I think these are good tips and they sound like pretty good meals, too.  But given that the Mrs. is not that crazy about chicken and I pretty much don’t like eating the same thing two days in a row ever, I doubt I’ll do this exactly.  Still, I like the idea of making something that can be remade into several different things, I like the recipe ideas, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t just freeze the stripped chicken meat and spread these meals out with a mix of things between just chicken.

BTW, as one of the commentators pointed out, not making stock from the left-over carcass is in itself a waste.  But that’s perhaps another food-oriented post.

Three somewhat related thoughts about it all:

• This was an interesting viewing experience for me, one that was “live” and “present,” but also “not” and removed.  Lessig was live in a lecture hall at Harvard, and I watched it with about 25 people at EMU (including Derek and a couple of students from my 516 class who made it out) in a room in the library with a large projection screen and a very nice sound system.  While Lessig talked, I also watched Twitter stream by with the #wireside hashtag. So it was like being there– actually, in some ways cooler than being there since a similar experience was going on at 40 different sites all over the world at that moment.But it was also not at all like being there.  I saw Lessig talk live at the CCCCs in San Francisco back in 2005, and I think he is the undisputed king of delivering incredible conference presentations and slide shows.  He gave the best talk I’ve ever seen at a conference that time in San Francisco, that’s for sure.  His talk last night was good (though not unproblematic, as I’ll mention in a second), but it wasn’t quite the same as being “right there” in the meat space of that room in Cambridge. Much of it was some of the wonkiness of the technology, and the split between focusing in on Lessig and on his slides.  If I was directing the shoot, I’d say keep the camera on his slides, but of course you do want to actually see the guy too.But beyond that, it was both a live but disembodied and not quite as vivid viewing experience I had quite frankly never experienced before.  it wasn’t quite being there, but it was more interactive than just watching it on TV or watching a recording.  I’ve never gambled in the “sports book” section of a casino or at an off-track betting site, but I suspect that’s a similar kind of viewing and interaction experience.
• It was a pretty darn good speech, but it wasn’t his greatest.  He started off with a discussion of cigarettes, cell phones, wifi, and cancer, particularly this GQ article, and the possibility that we may very well be in the place with cell phones and wifi right now that we were in back in the late 50s/early 60s with cigarettes, a place where people didn’t realize the dangers.  Compelling, but he just kind of drops it after he brings it up.  And really, as I think was clear in his speech where he basically interrupts it with a fairly long section about the importance of fixing the things wrong with Congress, I don’t think Lessig’s heart is completely there with the issue of copyright reform.  He said as much a few years ago, that he was more or less “done” with this copyright stuff and he was now moving on to institutional corruption generally and fixing Congress in particular.In a way, Lessig is a victim of his success, not unlike a whole bunch of writers and artists, notably musical acts like the Rolling Stones, Ringo and Paul McCartney, the Who, and Led Zeppelin.  The Rolling Stones and the Who (well, the two remaining ones) are still out there performing, but are they even bothering to write and record new albums?  Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are still coming out with new material, but honestly, does anyone care about hearing them do anything other than the music that made them famous in their 20s?  This is apparently why Robert Plant has refused to reunite with John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page to restart Led Zeppelin:  no one would care about anything new they do, so what’s the point?So while Lessig did his copyright and remix spiel and he patiently and carefully answered questions asked from around the world for a good 45 minutes after he talked for almost 45 minutes, I don’t think his heart was really in it.  Until the last question, actually:  someone asked something along the lines of “what is blowing your mind right now.”  Lessig lit up and spoke enthusiastically about his concern about the recent Supreme Court case for Citizens United and also for his Fix Congress First work.
• There are some conflicts and inconsistencies with Lessig’s call for open computing and remix culture that I guess I kind of knew about before but which I thought were really visible Thursday.  Remix culture is important and ought to be fostered in all kinds of ways– by the way, I stumbled across this cool book/project that’s available as a book and as a downloadable PDF, Remix:  Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. But as Derek and one of my grad students talked about after this at The Corner, the examples of remix “art” and “culture” are always a little thin.  The example Lessig had in his talk was of a series of live “remixes” of sorts of someone’s effort to remix a Breakfast Club mashup. I was reminded of the remix after remix of the Hitler meme.  This is all interesting and such, but… well, how much of it is “art?”  Remixing is a valuable and useful creative activity, especially for amateurs and fans and academics (I am all three at times), but it’s not quite the same as “creativity” or “art” exactly, is it?And as for Apple:  on the one hand, I completely agree with all the critiques about their rigid controls over devices via the Apple Store, about their secrecy, their reluctance to “open it up” even a little, etc.  On the other hand, I think every person they showed in the crowd at Cambridge (including Lessig) had an Apple laptop of some flavor, and Lessig himself confessed his love of all devices Apple.  Me too, and at least two of the reasons why I am such an Apple devotee is the integrated “look and feel” of nearly every piece of software and hardware, and the fact that Apple stuff “just works.”  There might be better phones than the iPhone out there, but since I have an Apple computer and all I need to do to get the iPhone to work on it is plug it in, why would I possibly bother experimenting with anything else?But of course, this beautiful integration, simplicity, and reliability of the software and hardware is a result of a closed system.  Proprietary-based Windoze inconsistencies between software and hardware are bad enough; open source/”free” software for these systems are often a hit and miss proposition.  Sure, you can get it to work and you can feel virtuous and smug about running all open source software on the PC you cobbled together with parts you salvaged, but that’s a pain in the ass.  It’s a heck of a lot easier and more elegant (albeit more expensive) to embrace the warm and glowing Apple logo.

