It is a hazard of our economic system that the majority of us (that is, adult humans participating in capitalism) must have a job in order to fulfill certain comforts. We need money for food and shelter, an RRSP or other structured savings for the future — and sometimes, heck, just a reason to get up in the morning.
 
Some lucky workers find fulfillment in their actual jobs: their “calling” and their career have happily dovetailed. But we at DFC are interested in how everyone can find happiness at work. Part of that involves taking control. But sometimes that is just plain not possible, and we have to look at more unusual ways to be happy.
 
An interesting recent study shows that there is a connection between an individual’s history of charity donations, and their overall happiness. While having money for yourself doesn’t really make you happier after a certain point, giving it away to others does — and also appears to affect your physical health as well:
 
“People who donate to charity have lower blood pressure, [project leader Prof. Elizabeth Dunn of UBC] said, even when controlling for factors like income, wealth, age and exercise, which suggests the giving itself is responsible.

Dunn measured people’s blood pressure before and after giving, and found it fell when people gave significantly to other people or causes, but did not change when they spent money on themselves.

The extent to which people feel connected to the cause is also important, she said, with more of an effect when people feel personally connected to the cause to which they are giving.”
 
So if you’ve done your darnedest to find something fun in your current job, but can’t, you can try making your own happiness by donating part of your income it to a charity that speaks to you. (If you need suggestions, I find the list at The Life You Can Save  to be well-vetted and very helpful.) The charity can do its important and necessary work, and you derive the emotional and health benefits of giving. Plus, you can revel in the subversion of using the money you earned through your misery for the greater good — Everybody wins!

During the mid-20th century growth explosion, leading economic experts, including John Maynard Keynes, sought to predict what the trend might mean for the West’s working future — the future in which we are now living. Keynes posited, roughly, that if economic productivity continued its upward trend, working hours would also trend downward. In the future, the average worker would spend a handful of hours a week at his or her job, spending the rest at leisure.

While productivity is higher, this latter point is clearly not the case. A new paper by Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman investigates why working hours in the United States haven’t followed their predicted path — after a dip starting in the 1930’s, working hours haven’t budged since the ’70’s — and his theory might have interesting reflections on workplace happiness.

Friedman refutes the idea that today’s humans are more materialistic, and work more to earn money for what they want next. He also complicates the hypothesis that, in today’s hyper-compartmentalized world, workers are more invested in the social relationships they have at work.

What he does find compelling is the increasing gap in equality in workers, and theorizes that most Americans spend more time at work not because they want to, but because they can’t afford not to. Wages have not kept pace with increased productivity, leaving many folks at the lower rungs of industry working as many hours as they can.

But what of the other end of that inequality spectrum — the, dare I say, 1%? Why are they spending long hours at work to, when they don’t have to?

“ [Friedman] theorized that for many top earners, work is a labor of love. They are doing work they care about and are interested in, and doing more of it isn’t such a burden—it may even be a pleasure. They derive meaning from their jobs, and it is an important part of how they think of themselves. And, of course, they are compensated for it at a level that makes it worth their while.”

So, for the majority of American workers, personal economic necessity pushes workplace happiness off the list of priorities. And for “top earners,” happiness is a motivator because the possibility of it exists for them. Keynes’ vision of productivity has come essentially true, but in practice it is skewed by inequality. The process of righting that imbalance should be an interesting one to watch.

There are a variety of theories out there that seek to explain the link between length and quality of nightly sleep, and weight gain. One of the newest involves our old friends, our microbiomes, and how sleeping less than required can potentially hamper their weight-managing talents.

Israel’s Weitzmann Institute has been on the case, and researcher Eran Elinav and team have published their findings in the current issue of Cell. The team found that gut bacteria in under-rested mice and humans had marked trouble processing glucose. In further studies, they mimicked the effects of jet-lag in their rodent subjects. The gut bacteria of the mice, disrupted from their usual routine, went haywire and caused general weight gain. They then tried to see if humans responded similarly:

“[T]he researchers collected bacterial samples from two people flying from the US to Israel – once before the flight, once a day after landing when jet lag was at its peak, and once two weeks later when the jet lag had worn off. The researchers then implanted these bacteria into sterile mice. Those who received the ‘fresh’ jet-lag samples gained weight, while the second group did not.”

