“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

We can credit Jack Torrence, Jack Nicholson’s character in the 1980 film The Shining for popularizing this proverb that dates as far back as the mid-1600s.

Americans continue to work more hours than their counterparts in other countries and as we are in the midst of a (finally!) government-acknowledged recession, it does not appear that in the near future that employers will be encouraging more vacation time, personal days, or working in a little “downtime” into our daily work schedule.

No worries some of us say!  Our lives are replete with a variety of great technological tools, by way of the internet, that allow us to never leave our desk to be entertained or “play.”  Social websites such as Facebook or MySpace offer an almost endless selection of “applications” for distraction from our stressful workday.  Yahoo! Games continues to offer games-arcade games, card games, board games, puzzle games…the list goes on and on.   Video sharing sites such as YouTube continue to bring us many laughs at the office with their quirky or sometimes scandulous videos.

Where am I going with this?  What do you do when these entertainment or play options are no longer allowed in the workplace?  I don’t see Mark from accounting carrying a Yahtzee game to the lunchroom for a quick roll of the dice or Marie challenging you to a game of paper football at her desk.

• What to you do to “relieve stress” during your workday via the internet?
• Do you only access these sites at work or at home as well?
• What is your opinion as to how this effects your productivity?

Tags: Fun, Games, Google, News, Social Networking, Technology, Websites by JD - No Comments »

The immediate response is one where skepticism plays anchor to hope: Could crowd-funding of real journalism work to actually, you know, save journalism?

Good ideas are always ruined by realities of humanity and this human reality involves not just money but bidding. It’s not just bidding, but it pulls from the masses instead of the elite. The only thing more corrupt than the elite is the masses.

At least the elite can be thrown over a cliff (or beneath a guillotine in one century) for misdeeds against the masses. But what happens when the masses are guilty? Does everybody just go home dodging accusatory fingers? Is a sacrificial lamb appointed?

Yikes, talk about a catch 22. But it will be fun to watch the experiment Spot.us is currently perpetrating in Northern California—David Cohn was able to talk the Knight Foundation out of $340,000 to give it a shot.

Before we get into how this crowd-funded journalism works, let’s address the present crisis. Media conglomerates own your news and with the help of the Internet and cable TV have created a 24-hour news cycle. While that’s been happening, traditional newspapers have been losing subscribers, money, and firing journalists. Bottom line: the watchdogs are employed by those they used to watch, and the formerly watched have pushed for more news in shorter time spans, which means less time and funding to investigate the flood of press releases in the inbox, often from PR/lobbying organizations hired by the formerly watched.

And then there’s blogging, good for the proletariat, bad for anybody actually looking for (expensive) truths. Investigative journalism, it is feared, is on the outs because nobody can afford it any more except those who’d rather nobody investigated at all.

Spot.us, then, thinks the answer is some good old-fashioned grassroots ingenuity, the kind that raised all that money for Barack Obama. Think the mayor is on the take from local contractors? Propose an investigation and donate $5 toward funding a report. If enough other people want that story investigated and are willing to fork over some cash to accomplish it, then you’ve got yourself an investigative reporter on the case.

Nobody guarantees he or she is a good reporter, but at least there’s somebody looking into it, right? And there’s that thing with the bidding: seems ripe for abuse, seems subject to similar problems we have today, as suddenly large sums of cash flow in toward particular stories in order to distract from certain other pesky stories.

But perhaps there’ll be a mechanism in place to control for rigs—and you know there’ll be attempts at rigging if this gets off the ground. But hey, it’s better than sitting on our citizen journalistic heels, right?

Tags: News by JasonLeeMiller - 1 Comment »

But only when on a deadline…

It’s hard to know how to react to psychological research saying procrastination is now an official mental illness affecting about 20 percent of the population. The cynic notes immediately this telling tidbit: psychologists warn these people need therapy.

Therapy, in case you didn’t know, is how psychologists stay in business. With all these psych majors pumping out of the liberal arts pipeline, there seems an obvious need to create more loonies—even if the loonies are generally functional, generally sane most of the time. There’s a lot of money in just slightly crazy. More drugs to dispense, more hours logged.

But that could be another sign of mental illness: denial. It could be humans have wires crossed in their brains all the time. Just add it to the list of human conditions. Human: man or woman existing in the throes of Kant’s constants of birth, death, and sexuality, but whose pandemic denial of evolutionary-societal conflicts makes them generally a little bit nuts.

Wouldn’t be hard to prove there are a lot of crazy humans, would it? It may be we only notice crazy when it’s really crazy, like-a-violent-monkey crazy or eat-your-liver-with-some-fava-beans-and-a-nice-chianti crazy. Maybe more subtle types of crazy we just tolerate and label as the character flaws that make a person human.

