Sustainability

multitasking vs. unitasking

Recently I stumbled upon an article on multitasking, which stated that it's a common misconception that performing multiple tasks at the same time is not necessarily more efficient than unitasking. In fact, the authors say, you frequently will get worse results than with unitasking. I knew it!

As probably anyone working in an office environment, I'm frequently confronted by the demand for multitasking. Different projects need to be managed, there are estimation, analysis, coding and debugging requests, phones are ringing, questions need to be answered. It really drains you, and is counter-intuitive to my goal of working at a sustainable pace.

Now I have found an interesting approach that could help me in my ambition to do more unitasking, while still being available for other tasks. I got the idea from a comment in the above blog post, it's the Pomodoro Technique.

The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique was conceived by an Italian in the 1980s, who tried to focus on upcoming exams, but was not getting anywhere due to procrastination. He came up with this idea: get a kitchen timer, set it to a specific time, like half an hour. In this period of time, do a single task. His kitchen timer was in the shape of a tomato, that's why the technique is called Pomodoro. A pomodoro is also the name of a single unit of focus time.




If you are unable to focus due to internal disturbances (wandering thoughts, need to check e-mails, etc) or external disturbances (phone's ringing, someone trying to talk to you), don't give in to the temptation to react in-depth immediately, but document it so you can address it after the pomodoro, then re-focus an continue. By this you get a better understanding of the concepts of urgency and importance (see also paragraph three of this blog post), and learn to get things done.

At the start of the day, you create a backlog of tasks. Then you pick a single task for the next pomodoro. The typical length of a pomodoro is 25 minutes, it is indivisible, so if you finish early, you should review your work, not start anything new. If you get interrupted by something important, the pomodoro is void. You can never resume a pomodoro, you have to start with a new one. If you have very small tasks, you can combine them into a single pomodoro, but this is not really recommended. After each pomodoro you have to do a 5 minute break, which is a real break where you are not allowed to do anything work related. Stand up, walk around, stretch, eat or drink, or tell someone a joke. After four pomodoros, a longer break of around 15 minutes is required.

If you manage to complete a pomodoro (which is different from completing a task), you can already consider it a success. You have managed to stay focussed, which is all you really can do. You can now measure how many pomodoros you get done in a day, it's quite tough if you do it by the book. I managed to get 7 pomodoros done last Friday (first day I tried it), but I was hoping for 10-12, so there is still some potential.

Philosophy behind the technique

There are various concepts of time: For example, you can look at it as a continuous flow, or as a sequence of events. The first approach easily suggests that time is slipping away, you're running out of time, or that time is passing. This may lead to anxiety, and puts pressure on people trying to get things done. If you look at it like a sequence of events, time does not exist independently of you, you are part of it. This puts you in control of time, not vice versa. The Pomodoro Technique tries to teach us the second perspective by having successive periods of focus time, which help you find a rhythm, which again gives you security.

Another thing the technique tries to do is to act as a focus enabler. Imagine a professional football player always tying the left shoe first, and then the right shoe. You might think of it as superstition, but it is a ritual which helps the person build focus on the upcoming event. Just like this, the winding of the pomodoro timer acts as a focus enabler. The winding symbolizes your commitment to the next pomodoro and helps you get in a flow. It is recommended to use a mechanical timer, as you would not get the same feeling with a software timer.

Resources on the pomodoro technique

The official website has everything you would want to know. There is a free e-book, a cheat sheet, template backlogs, links to user groups and so on. The e-book is definitely recommendable if you want to start using the Pomodoro Technique. Another interesting thing I found was a talk by Staffan Nöteberg, author of Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, which I haven't read. There are also billions of software timers out ther, and I couldn't stop myself from adding my own timer, using Raphaël.

Perspective
I have started using the Pomodoro Technique last Friday, and I wonder if I can keep it up. Although the creator says it is suitable for teams, I assume it will be the source of conflicts, if not the whole team is using it. But I will try to make it work, and will let you know how that plays out. I assume it will definitely work for individuals, and very likely in pairs. What are your thoughts on this technique? Is it something you would use? What drawbacks do you see? Or are you already using it? I'm curious about some feedback.

Due to global warming my inner clock urged me to start spring cleaning in December. I found a lot of stuff I wasn't aware of. For example, we found a whole flock of extension cords nesting in the basement.

Here are a two hints for citizens of Bonn thinking about spring cleaning.

You can put electronic waste or CDs into the red bins. There's one in the Stadthaus and one in the Stadtbibliothek.

