I’ve talked a bit about my work with automation, scripting, and AutoHotKey here, and today I was reminded of how imperative it is to not ‘show your hand’ unless it is in your best interests to do so.
Automating tasks is great. After your first useful script, you might even feel prideful. you might want to scream it from the rooftops – “I AM GOD HERE”
This man’s mistake? not shutting the f*ck up
But dont. Ignore the urge. there will be plenty of time for bragging when you’re old and senile. Telling your co-workers, peers, or (heaven forbid) bosses about your ability to automate tasks will only harm you in the long run. They’ll realize that part of your job can be replaced by a robot at no cost. They cant or wont take into account the ammount of knowledge necessary to maintain this system, nor the fact that it just doesnt run in perpetuity – it needs a trained, smart operator or it’ll fall apart upon the next update.
The truly cynical bosses will look at you taking longer than expected to complete a task and ask themselves “Why doesnt he just automate it?”
And as they see you automating more and more tasks, you’ll be expected to do more and more things – even if you’re pulling the weight of 3 other employees, they’ll load you down with more tasks. This is how it works.
So keep your damn mouth shut. Brag to your friends on fourchan. tell your cat. nobody cares. It makes your job easier and thats nice. But dont expect anything other than perpetual shit if your superiors find out.
I can imagine the inevitable question –
“but mister stress, how is this fair to the job creators?”
Me: “Is a slave morally obligated to keep his master informed?” – Listen. I’m not in the business of fair. I’m in the business of keeping you stress free. Do what you want, but 9 times out of 10, “fair” is going to get you shafted.
I have this mental problem – I fall into ruts and my train of thought begins to resemble something like:
“When does it ever end?”
and
“Well, atleast I can relax when I’m dead”
Thing is, If I’d have solved my problems when they were tiny annoyances rather than gigantic festering emergencies, I’d have less ‘on my plate’ and less urgency with which to do it.
And yet I dont. I start to become obsessed with this idea of getting “personal time” – that is, time to myself. time alone, with no cell phone, no interruptions, and no distractions. Quiet time. Where I can just chill out and let the worries of the day wash off of me. And as I carve off several hours each night to myself, I neglect everything else, and all of my little problems worries and responsibilities grow ever so slightly larger.
As these problems begin to loom, I stress and freak out, and seem to need even more ‘personal time’ in which i, once again, neglect these problems. Push them out of my mind. Drink, smoke, and stare off into space until the next morning. and once again, these problems arent anywhere near resolved.
This negative feedback loop continues until I:
a) start losing grip on reality (happened about a year ago…was pretty bad)
b) force myself to fix these problems that are now screaming at a fever pitch in my ears
or (often)
c) simply miss deadlines
Obviously, none of these are conducive to my mental or physical well-being.
Once you’re in this loop its hard to break out of it. I need to stay ahead of these little problems. If I squash these tiny problems early, well, sure – the problems still never go away. Its still a never-ending cascade of bullshit – but the bullshit is simpler. Easier to deal with in a relaxed fashion than if I let problems rot and stack up around me.
I’m off to solve a big problem of mine right now. What are you going to take care of this evening?
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle doesn’t seem to keep pace with a modern world. Atleast not with the pace with which we’re currently consuming.
I propose an alternative:
Stop, Repair, and Wear-Out.
Stop – as in “Stop Consuming”. Similar to ‘reduce’ – but taken further. Stop consuming. Now. You’re drowning in a sea of waste, lies, and faulty ‘american dreams’ foisted upon you incessantly by hucksters and con-men. Stop consuming. Dont reduce, dont ‘cut down’ – Stop.
Repair – Learn to repair what you own. Whether its learning to sew (a $3 sewing kit and some googling added 6+ months of wear to my ‘work pants’), learning to repair electronics, or simply learning to performs routine maintenance on your PC or car. Learn it, do it. Check out the Owners Manifesto
Finally, I bring you to:
Wear Out – Once you’ve stopped consuming and have learned to repair what you already own, this one will happen automatically. Take what you’ve got and wear it out completely. Drive your vehicle until the wheels fall off, wear and repair your clothing until you cant wear them anymore. Keeping that old PC around even 10% longer will save money, save headaches, save shelf space, and save our environment.