Based on flipping through both books and reading their back covers, my initial impression was that these books take opposite views on the notion of “productivity.” Allen’s book, I presumed, was about how to get more things done, while Ferriss’ book was about how to recognize what you don’t need to do so you have more time to do thing things you want to do. I thought (and still do think) that dichotomy is potentially interesting, though don’t ask me now what that paper/presentation/article/web site/book looks like.

And besides that, I thought I might actually learn something about being more productive.

My initial impression of Allen’s book has proven to be largely correct, though what I think is interesting (and what I suspect will be similar in Ferriss’ book) is that Allen’s approach to productivity is to essentially get “stuff” out of your head and onto various kinds of lists. The theory here is that if you have a reliable and external system for keeping track of all of the “things” that need to be “done,” then you can have “stress-free” productivity since you a) always know what to do next, and b) don’t have all of that stuff bottled up in your head and causing various psychic damage, e.g., stress.

In terms of just its advice, Allen’s book strikes me as being an interesting mix of “really good ideas” and “common sense” I already knew, recognizing that sometimes sense is far less than common. The system that Allen has is fairly well articulated in this image/flowchart:

First, you need to gather all of your “stuff.”  What’s “stuff,” you ask?  Basically, everything.  Here’s how Allen defines it on page 17:

Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. The reason most organizing systems haven’t worked for most people is that they haven’t yet transformed all of the “stuff” they’re trying to organize.  As long as it’s still “stuff,” it’s not controllable.

So “stuff” is pretty much anything and everything– more on that in a bit.

Now, the idea of taking your “stuff” and doing some very specific things– make it part of a project, throw it away, file it (for reference or “for someday”), or simply “do it”– is pretty good advice.  And of course, “GTD” is more than a cottage industry, with devotees and software and spin-offs galore. While I was reading Allen’s book, I came across this post on ProfHacker using a software called “Things” to manage the whole GTD, um, “thing” for academia. I was inspired and attracted to the fact that I could get a version of this that would sink to my iPhone, so I’ve been playing around with GTD in my own life. Any of these productivity/efficiency systems have to be tailored and altered by the user of course, and I’m still trying to figure out how this can work for me.  So far, so good.

But beyond the advice, I think it’s a kind of curious book. First off, the main audience that Allen appears to have in mind is some sort of executive-type, one who has assistants and underlings– e.g., not me. Routinely, he makes reference to “your assistant” or how to “properly delegate” projects to people who report to you. To negotiate this, I have to make some complicated interpretive moves to make the advice work for the likes of me.

Second, I was struck by the large number of anecdotes that Allen tells from his experiences as an “executive/life coach.” I suppose that makes sense, but you know those professors/teachers who relate each and every thing in a class back to some sort of personal anecdote, even when it doesn’t always apply? It’s a little like that at times. But besides that, it seems to me the personal anecdote is itself an interesting rhetorical strategy for a book like this, one I expect will be repeated in Ferriss book.

The other interesting thing to me rhetorically/critically is the definitive boundaries that Allen sets up between things, though at the same time, there is an element of multitasking here. GTD’s projects and lists and other strategies are always about both context and fixed boundaries: the projects/”stuff” are distinct lists that draw clear distinctions between home and work, and tied to specific contexts like “at the computer” or “traveling.” I don’t know but my own work and interpretation of the world is not often that black and white. But like I said, there is an element of multitasking: for example, Allen suggests keeping track of phone calls you need to make for when you are in some other situation but able to make those calls.

