The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you’re engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you’re renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/03/the-magic-of-doing-one-thing-a.html

Posted in Life | Leave a comment

Planted Broccoli and Peas

Finally got around to starting some seeds indoors today. Planted two flats of 60 Jiffy 7s each:

  • 30 Arcadia Broccoli
  • 30 Green Sprouting Broccoli
  • 60 Thomas Laxton Peas

The flats are covered by their clear domes and perking away on their heating mats.

Posted in Gardening | Tagged | Leave a comment

Testing API Integrations In RSpec

One way is to call the API, sleep, and then run the test. The problem with this is that you have to wait the entire sleep duration for every test run, even if the results are ready before the sleep is done. RSpec’s and Ruby’s flexibility allow you to avoid this situation by writing a helper function.

The wait function has the benefit of returning successes as soon as they are encountered, so the tests don’t have to sleep for the entire duration specified. However, it still has to wait the entire sleep period for a failure, because it can’t distinguish a legitimate failure from the API service not yet returning the correct results.

Testing API Integrations In RSpec, by Mark Mzyk.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

DevOps and Drupal Presentation

Found it here: http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/devops-and-drupal-survey-results

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Preparing for Planting

We went out and bought our first round of spring seeds today:

  • Arcadia broccoli
  • Green Sprouting broccoli
  • Oregon Sugar Pod II snow peas
  • Thomas Laxton snap peas
  • Bright Lights swiss chard
  • Red Russian kale
  • Pak Choi Chinese cabbage
  • Michihli Chinese cabbage

We also picked up 200 Jiffy 7 pellets, which are now soaking ready for planting tomorrow.

Posted in Gardening | Tagged , | Leave a comment

First Day in the Garden this Year

Took advantage of the warm weather today and got the rain barrels set out, last year’s pea fencing cleaned up, the planting boxes brought out of storage, and generally tidied the garage a bit.

Today’s high: 17
Today’s low: 2

Posted in Gardening | Leave a comment

WordPress Wednesday July 2, 2008

First up, I guess yesterday was Unofficial International WordPress Day. Silly me, I was celebrating Canada Day, a rather national holiday. How Canuck-centric of me.

Second we’ve got 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6. Press This and the Theme Preview look pretty strong, but the thing that gets me most jazzed is the Post Versioning. If it applied to pages too, WordPress just expanded from personal publishing and CMS to include something like a wiki.

Next, here a brief look under the hood of one team’s experiences theming WordPress. Worth a look, if you ever want to play with a custom theme.

Lastly, here’s a little quicky on How to Use WordPress as a CMS For Your Business Website, which I plan to use as grist for the mill when writing up some stuff for use with our clients.

That’s it for this week.

Posted in Technology | Tagged | Leave a comment