Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or any December-based Festivus, I hope you are having a safe and happy holiday season, full of cheer, love and lots of merriment.
I’m taking this week off to rest after a packed semester, but I’ll be back next week to kick off the New Year.
I’ll see you in 2017.
Much love, and Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I have terrible self-control in certain areas of my life. Chief among my vices is the habit of staying up late on the internet (YouTube is my drug of choice). While I rationally know staying up late is bad for me, I act contrary to my best interests with each rationalization of “just one more video.” Suddenly, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning and my lunch for work still hasn’t been made.
In an effort to combat my akrasia (Greek for “weak will”), I’m taking a leaf out of Odysseus’s book. In the Odyssey by Homer, Odysseus is faced with sailing past some Sirens. In antiquity, Sirens were dangerous mythological creatures who would lure sailors to their doom using their song. Odysseus wanted to hear the Siren’s call, but knew he would be unable to resist their spell. In a brilliant move, Odysseus had his crew stuff their ears with beeswax to block out the song, and Odysseus had himself lashed to the ships mast to prevent him from leaving the ship.
The story of Odysseus is held up in modern behavioural economics and psychology as an exemplar of not only acknowledging that humans are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest, but also in showing us that we can take steps to overcome our weaknesses. Odysseus, rather than holding on to illusions that he will make good decisions in the future, instead opts to build systems of accountability that will save him from erroneous beliefs about the strength of his will.
Inspired by his story, I have adopted a new system to resist my own Siren’s call. I hooked my wifi router up to an indoor vacation timer and set it so that every night at 11:45pm, my internet gets shut off. The systems stays off while I’m at work and turns back on at 5:00pm as I’m getting home from work.
This is obviously not a fool-proof system. I can still manually override the unit if I want to reconnect to the internet, and truthfully I have done just that when I wanted to finish creating my slide decks for class and upload them to the e-learning system the college uses. So far, I have not overridden the system for personal reasons, so on that front, at least, it has been a success. Another obvious problem is that while my internet is shut off, I can still distract myself with other screens, such as the television, my Gameboy, and most critically my phone.
Nevertheless, I rate this systems as a success in getting me off the computer earlier than normal. In previous posts I discussed how I am waiting for the term to wind down so that I can begin to focus on other, less pressing tasks. This is just a first step in getting me to make responsible decisions that are aligned with my goals and values. Sometimes, we need to lash ourselves to the masthead to stop us from doing stupid stuff.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
This term has been killer for me. I say “term” as a reflection of my added teaching load I’ve had since September. I’ve been musing recently that I think I finally hit my stretch/break point. Balancing all of my separate obligations is finally starting to test my ability to keep all the balls in the air. In sum, these are the priorities I can think of off the top of my head:
These are just the things I’m managing to keep in the air. Of course, to make space for these things, I’ve had to slack on some other priorities, namely:
These aren’t meant to be humble-brags. I’m not one that thinks of “busy” as a badge of honour. I know that busy people are notoriously unreliable in my circles. There is a saying that if you want something done, give it to a busy person. This is perhaps true in some cases, but in my experience the vast number of busy people tend to be chronically flakey on showing up and late on deadlines for deliverables.
Thankfully, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. As of writing, I will be delivering my last lecture this week, and by December 21st I will be done with all course work grading. Shortly after that, I’ll be on holidays from the College until the new year. I’ll still have shifts at the bar, but those are select evenings.
Other aspects will change as well. Podcasting will go on a holiday hiatus; the daily art project ends at the end of December; and the long distance relationship will move back to a local distance relationship. I will finally have some breathing room. I plan to use that time to reflect on my obligations and regroup. My birthday is coming up, and I always take that time to reflect on the past year as well as my current state of affairs with an eye towards my future. This will be a well-deserved holiday break, when I finally get some breathing room.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
Welp! That streak didn’t last very long. Last week I wrote how I proudly went to the gym the previous week, and how I was looking forward to trying to maintain that pace. I’m sad to report that I did not go to the gym last week. And it’s important that I stay transparent about this. It’s been hard trying to find a balance these last few months. When I wasn’t working three jobs, I found it relatively easy to go to the gym at least twice per week. Now, I can’t manage going once.
