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missmentelle · 5 years

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Tips for following and managing deadlines in college and as an adult? I didn’t realize adulthood requires so much paperwork

Adulthood does require a lot of paperwork (as does my specific job), and I have also sometimes struggled to keep up with it at times! I have ADHD that I manage without medication, and that has required me to come up with a lot of creative strategies for managing deadlines and responsibilities. If you’re struggling, I recommend:

Use the technology that’s available. There are a lot of apps and programs out there to help you keep track of things, and many of them are free. Ideally, look for apps that you can sync across multiple devices. I personally relied on Google Calendar to get me through graduate school - you can enter deadlines and tasks, and set up reminders for yourself to jog your memory. It also gives you a visual look at your schedule, so you can see where you have space to slot extra tasks into your day. In addition to Google Calendar, I recommend checking out Any.Do, Habitica, Bear, EverNote, and 24Me. You can also use the built-in reminder app on your phone, and if remembering to jot things down is a struggle for you, iPhone users can verbally tell Siri to set a reminder for them - I use this function of Siri several times per day. There is no shame in being dependent on technology to manage your life; there are great programs out there, and it’s okay to use the tools that are available. It doesn’t matter which app you choose, or how many apps you choose - it’s about finding a system that works for you.

Try bullet journalling or using an organizer. If technology just doesn’t work for you, you can also try using pen-and-paper methods to keep your life on track. You can find pre-made organizers and agendas at any bookstore, complete with calendars, to-do lists and daily agendas. If you want more control over format, you can also look into starting a bullet journal. It may take a while to set up your bullet journal and get the hang of using it, but when you’re done, you have a fully customized organizational system that can help you track whatever needs tracking in your life. I personally use a bullet journal, and I find it immensely helpful.

Invest in a filing cabinet. Shoving important documents into random drawers and cupboards is an excellent way to not be able to find those documents when you need them. Invest in a small filing cabinet, and take an afternoon to sort and label your important papers. All your essential ID documents, school paperwork, financial paperwork, etc, should be properly sorted and labelled so that you know exactly what documents are where. The time that you spend creating and setting up this system will save you a lot of panicked hours digging through random piles of paperwork you shoved into a drawer in the future.

Automate whatever tasks you can. If your bill payments can be automated, do it. If you have products that you regularly use, set up an automatic order of them on Amazon. If you’re going on vacation and don’t want to waste hours emailing everyone to let them know, set up an automatic reply that lets people know when you’ll be back. If it can be automated, automate it. The best way to keep track of deadlines is to minimize the number of deadlines you need to keep track of. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and stress.

Write everything down. The easiest way to miss a deadline is to forget to write it down. Never assume that you are going to remember something just because you promised yourself you would. If you have something you need to remember, jot it down, enter it into whatever organizational tool you are using, and make sure you set a reminder. Seeing all your tasks written out can help you figure out which deadlines are coming up first, and plan your time accordingly.

Do chores on a schedule. Trying to wing your deadlines and household chores is a really awesome way to find yourself frantically doing laundry at 2 in the morning because you have a big presentation in the morning and you’re totally out of clean clothes. Figure out a regular weekly schedule for your chores, and enter them into your calendar. Not only will this help you visualize how much time your chores take up every week, but doing chores regularly saves you a lot of time and energy - it’s much better to spend 10 minutes per week wiping down the shower stall, rather than spending 3 hours trying sandblast a month’s worth of soap scum off the tub.

Break large projects down into small, manageable chunks. Let’s say you have a huge term paper due three months from now at the end of the semester. Your grades and sanity both depend on you not waiting until the last minute to write that paper. But when you think about how much work needs to be done to write that paper - thinking of a topic, researching, outlining, writing, proofreading, citing, formatting, etc - it’s easy to get completely overwhelmed, and procrastinate working on the paper until the 11th hour. Instead of having an all-out, last-minute panic, start by breaking large projects down into tasks that don’t seem so daunting. If you need to write a 20-page paper with at least 10 cited sources, start by giving yourself 2 weeks to find 5 good sources to cite. Then in the next two weeks, find 5 more sources to cite. Then in the two weeks after that, write the outline. You get the picture. When tasks are broken down, it becomes a lot less overwhelming to do them, and you make much better progress.

Learn to prioritize. There are two things you need to think about when you’re trying to prioritize a task - how urgent it is, and how important it is. An urgent task is one that has to be done soon; an important task is one that has a very important outcome for you. All the tasks in your life fall somewhere on the urgent-important spectrum. If tax deadline is in three days and you haven’t filed yet, filing your taxes is both urgent and important. Taking the garbage out when the can is full is urgent, but not important - nothing in your life will go terribly wrong if you don’t do it. If you want to be a writer someday, working on your writing is important, but not urgent - there’s no deadline, but your life will be hugely negatively impacted if you don’t do it. In general, when you’re prioritizing, tasks should be done in the following order: important + urgent > urgent but not important > important but not urgent > neither important nor urgent. Sometimes, prioritizing means letting things slide if they aren’t worth the time and effort to do them. When you’re a student, this often means taking a hard look at how important something is. If you have a pop quiz tomorrow that’s worth 2% of your grade, and a midterm in two days worth 25% that you are completely unprepared for, your best bet is to take a quick skim of your pop quiz notes and spend the bulk of your time studying for the midterm, even if it means getting a mediocre grade on the quiz.

Overestimate how much time you’ll need to complete a project. How much time do you think it’s going to take you to finish that homework assignment that’s due next week? Think about all the contingencies - assume that you get stuck a couple times and have to scour the internet for answers, or call up your friend who took the class last semester. Maybe you estimate that the assignment should take 4 hours total to complete. Perfect - now schedule yourself 6-8 hours to actually get it done. People tend to dramatically overestimate their own efficiency, and underestimate the time it takes them to actually finish important tasks. If you don’t want to be scrambling all the time, the best thing you can do is intentionally overestimate how much time you need.

Do a regular “life audit”. Every 1-2 weeks, block out some time to sit down and take stock of everything that’s going on in your life. How did the previous week go? Did you get everything done that you needed to? Is there anything you need to catch up on? What are the things that are coming up in your life? What needs to get done this week? Are you making progress toward your goals? How’s the household chore situation? What do you need to prioritize for the week ahead? Is there anything that you’re wasting too much time on? Are there any papers or files that you need to put away in your filing cabinet before they get lost? Checking in with yourself regularly gives you a chance to catch small issues before they can snowball into enormous problems.

Staying on top of deadlines is a skill, and it’s easy to mess up every now and then. We all do it. The key is to keep trying, and to keep striving for improvement.

Best of luck to you!

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angrytigertastemaker · 4 years

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oertendahlii · 4 years

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So a while ago I was tagged by the wonderful @stolligaseptember to answer these 10 questions and then come up with 10 new ones. 1. What’s the worst household chore? Vacuuming, I think, it’s tiresome and most importantly, it scares my cats. Oh, and the sound is terribly disturbing to listen to when someone else does it.

2. Three books you think everyone should read? Oh no, this is tough! People have so different taste, the books I enjoy wouldn’t fit everyone. So I think three books I think everyone should read would be quite scientific ones about things I find important. Although I have at least one such book in mind, lets not go there…

So, instead, here’s three books I think everyone who has a similar taste in books as I should give a go (they’re all very lovely): ”Time stops for no mouse” by Michael Hoeye, the first book in The Hermux Tantamoq Adventures about Hermux, a watchmaker mouse who becomes a detective (it’s for children, but it’s really, really lovely), ”The Hobbit” (J.R.R Tolkien) and ”Britt-Marie was here” (Fredrik Backman). (Or, pretty much any book by Astrid Lindgren, I can’t really pick).

3. Even if you’re a terrible baker, what’s your go-to baking choice? Well, if I’ve got plenty of time for baking it’s buns! When there’s less time, then maybe pie (summer and autumn), chocolate balls or kladdkaka (sticky chocolate cake). But mostly I just ask my sister or mother if there’s anything special they want, honestly. If I didn’t save it for special occations, cake might have been my go-to choice, because I think planning out, preparing and putting together a cake is my favourite kind of baking.

4. Any favorite candy? Not really actually, not a clear favourite at least. What I’m craving really changes from day to day, and sometimes depends on mood, weather and situation. But chocolate is almost always right.

5. What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Drink water. Or turn of my alarms if I wake up before all of them has gone off.

6. Is there a story behind your name? If not, what does your name mean? I don’t know if it counts as a story, but what I know is that my mom wanted me and my siblings to have more "international" names, rather than common swedish names. Other than that, I guess she just liked it.

7. Favorite song right now? I don’t have one right now, haven’t for quite some time. But considering the fact that pretty much the entire thing is sung, may I say the musical ”Ingvar!”? (thanks for the suggestion, SVT Play, I love it!). That’s pretty much what I’ve been listening to the past days (together with a bit of Kristina från Duvemåla and other musicals).

On a side note: Ingvar! will be avaible on SVT Play (x) for some months, watch it peeps, it’s amazing! It’s in swedish though. Who could have guessed that a musical about Ingvar Kamprad and IKEA would be so very catchy. And just look at this:

I love the shelf, dynamite and meatball costumes. I only knew of Anders Ekborg and Daniel Engman before watching this, but all the performers are amazing. 8. Best compliment that you’ve ever received? This isn’t the best one, I know that much, but I don’t remember anything else right now, so: last year I worked with pulled sugar for the first (and so far only) time to do a bow for a cake to a friend’s birthday party, and for a split-second someone though it was real, that was fun!

9. If you could spend the day with any historical person of your choice, who would it be? Someone important to the field of conservation biology and/or ecology and/or environmental science I think. Probably Rachel Carson, I mean Silent Spring was revolutionary and so, so important, both considering the use of pesticides but also for raising awareness about nature’s vulnerability to human intervention.

10. Are you a prisoner of planet earth? I’d say it sometimes feels like planet earth is a prisoner of the human race. (I didn’t get the reference so I googled it and I’ve never heard of the ”prison earth” idea before, if that’s even what you’re after. But no, I don’t think I am). Here’s my questions: 1. Favourite mineral or rock, if you have one, if not: birthstone? 2. What was the last movie or tv show/series you watched and what did you think about it? 3. Favourite jam? 4. Do you prefer deciduous or coniferous forests? Or another kind of forest? 5. Is there any song/movie/tv show that reminds you of a time in your life that you miss sometimes? 6. Do you prefer restaurants or cafés, and why? 7. What would be the perfect picture (for you) for your birth month in a calendar? 8. Favourite instrument to listen to? 9. Have you got any favourite motivational quote(s) or lyrics? If not, any other quote(s) you like? 10. A language you wish you were fluent in?

I tag: @aprilskyforever @triplestaff @liljakonvalj and anyone who want to do it (oh and you, if you wanna do it again September) :)

#kako blev taggad #stolligaseptember #aprilskyforever #triplestaff #liljakonvalj

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negrek · 6 years

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How to Plan a Trip in Under Two Hours

And now for something completely different! A friend of mine recently asked me for some tips on travel planning, since she often feels overwhelmed when she tries to get started. I figured I might as well throw this up here as well, in case anyone else would find it interesting or useful.

Okay, travel tips! I'm going to assume for the purposes of this post that you already know where you're going, on a level of "what country," and what time you might want to go there, on a level of "starting and ending month." If you don't have that worked out yet, I can describe how I decide where/when to go if you like. Also, if you have in mind some specific activity you want to do in the place you're going ("I want to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu!") the process will be different (and easier!) than this. So: target country, target month.