I think my biggest problem/question/concern to explore eventually is Allen’s definition of “stuff.”  Allen makes it clear that you have to parse this out a bit. It isn’t enough to put “get car fixed” on a list as an example of stuff; the good GTD-er will list stuff like “make phone call to mechanic,” “schedule/put on calendar time to get car fixed,” “drive car to garage,” etc. I suppose that’s a good idea, but how just how deeply can you parse these things?

Ultimately, the limit that this book has (and I think that Ferris will be similarly limited) is this whole “get it out of your head and you will be free” philosophy. I’m all for getting stuff down on lists, but I’m not sure that actually means that it is getting out of my head, and detailed to-do lists divided up into different categories/projects and the like doesn’t make me feel necessarily free; actually, it makes me feel just the opposite.

And making lists doesn’t mean “getting things done.” I know lots of people who are really good at organizing things and making lists, but when it comes to actually “doing it,” well, not so much.

Allen says at the end of his book to come back to it in three or six months; I probably will do that after reading about the four hour work week.

Will was off school this week and because I’m teaching online (and thus a little more flexible in my whereabouts) and because we didn’t spend as much time with my parents at Christmas as we probably should have, Will and I came down here for a few days.  Annette, unfortunately, still was teaching/working, and (even more unfortunate) watching over a kinda sick dog.

It’s been a pleasant enough visit. The highlight clearly was Mardi Gras, which was a much bigger deal down here in Southern Alabama than I thought.  We didn’t make it into Mobile for the big parades, which was a shame since they claim to be “the original” Mardi Gras (take that, copy-cat New Orleans!), but the local parade through Gulf Shores was a lot of fun. Here’s a link to some picts; here’s my favorite chunks of video, me catching one of the things commonly thrown from the floats, moon pies:

Will and I also spent a very cool afternoon climbing around the battleship USS Alabama and the submarine USS Drum while my parents stayed back and read.  At first, I thought my parents were being party-poopers, but once I got on board, I understood:  it was a lot of fun, but the chutes and ladders and tiny doors mean it’s a little like climbing around in the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese.

And we saw an old fort, and we were at a thing where they shot off an old canon… wow, very military themed, I guess.  I “ran”/walked one day on the beach, which was pretty good exercise albeit kind of cold.

All in all, a nice enough visit, though I don’t know if I’ll be back anytime soon.  My parents are talking about going someplace different next year, and to be honest, I have a hard time making seeing me and Annette making our own vacation kind of trip here. But the moon pies are good.

It’s all rather bothersome in at least two different ways. First, I swear they say “ease” or “easy” at least 30 times in this 5 minute video.  Second, the uses they demonstrate of this board aren’t exactly “transformative:”  really, it seems to replicate classic elementary school pedagogy, with students sitting in neat rows, the teacher pointing at something on the board, and, instead of writing with chalk and erasing with an eraser, the teacher just uses his hand!  Wow!  And to the extent that the students are actually involved in using these things, it is to do stuff that would just as easily be done on a whiteboard or a chalkboard.

It’s all rather odd because I know these smart boards can actually be interesting tools.  They have them at Will’s school (none in Pray-Harrold as far as I know, and I don’t think there will be any coming into the building anytime soon), and, from what I’ve seen, Will and his teachers use them a lot to project some sort of web-based thing, to project some sort of slide show, and/or to demonstrate something on the computer desktop the teacher wants to show.  The touch screen makes it a lot easier to do these things than it is with a computer hooked up to a projector. And at Will’s school, I think the students play around with them as much the teachers– at least that’s what I’ve seen.

After seeing this, I immediately thought of this recent CHE article, “Class Produces Parody of ‘The Office’ to Highlight Challenges of Teaching With Technology.” This one does include a YouTube video:

It’s funny because it’s true, and the smartboard promo video is also not funny because it’s true.

I wrote an essay a while back about chalkboards as a technology, and I quoted Larry Cuban in it as saying something along the lines of teachers don’t change the way they do things as a result of technology just because they can.  Rather, teachers change the way they do things as a result of technology if they perceive that new use of technology as being beneficial to their teaching– both for their students and themselves.

I guess I’d amend/revise that slightly. If teachers aren’t willing or aren’t able to really rethink the way that technologies can transform their teaching, then they shouldn’t bother with the expense and hassle of things like “smart” boards.  And if teachers want it all to be so “easy” that they don’t have to think about it all, well, that’s kinda dumb.  I worry about this at my own institution where I see some of my colleagues wanting things like “smart” boards and other bells and whistles not because they would do anything significantly or meaningfully different because it’s cool.  Kind of like that Monty Python sketch about the button that goes “bing.”

