Tag: Good Practice

New Year and New Updates

Happy New Year!

I hope you had a fun and safe weekend.  This year’s celebration was the smoothest we’ve seen at the bar in a long time.  No fights or accidents, and everyone left before close.  From the staff’s point of view, it was a great way to ring in the new year.

A big bit of news happened for me in early December – I got engaged!  After months of scheming, everything came together and my fiancé and I are busy with wedding plans.

The decision to pop the question also forced me to think more about my future, specifically the next 3-5 years.  While we are not planning to wed until late 2018, the added commitment of marriage raised some questions in my mind about what I need to focus on in terms of priorities.

When I started this blog, it was meant to help me focus on my learnings on my way to becoming a paramedic.  A lot has happened since then, and it would be bad if I ignored the contexts at play.  In the beginning, I was a bit down on myself, felt aimless, and I didn’t like work.  2016, while a crappy year for the world, was a good year for me in that I focused a lot on improving myself.  In that time, my conditions at work have markedly improved, and I feel better about myself and where I am in life.  The only thing that hadn’t shifted was my career – I was still running under the assumption that I would be applying off for a paramedic program and would restart my career in two year’s time.

Getting engaged, however, forced me to think critically about this.  With my fiancé just starting out on her own professional career, us moving in together in the near future, and planning for a wedding, it seems like a bad decision for me to drop the security I currently have and take several steps back for the sake of a new vocation.

Maybe if I were a few years younger (I turned 30 in December), I could have pulled this  gamble off.  But for the present, I will be putting my paramedic aspirations on the shelf to focus on building what I have in front of me.  Down the line, there is always a chance that I could make a pivot into medicine but for the interim, this is not a good choice for me.

Which now raises the question of what is happening to this blog?

Short answer: nothing.  I will keep the blog for the foreseeable future.

Long answer: a change in theme will need to be made.

Obviously this won’t be a medic blog anymore.  At the very least, this blog has been very broad, so I don’t see a lot changing in terms of content.  I’ll still post on topics that are relevant to me and my interests, such as personal development, teaching, etc.  I don’t know what the changes will amount to, but if you are enjoying my content now, then you can rest assured that things won’t change materially.  In time, you may see a new coat of paint and a some rearranging of the furniture.

However in the mean time, check back in each Monday for a new post.  Let’s keep this thing going!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

Reflection – The Cost of a Lack of Routine

I’ve posted a few times recently about how I’ve been incredibly slack on keeping up my (lack of) fitness habit.  The addition of teaching was enough for me to abandon fitness as a priority.  There are obvious costs associated with this, such as poorer health and eating habits, but there is also the financial cost that most people are aware of, and I don’t think I’ve really appreciated the magnitude of until now.

Since July, I’ve been paying for my membership to the gym without going.  This cost shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.  At various points since July, I’ve been aware that the fees were being applied to my credit card each month.  On reflection, I realized how much of a “death by 1,000 cuts” scenario this is.  During each month’s charge, I rationalized that the cost is fairly low.  Because it wasn’t breaking the bank, it was easier to excuse the bad habit.

Yet, it all adds up:

August – monthly fee $11.30
September – monthly fee $11.30
September – bi-annual equipment fee $20
October – monthly fee $11.30
November – monthly fee $11.30
December – monthly fee $11.30
 Total (CAD): $76.50

If you don’t include any interest accrued, I’ve spent a little over $75 to not go to the gym.  There are two ways of looking at it.  Either, $75 has been the cost of inaction (not going, or not cancelling my membership), or $75 has been what I spent to sit at home and do other things (opportunity cost).  Regardless of how I frame it, I’m out $75 with little to show or account for it.

I suppose the obvious next step is to create a solution to this problem.  With the new year and my birthday rapidly approaching, it makes sense to use this as an excuse to erase the bad history and start fresh.  I want to, however, learn from this experience.  It’s important that I reflect intentionally because otherwise I’ll be doomed to repeat the behaviour.

I don’t have a nifty solution to this at present.  I merely wish to make this observation public to hold myself accountable and get myself thinking about what I can do about it.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Odysseus’s Wifi

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.

Odysseus and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper, c. 1909 – jigboxx.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9684835

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

Blog – Off and On the Wagon (Of Fitness)

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

Blog – “You Look Tired”

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.

Blog: Decisions in Life

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

Thoughts on Email and Ethical Research

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.

Community-based research has become cut-throat in the last few years…

So, here is your security weak-points and your measures to guard against a breach:

  • Physically accessing terminal location – lock the building/room and restrict access
  • Accessing computer terminal – password protect computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal – ensure login credentials are enabled and encrypt the data before sending

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:

  • Physically accessing your terminal location
  • Accessing computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal
  • Your mobile device
  • Email server(s)
  • Recipients physical terminal location
  • Recipients computer terminal
  • Recipients data/email on terminal
  • Recipients mobile device

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.