I can’t blame the job fully on this. Part of the reason for my poor performance is the lack of sleep. I have poor discipline to go to bed at a reasonable time, so things tend to compound from there. Poor sleep leads to decision fatigue, and then it becomes easy to excuse all sorts of bad habits – further bad sleep, poor nutrition, procrastination, etc.
These failures of mine have been harsh but incredibly instructive. I’ve learned two important things about myself: I’ve learned where my limit is for how much I can juggle at any one time, and I learned a bit more about my priorities. I learned that I need structures and rules in place if I have any chance of sticking to a plan for progress. Present-Me is very bad at self-regulation and is prone to making all sorts of bad decisions. Present-Me is short-sighted, lazy, and pleasure-seeking. I want to prioritize health and fitness, but when it’s time to deliver, my priority tends to favour pleasurable activities (I’m looking at you, YouTube!).
A tired cliche is that the first step is to admit you have a problem. In this case, I have a problem when it comes to managing myself. Not sure where to turn from there, but at least we’ve drilled down to the bedrock. Let’s see where I can take this.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
This post is “late,” and there is really no excuse for it. There are reasons of course: when I created a backlog of posts, I didn’t feel the pressure to write weekly, so things slipped in my mind. But that’s not a good excuse for this being written about an hour after it should have gone live.
A colleague of mine just commented to me “You look tired!” Which is true – I am tired. I’ve been tracking my sleep since about November of last year thanks to my trusty Fitbit, and in that year I found I get an average of five and a half hours of sleep per night. That’s well below the recommended eight hours. Until now, I’ve managed things fairly well, but with the addition of the third job (teaching) and maintaining a long distance relationship, things are really starting to strain for me. I’ve noticed it for a few weeks now, but this weekend things are starting pile up.
I napped more this weekend than I have in probably the last two years. I almost never nap. I hate napping, in fact. It feels like a waste of time, when I could be using that time (daylight) to do something more desirable than tending to my body’s needs. And yet, this weekend I found myself napping for at least an hour each day in the afternoon. I also elected to cut time short with my girlfriend to tend to some much needed cleaning at my apartment. The alternative would have been more social engagements and an early morning commute back home to go to work. She understood that I needed the time away and supported my decision. It’s why she’s a great gal!
My focus has been off lately, too. I keep talking about how I want to go back to the gym, but I haven’t acted on it. Call it failure to plan, call it failure to action on an item, but I suspect the real culprit is depleted will power. No, I don’t mean that I’m not willing myself to the gym. I mean I think have decision fatigue. It’s a long accumulation of factors that have finally hit a tipping point: poor sleep, poor nutrition, too many demands on my cognitive workload, stress from things in life, added stress from social media, etc. It creates a feedback loop that further breaks me down. Because I don’t sleep well and still try to contend with normal daily activities, my will power and motivation wane; this leads to poor choices and procrastination through my favourite habit (watching YouTube videos), which keeps me awake, which makes it harder for me to do the things I need to do, which weakens my ability to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, which leads to lesser amounts of sleep, and the cycle continues.
I don’t have an obvious solution to this problem. What I need to do is to critically evaluate my obligations, priorities and goals to find a better fit with my habits. That will take longer than one blog post to figure out, but for the meantime, the best I can do is monitor my health and situation to guard against large scale system crashes.
A little while back, I swallowed some of my biases and checked out Tony Robbins’s documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru (trailer here). I had prejudged him as something in between a vacuous motivational speaker and a charlatan. I of course based this opinion on nothing and admit that it was incredibly closed-minded of me.
I quite enjoyed the documentary, and I felt that I was captivated by his charisma. While I know a lot of the business involves crafting a certain persona and message, and that the documentary is edited to create a particular narrative, it softened me to him and I wanted to check out some of his other works. I’m not interested in investing the money to attend his events (I’m not *THAT* open-minded), but I thought I’d give one of his books a shot. He also recently appeared in a podcast episode with Tim Ferriss, whom I’ve started to trust as something of an authority figure. Anything that Tim Ferriss says, I’m willing to listen to.
