November 2009
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Day November 29, 2009

Entries 2 Total

In short – Missed Opportunities

This quote from Martin Luther King Jr. came up in reading for one of my Education courses today:

we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Too bad we’ve only gone in the wrong direction here. If anything we’ve become more thing-oriented since King’s assassination in 1968. The financial crisis perhaps gave us the best opportunity for such a shift in society but it now seems that the largest concern to arise from that was “When can I go back to buying as much stuff as I used to?” If only everyone gave some serious consideration to what they were buying and expending their time on.

Posted on November 29, ’09

Up to Nothing

A similar thing happens when you have clearly defined tasks that lack purpose.

Go back to work and think about your average day. How often are you not clear what you’re doing? How often is the goal of the next 30 minutes completely undefined? Yes, you’ve suffered through meetings where there was no clear agenda and you felt like you were wasting your time, but that’s still a known quantity — I’m currently in the poorly run meeting scenario. Been there, done that.

What happens when there is no meeting, no burning task, no one in your office? You wander, you surf the web, you stare at that calendar on the wall and think, “Why do we have leap years again? I forget.” And then you feel bad. I should be working. I should be doing something. They’re not paying me to reverse engineer leap years. I have things to do.

Posted on November 29, ’09