Math people are math people.

Hmm.

I mean, some people are just easily distracted without any compensation by way of a skill.

You can't just look for people with bare feet and have then do equations.

There's probably something about brain plasticity and aging at different rates being correlated with ability to learn into adulthood. Anyway, I was forgetful and absent minded until well into my thirties so I like to tell myself that.

OT:
This is interesting, and short by book standards: https://delong.typepad.com/files/studwell.pdf
Aims to answer the second most interesting question in world history, which is: why did some poor east Asian countries grow very rich in the 20th century and others did not?
(The most interesting question in world history is "why did the industrial revolution happen when and where it did?")

There is literally an open thread, started yesterday. Not only are we disturbingly far from 40 comments, we're still within the nascent joking part of a thread. This is not a threadjack so much as carefully unrooting the first, tiny, unfurling tendril roots and smushing them. How dare you.

It's probably not a good time of day for him.

Anyway, I get really sleepy every afternoon about three or four, so if I have a choice that's when I schedule meetings.

Abject apologies. I'll repost in the other thread.

I identify completely with the part about having no idea how to estimate the amount of time a task will take, but definitely not the part about losing track of time when things are actually going on.

I am also most productive in the morning. This happens to coincide with the couple of hours after I've had my morning coffee.

I used to be at my most productive very late at night. I could get into a flow state some time between midnight and about 4am, especially if I was dosed with just the right amount of nicotine and caffeine on top of a certain amount of tiredness and stress. I wrote inhuman amounts of prose in a continuous stream of consciousness.

These days, I can't even imagine staying awake that long. I can't even watch TV past about 11pm without conking out.

These days, I'm fairly productive throughout most of the day, as long as I have the odd break to play guitar, stare at my phone, drink coffee, etc.*

* sadly, I don't smoke anymore. But I still miss it as a way of breaking up the day.

13.1 was me when younger, except the amount of prose was, while much greater than anything I can write these days, far from impressive on a scale from one to did you finish a dissertation.

Also, I've been doing some work in the area and it turns out that smoking is really bad for you. Don't start back up.

6.last to the OP, clearly the Industrial Revolution happened when it did is because humanity was most productive at this time, call it the late afternoon of our species.

16 counts as part of the nascent joking of this thread so hopefully I will avoid heebie's wrath.

When it comes to math, you need fear the wrath of Khan.

My wrath was mostly joking. Although I had a pounding headache and might have missed the tone.

Also I was on a zoom call with mucky-mucks, and forgot to mute myself, and Jammies let loose with an utter tirade of f-bombs at the kids, because he is trying to get them to clean up, and they were slow-playing every last thing. Plus he discovered a giant puddle of water under the house, directly below the kitchen this morning, so he is not at his most patient. I scanned all the people and I think everyone else was muted enough that it was probably obvious it came from my house, if anyone was curious to figure it out. My poker face game was strong, though, because I'm just staring at the screen playing nonograms, during these calls.

Zoom will switch everyone's view to your camera when your camera is where the loudest noise is.

Nonogram: a terse note telling someone not to do something. (cf "nastygram")

20: oh damn, good point. What kind of monster doesn't stay in grid mode?

I just learned that grid mode existed yesterday.

ISTR there are in fact historians who think the early modern advent of caffeine, nicotine, sugar actually made a difference. Caffeine now being made in factories and distributed handily pre-spiked with meth, a fresh golden age is surely in the offing.

Somebody made us go to grid because we, for the first time, had nine people on the call. They wanted us all in Brady Bunch viewing.

I used to find that after a day of vague productivity and slacking at work, I'd come into a real burst of productivity between 4-5pm, and could keep it going until 8pm or so given the opportunity. Unfortunately, family life has made those hours much harder to access, and I haven't figured out how to shift it.

Caffeine and sugar?

My office has used Skype for voice chat and screen sharing, but people actually using the video option seems very rare, thankfully. (Zoom is unwelcome due to security issues. Teams is acceptable but much more of a hassle at this office than Skype.) It would make things a tiny bit more entertaining and a lot more distracting and anxiety-inducing.