Just as a disclaimer, everybody has different needs and preferences when they travel. I tend to be more on the loosey-goosey end, with relatively minimal planning. Obviously this makes things a lot less overwhelming! But if you really like having a set schedule, would feel much more secure knowing where you're going to be at a given time on any given day, know where all your meals are coming from, etc., I highly recommend that you consider a packaged tour or travel agent rather than planning your own trip. It's totally possible to figure things out down to that level of detail on your own, but if you tend to get overwhelmed by options, it will be way easier to have somebody else work things out for you. You can also do some kind of packaged or pre-planned trip and then tack a couple of extra days on at the end to have to yourself and use that time as a kind of practice for planning a longer trip; that way you can feel secure in that the majority of the work is handled for you and you'll know what to expect for most of the trip, but can also get some

That said, I think the most important thing to understand when planning a trip is that it is NEVER going to be perfect. You are NEVER going to get to do all the things you were hoping to get to do. You are NEVER going to be able to get the absolute best deal on everything. You WILL screw up and get suckered by the expensive tourist-y option, you WILL accidentally schedule something such that you end up not having the time to visit $landmark that you were dying to see, you WILL end up having disappointing experiences as well as great ones.

I think the huge proliferation of travel information available has kind of created this illusion that if you're smart and determined enough you can plan the MOST ENJOYABLE vacation that is also the CHEAPEST and "MOST AUTHENTIC" while visiting the optimal locations, eating only at the tastiest restaurants, etc. etc. This is not true! Even ignoring that online reviews are lies and everyone's preferences differ so the "best" experiences may not actually be the best for you personally, there is literally nothing the internet can do to stop you from having a bad oyster at what should have been a perfectly safe restaurant and then spending the next day horking your guts up instead of visiting Extremely Photogenic Waterfall Paradise. You can't, from hundreds to thousands of miles away, figure out what the best things to do are in a place you've never set foot in. On the other hand, the best way to figure out a travel itinerary is to visit somewhere; after a few days there you will absolutely know whether you have any intention of ever returning and, if you do want to return, a whole big list of things you want to do/see next time.

So it's more important to pick SOMETHING and just get there than it is to pick THE BEST THING. You'll have plenty of opportunities to change your mind later if you decide you really don't like what you've landed on, too. What you really need is a set of reasonable defaults and rules of thumb to fall back on when you have an overwhelming number of choices. If you do a lot of traveling, you will learn what works for you and develop these pretty fast. If you're feeling a bit lost, I'm about to give you a whole big list of them, and hopefully that will help to get you travelling so you have the opportunity to learn what your own are and develop a routine that suits you.

Just remember that these are reasonable and defaults and specific to me. They're supposed to keep you from overoptimizing, from wandering around airline discount mailing lists fretting about whether you could save $300 on your ticket if you just looked at one more web site (spoiler no you can't, if you really love deal-hunting or are on a tight budget airline scrounging can really pay off but otherwise don't even worry about it). So if at any point you look at some advice I give and go "whaaaaat no that sounds terrible," that's great! It means you have a clear preference about something that happens to be different than mine, and you should go with what makes the most sense to YOU. These recommendations are intended as guidelines to follow if you're feeling a bit lost, not the be-all and end-all of travel advice.

Let's get started!

Know where you're going and when, but not sure how long you should stay? Congratulations, you're staying for a week. Your budget is $1200. If you're planning to go somewhere that will require you to fly more than six hours, your budget is instead $2000 to account for airfare. There's virtually nowhere on earth where those figures aren't going to cover you, for the vast majority of the globe they're downright extravagant, and if you happen to have chosen one of those places where they won't cover you, you'll KNOW.

Now, where to go in $country? You may have some vague ideas already. For example, if you haven't been to France before and you aren't going for some specific purpose, you're going to Paris. Just accept it. You're going to Paris. If the options aren't obvious to you, or you want a better sense of what's out there, go to Google Flights. It has the neat feature that you don't have to put in a specific destination to find flights. Put in your home airport and the country you'd like to go to and it will bring you to a page that displays the major air destinations in that country along with an approximate price for a round trip to each one. Take a look at the prices. If any of them make you go, "Mein GOTT!!" just at a glance, cross that destination off your list.

Even in a fairly large country, there probably aren't more than four or five cities with regular flights that look comfortable in your budget. That's great! Take your list of four or five, and if you aren't familiar with them, Google them. Look up their Wikipedia pages. Search "top 10 things to do in $city." Spend no more than twenty minutes on this. You're not trying to figure out an itinerary or get a fine-grained look at each place. You're trying to get a general impression: is this place your history-and-culture kind of city? Lazy beach getaway? Outdoor adventure paradise? I recommend looking up general climate/weather conditions for the month you expect to be there in as part of this exercise, because they can vary surprisingly widely within a country, and "miserable rain 24/7" is a great way to eliminate destinations from your list.

Now pick your top two cities based on what you feel like at the moment (e.g. low-key lying in the sun kind of vacation vs ALL THE NIGHTLIFE vs arts and culture, or a mix). You're flying into one and out of the other. (If there's one place that seems super interesting and you think you'd be amply entertained spending the whole week there, great! Two is just your maximum.)

Another of my rules is that I won't schedule fewer than three days in one place. Packing up and moving cities, even if it's just a quick half-hour hop, is a real hassle and eats up a surprising amount of time. Having to go through the whole rigamarole more frequently than once in three days is too exhausting for me to bother with. So, vacationing for a week, and you have to visit each place for at least three days, and there are two places. That means you're in one for four days and the other for three.

Based on the no more than five minutes of Googling you did on it, which of your two cities seems more interesting to you? Okay, you're going to that one for four days, and also first. Go back to Google flights and plug that in as your destination to get an actual flight list. Do the same, in another tab, for your return flight from city #2. Google Flights shows you a nice calendar with estimated prices on each day of the month. Pick a start/end date that seems reasonably on-budget and convenient to you and take a look at the actual flights.

I will not do flights with more than one connection. I will not do flights with less than an hour connecting time. I will not do flights that leave before 8 AM (it's often hard to find ways to get to the airport pre-6 AM), and I will not do flights that land after dark. Everywhere is just more difficult to navigate at night--consider if you have a picture of your hotel, which will inevitably have been taken in the day, and it will inevitably look nothing like that picture at night. So, no nighttime arrivals. Examine the flight list with these in mind. Go up or down a day if you can't find anything reasonable that fits those criteria, or whatever you may have for your own personal criteria. Pick a departure flight and a return flight that satisfy your constraints. Spend no more than another twenty minutes on this.

So you've got your destinations and your flights! The hardest part is now behind you. Next up is accommodation. As you can tell, Google Flights is my "reasonable default" for airline tickets. For lodging, my go-to is usually Hostelworld, although Googling "hostel $city" works perfectly fine. I'm guessing you might want to stay somewhere where you aren't going to have to worry about an unscrupulous roommate stealing your shoes, though, so I'd Google "hotel $city" instead. If you travel frequently enough you'll learn what booking sites you like or don't and come up with your own reasonable default; Google will do you well enough until then. Or, if you're comfortable with/excited by the idea of AirBNB, that makes a fine "reasonable default" hotel alternative.

Your budget should give you roughly $100 to spend a day, and you should expect lodging to represent roughly a third to 40% of that. This means you're going to be looking for something on the order of $30-$40 per night. In a lot of places, that's going to be a damn fine hotel! In a western European country, you're probably going to need to be tacking "budget" onto the front of that Google search. Nevertheless, don't panic if you can't find anywhere that seems like it doesn't contain axe murderers and giant rodents for under, say, $65 per night or so. All that means is you're probably going to have to spend a day availing yourself of your destination's lovely "free" or "under $10" attractions and eating food from the grocery store to make up the difference, which is about as "local" as it gets, so enjoy living like a citizen of $city for a day!

In any case, look at what's available in your price range. The primary deciding factor is going to be location. You need something easily accessible by public transportation. Even if you know for sure you want to rent a car and go out and do car-requiring things, you do not want to rent a car and then venture forth into a traffic system you've never experienced before in an unfamiliar city after being stuck in a cramped airplane seat for probably way too long. Be kind to yourself and pick the first reasonably-priced hotel option that is within 10 minutes' walk of a transit stop. You can figure out what hotels fall into this category by going to Google Maps, entering the name or address of the hotel, hitting "Directions," and then entering "subway stop" (or "bus stop," or whatever the primary mode of public transportation there is in the city--you can Google that if you need to).

Repeat this process for your second destination. That's your accommodation! You are now virtually done planning your trip! In fact, the only thing left is figuring out how to get from city A to city B. If you're going somewhere in Europe, I suggest the classic rail option. Anywhere else, because I'm a cheapskate, it's the bus. (And I'll even bus in Europe because, again, cheapskate.) In some countries you may need to take a flight, but I'd typically start with train or bus. This can get annoying if there are a lot of different bus/rail options, since unlike with planes there are few aggregator sites (and the ones that do exist suck), but it's at least a straightforward process: Google "bus city A city B" or "train city A city B" and have a look at that first page of search results. My rules for busing/training are generally the same as for flying, so take a look at your options and pick the first one that seems tolerable.

And you're done! If you haven't already, you can now make those flight and hotel reservations and perhaps even buy your $transit ticket to get you from one place to another.

You may have noticed, though, that you still have no idea what you're going to actually do in those places you settled on. Not a problem! This is the fun part, and you can enjoy picking stuff out at your leisure between now and whenever you're actually leaving on your trip. There is literally no place on earth that has a major airport and yet is so boring that you can't possibly keep yourself entertained for three days, so I guarantee you don't have to worry about finding things, provided you did your earlier mini-Google and therefore know that you didn't accidentally book yourself into jungle adventure city!!! when what you were really looking for was hang out at artsy cafes city.

Again, as you travel more, you'll figure out some reasonable default activities that will be available pretty much anywhere you'll go and that you can reliably fall back on if you're overwhelmed. Personally, I like to do a walking tour as close as possible to first thing, simply because they're a fantastic way to get oriented in a new place and to get an idea of places you'd like to come back to and explore more later, or additional places to check out beyond the tour's limits. As a bonus, they also tend to be pretty cheap. Knowing myself, I also know that there's probably going to be at least one museum and at least one hike/other outdoorsy kind of thing going on in those three days, so I know to direct my searches towards those specific areas. But if you don't have a strong sense of what you'd be into ahead of time, Googling "top things to do in $city" is a great place to start. There's no shame in doing the touristy things everyone else always does, especially on your first visit to a place where you're just trying to see what's out there--there's a reason they're super popular. All the same, don't feel like you have to do any of the big attractions because they're the big ones that you simply must do to properly experience a place or whatever--if you look at a description of something and can already tell you're going to hate it, or even if it inspires no more than a "meh" in you, I hereby give you full permission to skip it without feeling guilty.

My only major other tip is to limit yourself to only one thing per day. For people who can reliably spend less than four hours in a museum (...cough) this may be a bit stringent, so I will permit you to go up to two things per day if you think that only one sounds insane. But consider that the best way to figure out where you might want to go/what you want to see is to actually go to a place and get a sense for what's out there! If you come in with only one thing a day planned you will have the reassurance that you're not going to be sitting in your hotel twiddling your thumbs but will also have ample time to take advantage of cool opportunities that come your way. Also remember that you are not going to see all the things. Not even close. And at least for me there's a much greater chance of trying to do way too much and then having a crappier experience because I'm exhausted and don't actually have the time to enjoy all the different pieces of my itinerary than there is of going somewhere and being bored because I don't have enough to do. Things to do will be hurling themselves into your path all the time, for real. You don't have to worry about planning activities outside of making sure that if there's anything you're dying to see/do you make it a priority. Thus: one thing a day. Try it!