So, I checked out Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins.
There was a really cool perspective he shared that has stuck with me since hearing it. Explained the etymological origin of “decision” or “to decide.” Without getting technical, it splits the word into “de” and “cision” or “away” and “to cut,” or in essence, “to cut away.”
Ok, that doesn’t sound very insightful. But then he framed it in terms of what a proper decision entails. He notes that when we talk about “making decisions” in our lives, we often are speaking as if we are expressing wishes. To him, people “decide” to lose weight all the time, but never follow through on the execution. In other words, when someone says they’ve decided to exercise and lose weight, until they follow through on that action, all they are saying is “I wish to exercise and lose weight.”
To make it a proper decision, you have to essentially make a cut and discard every other alternative. When you decide something, you are firmly choosing not to entertain any other alternatives, and you are committing to that course of action. To decide is to cut off those alternatives.
Framing it that way made a lot of sense to me. It’s a criticism of myself that I’ve heard flavours of for some time, and it’s something I try to be mindful of. This past year I’ve been reading books and reflecting on myself in order to live more intentionally. I’ve had a few decision points so far that are opening up interesting futures to me. Right now, I’m looking at career moves; should I continue to become a paramedic, or should I commit more fully to teaching. I don’t have an answer to that questions yet. It’s still really early in the process and I’m fine to live with that ambiguity for now. I have plenty of time yet to explore my options.
There are other areas where making decisions has become important. For the sake of being cryptic, I cannot divulge them at the moment and I apologize for that. I’ve had a decision weighing over me recently that I finally pulled the trigger on. But there are other “decisions” that are manifesting themselves as “wishes” and I’m not forgetting about them (I’m looking at you, exercise!). I still haven’t followed through on committing to exercise, so for now that’s is my personal shame I carry around.
What I’m starting to wrestle with is how to take ownership of deciding my life’s course and what it means to be a person of character and commitment. It’s not a strength of mine historically, but it’s a virtue I seek to cultivate moving forward.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I sit on the Board for the Community Research Ethics Office. Our organization helps community organizations have access to support and research ethics reviews traditionally only offered to members of an academic institution. We field a number of applications each month that explain a research project to us, and we evaluate the degree of ethical considerations made by the organization/researchers and sign-off on projects that align with the requirements set out in Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on Conducting Research on Human Participants.
At each of our monthly meetings, the Board dives into lively discussion on topics not often considered in the course of normal research. During our last meeting, we had a discussion concerning the use of email during the data processing phase of a project. In a review we conducted, there was mention of researchers using email to share data across geographic distances (the study was occurring in multiple cities).
When we consider email, especially at a corporate level, our intuition is that it’s reasonably safe. There are the occasional reports of data breaches, but if you use adequate security measures, your content is relatively safe.
But there is a crucial consideration that we need to make when we conduct research. In research, the most important element is the rights of the participants. If a researcher wants safeguard the participant’s interests while the participant freely participates in a research project, then a number of additional measures must play into your research system.
The participant, by agreeing to participate in a study, trusts that the researcher will not only always make research decisions that respect the participant’s wishes, but also the researcher must work to actively protect the participant’s right to safety, security and privacy to the fullest extent possible.
This is where emailing data to researchers gets complicated.
The intuitive thought is that as long as your computer terminal is secure, the data is safe – if you can prevent anyone (except maybe a super spy) from breaching your data, you have done your due diligence.
So, here is your security weak-points and your measures to guard against a breach:
Yes, there’s a problem with the third bullet: email is more complicated that that.
When you send an email, you are not taking a document/letter, folding up a copy and sending the only copy via the web to the recipient. If that were the case, then email would be fairly secure. But, what happens with email instead is you end up copying the information to various sources as it gets uploaded, transmitted, copied, and downloaded over the web. There is a copy created in your computer’s cached memory, there’s a copy that get uploaded and saved to your email server, the data is transmitted to your recipient’s server, and that information is downloaded as a copy to your recipients device.