I wonder what productivity feels like? I can buckle down and force myself to stick to something for a while when it's a big task and I'm under a solid deadline and that's it. Otherwise, I'm being fairly responsible if I switch back and forth between three different tasks. More likely, I switch back and forth between a task and a game or a task and a blog or article. The only thing I can actually stick to are games. When I was on amphetamines (a less boring name for "AD&D medication"), I felt more anxiety about the switching between things but that's it.

||
Is there a mental disorder that causes people to format lists by hitting spacebar multiple times, instead of either tab characters or table formatting? I can't think of any other explanation.
|>

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons?

Anyway, I do most work in SAS, so I'm used to fonts with monospacing.

Which is why sometimes a document will have spaces instead of actual formatting.

We're using Teams and I hate it. I'm usually most productive early in the morning but since the pandemic my sleep schedule has been even more fucked than usual so my cow-orking arrangement is wonderful, I get to sleep late/lounge about till the early afternoon then get my day's work done in 2-4 hours of cow-orking.

29: Heh. Might be a good idea.

30: Yeah, I see some monospaced fonts and command line inputs where I work, but the issue just now was at least three points removed from that.

Right but the output is also like that and cut-paste will keep it

I used to find that after a day of vague productivity and slacking at work, I'd come into a real burst of productivity between 4-5pm, and could keep it going until 8pm or so given the opportunity.

That is not my experience at all. IF I have a day of being unproductive I can sometimes motivate myself to buckle down (around 2:30) and try to get something done by the end of the day. But if that doesn't work, and I haven't accomplished much by 5:00 it's not only a sign that I should turn off my computer and go home, it's a sign that I probably would have been better turning off my computer and going home at 3:00 and just coming back to it the next day.

I'm an advocate of, "sometimes you just need to get away from the problem for a while and let your brain chew on it in the background and see if that shakes anything loose." But I'm fairly good at motivating myself to work when I have deadlines and I usually have deadlines.

We're using Teams and I hate it.

Shit, really? I was thinking about using it as a course management system for my classes in the fall. What do you dislike about it?

All this is a hell of a lot harder to figure out now than in the before-time, that's for sure. When I'm working from home full-time, and a lot of other people are but I'm not sure about "everybody", and it'll continue indefinitely but probably not forever and maybe not long enough to prevent personal problems, and all this with relatively new management, it's impossible to figure out what's a reasonable request and what's just a bit over the line and what's crazy. I mean both the time management and the switching between contexts where monospace fonts are reasonable and where they aren't, and figuring out whether I have the standing to correct it or not. (In this particular case, what to do about the list is obvious: convert it to a simple paragraph of text. I've already spent more keystrokes on it here than I did there. But six months ago, I wouldn't have got a list like that in this context, and if I did, I would have known exactly why. Now, I really have no idea.) And right now I've got the additional wrinkle of a time zone shift, but anyways.

I'm not just griping because that's the theme of the thread, one of those tasks I'm switching back and forth between is an email to my team lead about these very issues.

Is there a mental disorder that causes people to format lists by hitting spacebar multiple times, instead of either tab characters or table formatting? I can't think of any other explanation.

- this is just to say
- I get annoyed with auto-bulleting in Outlook
- because it introduces way more white space than I want sometimes.
- So I sometimes use a couple spaces and a dash, instead.

We use Teams and it's fine. BUT did you know that when you're attending a webex event and you open a different window (like your wordprocessor or ahem, a browser window) the host can tell? I just learned this yesterday. I mean, they can't see what you're looking at, but the host has a dashboard with little meters displaying each attendee's "attentiveness," i.e., whether the attendee is paying attention or reading unfogged.

Sometimes, usually, if my code allows it, I use spaces and tabs to line up everything.

39: Uh, how long has that feature been there? Asking for a friend who spent most of 2014 with WebEx on one monitor and here on the other.

36 I find the UX completely counterintuitive.

re: whitespace

I'm a Python developer, and I also churn out a ton of Git Gists in Markdown to share with people, so I format everything in units of 4 spaces.

FWIW, I find Teams fine, especially now they've added some basic features that were missing initially. If everyone you're dealing with is on Office software, or otherwise shares a domain (which presumably your students do) it works very well. Educators I know say they prefer Zoom though, at least for classroom stuff. I don't know how much of the other functionality of Teams is in Zoom. I doubt much of it except text chat.