Someone could be interested in stuff you longer need. Use the Verschenkmarkt. That's the best way to get rid of things. People might just need what you're about to throw away.

Even better than recycling is to not accumulate so much stuff. An easy and trivial way is to stop your mailbox to overflow from ads. A few months ago I created a simple sign that says "no ads please".



It's amazing, it really works. On second thought I should have chosen a more positive wording. But feel free to use it anyway.

Heraclitus was an enigmatic greek philosopher, one of the presocratics. He is best remembered for aphorisms like "You can't step twice into the same river". He argues that by the second time you step in, water has flowed and thus, it's not the same river anymore. At his time, this meant a completely different approach to philosophy, as he eliminated "Being" and replaced it by "Becoming". In his view, everything was in flux, time is not something to be measured in discrete units, there is no "now" and "then", just the flow of becoming.

The consequence is a wicked form of reasoning. If everything is flowing, things cannot be described absolutely. By the moment you have come up with a definition, things have changed. By this the only valid description is one which contradicts itself. A simple example is given in his aphorism "the way up and the way down are the same". A single thing can be described by two opposites. There is no right or wrong, as right is wrong and wrong is right at the same time. This really takes the sting out of any argument.

So much for my naive introduction to Heraclitus. Now take a look at the web. It is the tool that allows us to accelerate in the memetic rat race. As we go faster and faster, we lose the sensation of now, and experience a true form of flow. Heraclitus would have loved it. Imagine he told a carpenter 2500 years back "You are a carpenter and you are not a carpenter". He would have thought Heraclitus was insane. He was just carpenting the way his fathers and grandfathers carpentered. But I can really relate to the sentence "I am a web developer and I am not a web developer". New tools emerge, new skills are required, "the only thing permanent is change".

I have already described the downside of going faster and faster in the memetic rat race. But it's not the web's fault. The web suddenly feels organic.

Let's take a look at an elaboration of the river quote, "We both step and do not step in the same rivers". So how do we do step twice into the same river? This is where language comes in. Humans have come up with conventions of identifying things. We label things. So now a river is no longer a flowing substance, but for example the Rhine river. I can step into the Rhine river twice, although the actual water molecules have changed. This is the power of language.

Language was a big step for humans. Suddenly we were able to build and spread knowledge, and even describe complex issues permanently. What a meme-fest! They could spread faster and mutate, and by this, make our brains grow in size. But let's remember that we also cannot step into the same river twice: We now sense this is a contradictive statement, which shows that language is very limited in describing the world as it is. Permanence is an illusion induced by language. In other words, permanence is nothing but a powerful meme-plex that shapes the way we view the world. There is no "now" or "then" in reality. Language limits us, it limits the way our brains operate. It's like trying to travel at lightspeed in a Volkswagen.

This might be the reason why we are losing out in the memetic rat race. Our language is insufficient. Our brains have adapted to our language. Maybe the web is something that has the potential to capture reality much better than language. But it still relies too much on language. Maybe if its interfaces evolve and become less restrictive, our brains can manage to adapt and do not overload.

But even today, we have potentially great user interfaces. Take geospatial software, maps are already quite intuitive. You can't accurately describe a map, even with thousands of words. A map allows us to process information much faster. We need interfaces like maps in order to keep up. By this I hope we can manage to model the Volkswagen into a spaceship.

There's nothing wrong with Twitter itself, its users or its providers. What is my problem with this phenomenon? Why am I such a curmudgeon? Without a doubt, there is a lot of hype around Twitter. A hype is nothing but a meme pandemic. It's easy to get infected with Twitter these days, maybe it is a mutation of bird flu. Let's take a closer look.

The term for a 140 character text message in Twitter is "tweet". Memes love tweets. The barrier to twitter is low, because a tweet consists only of a few words. We don't talk about the content here, remember that memes are oblivious about what they transport. So the cost is low. What about the effect of a tweet? You immediately reach a huge audience, at least all people who follow your channel, potentially more. Memes love to spread as wide as possible. This is why Twitter is so successful, it guarantees to spread information wide and fast. The ratio of recipients by cost is tremendous. It's just another gear shift in the memetic rat race.

So Twitter is very helpful in efficiently spreading memes. How about the long term consequences? A tweet is just a line of text, it's hard to put complex information in a tweet. It's all about speed. Condense the information to a few words and off you go. Twitter lowers my attention span. It fucks with my brain. I want to be able to analyze and understand complex systems. It's only logical to assume that twittering produces bird brains.