Also my final tip is that those "city passes" and whatever that give access to a huge long list of attractions for a "discount" are without exception a huge ripoff and invitation to huge burnout as you rush around trying to do six things in order to get your money's worth out of them. Finding the best deal on tickets to museums and whatever is another way to easily get sucked into an internet rabbit hole and it is just so not fucking worth it. Life is too short, pay the damn full price and don't worry about it, attraction costs are not what's going to break your budget, unless again you're doing one of a small number of very specific things, in which case you'll KNOW.

I hope you found that helpful! Let me know if you have any questions or want more specific advice about anything or any particular country. I can obviously ramble on about things for ages.

#travel #travel tips

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wallpapernifty · 4 years

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12 Lessons I’ve Learned From Pink And Grey Abstract | Pink And Grey Abstract

Sunday, 19th April 2020, 6:55 pm

RSA Anniversary Exhibition 2020 – Online ****

The RSA’s 194th anniversary exhibition should accept opened at the end of March. Events overtook it. The works had all been delivered and were cat-and-mouse to be afraid back the lockdown happened and they had to be larboard area they were. Dismayed but not defeated, the Academy anticipation and acted bound and, by 10 April, the alternative had been finalised, the works photographed, a website able and the accomplished appearance put online. Not counting architecture, which is as affluent and active as ever, there are 400 works in the show. It is absolutely an accomplishment and could able-bodied beggarly that it is apparent by millions instead of aloof thousands.

There are two capital examination options. The aboriginal is the Examination Room area all the works are accumulated in a accidental adjustment to accord some faculty of the array and casual afterlife that you get from an absolute convenor’s hang. Its disadvantage is that, big or small, aggregate is accordingly the aforementioned size. Instead of a alternation of ample apartment afraid with a advanced array of works and with added on the floor, the aftereffect is a bit like a brand album, with ellipsoidal images in approved rows of four. You can bang on anniversary one and see it on its own, but there is additionally a further, able option. Bang “View on a wall” and you see the assignment blind on its own adjoin a white bank with a armchair to accord scale. You can additionally move from the Examination Room to Artists, area you get a folio adherent to anniversary alone contributor. One of the added appearance of the appearance is a accumulation of arrive artists, one called by anniversary affiliate of the blind committee. Their assignment is some of the best interesting.

I archive all this detail, not as criticism. I anticipate the accomplished affair is an amazing achievement. I am absolutely aggravating to explain the constraints that your analyzer is alive below to try to aftermath some analytic accurate commentary. Entirely managed by our artists, afterwards about 200 years the RSA anniversary is still the best important exhibition in the calendar. It deserves a able analytical response.

It may be a absorption of the way I am seeing them, or conceivably it’s aloof the altitude of the times, but things that were predominantly atramentous were the aboriginal to bolt my eye. You accept to attending closely, though. Isthmus 1, for instance, is a admirable copse block

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cladeymoore · 4 years

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Six months in: Scaling lessons from my first 180 days

By Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer

Some people say you should measure time in a startup in terms of dog years — every year is like seven normal years. By that measure, I’ve already spent in Coinbase almost as much time I spent at my last role at Google. And it has been a crazy six months — crazy fun, crazy exciting and crazy full of learnings in scaling and growing a company. Of course, the insanity was multiplied a hundred times by the fact that we are also going through an unprecedented global pandemic.

What comes with challenges is growth and understanding. What have I come away with from these first six months? Here are some key themes :

Every crisis can be an opportunity

We’ve grown our product, design and engineering teams by more than 50% over the last three months. We were one of the first companies to go “remote first” which widened the pool of candidates we could hire — instead of just from in and around SFO, we’re now hiring anyone across the U.S. Also, surprise-surprise, cutting travel time out seems to save everyone time! It has been much easier to find a quick 30 minutes in a day’s schedule to interview rather than travel for a few hours and block the calendar for half a day.

While hiring at such a rapid pace the big questions in my mind have been: 1) are we hiring the right people? and 2) how do we maintain and grow our culture? One of the big changes we made was to hire for #onecoinbase. This means we don’t hire for specific teams, but rather we hire product managers who are at the top of their game and can take on any challenge. There has been some skepticism about this approach. But we found that hiring great people who can quickly learn new things often trumps hiring those with deep domain knowledge but limited potential for flexibility. The opportunity in the crypto space is constantly evolving and we need great entrepreneurs and builders (see Brian’s more detailed blog post on who should join Coinbase?) in our product and design teams.

Focus on the most important things

Just a few weeks ago we had evacuation fears here in the Bay Area because of the wild fires. This is the first time in my life that I had to figure out if I could only take only a few things from my carefully curated house, what would I take? In other words, what are my priorities? In a space like crypto, new and interesting projects and ideas come up every single week. There is a huge risk with responding to every external stimulus and remaining in a constant reactive mode. One of the pleasant surprises for me at Coinbase was to learn how rigorous the company was in terms of creating quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). But OKRs are not useful if you have tens of P0s (top priority issues) and hundreds of P1s. We started asking our product managers to strictly stack rank their priorities during quarterly meetings. Stack ranking does not mean we only do one thing, but it helps create clarity and makes decision making easier when it comes to allocating resources.

…While planting seeds for the future

When you commit to achieving something revolutionary like creating economic freedom for the world, which is our vision at Coinbase, the length and breadth of vision can be daunting. We strongly believe that the way to achieve more economic freedom for everyone is to create an open financial system on top of crypto. These are ambitious goals and the exact steps to reach these are not all completely defined. We are on a multi-decade journey towards this goal. And when we reach it we’ll be disrupting all of finance as we know it today.

Disruption can only come from breakthrough innovation and for breakthrough innovation you’ve got to plant many seeds and not just tolerate, but celebrate failure. That is why we follow a 70/20/10 allocation model to help plant the seeds for the future. We call it Core (70%), Strategic (20%) and Venture (10%). There have often been internal requests to reallocate our 10 or 20 percent efforts to the top ranked 70 percent. This confusion isn’t something unique to Coinbase, or even a smaller start-up. This is a perennial confusion in many tech companies. Prioritization does not mean killing all high beta efforts, it means allocating the right amount of resources to each type of effort. Innovation is a core part of the career framework for our product team at Coinbase. In fact, we expect and encourage our senior staff to step out of their comfort zone and incubate more zero to one projects. No idea is too radical!

Connecting the dots

As the company scales, it becomes even more important to create harmony between OKRs of different teams. While the teams can choose their routes, they need to all be driving to the same destination. In other words, all teams need to be aligned to a few critical, top level strategic directions. That’s where Company Level OKRs become important — to me these should reflect company strategy and should not be changing every quarter. Specific KRs or metric goals may change, but the overall objective should have some longevity. Company Level OKRs help give teams the necessary context to come up with their own OKRs. These are often not set “top down”, but sourced from the team. It is really important for every team to clearly understand overall product strategy and connect the dots between their team goals and company goals.

Details matter! Empathy matters more!

Sometimes it is easy to get carried away with the big picture vision and mission at the cost of everyday great execution. I always look for creating a flow or rhythm. Rhythm is broken when teams lose perspective and end up prioritizing their own interest over the company’s interest. When collaboration is broken and teams don’t deal with conflict, and instead play passive aggressive, it can require a spidey sense to sniff out the real source of the issue. Sometimes it comes down to placating a single offended employee hurt by an offhand email from someone on their team or a misinterpreted Slack post, or a comment made during calibration or at a promo panel. The details matter!. Life often throws us curveballs, but with something like COVID-19, we saw the number of individuals going through extremely stressful situations in their own personal lives quickly multiply. Understanding these situations and helping out (sometimes just by listening) is critical to get the rhythm of execution back on track. Remember details matter, empathy matters more! It, sometimes, matters most!

Sometimes I was wrong and that was a very good thing!

We all approach a problem with our own individual set of beliefs and experiences. Sometimes our experiences help us quickly connect the dots and come up with an intuitive solution faster, while other times it can hold us back. Being wrong is not wrong, being unable to admit you are wrong is the real obstacle to progress. For example, I had some early doubts about how fast Decentralized Finance or DeFi would grow only to see in a few months that DeFi has completely exploded. One of our maverick PMs had a strong conviction and had his team continue to build out gateways into the DeFi ecosystem. This is the culture we hope to build and foster at Coinbase, where teams can try out radical new ideas and they don’t need to wait for top down approval for every single step.

It has certainly been a busy six months, but I’ve never been more excited about the opportunity ahead for me and my teams. Creating an open financial system for the world is a bold objective and getting there will be long journey. If you’re interested in helping us — we’re hiring.

Six months in: Scaling lessons from my first 180 days was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Money 101 https://blog.coinbase.com/six-months-in-scaling-lessons-from-my-first-180-days-1150f1f40d6?source=rss----c114225aeaf7---4 via http://www.rssmix.com/

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seanmalatesta · 7 years

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The Benefit of Pairing Digital and Analog to Manage Your Day

How My Hybrid System Gives You the Best of Both Worlds

Since we announced the Full Focus Planner™ a few months ago, I’ve lost track of how many people have asked me about my plans for task and calendar management. Am I planning on going full analog?

It’s an important question. When it comes to planning our time, reviewing our goals, and tracking our tasks, we basically have three options.

Full digital. You can do everything with a digital solution such as Nozbe, Todoist, or Evernote.

Full analog. You can do everything with a paper-based system such as a Bullet Journal, Day Runner, or the Full Focus Planner™.

Hybrid system. You can do some things digitally and some things on paper.

Obviously, you need to use what works for you. But there are some major drawbacks to the first two.

Digital and Analog Drawbacks

Digital environments are not just plagued with distractions, they’re designed to produce distractions. Going full digital means inviting all those distractions when you should be focusing on your most important priorities and tasks.

You’re always just one click away from another rabbit hole.

But going full analog has drawbacks of its own. Not only do you have to re-enter a lot of content, you also miss some of the benefits of digital—such as collaborating with others on your calendar or managing longer lists or projects. That makes full analog unworkable for most people I know.

The good news is that you can combine the best of both in a hybrid system. It’s what I personally use and teach. It lets me block out the distractions when I need to focus, and also copy with a click and collaborate with ease.

When to Use Each Format

I explain my hybrid system in detail in the Full Focus Planner™ tutorials provided with the planner. But basically I recommend digital for three main situations: when you have more content than you can keep track of mentally, when it changes frequently, or when it needs to be shareable. Examples might include:

Projects and task lists

Calendar details

Research and reference material

All of these are potentially complex and changeable, and I will probably want to share them or parts of them with my team at some point. An analog solution just doesn’t cut the mustard here.

But analog beats digital when it comes to content in these four situations: when you want to imprint content on your mind, digest it more slowly, work it into your subconscious, and make it easier to recall later. Examples include:

Annual goals

Major calendar commitments

Daily tasks and agenda items

Meeting notes

Weekly and quarterly reviews

These situations are all improved by deliberation, reflection, and synthesis. And handwriting is perfect for that. It’s why I created the Full Focus Planner™ in the first place.

How My Hybrid System Works

Now let me show you how these distinctions play out in the day-to-day management of my calendar, tasks, and meeting notes.

My Calendar

I use Google Calendar (via the Fantastical app) because I have a large team that needs to collaborate on schedules. However, I fill out the Monthly Calendar in my planner as a way of reminding myself of the “big rocks” for the month.

I also fill out the agenda on my planner Day Page as a way of reviewing today’s commitments and reaffirming my commitment to them.

That said, I don’t include all the detail that is in Google Calendar items (for instance, directions to meetings, meeting prep material, and so on). I can always pull that up on my phone if I need it it.

My Tasks

I’m currently using Todoist for managing projects and keeping track of longer lists. (In the past I’ve used Nozbe, but I like to experiment.) But I don’t use Todoist for daily task management. Instead, I review it first thing in the morning and write down my Daily Big 3 in my planner.

This better imprints them on my brain and keeps me focused throughout the day. I also write down trivial tasks in my planner—they’re not worth tracking in Todoist anyway.

