Repetitive Tasks Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Repetitive Tasks. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.
Martin Buber
Once in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks. You could spend hours looking at a picture or making absurd doodles. Everything is torelated because, after all, the person is mentally ill.
Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy. This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual...It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.
Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries." The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
You don't need special traits, special genes, or special motivation to write a lot. You don't need to want to write--people rarely feel like doing unpleasant tasks that lack deadlines--so don't wait until you feel like it. Productive writing comes from harnessing the power of habit, and habits come from repetition p.129
Paul J. Silvia (How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing)
Something had happened to him ove the past couple of years, something to do with being home with Aaron, sinking into the rhythm of a kid's day. The little tasks, the small pleasures. The repetition that goes beyond boredom and becomes a kind of peace. You do it long enough, and the adult world starts to drift away. You can't catch up with it, not even if you try.
Tom Perrotta (Little Children)
There is a strong connection between our ability to use our hands in useful work, and our ability to find happiness in daily life... daily repetitive tasks (are) the compulsive calmness that infuses our pedestrian chores with poetry. - Annie Modessitt
Lisa Grunwald (Whatever Makes You Happy)
Thea began to wonder whether people could not utterly lose the power to work, as they can lose their voice or their memory. She had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to another—as if it mattered! And now her power to think seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color, like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones outside her door; or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas.
Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark)
As I look back right now, I realize that it was all of those mindless, repetitive tasks I was forced to endure day after day, the getting up and doing every scene the best I could, over and over, that gave me a kind of “miles in the saddle.” They strengthened muscles not located in my body but in my heart—muscles not easy to access and certainly not fun. But easy is overrated and fun is extremely relative.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
I myself have the ability to do repetitive tasks, or stare into space for long periods of time without feeling the least bit bored. There is always something going on if one looks hard enough. Tiny dramas unfold all around us. Intellectuals like Veronica are oblivious to this, however. They are too busy thinking to notice anything.
Graeme Macrae Burnet (Case Study)
When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness. The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).
Ariel Gore (Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness)
For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
Asking experts to do boring and repetitive, and yet technically demanding tasks is the most certain way of ensuring human error that we can think of, short of sleep deprivation, or inebriation.
David Farley (Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation)
There is nothing so seductive to a girl as to be loved by a poetic-depressive type. And if she is vain enough to deceive herself into thinking that she loves him faithfully by clinging to him instead of giving him up, then her task will be easy. She will enjoy both the distinction and the good conscience of being faithful, and at the same time the most finely distilled romantic love. God save everyone from such faithfulness!
Søren Kierkegaard
Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.
Ken Follett (The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1))
Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
Otherwise, her real workload was as the college’s graphic designer: inputting calendars, formatting websites, changing out images—all dull, repetitive tasks. Such a waste, she thought, then felt a jolt of panic, recalling Nadia trying to make her give up her work.
Etaf Rum (Evil Eye: Don’t miss this gripping family drama novel from New York Times Best-selling author!)
What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
FrICE shows how the post transition world can be glorious; a world where machines serve and take care of human material needs; a world where humans are relieved of mundane repetitive tasks; a world where we are able to utilize the collective brain power of over 7 billion heads, relieved from mundane tasks, to discover and create new and amazing things
Ganesh Natarajan (Free Ice Cream)
Smart is just time on task, it's repetition and support.
Nicola Blake
But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes. Thus,
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen. In
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
Repetition and memorization of imposed lessons are indeed tedious work for children, whose instincts urge them constantly to play and think freely, raise their own questions, and explore the world in their own ways. Children did not adapt well to forced schooling, and in many cases they rebelled. This was no surprise to the adults. By this point in history, the idea that children’s own preferences had any value had been pretty well forgotten. Brute force, long used to keep children on task in fields and factories, was transported into the classroom to make children learn. Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were quite sadistic. One master in Germany kept records of the punishments he meted out in fifty-one years of teaching, a partial list of which included: “911,527 blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the head.”25 Clearly he was proud of all the educating he had done.
Peter O. Gray (Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life)
At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever, In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.
Robin Sloan (Sourdough)
The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the roles of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic; and a definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lacemaking.
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women)
This love of Christ and for Christ impels us day after day, taking up our tasks one after another, in full knowledge that our work no matter how tiring and repetitive is really his own. We have nothing to give to others that we ourselves have not first received. His gifts of forgiveness, life, and salvation are inexhaustible.