Regarding time in general, it's my job to estimate time. Again, Agile working practices are supposed to have that done by the team as part of sprint-planning, or whatever. Just in time estimation. Wisdom of the crowd, etc.* But, surprisingly, funding bodies and clients aren't mad keen on embarking on big projects without knowing up front how much it'll cost them, and how long it'll take. It's usually my job to work this out, and to get grumbled at when I get it wrong.

The regular mistake I make is thinking in terms of : how long would this take me? Because I am faster and more productive than some of the people I work with, and _hugely_ faster and more productive than the people I work with at client institutions. The second regular mistake is thinking: how long would this take me simpliciter? Forgetting that if I have 5 working days in a week, I'll lose about half of them to meetings, context shifting, dealing with clients, shit-shovelling when something goes wrong, being brought in to fix some shit that someone didn't deliver one time, etc. So, I should always double the estimation in terms of "when will this be done by?" and add about 20% for inefficiencies caused by never getting a clear run at anything.

* the entire Scrum/Agile bullshit thing

We use a mixture of Slack and Zoom. It mostly works well, I think. We also use a whole bunch of Atlassian products, though, for some of the things that, I think, Teams can probably do.

Speaking of gyms (really, it's in the OP), does anybody go to one now?

Nope, and I miss it. I don't like running nearly as much.

I was feeling like a slacker for never having joined one, but now it seems like I dodged a bullet.

Some people here get ZOOM licenses, but everyone has access to Teams. I use Skype for 1-2 people. ZOOM is better for presentations. So, Teams is the default for a presentation, because I'm not important enough to deserve my own ZOOM license. Before COVID we used Cisco WebEx a bunch.

47 and 48: I really want my own treadmill. I still go outside to walk a bunch, but I 2ould love to get on a treadmill for 10 minutes of every hour and walk on one when I meet with my boss over ZOOM.

Running is easier if you pretend you're trying to rescue hobbits that are being dragged to Isengard.

Tim struggles terribly with the "Time a task will take" thing and planning out time. I wonder if there's an ADHD component or if it's just his anxiety.

AD&D medication

Dying. "You can focus, but only on one thing? Here's your problem right here, Mr. Cyrus..."

I am faster and more productive than some of the people I work with, and _hugely_ faster and more productive than the people I work with at client institutions.

Okay, but are you faster at describing your productivity on Unfogged than people are at describing their lack of productivity on Unfogged? This is the important metric.

39: Read unfogged on your phone or tablet. I don't ever open unfogged on my company-issued laptop which tracks everything. Twitter yes, Facebook even, but not unfogged.

Yes, now that's what I do. But I didn't even have a smartphone in when I started here and you started before I did.

Patricia Lockwood, very funny: https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/patricia-lockwood/diary

Also, it's harder to link to pictures of dinosaurs fucking cars if using a phone. I assume that's why nobody does it now.

In so disappointed 57 didn't pwn me.

When I had a non-desk job, I wasn't really on unfogged while at work but I worked odd hours and was on unfogged on a personal computer. Then I had a laptop and a mobile job for a human services organization in the community with such bare bones IT that I knew they weren't Tracking anything. I think I got an iPhone in 2012 or 2013.

47: Not now. Used to have a YMCA membership, mostly for the kid's swimming class, and while she was in the water I'd often work out in some capacity. It obviously ended in March. The YMCA is reopening, I'm not sure if fully or partially, but either way, we aren't going for the foreseeable future.

I used to get most of my exercise by biking to work but that isn't happening now either. The in-laws have a ton of junk food around and after two weeks here I'm making conscious efforts to cut back.

There's so much junk food in this house and I have done all of the shopping since quarantine started. Funny that.

58: Game, set, match

https://glasstire.com/2012/10/21/no-art/

Only five and a half months until Christmas.

I always felt so terrible depositing my caches of probiotic soda, corn chips, energy bars and Blue Bottle cold brew on the checkout conveyor, while the underpaid cashier risking her life daily so that, in theory, people will not starve, rang them all up grimly behind the plexiglass. But I also thought: I am this close to going completely fucking insane, and if the probiotic pomegranate soda is the thing that holds back the tide, well...?

Have you considered buying Twix and domestic beer out of a sense of class consciousness?