My Meeting Notes

I take meeting notes in my planner (opposite the Day Page), then use Evernote’s Scannable app to take a picture of the notes and save them in Evernote. That way I have the benefit of Evernote’s search capabilities.

I can also share those notes via Evernote with my teammates. (And by the way, here are five tips you can use to maximize your note taking.)

“ Digital environments aren’t just plagued with distractions, they’re designed to produce them.

—MICHAEL HYATT

After thirty-five years of working with various systems, I have found that this is hybrid system is the best solution for maximum focus and efficiency.

Question: What system do you find most effective for managing your tasks and schedule? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

from Michael Hyatt, Your Virtual Mentor http://ift.tt/2vNeWsT via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Michael Hyatt #Your Virtual Mentor

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byheartmade · 7 years

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5 things you don’t know about Pinterest

Many clients have told me that they are in Pinterest but they don’t know how to use it professionally. I totally get them, because I was in the same situation until I took a course and I discovered the magic of Pinterest. That’s why Today I want to share with you 5 things you probably don’t know about Pinterest:

1. It is not a social media, it’s a search engine

When I first discovered Pinterest back in 2010 I remember saying “I finally found a social media than I love”. And how wrong I was… Not because it wasn’t the perfect place for me to hang around, no… But because Pinterest is not a social media, it’s a search engine! Let me explain myself. For those who don’t know what’s a search engine, the easy description is: Google. Google is the biggest search engine. His work consists in having a database with as many information as possible about the existing websites in order to show the best ones matching a certain word or sentence when someone types in their search box. And Pinterest does the same. Plus, you can save the results and categorize them following your own rules!

So… Why is that an important fact? Well, because if you keep that in mind and provide Pinterest the right information, he will help you back. We all work (or should work) on SEO for our websites, but we also need to care about Pinterest SEO. Good news is that they are connected. If you follow my tips in my “SEO for images” blog post, you will be doing the perfect job to make your images Pinterest friendly

2. You can be found by new people without spending extra time and money

Picture yourself right now working from a tropical island, with reggae music at the background, a fresh fruit juice and the beach just 5 meters far from you. That’s how I am writing right now. That’s in fact how I’ve been working for the past month from Indonesia.

I’m telling you this because although I haven’t continued working on as many things as before (I haven’t posted in the blog for a while and my last post in IG was two weeks ago…), Pinterest is one of the things that has continued working without me even caring about it.

I’m using Boardbooster to automate my pins. Every now and then I go into Pinterest and schedule some interesting images I find. But in moments like now when I can’t do that, I always have Boardbooster backing me up.

Isn’t it amazing?

3. It always keeps growing

Are you on Instagram? If so, this will sound familiar: – It’s almost 9, my best hour to post Today. – What should I post? – Oh here I have it. – Ok let’s do it quickly, this filter looks good. – What should I write? Hm… This seems nice. – Ok, hashtags… Yeah, got it! – Post! 5 minutes later… Yeah! This picture is working well! Many likes, comments and followers! 5 hours later… Still someone gives me some love. 5 days later… Crickets. 5 years later… Crickets.

In Pinterest the story goes like this: – Ok let’s share my new blog post to Pinterest. – Click, description automatically added (check SEO for images to understand how) and posted! 5 minutes later… Probably crickets. 5 hours later… Maybe some re-pins. 5 days later… Wow, this is starting to grow! 5 years later… Every day more and more people keeps re-pining your post and this means more and more people clicking and visiting your website!

Here you have a screenshot from my Nelio Content Analytics. I recommend you to read my blog post about How to Write Blog Posts in Half Time to know more about this amazing WordPress Editorial Calendar called Nelio. But for now let’s take a look at this image:

As you can see, my top three posts are How to design seamless patterns in Photoshop, which is a tutorial showing you how to design overall patterns for textile prints, wallpapers or any pattern application you may need; followed by 15 Motivational Quotes for Business Success and How to Create watercolor effects with Photoshop (another video tutorial). Few weeks ago I started receiving new subscribers and comments to my Youtube channel every day, especially in the video teaching how to design patterns with Photoshop, but until I didn’t saw this analytics I did not understood why. The video and the blog post went life in February, and now 5 months after they seem to start to receive visits. The answer? Look at the image how many pins this blog post has… Pinterest is the answer!

4. You need to submit your website to rich pins

You must be thinking right now “I must pin more from my website”. Correct.

But not that fast, please. Take a few moments to follow this easy instructions on how to set up rich pins, because that will make your website become “premium” in Pinterest eyes, which means that anything pinned from your domain will show up before other “normal” pins when people search for it in Pinterest.

I learnt everything I know about Pinterest thanks to Melyssa Griffin, so instead of repeating her own words I recommend you to follow her instructions to set rich pins: http://ift.tt/2waI2A1

5. Pinterest groups are the key to success

Last but not least, I want to tell you what I found to be the key to success in Pinterest: groups. There are Pinterest groups for every niche, you just need to find yours. I recommend you to search in Pingroupie and apply to join for some groups. Then, regularly (or scheduling with Boardbooster) you can share in those groups pins from your website so that other people in the same niche re-pin them.

I created some Pinterest Group Boards for Creative Market, where me and other sellers from that platform can share our products and get more sales from Pinterest. If you are interested to join any of my groups, just let me know here: http://ift.tt/2v1j083

That’s the fastest way to grow in Pinterest.

Hope you found these 5 facts interesting. I would love to hear about your opinion here in the comments section.

What’s your Pinterest profile and your niche? What surprised you the most about this blog post? Share it with us!

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thecheeverfillesseniorthesis · 7 years

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The Cheever Files The Cheever Files Adventures of a Senior Thesis. Secondary blog of @midlife-stoodent.

D-1

Had to jump the count a few days because my Senior thesis is due TODAY. I had the due date in my planner as Sunday.

I am nearly finished with it. I turned in my thesis and subclaims into my prof via email, then when I got started, I used the same and wrote out my own words beneath my subclaims (I changed their type to BOLD to keep them separate). It worked! I am able to maintain an outline! I tend to scatter ideas…

I am not asking for an extension. I have asked for them all term and I simply need to get this done. I am 10 pages in, I have three sublaims left to do, and it’s not due until 11:59PM tonight.

THIS WILL HAPPEN.

I work best when dealing with absolute fear. Don’t follow my example. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 5 notes

D-5

The struggle is very real. Still receiving instruction from my prof on my thesis.

At least my tense is correct.

BTW, I work better under pressure. Spending an entire term on a paper has yet to work for me.

LISTENING TO: Our Lady Peace #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 3 notes

D-7. Senior Thesis is due this week. Thankfully I am off of work, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

My digital project is completed (first picture) and that has been uploaded. I am still (yes, still) working on my thesis and subclaims. I emailed a correction back to my prof this afternoon, once I hone my thesis she will get to my subclaims.

Tomorrow I have to drop off my paperwork for my Service Learning, and take the TB test. I don’t know if all of this is going to get done before the end of the term, but that professor has given us an option if we weren’t able to solidify our service learning before the term ended.

I think 60 coffee pods should last me until the end of the week? Last term I went through 80 in a week and a half, and this term is way harder. I may need more… #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#Seniorthesis#starbucks 3 notes

D-15. Rough Draft final draft, if that makes sense. I am truly blessed to have an amazing advisor/professor who gave us an extension (read: mercy) to turn it in for our rough draft workshop. I have until 6AM tomorrow morning to get this uploaded. **weeps with gratefulness**

Did I ever mention the size of my Senior Thesis class? There’s myself, and two other ladies. One of the many benefits of attending a small, private university.

I admit, I did the usual “check-out” in the middle of the term, where I was watching You Tube videos instead of writing. Then today, when the module for Week 8 comes out, we get the admonishment to not check out.

I am reeling myself back in.

Sumikko guroshi page flags for for ultimate win!

LISTENING TO: The Cure Disintegration #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis#sumikkoguroshi#obviouslyilovemycoffee 4 notes

D-18

Rough draft time. Have my most excellent feedback from my professor to help, as well as my own lightbulb moment. All I need now is the time to get it written. She did extend the due date for us, which I absolutely love because our drafts go into a workshop for final editing.

I miscalculated my vacation time from work, it’s next week, and I should have asked for this week, or even the rest of the month off.

Oh well. It will get done.

LISTENING TO: Morrissey’s Viva Hate #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 1 note

D-25. 25 days left to go.

Along with my essay, I also have to complete a digital assignment as part of my grade to add to my portfolio. Ovid’s Metamorphoses arrived via Amazon Student Prime today. Yes, Ovid + Cheever=Digital Project. It’s going to be awesome.

Still trying to raise my thesis from the bowels of hell. I was going to discuss the agency of the various rooms used in “A Country Husband” but I realized I needed to narrow that focus, so I am doing the agency of living rooms in the text. Of course, it throws my rough draft right out the window…

I love my Starbucks cup. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis#metamorphoses#starbucks#seemyfilofax? 7 notes

My First Draft is turned in, a minute past my self-imposed deadline of 5AM. I am so thankful my boss let me leave work two hours early so I could go home, nap, and finish this madness. I am not good at first drafts…a final copy I can do, but first drafts? My mind is still a jumble of thoughts and quotes.

After I uploaded my draft, I found an article on John Cheever that said he isn’t taught in schools anymore, if he ever really was. I find that to be a big old shame because the man is brilliant. Needless to say, even though I had already turned in my draft, I am now determined to make my paper a testament to his literary greatness. The man should be taught in schools, students are really missing out.

I am going to sleep the sleep of a student who has been burning the candle at both ends, what with full-time work and three classes to deal with. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 1 note

Literary TheoryLiterary Theory Senior ThesisLiterary TheorySenior Thesis 4/22/16: Over the course of my academic career (so far, it’s only been what, two years?) I have learned working with a printout of a text is much easier for annotating than with a book. I have absolutely no shame in destroying a book in the name of essay writing, but there is less guilt with using a printout. This is my copy of “A Country Husband”, the first and second pages. Yeah, I use Midori stickers to mark important transitions within the text.

I have also learned to SAVE. MY. NOTES from previous classes. Last term, I took Literary Theory, and I need to apply a theoretical lens to my thesis. It is times like these I am glad I am so anal about my notes, as my notebook from Lit Theory is divided by the different theories.

The rough draft is due next week, already I have the very familiar pangs of self-doubt. Maybe I am placing too much pressure on myself, but this paper is a reflection of me and my scholarship. In no way do I want to come off as pedestrian, but that is my largest fear moving forward. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 2 notes

Senior Thesis, Week 4: Way back when I took Literary Analysis (from the same professor) I kept all of the writing “hacks” she gave us. I printed them all up and tucked them away into a file folder. Turns out she’s using them for this class as well. Don’t know if the drawing belongs to her, but it still makes me laugh. Funny, two years ago when I took Literary Analysis I was very self-conscious of my essay-writing. Now it doesn’t phase me at all.

I am reading Cheever’s “Letters”…the man is hilarious, dark and so right-on with his discriptions of humanity. There’s an entire section entitled “The Suburbs”, from when he moved his family out of the city to upstate NY. The passage I highlighted tickles me, but I have to wonder: how often do we look at the belongings of others to remind us of who we are and where we came from?

My schedule for the upcoming week. My days off are Thursday and Friday, so I begin the fresh week there. Today (Monday) I register for Summer. I have to be at work by 230PM and other than continuing my Cheever reading I have my two other classes.

WRITE EVERY DAY.

Our rough draft is due next week, so this is our instruction. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspp#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 7 notes

Got my Prospectus/Annotated Bibliography done, several hours before I was scheduled to turn it in, so that’s over.

