Green tips for every day life!

Green Profits

Being environmentally conscious (and generally, socially conscious) has become fashionable.  And as with all fashion, it has become expensive.  Somewhere between Carbon Credits and Green Roofs, we lost track of the basics.  When I was a wee lad in Elementary school, you didn’t have to go broke and smell of patchouli to save the world. On the contrary, it meant being frugal and being conscious of your actions.  On this first article in our “Green Business” category, I want to explore a few green tips that are not only socially conscious, they also increase your “Green visibility” and will not break the bank.  For now, I start with bringing it back to the basics: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And you may even save  a few pennies in the process.

1. Ditch Styrofoam

I walk in a meeting, at some ungodly hour like 10 am.  Happily, the person at the desk is nice enough to offer a very welcome cup of coffee.  They come out with a styrofoam cup and packets of sugar and cream. Oh, and one of those plastic stirrer things.  And I’m thinking: Styrofoam? Really?!  Whether there’s any basis to my bias is yet to be determined, and there’s still some debate about the paper vs. styrofoam cup thing, but it is accepted in many circles that styrofoam is just plain bad, with health effects as well as environmental.  I don’t know why but styrofoam still persists. 

2. Ditch the paper and plastic, too

Now consider the alternative: I get a reusable mug with a spoon and a sugar and cream server if I wanted sugar/cream.  Now I think happy thoughts.  I think they care about the environment. I think they think of their work place as something more than a factory.  I think they care about their employees and probably have a rec. room. Chance are the coffee tastes better too.   I get kind of confused when I go to lunch, and they ask whether the food is “for here” or carry-out…only to serve it in the same disposable plastics when I’m eating in.

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I came upon this article in the New York Times when doing research for a blog post.   I figured, what better way to introduce a new “productivity” category?  These are some astonishing figures:

the cost of unnecessary interruptions is $650 billion per year

This is mostly mundane matters, in large part dealing with email, IM, SMS, etc.  The majority of the cost is in the time it takes to get back to work

28% of a workday is spent in interruptions

For those familiar with Stephen Covey’s quadrant, this is in the “Not Important, Not Urgent” category.  Another 20% is spent in meetings (though whether these are important or ugent is not addressed), and part of 25% is spent writing “productive” emails.  This is almost 3 hours in a 10 hour workday.
On the email side, new terms are hitting the street such as “email apnea” (the condition of holding your breath when you realize you have 300 new emails), and “email bankruptcy” (where you have so many emails you have to delete your inbox and try again.)   Gmail recently added a “take a break” feature in Gmail, which locks you out of your mail for 15 minutes.

In light of this, I’ve decided to add a few more things to my list of email productivity.

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My plan, sitting down to write this log entry, is to present some philosophy about technology, redundancy, simplicity, and human error.I’m still battling the tense: not sure if that is my plan, or if that was my plan: I’ve realized that of more immediate concern, or at least more civilized priority, is an introduction. So allow me introduce: Me! My name is Mickey and I am the new co-author of WCDC. Hopefully I can help make this discourse between us a little more frequent.

“Discourse,” I say? And “us”? Sure, I maintain that this is a conversation. Certainly between you, the reader, and Ernesto and me, the writers. But the “us” still remains unclear: Is it between you and me? Ernesto and me? You and Us? Us and Them? Besides bringing more frequent updates, what is my role here? Am I the ying to Ernesto’s yang? Am I the Mac to his PC? (Yes, I do use a Mac, and no, Ernesto and I don’t always agree.) After a little thinking about all that, I decided to take my own advice, the one that I meant to write about before the whole introduction business confused things: I decided to keep things simple. Forget about playing a role against my co-author, who is after all the originator of this blog and therefore has last say. Forget about keeping in costume. Just say what I have to say. Practice the fine art of spouting. Isn’t Spouting what blogs are all about anyway? And what better way to start spouting than with a bit of philosophy. So here is my spout about simplicity. And this being a technology blog, I will talk about simplicity in technology.

In deductive sciences, we often follow Occam’s razor and accept that the simplest explanation is the best. This is common practice in areas where we observe a phenomenon which we subsequently try to explain. In technology, however, we often create

the phenomenon. And we quite often overcomplicate it. The problem with this is not the creation or complication: computers and technology will perform their assigned tasks regardless of how simple or complex this tangle of tasks may be. The problem is that we assume that technology might fail while failing to remember that people fail as well. In fact, people fail more frequently. We take great pains to create fail-proof technology that is self-healing, doubly-redundant and fail-safe. We add spares, and spares to the spares. We double our servers, and add redundant channels and pathways. And things work. You take down part A and the Thing stays up. You bring A back and take parts C and B down and the Thing still stays up. That’s the beauty of technology: It does what it’s supposed to, no matter how complex its design. A technology architect can design a very complex system that performs exactly the way it’s supposed to, down to the last specification. Whether by assumption or by mandate from the customer, the design can be completely redundant with every piece independent of any other. And it works. The technology, that is, works. (more…)