Actually, that University of Denver video has some good advice for getting started with teaching with technology:  get the students involved, allow for more collaboration, and don’t be boring.  Of course, the professor at the end of that video also talks about trying out “those clickers.”

Wait, I got distracted.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, multitasking….

The CHE article is good and probably worth teaching because it covers the issue from a variety of different angles– certainly not just from the “multitasking is bad” one.  There’s some kind of information here about the “history” of research on multitasking and various experiments, but I have to say (as someone who doesn’t do this kind of research) that a lot of this seems kind of like parlor games to me.  For example:

As far back as the 1890s, experimental psychologists were testing people’s ability to direct their attention to multiple tasks. One early researcher asked her subjects to read aloud from a novel while simultaneously writing the letter A as many times as possible. Another had people sort cards of various shapes while counting aloud by threes.

Well, duh, but isn’t that more like making someone say the alphabet backwards during a sobriety test or something?  I don’t know if that necessarily tests a person’s ability to do more than one thing at once though giving most attention to a single task.  For example, as I am writing this post, I am listening to my iPhone (REM right now) and I was just interrupted to take a phone call from my wife.  That’s multitasking, but it’s not like what these people seem to mean by multitasking.

Or I guess that’s the problem here– I’m not sure there’s a very clear definition of what multitasking is.  For example, part of the argument that comes up against multitasking is that increasingly old school argument about no laptops in the classroom.  Here’s an extreme example of that:

“I’m teaching a class of first-year students,” says David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “This might well have been the very first class they walked into in their college careers. I handed out a sheet that said, ‘Thou shalt have no electronic devices in the classroom.’ … I don’t want to see students with their computers out, because you know they’re surfing the Web. I don’t want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me.”

I don’t know who Meyers is or what his scholarship says, but that last line– I want them paying attention to me– seems pretty telling and egocentric.  And  it’s this potential lack of paying attention to me, the professor/teacher/sage on the stage/keeper o’ wisdom that has got most people like Meyers thinking like this.  Don’t get me wrong; I will sometimes ask students to close up their laptops to pay attention to something, especially if it is one of those times I have to go into a five minute lecture “about important stuff for the class” mode.  But generally, I don’t want to be the center of the class, and if my students find it easy to be distracted by Facebook (or whatever), then it’s probably a combination of me being boring or them not wanting to be in class.

One more thing:  I don’t think multitasking is even remotely a phenomenon that has come abut only with the age of the Internet.  I grew up in a multitasking household.  The television was ALWAYS on when I was a kid, and now when I am home visiting my parents, three sisters, and all the kids and in-laws (I think it’s 17 0r 18 people total), it is not at all uncommon for their to be three different televisions in different rooms but still within sight, all tuned to different channels.  My parents always read the newspaper or magazine while watching TV (or with the TV on– I’m not sure the difference was ever very clear when I was a kid), and layered over that would always be some kind of conversation.  When I go back home now, all of my adult siblings and their spouses will sit around watching TV, playing some kind of game, checking laptops or cell phones, watching children, eating snacks, and planning the next meal, all at the same time.

I mean, really:  in “real life,” who just “pays attention?”

#1:  Clearly, there was not a woman on the development team. Already all the the “feminine hygiene” jokes have been made, and I am quite confident that a woman on the team would have suggested the “problem” with the iPad name.  But beyond that, note that this intro is a bunch of white guys.

#2: I still await a device where I can store, read and make notes on PDFs. I think.  As I have commented/posted about before, I don’t read that many “trade store” books of the type you’d read with iBooks or Kindle, but a device where I could access the piles and piles of marked-up PDFs of journal articles I use to teach would be very VERY useful to me.  I don’t think this does that yet.  On the other hand, since this thing is tied to the open-source ePub platform, I suspect that there will be some way to convert PDFs relatively easily relatively soon.

#3: I think this is more of a “netbook” than it is a giant iPod. I say that because you can add a keyboard and because the keyboard that’s built in for stuff seems pretty workable, and also because I think you’d use this pretty much the same way you’d use a netbook:  some surfing, some reading, watch some movies, some email, some facebook, some games, etc., etc., all in a very portable package.  Every situation I can imagine using a netbook would be a good one for the iPad, I think.  Or maybe the iTouch is just a tiny netbook.