This week we will be working on our Digital Project/Digital Presence, so we get a break from writing. Doesn’t mean the fun stops, I still have two other classes to maintain. Above is my weekly calendar, I use it as well as my Ardium Academic planner. My “weekend” is on Thursday/Friday, which is why the dates are wonky.

As for Digital Presence, I really am not worried about it. I cleaned up my social media when I was accepted to uni because I knew there would be a time where I had to do the exact same thing, so I just wiped a whole bunch of accounts. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studysop#spring2016#ELNM#Seniorthesis 3 notes

Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography Work:

This is the current time. Not too bad, as I don’t get home from work until after 11PM, but my eyes are getting tired. I’m indulging in a large mug of black tea, having consumed enough coffee over the course of the day to sink a ship.

I have spent this past week reading and researching. I carry a book or an article with me at all times, because you never know when you are going to have a moment to catch up on some reading. I had a few minutes while at the gas station the other day, so I read a few paragraphs.

You do what you have to do to get it done. :)

My beat up Writer’s Reference book, a university requirement.

No, I don’t have to work tomorrow (sarcasm).

I have my annotations completed, but I need to edit them to make sure all of the commas are in the right place. I am almost finished with the prospectus part.

I did, however, make sure Word was functional on my iPad and the entire project was accessible. WIN. Now I can finish this up at work tomorrow.

It’s due at 11:59 Monday night. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis 21 notes

Day 2: Well, technically I am still running on the original post, but in reality we have passed midnight. Welcome to 2:15AM.

Week 2 is the Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography portion of Senior Thesis. I took notes of the instructions and WON on three academic sources. I need 5 total, including the original text. I could hug my WR 323 instructor right now, because I have become a master of Google Scholar and our library’s online search engine.

I leave this post with a picture of my stapler. This little honey has the capacity of stapling 40 pages at once, and for someone who simply cannot read and retain electronically, this has been a great investment. Oh, and all of the printer ink and paper I stocked up on last term. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#LIT498#spring2016#ELNM#seniorthesis

Day 1: Amazon Student Prime and Sunday delivery for the win. My books came today! I never had a book for “A Country Husband”, all I ever had was a .pdf. I will say, annotating on a copy is a lot easier than in a book. So, I printed out another.

The term just began a week ago, and for that first week we had to turn in an annotated page from two papers we have written during our academic career here at Marylhurst. “Desireè’s Baby” by Chopin was my other choice, but I was sold on Cheever from the beginning. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#LIT498#seniorthesis#ELNM 2 notes A Digital Accounting of my Adventures with my Senior Thesis. @midlife-stoodent here. I am an English Literature and New Media major, and welcome to my Senior Thesis studyblr. Check out my main blog for more studyblr goodness.

I decided to chronicle my path of the Senior Thesis to create a digital footprint of the process. Obviously, my Thesis is on John Cheever, his short story “The Country Husband” to be exact. I chose Cheever because his stories about the middle class intrigue me.

So! Lets get this started! I will be following the usual #studyblr format. #thecheeverfiles#studyblr#studyspo#spring2016#LIT498#seniorthesis#ELNM 1 note

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jccamus · 7 years

Text

All 101 announcements from Google I/O ‘17

It’s been a busy three days here in Mountain View, as more than 7,000 developers joined us at Shoreline Amphitheatre for this year’s Google I/O. From AI to VR, and everything in between, here’s an exhaustive—we mean that—recap of everything we announced.

1. The Google Assistant is already available on more than 100 million devices! 2. Soon, with Google Lens—a new way for computers to “see”—you’ll be able to learn more about and take action on the things around you, while you’re in a conversation with your Assistant. 3. We’ve brought your Google Assistant to iPhones. 4. Call me maybe? With new hands-free calling on Google Home, you’ll be able to make calls with the Assistant to landlines and mobile numbers in U.S. and Canada for free. 5. You can now type to your Google Assistant on eligible Android phones and iPhones. 6. Bonjour. Later this year people in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Japan will be able to give the Assistant on Google Home a try. 7. And Hallo. Soon the Assistant will roll out to eligible Android phones in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German and Japanese. By the end of the year the Assistant will support Italian, Korean and Spanish. 8. We’re also adding transactions and payments to your Assistant on phones—soon you can order and pay for food and more, with your Assistant. 9. With 70+ home automation partners, you can water your lawn and check the status of your smoke alarm with the Assistant on Google Home and phones. 10. Soon you’ll get proactive notifications for reminders, flight delays and traffic alerts with the Assistant on Google Home and phones. With multi-user support, you can control the type of notifications to fit your daily life. 12. Listen to all your favorite tunes. We’ve added Deezer and Soundcloud as partners, plus Spotify’s free music offering coming soon. 12. Bluetooth support is coming to Google Home, so you can play any audio from your iOS or Android device. 13. Don’t know the name of a song, but remember a few of the lyrics? Now you can just ask the Assistant to “play that song that goes like...” and list some of the lyrics. 14. Use your voice to play your favorite shows and more from 20+ new partners (HBO NOW, CBS All Access, and HGTV) straight to your TV. 15. With visual responses from your Assistant on TVs with Chromecast, you’ll be able to see Assistant answers on the biggest screen in your house. 16. You can stream with your voice with Google Home on 50 million Cast and Cast-enabled devices. 17. For developers, we're bringing Actions on Google to the Assistant on phones—on both Android and iOS. Soon you’ll find conversation apps for the Assistant that help you do things like shopping for clothes or ordering food from a lengthy menu. 18. Also for developers, we’re adding ways for you to get data on your app's usage and performance, with a new console. 19. We’re rolling out an app directory, so people can find apps from developers directly in the Google Assistant. 20. People can now also create shortcuts for apps in the Google Assistant, so instead of saying "Ok Google, ask Forecaster Joe what's the surf report for the Outer Banks," someone can just say their personal shortcut, like "Ok Google, is the surf up?" 21. Last month we previewed the Google Assistant SDK, and now we’re updating it with hotword support, so developers can build devices that are triggered by a simple "Ok Google." 22. We’re also adding to the SDK the ability to have both timers and alarms. 23. And finally, we’re launching our first developer competition for Actions on Google.

24. With the addition of Smart Reply to Gmail on Android and iOS, we’re using machine learning to make responding to emails easier for more than a billion Gmail users. 25. New Cloud TPUs—the second generation of our custom hardware built specifically for machine learning—are optimized for training ML models as well as running them, and will be available in the Google Compute Engine. 26. And to speed up the pace of open machine-learning research, we’re introducing the TensorFlow Research Cloud, a cluster of 1,000 Cloud TPUs available for free to top researchers. 27. Google for Jobs is our initiative to use our products to help people find work, using machine learning. Through Google Search and the Cloud Jobs API, we’re committed to helping companies connect with potential employees and job seekers with available opportunities. 28. The Google Cloud Jobs API is helping customers like Johnson & Johnson recruit the best candidates. Only months after launching, they’ve found that job seekers are 18 percent more likely to apply on its career page now they are using Cloud Jobs API. 29. With Google.ai, we’re pulling all our AI initiatives together to put more powerful computing tools and research in the hands of researchers, developers and companies. We’ve already seen promising research in the fields of pathology and DNA research. 30. We must go deeper. AutoML uses neural nets to design neural nets, potentially cutting down the time-intensive process of setting up an AI system, and helping non-experts build AI for their particular needs. 31. We’ve partnered with world-class medical researchers to explore how machine learning could help improve care for patients, avoid costly incidents and save lives. 32. We introduced a new Google Cloud Platform service called Google Cloud IoT Core, which makes it easy for Google Cloud customers to gain business insights through secure device connections to our rich data and analytics tools.

33. We first launched Google Photos two years ago, and now it has more than 500 million monthly users. 34. Every day more than 1.2 billion photos and videos are uploaded to Google Photos. 35. Soon Google Photos will give you sharing suggestions by selecting the right photos, and suggesting who you should send them to based on who was in them 36. Shared libraries will let you effortlessly share photos with a specific person. You can share your full photo library, or photos of certain people or from a certain date forward. 37. With photo books, once you select the photos, Google Photos can curate an album for you with all the best shots, which you can then print for $9.99 (20-page softcover) or $19.99 (20-page hardcover), in the U.S. for now. 38. Google Lens is coming to Photos later this year, so you’ll be able to look back on your photos to learn more or take action—like find more information about a painting from a photo you took in a museum.

39. We reached 2 billion monthly active devices on Android! 40. Android O, coming later this year, is getting improvements to “vitals” like battery life and performance, and bringing more fluid experiences to your smaller screen, from improved notifications to autofill. 41. With picture-in-picture in Android O, you can do two tasks simultaneously, like checking your calendar while on a Duo video call. 42. Smart text selection in Android O improves copy and paste to recognize entities on the screen—like a complete address—so you can easily select text with a double tap, and even bring up an app like Maps to help navigate you there. 43. Our emoji are going through a major design refresh in Android O. 44. For developers, the first beta release of Android O is now available. 45. We introduced Google Play Protect—a set of security protections for Android that’s always on and automatically takes action to keep your data and device safe, so you don’t have to lift a finger. 46. The new Find My Device app helps you locate, ring, lock and erase your lost Android devices—phones, tablets, and even watches. 47. We previewed a new initiative aimed at getting computing into the hands of more people on entry-level Android devices. Internally called Android Go, it’s designed to be relevant for people who have limited data connectivity and speak multiple languages. 48. Android Auto is now supported by 300 car models, and Android Auto users have grown 10x since last year. 49. With partners in 70+ countries, we’re seeing 1 million new Android TV device activations every two months, doubling the number of users since last year. 50. We’ve refreshed the look and feel of the Android TV homescreen, making it easy for people to find, preview and watch content provided by apps. 51. With new partners like Emporio Armani, Movado and New Balance, Android Wear now powers almost 50 different watches. 52. We shared an early look at TensorFlow Lite, which is designed to help developers take advantage of machine learning to improve the user experience on Android. 53. As part of TensorFlow Lite, we’re working on a Neural Network API that TensorFlow can take advantage of to accelerate computation. 54. An incredible 82 billion apps were downloaded from Google Play in the last year. 55. We honored 12 Google Play Awards winners—apps and games that give their fans particularly delightful and memorable experiences. 56. We’re now previewing Android Studio 3.0, focused on speed and Android platform support. 57. We’re making Kotlin an officially supported programming language in Android, with the goal of making Android development faster and more fun. 58. And we’ll be collaborating with JetBrains, the creators of Kotlin, to move Kotlin into a nonprofit foundation. 59. Android Instant Apps are now open to all developers, so anyone can build and publish apps that can be run without requiring installation. 60. Thousands of developers from 60+ countries are now using Android Things to create connected devices that have easy access to services like the Google Assistant, TensorFlow and more. 61. Android Things will be fully released later this year. 62. Over the last year, the number of Google Play developers with more than 1 million installs grew 35 percent. 63. The number of people buying on Google Play grew by almost 30 percent this past year. 64. We’re updating the Google Play Console with new features to help developers improve your app's performance and quality, and grow your business on Google Play. 65. We’re also adding a new subscriptions dashboard in the Play Console, bringing together data like new subscribers and churn so you can make better business decisions. 66. To make it easier and more fun for developers to write robust apps, we announced a guide to Android app architecture along with a preview of Architecture Components. 67. We’re adding four new tools to the Complications API for Android Wear, to help give users more informative watch faces. 68. Also for Android Wear, we’re open sourcing some components in the Android Support Library.

