Control Your Environment

At my speeches audience members say to me, "I'm able to handle the tasks in front of me for the day, but if I get one more call or one critical email, everything is just thrown off." That's why it is important to condition your work environment.

Look at your office, your car, your home, and all of the other physical spaces in your life, and ask, "What can I do to make these spaces work for me in the way I work and in the way I live my life?" Take your desk, for example: realize that it must be specifically set up for you. Position your PC monitor in the way that's most comfortable for you. If you need tissues, candy, or certain supplies, then put them on your desk, close at hand.

Look at your desk in new ways. Align it so that it supports the way you work, regardless of how it looks to anyone else. Never mind what the person down the hall thinks! Identify the items you need, and then condition your desk to work for you. Remove piles from the window sills or
cabinets tops and put them into file folders. Gain some clear space!

Ways to Manage Your Commute

1. Keep your car in top shape. Take it in for servicing if you even suspect something is askew.
2. Join an automotive club. They pay for themselves after one tow.
3. Wean yourself of flicking on the radio the moment you step into the car, or of listening to shock talkers who offer little to your life. Instead...
4. Install a tape or CD player to control your environment to and from work. Patronize your local library for lectures, plays, books, and music on cassettes.
5. Ride with the windows closed and the A/C on. You'll get the same MPG as otherwise, the ride will to be quieter, and you'll have more control of your immediate environment.
6. Keep spare car keys in your house and spare house keys hidden in a faithful "Hide-a-Key" compartment which magnetically attaches under the bumper.
7. Hide several quarters, key phone numbers, a pad, a pen, stamps, and envelopes in your car.
8. During your ride, reflect on what you'd like to complete or how you'd like your day to go.

No Limits to our Social Pace

A paper titled "No Apparent Limits: Addressing Common Arguments Against Continuous Computational Acceleration states, "The closer we look, the more we discover the astonishing, surprising, and (for some at least) alarming irrelevancy of all currently proposed limits to
the ongoing acceleration of local computation....Ours is the generation that will no longer be able to ignore the phenomenon of continuing technological acceleration."

"We, and more particularly, our technological creations, are on a wild ride to an interesting destination-the technological singularity-a local rate of computational change so fast and powerful that it must have a profound and as-yet-unclarified universal effect."

"As a side effect of this hypergrowth, biological human beings will not be able to meaningfully understand the computer-driven world of the near future unless they are able to make some kind of transition to 'transhumanity,' an environment with greater-than-human computational capacity, and a new, as yet undetermined human-machine symbiosis. How this transition will and should occur, and how it is presently occurring, is a subject of spirited and insightful debate."

The upshot for each of us? Don't expect the pace of society to slow down in your lifetime, and employing Breathing Space techniques is more important than ever.

Wanted: Fewer People in the U.K.

"Overpopulation is the main cause of environmental degradation," says Madeleine Bunting, writing in the London Guardian. Common sense tells us that, "if the planet's resources are being grossly depleted, there are just too many of us about." Yet none of the main environmental lobbying groups will mention that obvious fact "because of the unpleasant associations it brings
with it."

If we admitted that there were too many of us on this "crowded island" of Great Britain, we'd have to either limit immigration, which would seem racist, or limit family size, which would seem authoritarian. So the Green lobby tries to insist that if we all just recycle more and drive less, we can live together in ever-greater numbers. If only that were true. At the current rate of increase, by 2074 Britain will be the most densely populated country in the world after Bangladesh.

"How many more people can you squeeze into cities that already seem to be choking under the weight of their population density-the buses and trains packed, the streets clogged, and the parks on a Sunday afternoon teeming with people?" The challenge of the next few decades will be to have that debate "while steering well clear of racism."

Jeff's take: such a shame that honest debate about over-population and its enormous negative effects is stifled by the PC police.

The Catalog Blizzard

In any given year, catalog companies in the U.S. mail more than 19 billion catalogs, consuming almost four million tons of paper, despite wide-spread adoption and use of the Internet. Although the quality as well as availability of recycled paper has improved, the majority of catalogers, among them J. Crew, J.C. Penney, and L.L. Bean, continue to use solely virgin paper. What a waste, for everyone and everything.

Trashing the Plane

Even on flights of three hours or less, upon departure it's hard not to notice how badly passengers have trashed the plane.
As you proceed down that long, narrow aisle, you can see quite clearly that people have left food wrappers, crumbs, empty cups and cans, magazines, newspapers, and personal belongings.
Sure, flight attendants are supposed to pick things up before the plane lands, and
ground crews come in and clean the cabin after the plane lands. Still, is that any reason for 100 to 300 passengers to leave the place a total mess?
What does it say about our ability to control our environment when we can't keep a plane interior clean for a couple hours' ride? What have we become?