#4: I’m pretty sure I want one. And I am also willing to be one of the first kids on the block with one at this point, even though I am well-aware that something much better will come out in about a year.  I want to play around with it and do some more research first, but the $500 entry-level price point surprised me.  Anyway, do me a favor and talk it up as a good idea with my wife.

First off, I blogged about this very phenomenon back in 2007 here, in talking about both Facebook and also EMUTalk.org and my struggling (dying?) “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project.  (Perhaps I can count this post as something that will allow me to check off “worked on scholarship today” from my to do list.)  As I noted back then, since I think the readership of this blog is generally pretty small, I don’t need a lot of rules; on the other hand, with EMUTalk.org, especially when it was routinely getting 600-1000 hits a day (that’s fallen off to about half of that now), I did indeed need to set up rules.  In that sense, the Dunbar number seems to be about a threshold for organization as much as anything else.  If you have a group of people who like to play ultimate frisbee or pick-up basketball or softball every Friday night at a particular park and that group is less than 150 or so people, then you probably don’t need much in the ways of “rules.”  But if that group gets above 150, then I suspect you need to start forming a “league” with organized teams, schedules, etc.

Second, this all begs once again the definition of “friend,” something that has been a little easier to sort out with Facebook as of late thanks to its new “list” feature.  I think in the context of Facebook, people have basically over-valued and/or misinterpreted the word “friend.” In “real life,” I think of a friend as someone I either know quite well and engage in activities with on a regular basis (e.g., family friends, golfing friends, people I invite to my house for a party or something, etc.), people I know pretty well but only catch up with once in a while (e.g., many/most people at work, friends who live some distance away, etc.), or people I still know but are from a more distant past and who I haven’t necessarily even spoken with in some time.  This last category is a big one on Facebook:  we all have “friended” people from high school or college who we haven’t seen or spoken with in decades and who we aren’t especially interested in reconnecting with in “real life” again now, but who are still a kind of friend.

I have “real life” friends on Facebook, but besides “real” friends, most of my Facebook friends fall into the categories of “colleagues in my field,” people at EMU, and/or students.  No offense to any of these folks, but that y’all aren’t really my friends in the real world friend sense, right?

Third, I guess the other thing that comes up especially in the Thompson article is my concept/understanding of who I am “speaking” with when I post online, be that space on Facebook, Twitter, this or some other blog.  This may be kind of “old skool,” but I still work from the assumption that anything I post online has the potential to be read by anyone on the planet; therefore, I would never post any sort of personal thing which I would be concerned about some stranger reading.  You’re not going to get any “weird rash on my hands not going away” posts from me (btw, I have no rashes).  And if I post something like “ate tuna sandwich,” it is only because I don’t really care if anyone knows that I ate a tuna sandwich.

The tricky thing about this is trying to figure out those borders between the actually personal, the things you really would only tell to close friends, and everything else.  This is nothing new, of course; what makes it a little different now is that the sheer volume of people on networks like Facebook means that there is inevitably a learning curve for both writers and readers about the shifting definition of “Too Much Information.”  I mean, I have FB “friends” who do seem to think that posting about that mysterious rash is fair game; conversely, I also have FB “friends” who would comment on my lunch selection “Ew, TMI.”  So it goes with emerging medias, right?

BTW, today I’m going to have left-over pork loin for lunch.  If it isn’t too freezer-burned.

Thought #2: I think the main reason why the Democrats lost the senate race in Massachusetts (and btw, I think they lost rather than the Republicans winning) boils down to “hubris.”  Democrat leadership in DC and in Boston simply assumed that it wouldn’t be possible for a Republican in bluer than blue Mass. to win “the Kennedy seat” in the Senate and they assumed they could have run a potted plant for the job and win.  Hubris, and the lesson should be to take every election seriously and don’t assume anything.

Thought #3: I am (or at least vote) Democrat for all sorts of different reasons, not the least of which is I identify with the progressive ideals, the empathy for my fellow citizens of the country and the world, the thoughtfulness of the approach, etc., etc.  The Democrats (at least the current version) is the “thinking person’s party.”  In contrast, the Republicans– especially in this particular instance of debating health care and the senate race in Mass.– tap into the “reptilian brain” that is in all of us and below the levels of reason.  The Republicans know that people respond unconsciously and powerfully to fear and self-interests.  And I have to say I think that the Democrats are going to have to make at least a nod to the reptile brain that is (unfortunately) a bit too forward in too many Americans if they are going to hold in 2010 and/or win in 2012.