69. More Daydream-ready phones are coming soon, including the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, LG’s next flagship phone, and devices from Motorola and ASUS. 70. Today there are 150+ applications available for Daydream. 71. More than 2 million students have gone on virtual reality Expeditions using Google Cardboard, with more than 600 tours available. 72. We’re expanding Daydream to support standalone VR headsets, which don't require a phone or PC. HTC VIVE and Lenovo are both working on devices, based on a Qualcomm reference design. 73. Standalone Daydream headsets will include WorldSense, a new technology based on Tango which enables the headset to track your precise movements in space, without any extra sensors. 74. The next smartphone with Tango technology will be the ASUS ZenFone AR, available this summer. 75. We worked with the Google Maps team to create a new Visual Positioning Service (VPS) for developers, which helps devices quickly and accurately understand their location indoors. 76. We’re bringing AR to the classroom with Expeditions AR, launching with a Pioneer Program this fall. 77. We previewed Euphrates, the latest release of Daydream, which will let you capture what you’re seeing and cast your virtual world right onto the screen in your living room, coming later this year. 78. A new tool for VR developers, Instant Preview, lets developers make changes on a computer and see them reflected on a headset in seconds, not minutes. 79. Seurat is a new technology that makes it possible to render high-fidelity scenes on mobile VR headsets in real time. Somebody warn Cameron Frye. 80. We’re releasing an experimental build of Chromium with an augmented reality API, to help bring AR to the web.

81. Soon you’ll be able to watch and control 360-degree YouTube videos and live streams on your TV, and use your game controller or remote to pan around an immersive experience. 82. Super Chat lets fans interact directly with YouTube creators during live streams by purchasing highlighted chat messages that stay pinned to the top of the chat window. We previewed a developer integration that showed how the Super Chat API can be used to trigger actions in the real world—such as turning the lights on and off in a creator's apartment. 83. A new feature in the YouTube VR app will soon let people watch and discuss videos together.

84. We announced that we will make Fabric’s Crashlytics the primary crash reporting product in Firebase. 85. We’re bringing phone number authentication to Firebase, working closely with the Fabric Digits team, so your users can sign in to your apps with their phone numbers. 86. New Firebase Performance Monitoring will help diagnose issues resulting from poorly performing code or challenging network conditions. 87. We’ve improved Firebase Cloud Messaging. 88. For game developers, we’ve built Game Loop support & FPS monitoring into Test Lab for Android, allowing you to evaluate your game’s frame rate before you deploy. 89. We’ve taken some big steps to open source many of our Firebase SDKs on GitHub. 90. We’re expanding Firebase Hosting to integrate with Cloud Functions, letting you can do things like send a notification when a user signs up or automatically create thumbnails when an image is uploaded to Cloud Storage. 91. Developers interested in testing the cutting edge of our products can now sign up for a Firebase Alpha program. 92. We’re adding two new certifications for web developers, in addition to the Associate Android Developer Certification announced last year.&ltbr/&gt93. We opened an Early Access Program for &lta href="http://ift.tt/2qCjmQO, a new analytics tool in API.ai that helps developers monitor the activity in their chatbots.&ltbr/&gt94. We’ve completely &lta href="http://ift.tt/2rAzsYd AdMob&lt/a&gt, which helps developers promote, measure and monetize mobile apps, with a new user flow and publisher controls.&ltbr/&gt95. AdMob is also now &lta href="http://ift.tt/2qClecq with Google Analytics for Firebase&lt/a&gt, giving developers a complete picture of ads revenue, mediation revenue and in-app purchase revenue in one place.&ltbr/&gt96. With a new &lta href="http://ift.tt/2rAiyZN Payment API&lt/a&gt, developers can enable easy in-app or online payments for customers who already have credit and debit cards stored on Google properties.&ltbr/&gt97. We’re introducing &lta href="http://ift.tt/2qCldoS ways for merchants to engage and reward customers&lt/a&gt, including the new Card Linked Offers API.&ltbr/&gt98. We’re introducing a &lta href="http://ift.tt/2rAFMzf options for ads placement through Universal App Campaigns&lt/a&gt to help users discover your apps in the Google Play Store.&ltbr/&gt99. An &lta href="http://ift.tt/2qCgT96 to Smart Bidding strategies&lt/a&gt in Universal App Campaigns helps you gain high-value users of your apps—like players who level-up in your game or the loyal travelers who book several flights a month.&ltbr/&gt100. A new program, &lta href="http://ift.tt/2rAgRvC Attribution Partners&lt/a&gt, integrates data into AdWords from seven third-party measurement providers so you can more easily find and take action on insights about how users engage with your app.&ltbr/&gt101. Firebase partnered up with Google Cloud to offer &lta href="http://ift.tt/2qCh7wT storage for up to 10 gigabytes in BigQuery&lt/a&gt so you can quickly, easily and affordably run queries on it.&lt/p&gt&lt/div&gt&lt/div&gt &ltdiv class="block-paragraph"&gt&ltdiv class="rich-text"&gt&ltp&gtThat’s all, folks! Thanks to everyone who joined us at I/O this year, whether in person, at an I/O Extended event or via the live stream. See you in 2018.&lt/p&gt&lt/div&gt&lt/div&gt

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3one3 · 7 years

Text

The Sequel - 813

Working Posture

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s (okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

“Hey. I didn’t think you’d wait up,” André remarked with cautious optimism when he padded into the bedroom at home quite late on Tuesday night, after his team’s DFL Cup snow-day make-up match.

“Shhh.” His wife was sitting up in bed with her computer, and she peeled the comforter down to reveal the platinum haired child sleeping on her underneath.

“Why isn’t he in bed?” the player whispered, pausing at the door to his dressing room.

“He didn’t feel well.”

“Oh.” At least she’s talking to me, he thought as he ducked inside to put his bag down and take off some clothes. That’s an improvement. Christina hadn’t spoken to him since he accused her of “saving it” for Juan- “it” being her appetite for sex. He slept in a bedroom at the opposite end of the house that night because he didn’t even want to be near her, and then remorse set in on Monday morning when he realized she’d already worked out and headed to the barn before he woke up. She didn’t even send him a text that day. He only knew she arrived safe in London because she posted a picture of an extravagant looking drink at Daphne’s. Just as there was no “good morning”, there was no “goodnight”, no acknowledgement on Tuesday morning, and no “good luck” ahead of his match.

Choosing between anger and disappointment was no easy task. He went to bed angry after their fight, and woke up sad. He got angry about the silent treatment, and went to bed feeling sad that Christina wouldn’t talk to him all day. Then he was angry again when the silence continued in the morning, and really sad that she couldn’t even see fit to wish him well for the match when she found out that he was starting. André scored a goal, and it was one that mattered too rather than an inconsequential one in a 6-goal rout. He was elated, until he saw that his girl wasn’t among the people who sent him messages of congratulations. The anger was inherent throughout that time, and for weeks and months before that. It was really just the level of disappointment that waxed and waned. When he missed her and longed for her companionship, he got sad that things weren’t right between them anymore. When he didn’t need her for anything, there was no other emotion to shove the anger to the side and that was the one he felt most strongly. He wasn’t sure when he got home if he was angry or sad. There was the silent treatment thing, but then there was also his desire to share his other emotions, tied to the game, with someone who cared. He missed sharing, and he finally had something good to share.

“Do you want me to put him in the crib?” the BVB man questioned the girl with her hair clipped to the top of her head and a pen between her lips. She shook her head. There was an empty glass on her nightstand, which she couldn’t reach from where she was sitting anyway, so he asked if she needed anything. Again she shook her head. It was clear her attention was on the computer. It was difficult to read her since she wouldn’t speak. Is she mad at me? Is she trying to ignore me without being childish about it and completely refusing to interact but hoping I’ll get the message and go away? Or is she just very into whatever she’s doing? Should I get in bed? Should I sleep in the other room? To answer any of those questions, he needed to first decide what he wanted. He needed to decide if he wanted to be able to sleep next to her, or if he preferred to just go spend another night alone and wait for her to come around on her own. Maybe we can’t upset each other if we sit in the same bed but can’t speak? André decided to get into bed- carefully, of course. Christina’s reaction was a surprise.

“Nice goal,” she said quietly before carefully leaning over to kiss his cheek. A little notepad slid off the MacBook Pro at the same time. What she had on the screen was actually more relevant to him.

“Where are you going?” he asked, unable to keep a hint of whining out of his voice. She was looking at Google Flights.

“So...um...we’re gonna go to the Global Champions Tour rounds in Mexico City and Miami after the World Cup in Omaha. I’m looking for a place to hang out between the World Cup and Mexico City since there’s three free days and I don’t think I want to spend them- Well, actually- I think I’m gonna bring Lukas with me now since I’m going to be gone longer, so I don’t know if I want to have him in Mexico City for extra days when we could visit someplace better on the way, like Austin. Miami is easy. We can go there early, no problem. He loves the beach.”

“You guys are leaving for three weeks?” he asked with a blend of disbelief and disappointment.

“Yeah...I think it’ll be good for...me...and I’ll be home for three and a half weeks after that.”

“You hate it here that much that you think going away forever is good for you? Or you just want away from me?” His follow up question was completely flat. It was a little louder than the conversation up to that point though, and Christina recognized that they were headed in a direction that would only get even louder.

“I think I should take him to bed before we get into it,” she sighed.

“Or we could just not get into it. We don’t have to have a fight about everything. You can try just talking to me, and being reasonable.”

“I’m not the one raising my voice.” She pushed the computer and the pillow it sat on further down her legs, and then reached under the blanket to rub Lukas’ back above where her other arm was around him. Juan took her to his dad’s restaurant that morning to see how it was shaping up and to make an early lunch out of the executive chef’s “menu research session”. They got to try all of the food the kitchen staff was experimenting with as they finalized their first menu. Then she flew back, exercised 4 horses, and went home to spend the rest of her day with Lukas. Despite it getting easier to make decisions about what she wanted and needed, it was not easy to reconcile how those decisions would affect her son. Even if she somehow grew to loathe his dad, she couldn’t get comfortable with taking him away, or sharing him across borders. It was very tough for her to reconcile that two years earlier the thing she wanted most in life was to raise a wonderful kid with her wonderful Schü, and in the present time she was worried that they couldn’t even spend a day together.

“You promised that you want to give us a chance. This isn’t giving us a chance. How can you see how much better everything is when we’re together if we still aren’t together?”

“Nothing is better when we’re together. We’re worse when we’re together.”

“You know what I mean. You know we have to give it time.”

“How is giving it time going to help when the more time we spend together the more we fight? Where is this magical crossover point where time together goes from terrible to great? How long do we have to suffer first? Is there a date I can put on my calendar?”

“Why don’t you just say that you don’t want to be together anymore and you want to go back to London and be with Mata?”

“I don’t want to be together anymore and I want to go back to London and be with him.”

“What?”

“I want to be with him. Right now, I want that. I do. It’s true. In some ways, I feel like I’m already with him. But I want to give us a chance. I want to see if you and me are still what I want more.”

“Then why are you leaving instead of using the chance?”

“Because I need a life outside of you and me and me and him. I need to build a structure that can stand on its own, so when the two of you fuck me up it doesn’t ruin my entire life.”

“So...this is a competition now? You want us to compete?”

“Not at all. I love you, and us at our best is still the best thing I’ve ever had. I want to know if that’s a thing of the past, or if our best is yet to come. We’re a long way from our best. We’re unhappy. I can’t be unhappy forever, babe. I won’t do that to myself. That’s what my mom did. If we can’t be happy together again, then I’m going to be with the person I’m happy with. I know that’s hard to hear. It’s hard to say. It’s not romantic. It’s just...the truth. It’s not you versus him. It’s you and me versus ourselves. I’m not sitting here waiting for you to prove anything to me. You and I have to work together to see if we’re still capable of making each other happy.”

