Communication Sprawl

A few weeks ago I finished a book by Charles Montgomery called Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.  A self-professed cosmopolite, I found the book enlightening and started thinking about my surroundings a bit differently.  One idea that stuck with me is the impact of urban sprawl on fostering communities or maintaining close connections with other people.  If I understood the concept correctly, city expansion can create urban sprawl, requiring people to commute further, generating more traffic, resulting in more time spent in transit rather than in community building.  Urban sprawl also makes it more difficult to make and maintain physical connections with people. Everybody has to travel further, which takes more time.  A lack of support in transportation options makes this connection even harder.

For some reason this idea stuck with me and I started thinking about the impact of urban sprawl in my world, records and information.  It occurred to me that urban sprawl is manifested in what I started thinking about as communication sprawl.  In the same way that habitation is spread out, we also also spread ourselves out with our communication methods.  As our digital world and presence expands, our physical one shrinks and diminishes. Physical face-to-face interaction is being replaced by an incessant stream of tweets, posts, likes, updates, images, video, etc., much of which I would consider low-quality or transient.

The advent of social media, and other types of messaging/sharing apps, has made it very difficult to keep communications consolidated and centralized instead of employing multiple options to maintain contact.  For example, I connect with my bookclub through Facebook, except for one member who’s not on it that has to be emailed separately.  I usually coordinate through email and text with varying degrees of success, mostly because everybody can be reached. Some people prefer to message through LinkedIn.  Another group I’m in has it’s own separate messaging functions.

It’s supposed to be “easier”, but I actually find it more challenging to remember who’s on which channel and to keep up with the quantity.  As a result, my communication efforts become dispersed resulting in poor connections.  I imagine this is similar to the challenges presented by urban sprawl around building solid communities.

The digital world offers great opportunities to build up communities, but sometimes it’s hard to take advantage of them in a way that results in quality and meaningful interactions.

Urbina Bay & Dolphin Wrangling

We disembarked early in the morning. Another wet landing, this time onto a black sand beach. Black sand is sticky and gets everywhere. Just a few meters into the trail we spotted our first tortoise, a juvenile. We took our pictures from a respectful distance and then walked by, causing the tortoise to hide.

The only Galapagos tortoise we saw in the wild.  This one was a juvenile and pulled into its shell as soon as we came near.

The only Galapagos tortoise we saw in the wild. This one was a juvenile and pulled into its shell as soon as we came near.

The terrain on this part of Isabela Island was definitely the lushest place we had visited so far. All the greenery, flowers, and humidity brought the insects along. Some of them were annoying, like the wasps, an invasive species. But I quietly cheered every time I saw Carpenter Bees buzzing around the flowers.

The varied landscape at Urbina Bay.

The varied landscape at Urbina Bay.

Birds flitted everywhere, including a Vermillion Flycatcher, a gleaming flash of yellow among the branches.

A land iguana, cousin of the marine iguanas, posed motionless under a tree. The two species share some similarities such as they are both vegetarian and evoke an image of something prehistoric and dinosaur like.   But the land iguana is covered in soft, muted hues to match the earth and foliage. The tail is shorter and more rounded, as this one is not used for swimming. This was our only opportunity on the trip to see the land iguanas. We were lucky to see three of them.

Land iguana, cousin of the marine iguana, in its native habitat blending in almost perfectly with the dead leaves.

Land iguana, cousin of the marine iguana, in its native habitat blending in almost perfectly with the dead leaves.

Back on the boat we headed to a different part of the island for the afternoon.   At mid-morning we lucked out and managed to see a pod of dolphins swimming through the channel.  We boarded the pangas and raced out to greet them. They were intent on feeding and not that interested in us.   We rode beside them for a while before they raced off again. At one point a sea lion inserted herself into the pod and leaped about in a graceful imitation of the dolphins. She even made sure to look at us in the panga so we that we would also notice her.

It was pretty incredible. I decided to relish the moments and not take my dorky iPad so the image is courtesy of my mother. Besides, I needed both hands to hang on!