These findings indicate that disruptions to sleep routines of all stripes can play havoc not only with your mental health, but that of your gut! A sleep-debt-induced weight gain can’t be worth the extra hours at work, in front of a computer, or otherwise burning the candle at both ends. It’s one thing if you agree to it — but think of those poor, defenseless bacteria.

Before we get down to work, about work, I need to vent. I hate the word “lifehack.” It’s too jargon-y, and most applications of it are so far removed from the original definition of “hacker,” it just makes me mad. (Are you gaining unauthorized, back end access to the computer system that is your life in order to cause mischief? Is getting up thirty minutes earlier and writing down the things you’re grateful for the direct equivalent of phone phreaking? I’ll stop…)

Definitions aside, lifehack.org can be a source of interesting info amongst all the content. And a significant amount of its contributors seem concerned with the problem of happiness — especially when at work.

Unfortunately, many of us have jobs that do not spontaneously bring us joy. But, thanks to the University of Warwick, we now know the quantified connection between happiness and productivity. And writer Adam Maidment, citing a 2008 report by the American Psychological Association, links being yourself with being happy. Therefore, being comfortable enough to be authentically you at work should equal greater productivity! 

But, how do you be you at work? Maidment presents several strategies, in three categories. My personal favourite is “Don’t aim to please:”

“It’s okay for people to disagree with your opinion from time to time – it’s your opinion, not theirs. Having an opinion means you have a voice. Even if people decide not to listen, you will ultimately feel proud that you at least spoke your mind and shared your feelings. Don’t be brash about it. Be sure to respect other people’s opinions and even company culture, but don’t be afraid to share your thoughts.”

Many of us aren’t lucky enough to work in places where we even have space to voice our feelings. But the sentiment is a solid one to keep in mind, wherever we happen to be… Even if exercising it requires a little creative — (fine) — “hacking.”

I thought it was my devices getting rickety — crankily refusing to load pages, making online video and audio stutter. But no: websites everywhere are getting unwieldy, stuffed full of megabytes worth of info that enhances form but drags down function.

Maciej Cegłowski has distilled an impassioned talk he gave at the Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia, into a simple, streamlined webpage. In its form, it sets a great example for the future of the web; in its content, its a diatribe against the current plague of “page bloat.”

Page bloat is demonstrated to reduce user engagement with the web. It can be caused by the actual things you’re there to access (presentation slides from a distant conference that are only available as a giant PDF), the structure of the page itself (hidden menus that slide in from nowhere), or the accoutrements of web use today (a huge autoplaying ad for a luxury car). Corporations like Facebook and Google have recognized the problem, and have rolled out “fixes” like Instant Articles or AMP; but, Cegłowski maintains, these only appear to solve the problem:
 
“[…T]he page describing AMP is technically infinite in size. If you open it in Chrome, it will keep downloading the same 3.4 megabyte carousel video forever.

If you open it in Safari, where the carousel is broken, the page still manages to fill 4 megabytes.
These comically huge homepages for projects designed to make the web faster are the equivalent of watching a fitness video where the presenter is just standing there, eating pizza and cookies.
 
The world’s greatest tech companies can’t even make these tiny text sites, describing their flagship projects to reduce page bloat, lightweight and fast on mobile.

I can’t think of a more complete admission of defeat.”
 
Ultimately, this page bloat problem says something disturbing about the current and future web: that its democracy is just an illusion; that it will take the fastest and most up-to-date device and an expensively solid connection to access any information; and, most damagingly, that only professionals with programming and design certifications can, andshould, put anything up on the web.

I support Cegłowski in asserting that this cannot be allowed to happen! The internet can be an immense force for change, and it’s up to us to resist the corporatized slow-down that is becoming the accepted standard. Re-harnessing the web’s true purpose shouldn’t take too much bandwidth at all.

Chris Bailey writes for The National Post about an experiment he undertook early on in his Life of Productivity efforts, when he needed to get a really good sense of the amount of hours of work it took to actually accomplish something. He set up alternating weeks of very short and very long (20 hour and 90 hour respectively) working weeks, and tracked how much work he completed, as well as how much work he felt he completed.