“I’m happy that you think it’s a problem with both of us and not that I don’t love you, because that’s an argument I’ve heard too many times and I can’t handle that again, but I don’t see how you’re “working together” if you’re not even here, Prinzessin.” André had a lot to take in at once and not much time to figure out how he felt about each thing. It made him crazy to hear his wife say she actively wanted to be with Juan, and that in that moment she did want to leave him and go be with the Spaniard, and that he made her happy, and she even thought she already was with him in some way. He was furious about it, and heartbroken. The only thing keeping him from exploding was not that his little boy didn’t feel well and was trying to sleep, but that the grown-up person inside knew he gave Christina permission to have any kind of relationship she wanted with Juan, and he was capable of seeing their situation from her perspective. There was no denying that she was unhappy. There was no denying that he could have done better and done more to stop the trend in that direction and get things turned around. He thought it was nothing but understandable that she would gravitate toward the thing that provided relief from her problems and her disappointments. There were occasions in their past in which he thought she manufactured excuses to ignore the good thing they had together in favor of exaggerating the significance of Juan’s feelings for her. It wasn’t like that anymore. She didn’t, in his eyes, deliberately blow up their happiness in order to explore happiness with someone else. Christina was just searching for happiness and grateful to take it wherever she could get it.

That wasn’t all his fault, and he knew that too. That she acknowledged her role and didn’t just try to blame him for it meant a great deal to him. But understanding the angles of the situation didn’t make it easier to digest. He wasn’t happy either. He was just done with thinking he could ever find happiness elsewhere. He had those spells. He had those times when he was so angry and disappointed in Christina’s behavior that he thought he might be better off with someone else. He did leave her for 6 months, after all. The German just never let himself get all the way to “I want to be with someone else”. He always still wanted to be with her, if she could only change.

“You said a while ago that I’m never okay if things are up in the air with Dirk, and I think that’s right. What if I can’t be happy with you because I’m not okay with where I’m at with him, and I’m not getting to a good place with him because of all the drama with you? I think I just need to get out of this negative feedback loop...get away for a few weeks and just focus on myself,” Christina explained with sympathy. She wouldn’t look her partner in the eye though, and that concerned him. “Remember last year when I took him and Nicky to Asia for three weeks and I wasn’t speaking to you or Juan when I left? He made his big comeback, and I started to feel better, and by the time I got back I was good with all three of you again.”

“I get the thinking in that idea, but I don’t get why it’s impossible for you to be happy here, with me, if you aren’t winning everything with Dirk, when you say you’re currently happy being with Juan. Is it just me you can’t be with when you’re not the best in the world? I don’t understand that,” he shot back, a little cold. I want to believe her, and she’s really just making an argument I already made to her, but I told her she couldn’t be happy about anything if she wasn’t happy with the damn horse. She’s saying she’s fine when she’s with Mata. What sort of sense does that make?

“Happy with him is relative.” She scratched at her neck and alternated between pretending that required looking at the ceiling, and looking down at Lukas, who was falling off the side of her thigh and drooling on her BALR. t-shirt, which was the least baller thing imaginable. “I don’t suddenly become carefree and overjoyed with life when I’m with him. I still have the same issues inside. What I don’t have is the antagonizing and petty fights and inability to connect. Look, I don’t want this to turn into me listing all the things I appreciate about him, or that he does and you don’t,” she sighed. “But I told him the same thing. I told him I can’t be good with my riding with him right now either because if I just gave up on you and me and said “Okay, I’m with Juan now,” then I would be horribly heartbroken and upset and I still couldn’t ride. I told him I’m choosing Dirk right now, and actually I told him I’m thinking about going to a lot of shows after the three and a half week break- like, a lot, a lot of shows- like only one week off between the beginning in May and the announcement of the Olympic team at the end of July- and he said I can’t do that because it’s not giving you and me a chance to find out what we’re all about now. He’s not lobbying for himself. I wasn’t telling him “oh I can’t be with you right now either” and he was trying to say I could. It wasn’t like that. He wants what’s best for me because he believes that’s the best thing for him too, so...I don’t know. Anyway. It’s not just you. I need to go away and focus on myself and my horses and my riding for a little while so that I am the best me I can be and thus the most ready and open and capable of being a good partner. It’s like...how you have to rotate crops. If you grow the same crop on your plot of land over and over, it strips the soil of stuff and then eventually you can’t grow on it anymore, so you have to plant a different thing now and then. I want to plant my career for three weeks and then see if our relationship re-grows after. God, that sounds cheesy,” the rider cringed.

“I guess I understand that, but are you saying you want it to be like that Asia trip, and you’re not even going to talk to me? You’re going to take the baby away and just be completely alone for three weeks? I don’t want to say that everything that’s good for your career is automatically bad for mine, but how is it fair to me that I have to suffer by myself and-“

“No, babe. No.” Christina shook her head emphatically to deny the allegation that she wanted to be alone for three weeks. That wasn’t what the agenda was about. “We’re gonna talk every day. I’m not trying to cut myself off. I mean, I don’t want you complaining every day that you wish I were home, because that isn’t going to be helpful, but I’m not looking to be completely apart like that,” she chuckled quietly. They’d been speaking in normal indoor voices and it was evident that Lukas was down for the count. He wasn’t going to wake up. “And if you don’t want him to come with me for the whole trip then that’s okay with me but you’re the one who has to tell Espen she has to fly across the globe with him by herself. I would be fine with not having him in Miami, for example, because I imagine there are some preeeeetty good parties that week, but at the same time, he loves the beach so...I dunno. Whatever. I was never going to bring him to Omaha in the first place, so maybe they can just meet me in Mexico. I’m negotiable. Whatever you want.”

“I’m going with the national team next week, so I’m not even going to see you. We have a match the day you leave,” André mumbled absently, mentally reviewing the calendar. “I won’t see you for a whole month.” This wasn’t how this was supposed to go, he thought. Now we live together in the same country and somehow we’re together less than before.

“Did you talk to Bierhoff? I thought you said you didn’t think you’d get called up.”

“He called me today.”

“Oh. Well congratulations. That’s good, right? Jogi still loves you.” That also means I’m alone for a week when Juan has nothing to do, Christina realized. Juan already knew he was not going to be on the list of players called to play for La Seleccion announced in a few days. A week when I’m supposed to be preparing for a World Cup Final though. Althoooouuuugh...the horses are leaving several days before me. Would it be horrible of me to go to the beach with Juanin for a little and then fly to Omaha from there? Then Lukas could stay here...

“Jogi is too invested in me to back out now. He’s going to call me every time as long as I’m fit. It saves him the trouble of having to break in someone new.”

“Oh come on. That’s bullshit. You’re also one of his most experienced players, your minutes per goal is among the best in the team, you’re a good guy he trusts, and you don’t make problems in the team. Don’t act like you’re included because Jogi Löw is lazy. He is the least lazy man on the planet.”

“Yeah,” Andre yawned. “I’m going to go get some of those chocolate covered almond butter balls, unless you ate them all.” I’m turning into a girl. Upset? Emotional? Chocolate. I need something sweet though, because I think she just tried to be fake sweet right now and I almost fell for it because I need sweet.

“I forgot we got them. I made peanut butter banana ice cream for Lulu Schü, if you want some...” His wife meant she made something that sort of looked like ice cream but without any cream. Her husband was tempted to tease her and imply that her dessert was probably the reason Lukas didn’t feel well. Instead, he volunteered again to take him to his crib, and she relented. The baby got a goodnight kiss, and Christina got a sort of solemn and sad look as his dad lifted him from her lap. Her whole idea about shutting out her broader reality to insulate herself from the hard stuff and focus on her riding was something that often applied to her relationship with her son. She had to actively instruct herself not to think about him when she went away, or she’d miss him too much to ever enjoy whatever she went away to do. Being with Juan, for example, required ignoring the little hole inside that was usually filled with the joy and satisfaction of taking care of Lukas and getting to know him as he figured out who he was. Missing him somehow always caught up with her when she got home, and she kind of retroactively experienced the bad stuff she refused to go through while she was gone, so she just wanted to be with him. It was totally fine with her that he couldn’t sleep and wanted to stay with her. Missing his bedtime was great. Mommy was happy to have a few extra hours with him.

She made a note on her to-do list to talk to Espen about them meeting her in Mexico, and closed out the rest of what she was doing on the computer. There was no point in making further plans until she knew who would be where, and when. The other “kids” in her life were not invited on the North American trip. Tom was still interviewing people to fill the other groom/property manager role, so Kyle would need to be home to take care of the horses and help ride the 4 horses Christina was leaving there. Stefanie didn’t want to spend the money to go to the World Cup Final just to spectate, and there wasn’t much value in shipping horses over there for her to do the 1* classes offered at the Tour events. Those two locations were really popular and the 40 slots open in the 5* classes would definitely be snatched up by riders at the top of the Longines ranking. She was nowhere near the top 100.

“Want one?” The BVB goalscorer returned with a coffee mug with three of the bite sized chocolate covered balls, and one already in his mouth. He was trying to chew, talk, and take his pants off all at the same time. His girl waited until he got back under the covers with the mug on his chest to help herself to one of the treats, and much to his surprise, she molded herself into her traditional position at his side to eat it, with her head on his shoulder. It was her turn to mumble through a mouth full of food.

“Thank you for listening and understanding and not making a fight.”

“You’re welcome. Thank you for explaining and being honest.”

“Welcome.”

“Thank you for watching the match tonight. My first thought after I scored the goal, besides “Thank God, finally,” was hoping you saw. I was so relieved.”

“I always watch.” Can goals change people, the rider wondered. Does relief change your whole vibe? His aura is so much calmer right now. I just gave him bad news, and told him I want to be with Juanin instead of him right now and I already told him it’s because of Juanin and not because of him, and he’s eating snacks and thanking me for watching him play football. If he didn’t score that goal, would we be shouting at each other right now? Would he be tucking himself in down the hall?

“Do you want to watch something right now?” André, indeed sort of too light of mood for the situation, reached for the TV remote on a pillow behind Christina, and since he had to reach around her to get it, he used that as an excuse to close her in with his arm and rest his hand on the top of her hip while he turned the TV on. “What about an old movie or something?”

“Too pumped to sleep?” His armrest knew the adrenalin spike of a much needed goal could be hard to come down from, and also that her husband had very little interest in old movies unless they were overtly in-your-face funny. They put him to sleep.

“Between the match and hearing my Prinzessin tell me she wants to leave me, you could say-“

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she interjected almost sheepishly. “I don’t want to leave you.” The armrest also behaved like an overly affectionate octopus, negotiating more of her body onto his and nuzzling her face into his shirt as if she could burrow beyond the cotton. “I just want to wake up and feel good more days than not, and go to bed feeling good, and for a while now the only good days are with Juan. I don’t want to leave you. I want good days with you too. They just...don’t seem to happen right now. I don’t think you’re having any good days either, regardless of me.”

“The last really good day I had was Valentine’s Day. Can you tell me what a good day with him looks like? What makes it good? Is it what you do together?” André squeezed the remote again to turn the TV back off. “Is it how he treats you? The places you go? That you don’t have Mausi with you to worry about?”

“It’s none of those things. That’s what’s so difficult about all this. It doesn’t matter what I do with him, or where we are, or who’s with us. It’s not like I enjoy hanging out with him because he fawns over me and puts his coat down over puddles so my shoes don’t get wet. I hate saying this to you, but he’s Happy Place-little-™ right now.”

“My current Happy Place™ is Mausi, and you when you’re asleep and can’t do or say anything I hate,” he smiled above her head. I’m teasing her, but it’s also the truth, he reminded himself. I know what she means with this term. She has used that term forever. She means the person who makes everything okay, and helps her relax, and who she can be completely unguarded with. We’ve always been that for each other. I don’t think she even recognizes that she is usually the Happy Place thing for me way more than I am for her. I think she’s split that between me and him for a long time.