My mom took this pic.  I was too busy hanging on!

Mom took this pic.  My hands were busy holding onto the rope!

Getting Back on Track

It’s official.  I have dish gremlins.  It’s the only rational explanation left!  *sigh*  Despite my best efforts at reconditioning, I do still come home, or wake up, to this:

The gremlins latest visit left me with a new load of dishes.

The gremlins latest visit left me with a new load of dishes.

 

I deal with the full sink, full dish drainer scenario several times a day in my house.  Even though both always seem to be full, it’s almost never to capacity.  In that respect, part of my strategy has been to do small amounts frequently rather than waiting for pile ups.  However, when the strategy starts to fall apart and the pile up begins, I have to devise new ways to trick myself into staying on top of my chores, and other mundane tasks.  *sigh*  They can feel awfully tedious.

Over the years I have developed a number of techniques to trick myself and get back on track.  Whenever I notice myself slipping back into my old ways, I try to correct the behavior as soon as possible.  My first corrective action is to accept that I’m human and remind myself that the changes are not permanent.  I’m kind to myself.  After all, it’s an ongoing process.

Then I re-assess why I think it isn’t working. The flow of the new habit may need to be adjusted.  There could also be emotional or psychological reasons causing resistance. Getting to the root of deeply ingrained habits to re-route them takes time.  Or maybe it’s just because my schedule was super crazy and a few less critical things were neglected.

After the first two steps, being nice to myself and re-assessing, I get back on track by going through the same steps I originally used to modify the habit.  Usually I start by setting the timer for 5 minutes, or by making compromises with myself.  For example, the other night I was super tired and once again facing a full sink, full dish drainer scenario.  This was because I hadn’t washed the dishes in the morning, starting the whole cycle over.  As a compromise, I forced myself to empty the dish drainer so at least I could wash the dishes straight away in the morning.

If these tactics, and the ones from last week’s post aren’t working, then I start bribing myself and using a reward system.  Feel free to share your best strategies in the comments section.

Modifying Bad Habits

Last year I read a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  One of the many things I learned is habits save us time and energy.  Doing something habitually spares our brains from constantly making decisions.  For example, when getting dressed in the morning, I don’t decide which leg goes in the pants first.  It’s automatic.  When I get home I automatically put my keys in the same place. I don’t have to think about where to put them, or where to find them, later.

If I wanted to wake up to a clean kitchen, I was going to have to make emptying the dish drainer a habit.  As I mentioned previously, several things were working against me:

  • Bad stacker
  • Prolific creator of dirty dishes
  • Extreme annoyance and dislike for the task

How was I going to recondition myself?

I started small by working on the emotional aspect.  I stopped expending energy on chastising myself for not doing the dreaded task, which only succeeded in decreasing what little motivation I had.  Instead, I focused my energies on thinking of ways to trick myself into the emptying habit.  Here are a few of my more successful tactics:

  • 5-minute sprints – In the beginning when I felt tired and annoyed, I would challenge myself to empty dishes for 5 minutes and then quit.  I quickly noticed it only took 2 minutes.  I found this oddly motivating, even though it did make me feel a bit silly for being sooo resistant.
  • 2-minute rule – The Getting Things Done method by David Allen has a simple rule, if you can do something in 2 minutes or less, do it right away.  It was harder to make excuses now that I knew it only took 2 minutes, max!
  • Positive reinforcement – I liked the results.  Sink and dishes remained clean. Doing small amounts frequently made it easy to maintain.  This gave me encouragement.
  • Finding time – I found ways to reallocate my time.  For example when waiting for bread to toast, I trained myself to empty the dish drainer before checking my phone.

It’s slowly becoming a habit to empty the dish drainer asap and keep it that way.  Despite my best efforts, old habits are hard to change.  Stay tuned for the final part in the series when I share strategies for getting back on track.