Sidenote, the vast majority of people have no idea when they ‘need’ a new PC – Remove the viruses and crapware from your current box and it’ll do facebook and email just as well as any new PC out there.
As embarrassed as I am to admit it –
I signed up for one of those crowd-sourced micropayment labor mills.
you know the drill – “Work from home!”, “Make money completing simple tasks”
They of course use “Work”, “Money”, and “Simple” VERY loosely here.
And I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of in the back of a dirty van.
“Dear God, why? are you that hard up for cash?” I hear you scream –
No. I’m not. So why did I sign up? Hell if I know. maybe I was bored. Maybe I cant justify a new gaming laptop and thought that over the course of a month I could scrape together enough pennies from something like this to buy one.
But of course I cant. nobody can. I effectively made maybe $0.25/hour, and to make matters worse they pay other “workers” to verify your work. These people can’t read, and they can’t think critically. They reviewed my work, rejected half of it, wrote their reasoning in barely comprehensible broken English, and now my “credibility” rating is wrecked so badly I cant even complete basic tasks.
“But mister stress” I hear you say – “Why would you EVER do something like this in your leisure time?”
I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been around long enough to know better. These labor mills are arguably the worst things to come out of capitalism in the last 100 years – And if this were the late 1800’s, we’d have burned cloudcrowd headquarters to the ground.
And I just realized that I often make more per day, hands off, from my meager investment in Lendingclub than I would make in a full 8 hours on CloudCrowd (And I have no money in LC)
Moral of this story? Even if you don’t value your leisure time as much or more than your work time, some tasks simply aren’t worth doing. This goes doubly for tasks that allow others to make money off of your back.
Quitting smoking is the best thing I’ve ever done for stress reduction. Hands down.
I dont crave cigarettes, I’m not pissy anymore, I dont miss them, I dont think about them. I’m working dilligently on improving my indoor air quality through the use of anti-allergen filtering mediums and HEPA filters and good, old fashioned sweeping/vacuuming.
My morning cough is like 98.99% gone, and I no longer cough up green/black slime.
My relationships are starting to improve – I still get sleepy, but the absolute lethargy that I’d feel while lounging on the couch smoking is gone.
Let me say it again -Quitting smoking has been, by far, the biggest stress reducer I’ve come across since starting this blog.
The extra ~$165/mo isnt bad either. As long as I can remember to invest it, save it, or spend it wisely so that I can continue reducing clutter and useless shit.
Dont believe me? Follow my quitting path, give it 15 days and if you still disagree, feel free to call me a liar.
And I imagine it makes yours pretty stupid too.
Money makes my brain short out. I have a hard time keeping track of:
A) How much I have
B) How much I NEED
and
C) what my TIME is worth.
I’ve realized that I’ll do ridiculous, difficult, painful things for almost no money,
and if I’m not careful, I’ll burn real hours of my real life chasing literal pennies.
One of my bigger problems is that I manage to see “Money saved” and “Money earned” as entirely different concepts. When in reality they have the exact same effect on my balance, ‘Money Saved’ being even slightly more advantageous because I avoid several layers of taxes.
My one major example is my Condo – it has been sitting idle, languishing and honestly probably depreciating in value for the last 6 months. Not only is it losing value, It’s also sucking money through:
a) Condo administration fees
b) property taxes
c) utility bills
d) mortgage and mortgage interest
e) insurance
(Not to mention the ongoing stress and headache of knowing that I have a major responsibility that I’m neglecting)
On top of this, selling the condo will give me a good deal of my equity back in cold hard cash. It might take me a total of 15 hours to get it ready for sale.
15 hours of labor. .
For ~$20k in cash and an extra ~$375 per month!?
