Tag: work
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Doing The Work
To get a thing accomplished, you show up and do the work. That’s all you can do, really. Other things that aren’t “the work” don’t get the thing accomplished. And what happens as a result of your trying to do “the work”: that’s also not really your choice. You just show up and do “the work”. Byron…
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OPW: “Our Actions Create Our World”
I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve been thinking about bringing it back. OPW stands for “Other People’s Words,” and since I moth-balled Link Banana I’ve been sharing most things I would have previously put there on Twitter. But this mini graduation/commencement/life speech from Hank Green, in the form of a YouTube video,…
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It’s Just About Time and Attention
It seems that we only have control over two things in our life: the hours allotted to us, and the things we put our attention on in those hours. But that’s a fact that’s easy to miss. We worry about how pretty we are. About how smart we are. About how kind we are. About…
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The Meaning of Meetings and Metawork
A bit of a neologism, I wondered if I should use the hyphenated “meta-work” instead. To explain: metawork is simply work about work. That is: rather than making widgets, metawork consists of conversations about making widgets. Meetings are the quintessential form of group metawork. And the popular disdain for meetings among white collar workers is mostly due to the…
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Premature Optimizations and the Tool Distraction
I do a lot of computer programming. More than that, I’ve made it my primary task of the last few years to learn as much as I can about it. One of the ideas anyone who spends a lot of time doing this will come across is this quote from Donald Knuth: Premature optimization is…
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“Work is More Fun than Fun”
This quotation, whose owner I’ve seen cited repeatedly as Noel Coward, strikes me as largely true. Not completely, always, and unequivocally, but certainly for the right type of work it can be in a way we tend to underestimate. When your wife, friend, or boss commands you “to go have some fun,” they obviously don’t…
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OPW: David Callahan on Honoring Work
On today’s “Other People’s Words,” a quote from the book I reviewed Monday, The Moral Center. I do feel the need to apologize for bringing it up again, but I can’t seem to avoid it. In this excerpt, Callahan makes some interesting observations about the how attitudes towards work and collective struggle have shifted over…