 

 

 

 

Diagnosing Bad Habits

When I lived in NYC I developed a terrific habit of keeping my kitchen immaculate. The constant threat of vermin motivated me to make sure every dish was washed and every surface cleaned before going to bed.

I haven’t lived in NYC for over 10 years, but I maintained my standards for years after moving to other cities. Over time, without the vermin threat, I started to let things slide. I routinely went to bed leaving the sink piled high with dishes to greet me in the morning. In fact, I seemed to always have dirty dishes in the kitchen. It really started to bother me. I knew I was capable of keeping a clean kitchen, so what was causing the slippage?

Over the next several weeks I observed my dishwashing habits and how I felt about it. In time I realized the problem was not the dirty dishes. The real problem was not emptying the dish drainer regularly. Consequently when I wanted to wash dishes, the dish drainer would be full making a simple task into an onerous two-step process. And since I was usually tired, it was easy for me to convince myself to do it when I had more energy. Inevitably, I always woke up to a sink full of dirty dishes to be washed before going to work, which was unpleasant and costing me valuable time in the morning.

Other factors that were working against me:

  1. I create an obscene amount of dirty dishes.
  2. I stack things terribly in the dish drainer. I can’t be bothered to wash things a certain way for stacking purposes.
  3. I hate emptying the dish drainer. Totally irrational, but it’s one of my least favorite tasks.

Armed with this information, I created a strategy to achieve my goal: waking up to a clean sink. Now I wake up to a clean sink about 80-90% of the time. The trick for me was diagnosing the right habit to change. The bottleneck was not from the large volume of dirty dishes. It was a direct result of not emptying the dish drainer routinely. Once I figured out how to keep the dish drainer empty, everything else fell into place.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment when I share my habit transformation methods.

Fernandina – Love on the Islands

Love was in the air when we disembarked that afternoon at Punta Espinoza on Fernandina Island. Earlier in the day we had seen several pairs of sea turtles mating at different times. One fellow traveller remarked it was no wonder the sea turtles were endangered because we kept disturbing them.

Within minutes on the new island I saw a Lava Heron fishing near the shore, a sea turtle missing a flipper, and a pair of Sally Lightfoot crabs mating in the rocks.

Lava Heron

Lava heron on Fernandina.

 

I lifted my head up from all the action on the shoreline and was amazed to see hundreds of marine iguanas lazing in the sun draped haphazardly across the hardened lava.

Lizard City - even though these are all technically iguanas.

Lizard City – even though these are all technically iguanas.

Along the trail a female Lava Lizard raced by with her tail held high, signaling to the males she was ready for action.  A short time later we saw marine iguanas mating. It seemed pretty violent.  The marine iguanas might look harmless because they don’t move much and have a vegetarian diet, but their mating rituals left me with a different impression.

I missed seeing the flightless cormorants mating, but turned around in time to see them building a seaweed nest together in preparation of the eggs.

We continued our walk across the expanse of lava into a mangrove complete with red, white, and black varieties.  A Galapagos Snake lay motionless in the sun, blending seamlessly into the rocks. Looking across the terrain, composed of tumbled, swirled lava budding with fresh, green mangrove shoots, was again like travelling back in time. This was the beginning.

Fernandina Lava field expanse

Expanse of lava on Fernandina. Sprouting in the cracks we saw three different species of mangrove and cacti.

 

We took a few moments to relax at the edge of a brackish lagoon, watching sea turtles swim around lazily and tiny fishes slurping algae off the rocks near our feet.  A few feet away a small sea lion snoozed peacefully on the rocks.   Scattered on the rocks were more marine iguanas, barely moving and sometimes difficult to avoid stepping on since the muted tones of their skin often matched the stones.

Trekking back across the lava field to leave I could see time racing forward. The mangroves thickened and became denser, forming a canopy protecting me from the late afternoon sun. I spied a Galapagos Mockingbird, one of the first species that got Darwin thinking, before boarding the panga back to the boat.

Galapagos Mockingbird

Galapagos Mockingbird