tipping point.....................

 In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back and forth email threads need to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize your collaborators.  This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. . . . As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you're paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new.

-Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Work or leisure...........................?:

Stuart Schneiderman looks at the options:

"As opposed to sitting around the house or the golf course doing nothing but whiling away the time, working, for a social being, is an active way to affirm one’s moral being. Beyond the money, it has much to recommend it."


As for me, I prefer Robert Frost's way of looking at it:

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

Working on it......................................

via

Stringing.........................

From the Journal of a Nobody, a very excellent tumblr:

More good questions..................

thanks leah

Culture matters................

Victor Davis Hanson, while leading a military history tour down the Rhine, sends these thoughts home:

".....But the noble lies of the EU — that technocrats could reinvent human nature and ensure a continental equality of result, as culture bowed to edicts from Brussels — destroyed the pretenses of the post-Cold War world. The scab is now off, the wound is still raw.

"What would be the salvation of Europe? Praise, rather than damnation, for Germany; requests for German advice coupled with thanks for bailouts and promises of reform. In other words, impossible admissions from proud broke peoples that the way they are living is not sustained by the way they are working and organizing their society. How tragic that when the Germans finally learned to channel their talents and energies into pure production and enriched themselves and those around them, it still earned them in the end suspicion and envy, and yes, growing dislike — disarmed, pacifist, and multilateral as they try to be. Reader, you tell me what follows.

"Culture is everything. That is a politically incorrect thought that can get you in trouble as much as we suspect it is true."

Full essay is here.

What's bad for the goose...................

From the Privatization Blog:
Even from a conservative, free-market perspective, 
government subsidies for businesses distort markets, 
foster monopolies, undermine competition, and reduce 
efficiency.  The same complaints that business advocates 
make about the welfare system apply to government 
programs to help businesses - the vicious cycle of 
dependence, the lack of incentive to work hard or face 
difficult choices, the inevitable favoritism (some businesses 
get taxpayer subsidies, others miss out, and those that do 
have an unfair advantage over competitors who might 
otherwise win in a free marketplace).  It has a chilling 
effect on market-driven innovation, improvements in 
efficiency, or "creative destruction." 


thanks warren

Authority issues..............

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, 
but people wouldn't obey the rules.” 
― Alan Bennett 

On the proper way to be depressed.....

Short meeting................