So by losing context and lacking coherence, meaning potentially gets lost. This is what I dislike most about Twitter. Tweets are potentially ambigious due to their briefness. Is the benefit of speed bigger than the loss of meaning? Just a few days ago the weekly (sic!) german language newspaper "Die Zeit" had a great article about a related issue, the demise of newspapers all over the world. Newspapers just can't compete with the internet, it's too fast. So what do they do? They desperately started to blog and podcast. And now they also twitter.

This is what I call fascism. You just have to twitter these days. Twitter is so new, we really know nothing about its consequences or even what it is good for. We twitter because everybody else does. It's about fear, if I don't jump on the Twitter wagon now I won't be able to catch up later. I wonder what's next. What's the sound of a Kolibri?

If you think I'm not doing Twitter justice, please help me. I would love to understand if there was another side to it that has escaped my attention. But for now, my advice is to subscribe to a newspaper today. It seems to be an anachronistic thing to do, but I'm really afraid to live in a world of meaningless hyperspeed news and wading through bird droppings. And if you think Twitter is not really applicable to the distribution of news, that's just what they say it's about.

Having said that, expect me to promote my very own Twitter channel here before the end of the year. I'm just a feeble hypocritic meme host myself.

Coincidentally I watched the sci-fi flick Johnny Mnemonic yesterday. If you manage to look past the wooden acting and straight-to-video charme, is has an interesting premise. In a nutshell, the plot takes place in 2021, where corporations have taken over and are in control of the whole information flow. Half of the earth's population is suffering from Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, a fictional, epilepsy-like disease, which is a result of overexposure to the radiation of technical devices. Johnny Mnemonic is a data courier, who has an implant which allows him to store any data in his brain and smuggle it for well-paying customers. In order to fulfil a contract he overloads his brain severely and desperately tries to get rid of the information he is carrying.

For me, it rang a bell. The volume of data we are dealing with seems to increase all the time. Getting information is trivial today, the challenge is filtering. The tools and user interfaces have a hard time living up to that challenge. Our default tool, the brain, is quite well-designed as it automatically discards useless information, we forget details, and only store what left the biggest impressions on us. Well, most brains manage, unless you happen to suffer from Hyperthymesia. People with this condition are unable to filter between more or less important pieces of information. I guess my mail client has Hyperthymesia too.

I'm not even talking about spam here. Spam is filtered quite well, although it is still annoying to some degree. I'm only talking about information I get from my peers, mailing lists and company mass mails. I have to make a conscious effort to arrange the incoming data. I created a sophisticated folder structure along with a set of filters. But I still have all the data. I have to make a decision everytime I want to delete a mail. Making decisions causes stress. What would it be like if you had to consciously delete a thought, a visual impression or a sound? Think about it.

There's not a lot I could do about the mail issue. First of all, I deleted 100,000 mails in a frenzy. I cancelled a lot of mailing lists, and only kept those I contribute to. Mozilla Thunderbird has a feature "delete messages more than n days old", which is interesting, but I'm afraid to use it. That sounds too much like Alzheimer to me. My only advice is to check mails a few times a day, in the morning, before and after lunch, and before leaving the office. I keep the mail client closed in between. I keep my inbox clean. There's nothing more satisfying than going home and leaving an empty inbox behind.

I prefer using forums over mailing lists. In a forum, you search for the information you want. You will get notified if people write about topics you have shown interest in. In a mailing list, you always get all the information (digests don't help). It's like having this pathetic friend that cannot stop talking, until your ears bleed.

If you have advice for me, if you know any great tools that would help me, let me know. I don't want to end up like Johnny Mnemonic. Only twelve years until 2021.

This is a trilogy of blog entries I have planned for the near future. It is about my perception of the web and how it relates to humans. This is the preamble.

I deal with the web a lot. I don't have to. But I do. Is it just what people do in the 21st century, or is there more to it? I'm not asking whether we would manage to live without it, but rather, are we capable of living with it? Or even worse, are we at all free not to use it? The web is a very attractive place for the human brain. It offers everything and demands nothing, it's huge, yet efficient. However, it's just a tool. A tool itself cannot be judged. It's the way people use it and by this shape the future I'm interested in.

I labelled this post "a memetic rat race". Some terminology first.