Maybe immediate manic skepticism or depressive acceptance of either theory is a bit too, well, bipolar. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe that’s a lie too. Doesn’t matter, the research shows what it shows: procrastination is a mental illness and the digital age isn’t helping things one bit.

I remember thinking ten years ago about how many kids I knew were on Ritalin and I wondered if too much stimulation—TV, radio, the Internet, cell phones, movies, music, games, well, you name it—wasn’t contributing to everybody having so much trouble paying attention. We know now that multitasking isn’t what it’s cracked up to be—it actually makes one slower—and I may not have been far from the mark according to the procrastination research.

So here’s what’s up: Chronic procrastination is more common than depression or phobias, and doesn’t affect any particular demographic. Rather, it affects people across racial, gender, and socio-economic lines:

“[I]t encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, causes insomnia, and indirectly affects health by discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor. Sufferers are also more likely to have accidents at home involving unmended appliances.”

They think procrastination is on the rise because of email, web-surfing, social networking, texting, YouTube, blogging, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s not a new thing, not by a long shot. Time-wasters (”sufferers” of procrastination), they think, are hard-wired to be that way by evolution, by survival instinct. Back when we lived in caves, we only turned on the go-getter attitude when absolutely necessary, like when a saber-toothed tiger was staring us down, and hurrying the hell up suddenly mattered. So then, add this to list of human conditions as well: generally lazy until given a good reason to do something.

Take a good look at orangutans, how they lay about (you can see them on one of the Discovery channels), and then walk by a backyard with a hammock some time. Do you think there’s a difference?

It wasn’t really clear from the article about the study what was meant by “therapy.” When my grandmother was growing up, “therapy” entailed her parents taking switch to her backside. They didn’t know that causes other problems perhaps worse than laziness, which is why we (as a society) don’t do that anymore.

Today we use deadlines, and chronic procrastinators push the limits of those deadlines. Researchers say it’s not true when they tell themselves they work better under pressure; they just have selective memories and put those times they succeed in their mental pockets while conveniently forgetting the times they crashed and burned. One more human condition: We kid ourselves a lot.

How about a different, more radical proposal than trying to rewire a brain hardwired for energy conservation (i.e., chronic procrastinator)? How about we slow down and enjoy life from time to time? Maybe it’s the workaholic who’s crazy, instead?

Yeah, I know. Not gonna happen. I suppose brains are easier to rewire than entire achievement-driven societies.

Tags: Blogging, Business, Computers, Fun, Internet, News, Productivity, Ramblings, Technology by JasonLeeMiller - 2 Comments »

Europe’s got it right, man. All that work just isn’t worth it. A Yahoo HotJobs survey says half of Americans are cancelling their vacations this summer because of concerns about the poor economy.

Gas prices lead to more expensive everything, adjustable mortgage rates lead to a need to work more hours and save money while companies start laying off workers like there’s no tomorrow–which also means remaining workers have to pick up the slack of those laid off.

It totally sucks. When you can barely afford to live, you sure can’t afford to take a break or spend money to go somewhere. Give a big thanks to big oil, investment banks, and a gov’t that not only looks the other way while its citizens are gouged, but bails out the bigwigs while stepping on the middle class.

If anybody gets within reach of Bush’s damn veto pen, grab it from him.

Cheers.

Tags: News by JasonLeeMiller - 1 Comment »

You have heard it time after time that there is money to be made online, yet it seems like you just can’t find an outlet to attach yourself and get that cash flowing. Today, the web has without a doubt emerged as one of the most viable platform to earn a living for the skillful. But, it is not without opportunities for one’s that lack skills either ( designing, coding and so on ).

Internet has given a new meaning and new life to many, be it financially or in terms of peace and sense of satisfaction. Most of us knowingly ignore some of the outlets on the web that allow us to make money. By no means this is an extensive list but hopefully this post will introduce you to atleast one new platform. [Read more →]

Tags: News by Ritu B - 2 Comments »

Here are some simple and basic tips that we can apply to become successful,

1. Let go off the Past, Act and Apply in the Present and Shape up the Future
2. Utilize your failures as a guidance towards success
3. Do not try. Trying is quitting when you are almost there. Just do it.
4. Make a list of your dreams. No matter how hard it might be to achieve just sit down and write all your dreams down.
5. Make a list of your goals and think how you can achieve them
6. Use negative feedbacks and criticism to your advantage and better yourself
7. If you want to be successful in someone else’s game ( if you have a boss ), play by their rules
8. Make a list of your value. What do you value most and build your success upon them
9. Keep personal time separate from business time
10. Your success depends on your achievements.

[Read more →]

Tags: Business, Internet, Life, News by Ritu B - 4 Comments »