I had a gym membership and was working out (weightlifting) with a trainer weekly, which I liked a lot. Some branches of the gym are re-opening soon but I am still skeptical that heavy breathing in a windowless basement is a good idea, to say nothing of how I would get there. I am wondering if I should proactively cancel my "suspended" membership.

I am starting to get worried about the overarching fact that even in a place that is doing (relatively) well, I don't trust that what is allowed to be open is actually safe enough. And starting to second-guess that everywhere is going to be exhausting, at a minimum.

I am starting to get worried about the overarching fact that even in a place that is doing (relatively) well, I don't trust that what is allowed to be open is actually safe enough.

Yes, this.

I am going to get a pedicure on Saturday, but I know they are making people wait outside and have out up plexiglass shields, and I'm planning to give like a 100% tip.

Speaking of exercise. I have some resistance bands I bought a while ago to work on upper body strength. I followed some 3 week routine for a bit every other day but then dropped it. Can anybody recommend videos or better yet, are there people with scheduled exercise classes online that aren't crazy expensive that I could join. Specifically, I'm interested in upper body strength. And I wouldn't mind a way to interact with people too.

If I buy the Twix and "domestic beer," do I have to blow the savings on professional hair coloring? And an SUV? And a colorist for my SUV?

If you have savings, you aren't drinking enough.

I have to stop commenting here. I am aware that my comments are increasingly fucking awful.

I'm in a bad place and it's better around here when I disengage. I'll check in sometime later in the summer, hopefully once things have improved.

Please take care. Best wishes.

72: I'm really sorry to hear that you're in a bad place. For what it's worth, I feel guilty about the pedicure but not guilty enough not to go. Please do take care.

I'll miss you -- come back if and when it feels like a good idea.

I can't get a pedicure because even the fish that eat dead skin are repulsed by my toenails.

||

Very angry about the Supreme Court birth control decision. Not unexpected but angry.

Does anyone know how Instagram Live works? Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro are discussing the coming eviction crisis today at 3:30, and I would like to watch it, but I don't use Instagram.

|>

Be well, lk I hope things improve, and it'll be nice to see you back.

I'm going to my gym, and getting squirrelly about the practices of this one trainer dude and the gym drama about the dude is escalating rapidly. We will see.

Yes, I did know that Webex reports to the facilitator about who is in the Webex tab and who has clicked away from the tab.

I'm sorry, lk. I hope things improve.

Heebie, the most important thing about Teams is to make sure you fix that godawful administrator settting where it announces EVERY TIME a person joins or leaves the meeting with an obnoxious interruption. HEEBIE HAS NOW JOINED THE CALL. It seems to be on by default, at least judging by the myriad meetings I've been on where the host has no idea how to disable it or how it got enabled in the first place. HEEBIE HAS NOW LEFT THE CALL. Arrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhh.

We took 7yo to a small group outdoor tennis lesson today and she was sobbing saying she didn't want to go. It turns out she was upset about seeing other kids her age and not knowing what she should say or do. She hasn't physically been near another kid besides her older brothers since early March although she's done a bunch of Zoom with class and friends.

Be well, LK

Be well, LK

I suppose the second time was to greet you when you return.

81: congratulations on doing a good job of social distancing, I guess? Atossa has had, I don't know, at least six playdates with friends since March. All outdoors, and with reminders to keep some physical distance, but definitely more than zero. Plus at least a dozen sessions of playing in a neighbor's yard with his dog, usually with the neighbor working in the yard at the time. I've often felt guilty about not socially distancing enough.

Take care lk

Everyone in my family hates how long it takes me to put on my shoes.

Because you're so fast they can't get a good view?

On the internet nobody knows you're a centipede.

re: 54.last

It does sound like I'm bragging. I'm not really. I have some work colleagues who make me look like I do nothing at all. It is generally, true, though, that people who work in publicly funded institutions have literally no idea how little work they actually do.*

* Not academic and research staff. I'm thinking of people like curators, librarians, IT, etc.