A meme is an entity, an information container with the distinct purpose to propagate and multiply. Like a virus. A meme is oblivious to what information it carries. It doesn't care. It just wants to spread. Think about World War II. Do you think people wanted a war where 50 million people die? No, the circumstances where just right for the fascism meme (and others) to spread. The meme succeeded short term, humans suffered long term. The meme is oblivious. This might be quite a low blow if you thought you had a free will. Bad luck. You are nothing but a meme host.

A rat race is the antithesis to sustainable pace. When you move at sustainable pace, you can keep that speed forever, theoretically. While sustainable pace ignores the context, the rat race is about competition. It's about winning, and wanting to win, whatever the cost. Taking a closer look, it's more about the illusion of winning. You seem to win, but lose in the long run.

In the memetic rat race, us humans are the rats. We are competing, and the goal is to process information as efficient as possible. The rat race is camouflaged as work, as communication, even as recreation. The web is the ever-evolving tool which enables us to accelerate in the memetic rat race. We get information at a faster rate, we get it in increasing volume. Do we want that? Do we need that? The web doesn't care about us, it's oblivious.

I'm aware that I'm just spreading memes as well. My memes are not better than other people's memes. But first, I think I happen to be connected to some unusual meme agoras, and second, somehow my brain produces weird mutations of the memes it is fed. I think that spreading these memes might be helpful to humans in the long run. I think by understanding the way memes operate, you can manipulate the system. The meta-meme.

In fact we are more than meme hosts. We have bodies and emotions, these need a sustainable pace in order to exist. They don't mix with the memetic rat race.

By the way, the blog entries that will form the trilogy are these

- How I deleted 100,000 e-mails
- Twitter fascism
- Heraclitus would have loved the web

In addition to the chicken or egg causality dilemma, which deals with whether the chicken or egg came first, an aware consumer also has to think about where the eggs come from, no matter if they came first.

Fortunately, since January 2005, all eggs sold within the European Union have a mandatory label, which helps to identify where they come from. There is also a search engine, which also displays the origin on a Google Map.

Apart from the origin, the label also shows how the hens were held. As hens are no longer allowed to be kept in cages since 2009, there are three categories left: Organic keeping, Free range keeping and Barn keeping. As these categorizations are quite soft, and some concern has been raised on free-range eggs, I think I have to go with eggs from organic kept hens from now on.

Furthermore, chickens kept in barns will not help us to answer the why did the chicken cross the road question. How should they know? But beware, if you don't look out for your livestock, you will end up with your chicken ticketed.

After watching the film "Home" yesterday, took a quick glance at goodplanet.org, which is the site of the environmental non-profit organisation of Yann-Arthus Bertrand, the director of the film. One section of this websizte is headlined "Act for the planet", which among other topics offers yet another carbon footprint calculator, which does not require a detailled input. After a few minutes I found a calculator of the Umweltbundesamt. Here I'll share the results for my household (three persons) with you.

Public consumption includes all emission for which the state is responsible. These emissions are divided by the number of inhabitants. Hmm, nothing we can do about these 3,72 tons for now, apart from voting green.

Private consumption includes shopping habits and criteria, and hotel overnight stays. I guess I'm not overly consumptive, and fortunately spend little time in hotels. Nevertheless, the calculator adds another 4,57 tons to our carbon footprint.

Fortunately I can get to work on foot, so the public transport segment does only add 0,21 tons. We don't have a car or motorcycle either, so 0 tons in private transport.

The next segment, traveling by plane, really breaks our neck. My wife is from Indonesia, so a round trip results in a whopping 21,79 tons (!) for the three of us. We only travel every two years at most, so I'll add half of that, 10,9 tons. My business trip to the OSGeo hacking event in Bolsena, Italy, adds another 0,69 tons. All in all, 11,59 tons.

Foodwise, our behaviour is quite average. We try to buy seasonal and regional products, avoid deep-freeze stuff, but also buy imported asian food. I guess that somehow levels out. Another 4,85 tons.

For the last two years we have used electricity from renewable ressources (123ökostrom 360). We also seem to use little electricity, I checked the last bill and it lists 1721 kWh. Nevertheless, the calculator adds 0,07 tons.

Our heating habits also seem reasonable, as our apartment is not really big. We have used 5242 kWh last year. However, we could switch to Bonn NaturGas next year to improve. 1,13 tons.

In the end, this sums up to 26,13 tons, which equals roughly 8,7 tons per person. Compared to the average 11 tons a person from Germany is responsible for, this is a good number, but if you keep in mind that about two tons per person would be called sustainable, it's far too much. I think we could half our emissions from 8,7 tons to about 4,4 tons. If even well-educated people like us don't manage this, then good night, planet. So here's what we as a familiy will do

- be more aware when buying food, especially cut down on meat and imports (save 0,16 tons).
- use gas from renewable ressources (saves 0,38 tons)
- compensate all the emissions from airplane travel by donating to an organization like atmosfair (saves 3,8 tons).

