What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I just saw an intersting post over on The Slacker Manager about greed, capitalism and children. Interesting comments, but I think the fear of creating a greedy little capitalist that the author worries about is baseless. His fear is that his son will come to expect a reward for every good deed. That isn’t what I see in children. They learn, especially as the rewards become fewer or less valuable, to internalize the good feeling they get when they get something. That internalization doesn’t continually require good things, presents or rewards to create the good feelings. It also doesn’t happen overnight in little children.

My wife has taken care of developmentally delayed and handicapped children for over 20 years. One of the children was about 5 years old and hadn’t gotten out of diapers yet. She was old enough, but didn’t appreciate the benefit of using the bathroom. She was very stubborn about this or any other discipline learning in part due to having been neglected by her parents for most of the first 5 years - “why pay attention to an adult now when they’d never payed sufficient or positive attention to me all this time?” One thing my wife noticed was that this child positively loved cranberry sauce. She still does 20 years later. My wife told her that she’d get a teaspoon of cranberry sauce if she went to the toilet in the right spot. Then it was most times, but not every time. Then it was only if the diapers were clean at the end of the day. Then it was only at Christmas and Thanksgiving with everyone else. The child, now 24, still uses the facilities. She doesn’t have accidents. And she still loves cranberry sauce. The internalization process of the gratification has taken place even in a person who has not matured to full adulthood and may never do so.

I was talking with my wife over morning coffee today. She said, “I’ve got all these piles of things I need to get put away and organized. They’re driving me nuts. I wake up in the night and these worries invite themselves into my mind.” She and I are both horizontally organized, so we have at least one stack of things to organize.

I mentioned the interesting thoughts that Terri, at From the Belly of the Beast among others, about the Ready for Anything notes that Buzz Brugman posted on his blog.

Her eyes lit up when I described the concept that your mind is always working at some level on any unfinished task. That eats up time and attention better spent somewhere else.

She’s decided to implement the concepts David Allen describes in his book “Getting Things Done” in a novel way. She works around the house, either caring for our grand children and caring for three girls (sisters) with special needs, or taking care of the house. She’s decided that the “contexts” that work for her are the rooms. She’s going to put a small spiral notebook in each room with the projects and next actions (she hasn’t digested all the koolaid yet, so she’s not calling them that…yet) listed for that room.

She’s also one of those people who doesn’t like to finish a task/project without having another task/project lined up, and preferrably started. This will give her mind the “tactile feedback” of having proects started all over the house, so that won’t upset her. By the way, for those of you in management school, her type in Myers-Briggs-speak is ISFP. The —P says she likes the idea of doing things, not completing things. —Js like to get done with things.

I found this web site for Envelope and Letter Folding. For many of us, the computer has moved us away from the traditional analog letter. In addition, pre-folded and pre-glued envelops for letters are everywhere.

To quote from their introduction:
“Why the Heck Would You Want to Fold an Envelope?
If you are not into envelope and letter folding you may
wonder why one should go to the trouble of folding up
an envelope when you could just buy one from a stationery
store. Well, first off, it is the very nature of hobbies that
they tend not to be entirely practical. In spite of that,
hand folding letters and envelopes is one of those rare
intersections of decoration and practicality, where paper
folding produces the satisfaction of making something
useful and novel. The folds can be extremely clever in
their attempts to reach a number of basic goals: to make
the largest possible envelope from a given piece of paper,
to latch or remain sealed with out need of adhesive, to
meet postal requirements and to be attractive.”

Now, to find a nice wax seal and some sealing wax…

There’s a great article over at dirtSimple.org that looks at how and why we think and act. The author describes the various aspects of “you” and “yourself” in somewhat computer teckie terms that serve to explain some of the idiosyncrasies and oddities of human behavior and thought that plague all of us “users.” I first saw reference to this on the 43 folders web site today.

The dirtSimple article is a very easy read, with a deceptively light-hearted style. The content is such that it will take several readings before I catch much, if any of it, and really understand it.

I have refrained from posting on the catastrophe that hurricane Katrina wreaked on Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana until now. I’ve had a couple of thoughts that stick in my head or that reappear regularly as I watch TV coverage, though, so I thought I’d put them on the blog.

On the second day of the calamity, as New Orleans and the surrounding area flooded, I watched people looting. I don’t mean the people who were looking for things to help them feed or clothe themselves and their dependents. I mean those taking expensive items that would be of no use to their survival in the disaster - jewelry, TVs, those kinds of things. I mentioned to my wife that I wonder if the looters understood what they were doing - they couldn’t use the loot where they were, and would have to leave it; they couldn’t take it with them when they were forced to evacuate; and all they had done was show everyone around them what kind of character they had.

Those ideas caused me to think and, eventually to write this. I don’t think the hurricane and the destruction is something done by God to man. I do believe that (in biblical terms) this calamity presents us all with an opportunity to show God and our fellow man what our true nature is. Will we help our fellow human? Millions are doing so in every way conceiveable. Will we hoarde what we have to keep only ourselves alive at the risk of sickness and death of others? Will we care for the weak, the infirm, and the children - those without enough to take care of themselves or with nothing at all?

I know that I will see my own true self exposed under these conditions. What will I, my family and friends think of me as a result?

Under stress people revert to type - what type am I?

Well, the long awaited DIY Planner website, spun off from A Million Monkeys Typing, is finally up! This site promises to be a great boon to those who’ve overdosed on digital planning and want to regroup around analog methods. Of course, for those of us adictive personalities, we’ll be able to OD on the creative variety we will surely find on this site. But the first step in any recovery program is to admit the problem is mine, not the sites. I can quit any time too…

This will be fun to watch. I can’t wait until the PocketMod guy gets together with the DIY Planners and comes up with some nifty new tricks that none of us has thought of.

I just found a fascinating web app through Lifehack.org. It’s called a PocketMod. The website is at PocketMod.com. It’s still in beta, so there are a few glitches, but it’s fascinating to try out and create a pocket sized folded, multi-page organizer. The next step should be to enable dropping or entering text into the app before printing. How creative!