Assuming I can clear $20k in the sale, that’s $1333 per hour! and an extra $375 every month forever (in fees avoided – assuming I never sold or rented the place). At a job I can show up to late, Can show up to hungover, a job in which I can drink while working, with unlimited coffee breaks and unlimited smoke breaks (had I not quit) – Labor on my own terms, on my own time, with no boss breathing down my neck
And yet I find myself sitting on my ass looking through the gigs section on Craigslist. and I’m not sure why.
Seeing this observation written down is enough to move me in the ‘right’ direction. I’m going to start work on selling my condo this evening. What high-paying “job” are you putting off and avoiding? Let me know in the comments.
or “Your brain is a big dummy and we’re going to trick it”
Alright. I think I’ve mastered this skill.
I’ve done it so many times.
The beauty is that its almost completely painless.
Check it out – you’ll need a few supplies.
- box of nicotine gum, lowest strength available – the lowest strength is still stupidly high. This, combined with the outrageous price, and the fact that they only sell them in what appear to be 300-piece family packs makes me think that the people selling nicotine gum are more evil than the people selling cigarettes. Still, buy a box. You need it.
- Something to “cut” the gum with (because, as I said, the lowest strength is still an insane amount of nicotine and not conducive to quitting) – Get another type of gum. Whatever you like. but probably a similar flavor to that of the nicotine gum. Get roughly half as many pieces as you have pieces of nic gum. Or dont. whatever.
- Get some teabags. I’d recommend green tea for a couple reasons:
- Lighter, more distinct flavor
- less caffeine, so if you’re anything like me, you’ll drink more of it
- arguably better for you
Alright. you’ve got everything you need to do this. I’m just spitballing here and making this up as I go. It worked for me, but only accidentally. But lets go:
Week 1:
Continue smoking while you acquire the supplies. decide on a start date (hint: next monday). Dont freak out, this is going to be so easy you wont even know whats going on until it’s too late.
Week 2:
Do you take smoke breaks at work? If so, that stops here. You instead replace these smoke breaks with making a cup of tea and chewing a piece of nicotine gum. place the gum in your mouth as you start making the tea and just leave it in there normally until you’re about to start drinking it. This is now your smoke break ritual.
Continue doing this for the entire week. This is the most painless way you’ve ever quit smoking.
Week 3: You’ll start to feel a weird craving for tea. When this happens, give into it. But dont forget to pop a piece of gum into your mouth beforehand. What we’re doing is making your brain associate the process of making and drinking tea with the calming feeling of nicotine gum. Keep this up. You want to strengthen this association.
Week 4-5: You’re done smoking cigarettes. Throw away any you have, clean out and hide your ash trays, hide your lighters, any other smoking paraphenalia. Sounds harsh now, but it wont once you’re at this point. It’ll be a mild speedbump at best.
You’re now a tea drinker, through and through. Keep it up as you continue not smoking. Continue with the nicotine gum too, BTW. this is simply there to keep you from exploding and to reinforce the brain’s association with tea and nicotine.
Week 6: Good. you havent smoked for 2 weeks. Cigarettes nary cross your mind anymore, and you’ve tried teas from all around the globe. you’re probably still chewing nicotine gum, but probably not as much as before. If you’ve dropped it completely, good. you’re done! congratulations! if not, this is what we purchased the other, non-nicotine gum for. Start cutting your nicotine gum intake by literally cutting the piece of nicgum down and replacing the part lost with the non-nicotine gum. Increase this ratio of non-nicotine to nicotine until you’re just chewing gum. and then stop chewing gum because that shit is bad for your teeth.
There. I solved your smoking problem.
Did this work for you? Did it not? Comments? Any ideas on how to improve this method? Leave us a comment.
I have this problem at work.
Its my own damn fault, my own damn creation, and 90% of it is just the machinations of my own damn sleep-deprived mind.
I dont follow through on shit all the time. Someone will call in and ask for something weird. Then I’m like “I dont know I need to ask $_person about your weird f*cking request” and then I’ll often walk to his or her office, see that they’re not in, and say “k i’ll talk to them tomorrow”
Thing is, I always forget to do that.
And that’s almost never a problem, because I don’t take off work. So when these neglected and rightfully PO’d people call back, I catch the call, calm them down, and deal with the problem.