I'll let you know how that works out. Please feel free to share your carbon footprint or help us in lowering ours.

My wife had told me about this new documentary "Home", which I can describe best as a mixture between Koyaanisqatsi and An Inconvenient Truth. It more or less illustrates the impact of mankind on planet Earth's eco system by showing aerial shots of affected regions.



The film was directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whom I knew from his photography series Earth from above, prominently featured in GEO magazine a few years ago. Needless to say, the cinematography is quite beautiful. Arthus-Bertrand knows how to masterfully compose his shots, and thereby he captivates the audience's attention.

The fact that the glorious imagery is accompanied by a stereotypical, clicheed soundtrack (it pales in comparison to Koyaanisqatsi's score by Philip Glass) and an at times preachy commentary might be annoying, but on a second thought this is perfectly fine because a film like this has to be targeted at a mass audience, as it transports an important message. We liked the optimistic ending of the film ("it's too late to be a pessimist"), finally directing us to the website http://www.goodplanet.org/, which helps us to adopt a life style guided by the principle of sustainability. I will elaborate on the website at another time.

Currently, "Home" is freely available at YouTube in high definition for a short time. If you care to download it, these instructions are helpful. Tell everyone you know about this film, it's really worth watching and has the power to change your view of the world.

What is sustainability? The author, John R. Ehrenfeld, defines it as

the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever

and explains his interpretation of each word in great detail. That's what he does in general, his descriptions and definitions are both precise and concise, and he always takes the time to share the etymology of each term with us.

Sustainability is not just about the environment or "saving the planet". Ehrenfeld explains how humans have alienated themselves from nature und by this picked up habits that lead to unsustainability. He describes two basic system archetypes of behaviour, "fixes that fail" and "shifting the burden".

Almost all human problems are solved by a quick technological fix (humans nowadays are overly optimistic about technology), which most likely has side effects, which in the long term lead to unsustainability, and thus fail. We must acknowledge that nature is a very complex thing, and that technological solutions tend to fail.

Humans also tend to concentrate on the symptoms only, and by this don't search for a long-lasting solution. We shift the burden to a habitual solution. An example could be consumption, which detracts us from our unhappiness, but in the long term is not satisfying and even more, becomes addictive (side effect).

Ehrenfeld elaborates, and this may be this most important thought for me in this book, that sustainability cannot be achieved by reducing unsustainability: Instead, a real paradigm shift is in order. This paradigm shift includes three sectors, humanity (our sense of ourselves as human beings), nature (our sense of our place in the natural world) and ethics (our sense of doing the right thing). Only if all three sectors are covered by this paradigm shift, will sustainability emerge. Here's a similar diagram from Wikipedia:



Besides Heidegger, he cites Erich Fromm, who identified two modes in humans, the "being" mode, and the "having" mode. We have shifted away from the "being" mode, and tend to live more in the "having" more: The more you have (money, cars, stuff), the happier you are. We even measure our wealth by the gross national product. To describe the "being" mode, Ehrenfeld also borrows from Maslow and Max-Neef: while Maslow's pyramid of needs is incremental (you fulfill each need after another), Max-Neef says that all needs (he identifies subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, freedom) must be fulfilled at the same time in order to achieve wholeness and happiness. I find this closer to reality than Maslow's approach.

Ehrenfeld further describes that he doesn't believe that a shift towards sustainability will come from authorities: It must be a cultural shift. For him, the easiest way would be to re-design our everyday tools in order to make us more aware and steer our behaviour towards sustainability. He mentions for example a two button toilet, one button for a big flush, another button for a small flush. By offering a choice, responsibility is created, and a responsible behaviour can be automated in the long run. This is what he calls "Sustainability by Design".

The necessary paradigm shift is not easy to do, and Ehrenfeld is aware of this. In the last chapter, he has a great quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald

...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Quick fixes to reduce unsustainability will not work in the long run, but they may still be useful to get started and to learn from. However, true sustainability will only come if human beings are able to return to the "being" mode by a paradigm shift.

All in all an insightful, inspiring and well-written book with a relevant message, I urge you to read it. My copy of the book is now sitting on a shelf and would love to meet you; just let me know.