90.last lol. I've been getting a lot more done during our lockdown, especially of the kinds of things that management wants me to do (i.e. cataloging) because they've been out of my hair. They've truly fucked up everything else. If someone contacts me about maps, a patron or another institution because they want to borrow maps or images for an exhibition, or even an elementary school teacher who wants me to remotely give a talk to her class on my favorite maps, etc, I get a metric shitton of grief because they weren't cc'd first and I don't have permission to, uh, do my fucking job. I'm well known here for my knowledge and enthusiasm but I've stopped reaching out to bring people in to use the (truly amazing) collection here because of this. Truly the values here are entirely antithetical to librarianship. I've had some ideas for amazing digital projects here that other institutions have done but also nothing has come of it. The incompetence here is astounding and it's the most demotivating place I've ever worked in.

90 last -- I was reminded of when (early 1990s) I worked in the cataloging department of the library of a major state university. The head of the cataloging department pointed proudly at our backlog, "This is our job security." You can imagine how motivated we were to get lots of work done.

92: don't make fun of my typo! I'm feeling sensitive today.

re: 91

That sucks. Your institution does sound less than ideal.

I work with people who have genuinely great ideas (at clients) but the typical process is:

* they have some great idea,
* they are really not very good at actually articulating that idea in a very practical way, so
* you jump through a million hoops to try and help them massage their ideas into something that a funder or their own senior stakeholders might sign off on.

Then they ghost you for a year.

During which time, they might or might not be pursuing this idea. If they are evil bastards -- and a non-zero percentage are -- they might then try and take the idea to their internal teams to do -- with all of your uncompensated hard work attached -- or even to a competitor to see if they can undercut you. Then they come back to you 12 hours before their funding deadline and demand you make a whole bunch of changes.

Then they ghost you again for 6 months.

Then they reappear with money! Yay! But, turns out, they forgot to tell you they need 20% of the budget to pay for themselves. And they forgot they promised their stakeholders or funders that a whole bunch of new features would get done. But no more money! Yay! By the way, did we tell you, we need it in N weeks?

The work begins. You need data from them. They take fucking forever. When they give it to you, it's a fucking spreadsheet, in Latin but in Arabic script, with colour coding for semantics. Except each version they send to you, is completely different from the last one. Columns appear and disappear. They have no idea why version is the most up to date one. Sometimes they send you the wrong files.

You ask for changes. They literally take longer than the entire proposed time line of the project to come back to you with revised data. They tell you how hard they are working. Six months pass and they return to you with data that you could literally have done yourself in an evening, while drunk. The quality of their data is a lot worse than the work you'd have done drunk.

So, you suggest that you just produce or update the data on their behalf, because it'll be quicker. But no .... because you are not an inducted member of the fraternity/sorority, and as a know-nothing code-monkey, you cannot! Cannot! Shock is manifest! Territorial pissing ensues.

Three months pass. You get some more half-arsed shite from them.

Eventually, you do some work and you ask for feedback.

Literally 50% more of the entire proposed time line of the project passes.

They come back to you with some half-arsed feedback that they clearly knocked off in ten minutes. They ghost you for 3 months. Then they start sending you stressed messages because their funder is wondering why the project is 3 times over the deadline.

Repeat.

94 is forensically accurate.

94 Yeah, this is why the projects I've wanted to implement here were based on those already done at major institutions, no reinventing the wheel necessary, just some minor, local tweaking.

Wow. I've been saying for years that my husband essentially has no idea how to gauge the passage of time or how long something will take, and that it clearly has something to do with his brain working differently, not just callous disregard, but I had no idea it was an actual....thing. He definitely has/does this, and I've noticed it since I very first met him (which was online, so it really is pretty obvious).

Productivity-wise, for myself, I am basically productive sporadically and without much rhyme or reason. However, put me in a 9-5 office job (or WFH but where I'm not accountable only to myself) and it turns out I can be quite productive all day long without any noticeable regular slumps (yes occasionally I eat too much at lunch or it's too hot and then I do nothing in the afternoon but they're exceptions to the rule). However, if I'm pushed to my max for too long without the chance to break it up - as I have been recently - I will then find myself on an occasional day where I just can't get anything done because the will has been lost.

Sympathies to LK; we will miss you, and look forward to your comments when you feel like returning.

I have lately been feeling worn down by the terribleness of 2020 (both COVID and the election/politics). It's not a good year.