That’s right, device, not necessarily a computer. You see, a further layer of complexity is when we route mail to our mobile devices, which is yet another copy of the information. A computer is cumbersome to physically lose, but cell phones are lost/misplaced all the time. Same with external hard drives and flash drives. And don’t forget your mobile device; if you send the data on the same email platform that is accessible on an app on your phone, that information can be retrieved from your sent messages folder.
All of these points are potential security breaches. So, let’s update the list above as to the number of ways data can be compromised:
There are probably other ways the data could be breached that I’m not considering in this example, but I think I’ve made my point that ethical and security issues are ridiculously complex when considering research projects. Regardless of whether you think your data, if exposed, will actually harm your participants in any meaningful way, that is missing the point entirely. Your participant’s data was important enough for your to collect in the first place, and therefore you have an obligation to protect the rights and well-being of your participant to the fullest extent that you can.
The point of our ethics reviews is not to halt research. Our purpose is to help the researchers think of all of the ways we can conduct good research and ensure that our good practices ensure we can continue to conduct research in the future. We must learn from past mistakes and the harm that has come to people who participated in research (inadvertently AND in good faith). Respecting our duty to care is the cornerstone of what it means to do good research.
Last week, I taught my first class at college. It was quite the experience to say the least. Even now, I’m split between knowing that I did somewhere between “adequate” and “well,” and allowing the super self-critical side of me to autopsy the wreckage.
Wreckage is a gross overstatement because things weren’t *that* bad. I’m mostly critical over some common themes. First, I feel that the transitions between ideas could have used more intentional thought to make things smoother. Second, the second half of my presentation was fairly slap-dash in construction and could have spent less time buried under procrastination as I prepped. Finally, that my oration could have been better performed (read: slow down!).
The biggest observation was on just how exhausted I was when I finished. There are a number of reasons why I was so drained by the end, all of them preventable in hindsight: I didn’t sleep well the night before, I hadn’t eaten food all day prior to starting class, I hadn’t consumed any caffeine like I normally would have, I wore a moderately heavy sport coat for the first half of the class on an already humid day, I’m very animated when I speak, and teaching just takes a lot out of you. Only the last thing, I would say, is something I can’t control and will need to learn to manage. Everything else, yup, that was my fault. Next time, I’ll bring a lunch.
Those were the “bad” things. Almost everything else about the experience was great. I seemed to connect with the students. I felt that I was able to convincingly show that the students should take these issues in philosophy seriously. I feel like I earned their attention, despite it being a class from 1-4pm on a Friday.
Of the feedback I’ve received, students enjoyed my class and are looking forward to the rest of the term. That may be because I did my job well, or it could be because they feel less pressured by the work of the course. Time will tell on that front.
My final verdict for my first day of teaching is probably a B-. I made a fair number of points and supported my claims with evidence. The flow and presentation kept the audience entertained while sticking to a path that was clear to follow. There is room to improve, in that this felt like a first draft and could use a few more rounds of editing for coherence and to remove repetition, but otherwise a solid entry into the gradebook.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I had an idea for my class that online discussion postings that might be construed as uncivil could serve as a teachable moment in class to discuss and elaborate on. My plan was not to shame or rebuke the students in front of the class, but to take it as a chance to reflect on the content of the idea and why it might be disrespectful to others. I ran the idea by a colleague and she cautioned against it. She pointed out that you never want to be seen as “picking on” a student or singling them out in front of their peers.
Then, I realized that I forgot about the power imbalance that exists between the student, the collection of students, and I when I stand at the head of the class. Despite how I feel about whether I am truly a teacher, or if I’m closer to being their peer (compared to other teachers they encounter), I must remember that I am still their teacher. I institutionally have more power; I stand in front of them as an authority. I have power, whether I realize it or not.
Somewhere along the line, it was pointed out that picking on students picks them out from the amorphous mass that is your class and distances them from their peers. They are free to stand themselves apart, but I cannot force them for the sake of a teachable moment.
A Paramedic's Notebook 