In the rare case that I’m too sick to come to work (because I rarely take off otherwise), things can get sour quickly. I start stressing like crazy until I get back into the office. I had a wonderful weekend recently. A nice 5 day setup punctuated by bronchitis in which I spent 4 days or so just sleeping trying to shake the (completely overblown) fear and sick sinking feelings about being a ‘bad worker’ – whatever the hell that is.
Because I never look at the long-term, the effective result of this is that I cant and don’t ever take vacation and I become this angry, dark, hollow shell of a man. The long term solution would be to just to follow through on things, or just as easily, email these $_people and let them handle it. But the short term solution is just to never take off work and worry all the time.
I’m my own worst enemy in this regard and I don’t know why.
But now I know. And Knowing is half the battle.
In my last post I talked about cleaning my house in preparation for appraisal – This turned into more of a great purge. I located and generated more than enough garbage to fill my weekly curbside receptacle several times. I sorted it into ‘perishable’ (stuff that’s gonna stink), and nonperishable items. the perishable items made it curbside. i’ll work on removing the rest from the premises after this week’s trash pickup.
About half of my purge focused on my basement. I’ve acquired so much stuff that I “might” need – antiquated PC hardware – (never know when I’ll need a 10/100 PCMCIA NIC or an ISA sound card – oh, right. Never. Never is when i’ll need these items.) or 3 year old business documents that were only marginally useful when they were new and are completely worthless now.
So I sorted and disposed of this stuff – trashing the old hardware and sorting, scanning, and shredding the paper documents. most of the clutter in my basement is now put in its proper place (the garbage bin), and my downstairs workspace is now, for the most part, ready for business. Over the last couple days, my city has gotten some well-needed rainfall. quite a bit actually. So much in fact that I got several gallons coming into my basement. This is where I saw the greatest benefit to the purge – I had no more boxes of paper documents on the floor to get wet and ruined. in fact the only thing remaining on the floor at all are a 2×4 and some bricks. my network infrastructure, which I’m very proud of, is elevated 2 feet off the floor, suspended on shelving hung from the cieling. my workbench has metal castors keeping even its beefy wooden legs elevated above any potential water damage.
So while I did spend some time in my basement sweeping water around, it wasnt very stressful – after all, there was no urgency to the process (aside from removing my cat’s ability to roll in it and track it upstairs) as I had nothing left down there for it to destroy, and had I left my basement to its own devices, the dehumidifier would’ve made quick work of the infiltration anyway.
No tip today, just an observation – these small changes can indeed have a major impact – and once I’ve seen how small of an impact on my life that water infiltration actually has, my mind is just a bit more at ease when I hear those drops falling or see stormclouds rolling in. So let it rain. I’ll be sleeping soundly.
As a stressed-out twentysomething in the top 1% of wealth worldwide, working less than 40 hours a week at a relatively quiet job for a relatively laid-back employer- I’m looking EVERYWHERE I can to find and eradicate my stressors. I should be chillin’ out maxin. but I’m not. Not yet.
One place I’ve so far neglected to look is my sleep schedule. Probably because I dont care to mess with that. Its the way that it is for a reason. All the good stuff happens late at night, and that’s when I get time to think and work on personal projects. Plus, a little less sleep wont hurt me, right?
But then I started doing some research and found that my sleep is severely lacking. I’m getting about 6.5 hours a night and the CDC recomments 7-9. I started running a smart alarm on my phone to wake me up at the easiest part of my sleep cycle. it also graphs my sleep pattern and estimates my total time spent sleeping. Here’s what the graph looks like:
But this alone is only going to provide me with more insight into my sleep patterns, and allow me to wake up easier. It wont, in itself, get me more sleep.
To do that I’m gonna need good, old-fashioned discipline.
Research also suggests that I should cut out alcohol and nicotine before bed. That might take abit more effort, but its worth a shot.
I have a LAN party this weekend but starting Monday im going to try to start getting a full 8 hours per night. i will update you on how that goes