Bailey expected to find, like most of us I imagine, that if he threw more hours at a project, he would get a lot more done. But, when he finished his experiment and compared his long weeks to his short weeks, he discovered the following:

• Even though Bailey nearly quintupled his working time, he only accomplished a tiny bit more actual work,
• However, during the 90-hour workweeks, Bailey reported feeling “twice as productive” than during the 20-hour weeks — a gut reaction that was not supported by his actual output.

Bailey attributes his ability to get roughly the same amount of work done in 20 hours as in 90 hours to the focused “energy and attention” he was able to bring to it. In the longer workweek, that energy and attention was dispersed more widely:

“When I invested more time in my work during my insane weeks, my work became a lot less urgent; on a minute-by-minute basis, I invested less energy and focus into everything I intended to get done. But when I had a limited amount of time in my 20-hour weeks, I forced myself to expend significantly more energy and focus over that shorter period of time so I could get everything done I had to do. Of course, all the pressure I felt during this experiment came from me — I didn’t have a boss, team or any large, looming deadlines around the corner. But the lesson is just as potent: by controlling how much time you spend on a task, you control how much energy and attention you spend on it.”

This is the chief lesson Bailey derived from his experiment, and one he wants to pass along to us: We can’t always control the length of time we have to complete a project, but we can control the shortness of time — and a shorter time in which to work equals greater productivity.

Bailey recognizes that the world can’t run on the 20-hour workweek ideal — but he cites research that the standard workweek of 35 to 40 is still sustainable, as studies show productivity and quality really takes a nosedive after 40 hours. There is some hope for us!

Two programmers at the 32nd Chaos Communications Conference have offered the rest of the world a look at the operating system that runs the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — otherwise known as the mysterious and suspicious North Korea.

North Korea has been closed to outside influences since the mid-20th century reign of Kim Il-Sung, and its continued existence depends heavily on propagandistic claims that, despite frequent famines and a violently repressive government, the country is better off than anywhere else. In order to keep this up, an operating system has had to be created that serves the regimes restrictive purposes, while acting spiffy enough to be appear competitive.

Dubbed Red Star OS, the system is Linux-based and superficially looks an awful lot like Mac OS 10 (the rumoured favourite of current leader Kim Jong-Un). Florian Grunow and Nicklaus Schiess take the 32C3 audience through an hour-long, totally fascinating analysis of the OS here. (There’s a shorter real-time that I found intriguing here, via BoingBoing.) Some of my favourite points include:

• Red Star OS has a proprietary browser that only allows access to the state-approved intranet, so no user can ever access the larger, democratic internet and hear a dissenting voice — the 21st century equivalent of hardwiring citizens’ radios to a pre-set frequency.

• The OS has no means of accessing root when it first ships, limiting casual users from going through the back end to make unauthorized changes. In the interest of appearing transparent though, there is an offered add-on that allows access to root — but of course, downloading it makes you known to the government.

• It comes with a its own anti-virus program, but, instead of seeking out and destroying malware under its typical definition, it can be calibrated to identify and delete any unauthorized files or media the regime doesn’t want a user to have.

In short, Red Star OS is a spectacular demonstration of the lengths a regime will go to in order to limit and ultimately persecute its citizens, while maintaining the shiny propaganda façade of competitive computing. It makes me grateful that all my computer does to injure me is occasionally not recognize my printer…

Moore’s Law — the projection that digital performance and capacity can be expected to double every 18 months — is always exciting to think about. But each new technological breakthrough and refinement we’re sure to cook up will also have a more mundane flip side: we will also have to dream up equally innovative ways to make them “go.”

Researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden, have dreamed up such an energy storage device, and it’s pretty exciting on its own merits. They call it “power papers:” made of easily sourced materials, and both thin and strong enough to be folded into an origami swan (!), it can hold up to 1 F, and can be used in challenging storage situations:

“The structural foundation of the material is nanocellulose, which is cellulose fibres which, using high-pressure water, are broken down into fibres as thin as 20 nm in diameter. With the cellulose fibres in a solution of water, an electrically charged polymer (PEDOT:PSS), also in a water solution, is added. […]

The new cellulose-polymer material has set a new world record in simultaneous conductivity for ions and electrons, which explains its exceptional capacity for energy storage. It also opens the door to continued development toward even higher capacity. […]It is light in weight, it requires no dangerous chemicals or heavy metals and it is waterproof.”