91- Dolley has a small gig as an adjunct for an online university grad program, teaching a couple courses a year. It's always been a remote asynchronous learning program mostly through message boards and posted files. For this semester, they gave her a Zoom account, so she tried having a totally optional Zoom to start the class on her own time for no additional pay, which 5 students showed up for. However there's a teacher of another section in the same class who asked ahead of time about doing a Zoom, and was told no because it's advertised as asynchronous which a live Zoom would not be. But her students found out that Dolley's students did have a Zoom, and this all got back to the program coordinator who told Dolley in no uncertain terms that it was not acceptable to have a Zoom because then the students might expect it for the future and it would require commitments of support from IT (despite the fact that they GAVE HER A ZOOM ACCOUNT) and that she was not to hold any more online meetings with her class. But she can do office hours! Just... not with too many students maybe? The coordinator said the class has been this way for 10 years and this is not the time to change it. This had already been a pre-COVID issue Dolley has raised with them because it literally hasn't changed in 10 years and she is not allowed to make changes even though there are things in the published curriculum like broken links and outdated references and concepts. She's told the students to complain if they aren't being served well since they're the customers but no students want to risk getting in trouble and not getting the credits they're paying for. All in all a disgraceful example of "non-profit" educational moneymaking and ass-covering administrators who will never make any changes to anything because that requires seven levels of approval while just letting your online materials slowly rot isn't any particular person's fault. Fortunately Dolley doesn't really care if they fire her because the pay isn't much so she's fine telling them that they're ripping off the students by acting like the worst stereotypes of bureaucrats.

https://twitter.com/yorksranter/status/1280918316547289094

The coordinator said the class has been this way for 10 years and this is not the time to change it.

Amazing. Appalling.

100: God, no. The only thing worse than academics managing themselves is "professional" management. The UK has the most bloated, inefficient academic sector in Europe, because they have something like one administrator for every two faculty members. German universities have chaired professors run everything (except the few things that are naturally centralized), and they manage just fine.

I have worked in the private sector, and the management there is just as shitty.

The UK has the most bloated, inefficient academic sector in Europe, because they have something like one administrator for every two faculty members. German universities have chaired professors run everything (except the few things that are naturally centralized), and they manage just fine.

Germany and the UK spend about the same per student ($11,700 vs $11,600) but it takes a German student longer to get a first degree, and there are not many German universities in the top 100 worldwide and none in the top 25, and none in the top 100 THE Impact list.

102: they whine endlessly about administrators but I get to see their own godawful cow-with-a-pen efforts.

My husband complains that in the sciences people get their jobs because they have Ph.Ds, but nothing that's a requirement for getting a Ph.D equips you to manage people. He's not a proponent of MBAs but things theat companies should invest time into training their employees as managers. I think this is utopia, but his Dad would have said that the big corporations had training programs in the 60's.

105 is common across a lot of fields. There's a common assumption that being a really good X should equip you for managing a team of Xs, and it doesn't always hold, particularly when the assumption is that being a really good X is all you need to manage a team of Xs. A really good pilot can be a terrible airline manager. The assumption doesn't even hold in the weaker form that being really good at managing a team of 10 means you'll be really good at managing a team of 1000. Armies are full of great captains who developed into terrible generals.

German universities can only hire people who speak German. UK universities hire people who speak English, which is basically every educated person in every academic subject. Also, the German system is much flatter, while the UK system is in love with knowing that there is a Great Chain of Being that stretches from the lowest school up to Oxbridge, and then God.

German universities can only hire people who speak German.

What does that have to do with the assertion that German universities are much more efficient?

(Also, hate to say it, but that isn't really true. I know people who've lectured at German universities with, at least initially, only very basic German. They lectured in English.)

And, indeed, are German universities more efficient? As I said, they cost about the same to educate one undergrad for one year as a UK university. That sounds like roughly equal efficiency, at least in the area of teaching. Is there a metric of efficiency where the difference is clearer?

Good, helpful article. I have time blindness and it's truly a curse.

My last two jobs have provided a lot of manager training. I think they recognize the issue in 104-5 and decided it's easier to make good scientists into passable managers than to make good managers into passable scientists.

108: my experience of an Austrian university was not characterised by efficiency - it took them half the first semester to finish registering me as a student, which needed visits to half a dozen offices, acres of paper, and countless cock-ups. Fortunately, at the time, you could wander in and out of the campus and into lectures and seminars without anyone batting an eyelid.