve that problem. What a good idea! Is that what really happens? Not often. Meetings may be held to get consensus on a decision that’s already been made or to give a big group of people the same information simultaneously.
How does this relate to wild dogs? Hallie Walker, a Ph.D. student studying behavioral ecology, focused on the African wild dog and through her research found that the dogs sneeze as a form of communication. A dominant dog’s sneeze carries more weight with the pack than a less-dominant dog’s. So it is with meetings at work: the higher someone’s professional title, the more their voiced decision impacts the group’s support of their chosen direction.
A dominant voice is just one example of how meetings can go sideways. There are meetings where people get sidetracked, the meeting running long to cover the agenda topics in the final few minutes; meetings where people leave needing time to emotionally recover (which impacts post-meeting productivity); and meetings where only the loudest voices are catalogued, though psychologically the meeting leaders leave feeling that everyone’s on the same page (this is called implicit consensus).
Solution time: Luckily, there’s not one right way to run meetings (which makes sense—there are so many bad ways to run meetings). 1. Try breaking up the meeting into smaller group sessions to chat about a particular topic, then come back together to share the varied discussions. This connects attendees with the topic and encourages more voices to be heard. 2. Encourage positive conflict, which is to say, conflict of ideas (not conflict between individuals). You’ll draw out people’s passion and spur a stronger conversation. 3. Guard your time, and say no to meetings so you can think and write and produce and solve problems.
Big voices are in. And if not done properly, singing big damages the vocal cords. Surgery is an option, though risky, and often doesn’t fix things forever. So maybe it’s time to learn how to sing from the diaphragm.
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SING FROM YOUR DIAPHRAGM
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WELLNESS TRENDS
What wellness trends should you actually follow? Not many, my friends. Here’s a summary:
Exercise. Go outside. Eat real food (follow Michael Pollan’s advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.). Learn how to feel your feelings. Build connections with other people. Drop distractions and engage. Find meaning. Cultivate a lovely environment.