The next step for development is to create an industrial production process, to begin churning out power paper for innovations that require a sustainable, flexible, and efficient source of power. I can already think of a handful of applications for power paper – but I suppose the most exciting ones lie in the future, and our minds can’t even conceive of them yet. I can’t wait!

As any of us who’ve been sucked into a YouTube fugue know, it’s hard to escape the self-recrimination cycle of online overuse. We blame ourselves for our lack of self-control – and the many lifehacking tips and even hilarious cartoons on the subject support that sense of personal failure.

But, Michael Schulson argues (in his recent article “User Behaviour” in Aeon), it’s becoming more apparent that people get addicted to the Internet because of the nature of the experience itself, and not because they’re weak. Moreover, that addictive nature is engineered to hook as many users as hard as possible, all in aid of upping page views and increasing ad revenue. We are living in a digital world where having an item for sale in a website’s “room” is less lucrative than monetizing entry through its “door”:

“They equip them with sensors. Each time you go through one, someone gets paid. Immediately, some people will start adding a lot of new doors. Other people will build rooms that are largely empty, but that function as waystations, designed to get as many people as possible to enter and leave. […]

At some point, you no longer make money by building excellent rooms. You make money by figuring out how to get people to pass through as many doors as possible – to have them scanning across the web, that scrolling hallway of doors, in a state of constant motion, click-click-clicking away.”

Schulson’s ultimate recommendation is to acknowledge the true cause of Internet addiction, and require websites and companies to assist users in not falling into the dopamine trap – if that’s not what they came to say, Wikipedia, to do. This could range from mandating a “distraction dashboard,” where users could set their own limits and reminder times before they start surfing; to a self-reporting function, where time spent (or wasted) is quantified clearly for a user – after all, Twitter, Facebook, and gaming sites already generate that info for themselves.

In short, he advises regulation. That sounds scary, but it could actually open the Internet experience up to more functionality for its users – if we could just end the judgmental culture surrounding us.

You may call them “hoverboards,” or “smart balance wheels,” or another catchy name – whatever they are, on my last foray into downtown Toronto I witnessed a flock of people wheeling up the sidewalk on these colourful, seemingly physics-defying things as though they had been born wearing them.  I was so astonished at the futuristic sight I stopped dead!

At the time, I attributed my lack of familiarity with these hoverboards to my simple country living. But, as this report from Cory Doctorow indicates, even in jaded urban centres folks are gobsmacked at this technology’s overnight appearance — and subsequently diving into purchases, especially for the holidays. Doctorow theorizes that hoverboards — popular with Chinese youth and Vine and Youtube celebrities worldwide — are an early real-world example of a brand new manufacturing model: one that we are going to see a lot more of in the developing economic climate.

Tech reporter Joseph Bernstein dubs the process “memeufacturing,” which speaks to the almost biological propagation of these items and the idea behind them. The manufacturing infrastructure and social network in southern China (and mostly in Shenzhen) is so responsive that, as soon as a new media star features a novel piece of technology on, say, Instagram, thousands of factories can convert almost instantly to produce that item, using components of the products they used to make. And, most interestingly to Doctorow, they are using the format of “copying” — without an original to copy. This leads to infinite variation, and a quick overwhelming of the market:

“ I remember visiting China in 2007 and seeing a million bizarre variants on Ipods, which were the hot category at the time. That story was easy to understand: Apple spent a fortune opening a market for music players of a certain size and shape. China’s entrepreneurs, living in a bubble where Apple’s patents and trademarks were largely unenforceable, set to copying that design, and (this is the important part) varying it. […]

It’s a funny old, new, world.”

Over the course of the last six months the supply chain in China has completely flooded; and with hoverboards that retail in North America, Australia, and Europe for the equivalent of $1000 per unit, who knows how long the demand will last? But, it is central to Doctorow’s and Bernstein’s arguments that this method of trade is not going away. When the new hot item makes itself known, the infrastructure will turn on a dime again, and the hoverboard will be left in. I’ll be keeping that in mind this shopping season!