“I’m sorry.” Christina aggressively rubbed the footballer’s stomach and side, from waist to chest. And she really was sorry. His comment was as harsh to her ears as anything she’d said to him was on his. No matter how many bad days they had, the rider had no will to hurt him, or exact revenge. “This is nice right now though, isn’t it?” she asked, trying to lift the mood. “Talking without getting upset.”

“If you’re not careful, I might think you’re only nice to me when I score goals, pretty girl.”

“I think you’re just more reasonable and calm about things when you’re not on edge about not scoring goals...”

“Is that your way of telling me I have to go away for three weeks to work on myself too?”

“Are there any football camps you can go to?” the Bee’s warm little appendage chuckled. At least he gets it, she thought. We have to be okay with ourselves before we can be okay together. “Also, has anyone pointed out to you that you and Thomas Müller have the same number of Bundesliga goals right now?”

“No.”

“Thomas Müller the actual human, I mean, not the goldfish.”

“I assumed you meant the human.”

“Thomas Müller the goldfish needs a bigger bowl, by the way. He’s growing again. Do you think we should get him a bigger home and maybe a friend?”

“I guess.”

“Want to find a fish store tomorrow? We can take Lulu Schü.”

“We’re going to end up coming home with a huge tank and a school of fish, and then every few days for a while you’re going to tell me how you had to skim a dead one off the top or wash it out of the filter.”

“You say that like you’ve heard my childhood fish tank stories.”

“Juan Mata is not the only guy who listens to your stories.”

“I know.”

The final points made in the goldfish exchange were exemplary of the couple’s inability to stop provoking one another. André didn’t have to bring up Juan, and Christina didn’t have to let that he did change the tone of the casual conversation. When she told him she knew Juan wasn’t the only one who listened to her, she let her voice sink, and with it went the small moment of Pax Schürris. She could have laughed it off, or ignored it. Instead she got quiet. They were equally culpable, at least that time, for their seismographic waves of peace and war. They were equally aware of it too.

“Sorry,” they told each other in near perfect unison some 90 seconds after the atmosphere between them bottomed out. One spent the reflection period rubbing some t-shirt between two fingers and staring at it, and the other spent it trying to bite a torn cuticle and staring at the blank TV.

“Why are you sorry?” the blonde questioned with surprise.

��Because I know you weren’t even trying to be a jerk and I reacted like you were doing it on purpose anyway.”

“It wasn’t a good way to joke.”

“It’s way past my bedtime...” the darker haired one announced, causing the other’s hopes to deflate a bit. Now she’s going to roll over and pat the blanket down around her so it’s like a protective bubble and that’s the end of trying to be normal tonight, he lamented inside. She’s like Jelly Bean. If you smack him for something then he doesn’t trust you for the rest of the day. That’s what she says about him anyway, he recalled. The anecdote came from an afternoon when he and his wife were having lunch together in her office and Stefanie came in to ask if Jelly Bean could have a few ml’s of a sedative called Dorm to get through having his feet trimmed because he bit the blacksmith and tried to kick the door to the storage room by the crossties where the guy’s truck pulled up for him to work. Christina readied the injection and it took quite a few tries to get the horse to be still so she could give it, and André asked why she didn’t just yank on his face or smack his butt and tell him to knock it off the way she did with the others. Jelly Bean would never be bitten twice. She told him that the animal wouldn’t trust you again if you hurt or scared him, maybe for a day, maybe for a week. It was an issue for him under saddle too. He didn’t trust Stefanie if she rode him to a terrible distance. The player felt his wife exhibited some of that behavior too. If he cut her or implied that he might, she moved a respectful distance away.

“Okay,” he said, thinking she was asking him to let go of her. He removed his arm from around her back, and expected her to sit up from his shoulder and chest. That wasn’t what she wanted.

“Will you be big spoon or are you not ready to sleep yet? We could angle a little so you can see the television if you want to watch something. The noise won’t bother me,” Christina pointed out, hope in her voice. Her partner felt a great deal of relief. It wasn’t on the same level as breaking a goal drought but it wasn’t that far off.

“Sure, Prinzessin.” Gimme, gimme, gimmie, he thought greedily while he waited for his girl to pick the ideal spot and position. He even held his arms out behind her, where she couldn’t see, like he was getting ready to capture something and squeeze it to death.

#i forgot to bother with posting like 10 of these

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 7 years

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I'm Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, and This Is How I Work

Brad Smith knows karate. Not “business karate” or any overwrought metaphor about teamwork; he literally teaches karate. Or at least he used to before he became chairman and CEO of Intuit.

Intuit is the financial software company that owns and operates TurboTax, probably the most idiot-proof way to file your taxes. (I speak from personal experience, as I’m definitely bad with money and taxes. Using TurboTax feels like playing a soothing video game.) They also own the popular personal finance app Mint, and were the original developers of Quicken. It is more than worth mentioning, though, that nothing is without controversy; Intuit has been criticized for lobbying against making filing your taxes easier. But let’s get back to the karate.

Brad Smith has been with the company since 2003, has served as CEO since 2008, and credits much of his success to the lessons he discipline he gained at the dojo as a young man as well as the career advice given to him by his father. We caught up with Brad to learn a little about his background, how he manages his time, and some of his favorite inspirational movies. Here’s how he works.

Location: Mountain View, CA Current Gig: Chairman and CEO, Intuit One word that best describes how you work: Passionately Current mobile device: iPhone 7 Current computer: MacBook Air

First of all, tell me a little about your background and how you got to where you are today.

I was born and raised in Kenova, West Virginia, population 3,500 if you round up! From an early age, the community played a key role in my life. I began studying martial arts at a local dojo as a sophomore in high school, and the discipline it taught me continues to impact my life to this day. After graduating from Ceredo-Kenova High School, I attended the US Military Academy at West Point for one semester, but my West Virginia roots pulled me back home. I went on to graduate from Marshall University in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing.

After graduating college my dad advised me to always pursue what makes your heart beat the fastest. He [also] said I should always make my job choices based on the franchise and not the role. In other words, look for purpose-driven companies that would challenge me and provide me with stretch assignments so I would continue to grow. He told me not to focus on title or the money, because that would change over time if I worked hard. Finally, [he said to] understand that there will be good days and bad days, but if the good outweigh the bad, you are on the right course.

I learned at an early age through my martial arts training—where, as a black belt and teacher, you are measured on the progress of your students—that I loved getting things done through a team as opposed to being an individual contributor. This led me into people management and my first job at Pepsi. I went on to work at ADVO and ADP before joining Intuit in 2003. I held various roles within the company before becoming CEO in 2008, and chairman in 2016.

What apps, software, or tools can’t you live without?

Time is our most precious and limited resource, therefore managing my time is my most important priority. A productivity tool that helps me is color-coding my calendar so I can see how I’m spending my time against my “100-point plan.”

I allocate my time in a 40-30-20-10 split: I spend forty percent of my time running the company through operating mechanisms and product reviews; thirty percent building our organization’s capability and leadership bench through 1:1’s, skip levels, and leadership development forums; twenty percent on outside-in learning by engaging with fellow leaders in roundtable discussions, forums and board rooms; and the last ten percent on personal growth and development, meeting with mentors and learning from others I admire. Color-coding my calendar holds me accountable and allows me to measure whether I am on track or off, so I can adjust if needed.

What’s your workspace setup like? Coffee shop with laptop and headphones? Home office with a standing desk?

I have a seated desk for when I’m focused on getting work done, a table for in-person meetings, and a video conference screen so I can meet face-to-face with people around the world.

When I’m in my office I’m surrounded by photos of my family and special memorabilia that represent the influences in my life, like my framed We Are Marshall poster, a Marshall University football, and a model of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable—with a Latin inscription that reads “leadership through serving others.” My home office is similar, with family pictures and signed photographs from my favorite movies including Forrest Gump, The Godfather, and Gladiator. Family and fighting for causes greater than oneself have always inspired me!

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

The tip is simply-stated, but requires real commitment: never touch something more than once. For example, my email inbox is cleared every day, despite receiving several hundred emails that require action. It is not managed or sorted by an assistant. Instead, I practice the principle of read, act, file, or delete. To stay on top of it, I schedule forty-five minute meetings (versus an hour), which allows me fifteen minutes in between meetings to quickly read and act on any incoming messages.

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

Call me old school, but I’m a pen and paper kind of guy! If I write something down I won’t forget it.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without and why?

Google Home, because it has the power of Google search at voice command. Conversational user interface (CUI) is enabling us to do things faster than ever from shopping to getting our news, and these types of gadgets have won me over. I’ve just been looking for the one that can understand my West Virginian accent, and luckily they keep getting smarter!

What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What’s your secret?

I’m not sure I am better than everyone else at anything, but I do write poetry. My wife and my two daughters each have poems that I’ve written for them framed on their walls. My wife has one that was written before our wedding, and another that I wrote when she chose to leave her profession to be a stay-at-home mother. Each of my daughters’ poems were written the night of their birth. While they aren’t world-class poems, they are sincere expressions of my love and gratitude for having them in my life, and for helping me strive to be a better man each and every day.

What do you listen to while you work? Got a favorite playlist? Maybe talk radio? Or do you prefer silence?

While I am a musician myself (guitar and sax) and I am constantly inspired by music, it has its place in my life. I tend to work in silence, which allows me to focus 100 percent of my concentration and energy on the task at hand. However, during a break or at home, my playlist is quite eclectic—80’s rock, contemporary country, and some classical music tossed in for good measure. Lyrics matter most to me, so good songwriters are a plus!

What are you currently reading? Or what’s something you’d recommend?

I’d highly recommend a book I recently read called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. It’s full of amazing, inspirational stories that show that anyone, regardless of I.Q., talent, or background, can succeed if they have grit—a blend of passion and persistence. I’m a big fan of this school of thought—one of my strongest personal beliefs is that it doesn’t matter where you went to school. This book makes all of us underdogs feel like we’re just as capable as anybody else.

How do you recharge? What do you do when you want to forget about work?

Spending time with my wife and daughters is my favorite way to recharge. I also love to go to the movie theater. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been touched by the power of movies, and I find some of my greatest inspiration comes from them.

What’s your sleep routine like? Are you a night owl or early-riser?

I’ve always been a morning person, so on a typical day I get up early, around 5:30 or 5:45 a.m. I work out every morning, I do P90X and I watch [CNBC’s] Opening Bell. Then I read a couple of papers: The Wall Street Journal and the Huntington Herald Dispatch before getting into the office around 8 a.m. I usually get out of the office a little after 7 p.m., get home, have dinner, and spend time with my wife. I’m in bed about 9 p.m. That’s the program!

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

My Dad is no longer with me, but the best advice I ever received was from him on making tough career choices. He offered three simple guideposts:

Surround yourself with people smarter than you: According to Dad, this was important for choosing where you work, because it ensures that you will constantly be learning and growing. With this in mind, I have always been drawn to work in organizations where the bar is high.

Volunteer for assignments no one else wants: Once you find the right environment, volunteer to work on the hardest and most unwanted problems facing the organization, because that’s where you’ll stretch yourself and be forced to grow in ways you wouldn’t have planned. In addition, every boss has something that no one wants to do, and if you volunteer to take it on, it will distinguish you from others and establish you as the “go-to person” for tough problems.

Finally, make sure you can pay your bills: The last thing Dad told me was to never prioritize big dollars and big business cards over the principles above. He cautioned that if I did, I would most likely find myself in a position where the number of bad days outweighed the good ones. As for paying my bills, Dad was always someone who fulfilled the promises he made. For him, bills were a promise of payment. So he closed by saying “but always try to make enough to pay your bills!”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. The How I Work series asks heroes, experts, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more. Have someone you want to see featured, or questions you think we should ask? Email Andy.