Harold L. Senkbeil (The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor's Heart)
There is a huge body of scientific research to explain the mechanism by which routine enables difficult things to become easy. One simplified explanation is that as we repeatedly do a certain task the neurons, or nerve cells, make new connections through communication gateways called “synapses.” With repetition, the connections strengthen and it becomes easier for the brain to activate them.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
The induction had waxed long on the topic of robots and other automated helpmates replacing human labour, but he hadn’t realised that, back in the past, humans had worked so hard to live like robots. The endless round of tasks, the queuing, the utter repetitiveness of these people’s lives. They must, Uncharles predicted, be so grateful to have such lives designed for them. How good it must be to have no choices or options.
Adrian Tchaikovsky (Service Model)
Brainless wasn't bad. Today, brainless was right up her alley. This world of grunts and clanking iron, the same tasks repeated mindlessly until failure, Mitzi loved it the moment she'd stepped through the door of the weight room. The Sisyphean repetition of lifting and lowering. Nothing represented life better than this endless losing battle against gravity. The grunts and cries that conveyed so much more than words ever could.
Chuck Palahniuk (The Invention of Sound)
Of course, the champions of totalitarianism protest that what they want to abolish is "only economic freedom" and that all "other freedoms" will remain untouched. But freedom is indivisible. The distinction between an economic sphere of human life and activity and a noneconomic sphere is the worst of their fallacies. If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him. He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.1 Committees of experts may be called to advise the planning authority whether or not a young man should be given the opportunity to prepare himself for and to work in an intellectual or artistic field. But such an arrangement can merely rear disciples committed to the parrotIike repetition of the ideas of the preceding generation. It would bar innovators who disagree with the accepted ways of thought. No innovation would ever have been accomplished if its originator had been in need of an authorization by those from whose doctrines and methods he wanted to deviate. Hegel would not have ordained Schopenhauer or Feuerbach, nor would Professor Rau have ordained Marx or Carl Menger. If the supreme planning board is ultimately to determine which books are to be printed, who is to experiment in the laboratories and who is to paint or to sculpture, and which alterations in technological methods should be undertaken, there will be neither improvement nor progress. Individual man will become a pawn in the hands of the rulers, who in their "social engineering" will handle him as engineers handle the stuff of which they construct buildings, bridges, and machines. In every sphere of human activity an innovation is a challenge not only to ali routinists and to the experts and practitioners of traditional methods but even more to those who have in the past themselves been innovators. It meets at the beginning chiefly stubborn opposition. Such obstacles can be overcome in a society where there is economic freedom. They are insurmountable in a socialist system.
Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
And she took this card five days a week, for the past three years. Punching in and out, marking her time. Maria worked into the work, eventually finding comfort in camshafts. It had taken months for this to manifest itself--it was endless and repetitive and crushingly dull--but after a time the religious beauty of the task emerged. The detail, the exactitude required in working the lathe. How deep can an action go? How perfect can a human act be? Maria worked to a precision of thousandth of a millimeter. A micron, they called it. A micron. And the repetition. And the repetition. And the repetition.
Darragh McKeon (All That Is Solid Melts Into Air)
In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan proceed from the principle that humans are natural learners and children are born creative and curious, “intrinsically motivated for the types of behaviors that foster learning and development.” This idea is complicated, however, by the fact that part of learning anything, be it painting or programming or eighth-grade algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice, and repetitive practice is usually pretty boring. Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; it is the rare student who feels a deep sense of intrinsic motivation when memorizing her multiplication tables. It is at these moments that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when behaviors must be performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate outcome. Deci and Ryan say that when students can be encouraged to internalize those extrinsic motivations, the motivations become increasingly powerful. This is where the psychologists return to their three basic human needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When teachers are able to create an environment that promotes those three feelings, they say, students exhibit much higher levels of motivation. And how does a teacher create that kind of environment? Students experience autonomy in the classroom, Deci and Ryan explain, when their teachers “maximize a sense of choice and volitional engagement” while minimizing students’ feelings of coercion and control. Students feel competent, they say, when their teachers give them tasks that they can succeed at but that aren’t too easy — challenges just a bit beyond their current abilities. And they feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that their teachers like and value and respect them.
Paul Tough (Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why)
No person had less animosity than Mrs. Browning; it seems as though she could hardly bring herself to speak harshly of anyone. The omissions that have been made are almost wholly of passages containing little or nothing of interest, or repetitions of what has been said elsewhere; and they have been made with the object of diminishing the bulk and concentrating the interest of the collection, never with the purpose of modifying the representation of the writer’s character. The task of arranging the letters has been more arduous owing to Mrs. Browning’s unfortunate habit of prefixing no date’s, or incomplete ones, to her letters
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Much more plausible is the computer-based explanation that dreams are a spillover from the unconscious processing of the day's experience, from the brain's decision on how much of the daily events temporarily stored in a kind of buffer to emplace in long-term memory... The American psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University has provided anecdotal but reasonably persuasive evidence that people who are engaged in intellectual activities during the day, especially unfamiliar intellectual activities, require more sleep at night, while, by and large, those engaged in mainly repetitive and intellectually unchallenging tasks are able to do with much less sleep.
Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence)
That hidden economy, which still exists today, is one of love. There is self-interest, certainly, in all of these women's endeavors; for their trouble, they get shelter and food. But you don't do any of that - the mind-numbing care of small children, the endless repetition of cooking and laundry, the indignity of having a mind as fine as any man's and no opportunity to exercise it - without love. Either love for the owners of the dirty underwear and the sticky little hands, or love for people whose survival depends on the pittance you make for doing it. Almost three hundred years after Dam Smith was born, women still dominate the "caring professions" - teaching, nursing, social work - and are scarce in positions of financial or political power. Married women who work full-time still do substantially more cleaning, food preparation, and child-engagement tasks than their male partners. And when professional women's work becomes too time consuming, the care of children and the household isn't shared more equally with male partners, but outsourced to other women, frequently poor women of color. It is men who are raised to participate in a strict economy of self-interest. Most women could never afford that.
Kate Harding (Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America)
Parents often have the misconception that setting boundaries occurs when a child misbehaves, but the fact is that the word ‘misbehave’ is misused. Children don’t ‘mis’behave. They behave, either positively or negatively, to communicate. Small children communicate through their behavior because that is the only method of communication they have. Even when they become verbal, though, they still aren’t able to articulate big feelings and subtle problems well verbally, so as parents it’s our role to ‘listen between the lines’ of our children’s behavior to discern the need being communicated. Setting boundaries is not about ‘mis’behavior. It’s about guiding behavior, and guidance is something we provide through everyday interactions with our children. Repetition is the hallmark of the early years of parenting, from the endless tasks of diapering and feeding to the endless explorations of a curious toddler. There is no way, and no point in trying, to make a child stop acting like a child. There are, though, gentle ways to guide a child through the normal developmental stages safely and peacefully. The repetitious nature of boundary-setting in the early years is a bit like washing your hair, “Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat…” Knowing that and accepting it makes the seemingly endless repetitions, reminders, and redirections a bit easier to handle.
L.R. Knost (The Gentle Parent: Positive, Practical, Effective Discipline (A Little Hearts Handbook))
In his book Tapworthy, author Josh Clark focused on three critical mobile behaviors: micro-tasking, “I’m local,” and “I’m bored.” These align pretty well with Google’s breakdown of mobile users into three behavioral groups: urgent now, repetitive now, and bored now.
Anonymous
The other feature of this list is that many of these signals could easily be viewed as obvious and redundant. For instance, do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up? The answer, as Endmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation.
Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
In the current business scenario, it is imperative for all the business persons to take efficient Backup Thunderbird Mac so that they don’t have to lose their precious data permanently due to various security hazards. So, if you are also looking for an alternative for doing so, then Inventpure’s Mail Backup X is the best solution for you. This tool has an incremental backup system which means that it is smart enough to skip those files whose backup has been taken in the previous mail backup proceedings. Moreover, there will be no repetition of the data and users can locate them with complete ease. Also, the tool works independently as it is based on high-level automation which can accomplish the entire task automatically by itself. Users don’t have to participate in the software while backup proceedings are going on. Some Advanced Features Of Mail Backup X Are As Listed Below: • The Users Do Not Know How To Backup Thunderbird Email Can Also Use Mail Backup X, Effectively: This tool is designed for everybody to use it. In simple words, users having basic knowledge of computers can also Backup Thunderbird Mac without any hassles. The system generates on-screen wizards at every step to assist the users. Such instructions are written in a simplified and lucid form so that professionals, as well as the novice users, can understand them with ease. • Download The Free Demo Of Mail Backup X Take Unlimited Thunderbird Backup Without Paying Any Cost: The company has launched the 15 days free demo trial for those users who have doubts relating to its performance. The company has not locked any of its features so that users can have a bright idea about its performance. During the free trial period, Users can export up to 10 files in one process. Limited exportation of files is the only constraint of free demo version; if you want to break this restriction, you should buy its paid license package for a lifetime. • Mail Backup X Can Also Play The Role Of Email Conversion Tool With Great Perfection: This email backup software has advanced data conversion engine that is mostly used by professional conversion tools. Through this, users can convert any mail to any file format that is supported by almost all the major email clients. It will come up with complete, appropriate and 100% accurate results with zero file damages. Thus, users do not need to purchase additional data converter; Mail Backup X can flawlessly restore their email archives in the format of their choice without any compatibility issues. • Mail Backup X Come Up With Advanced Emailing Services Which Makes Your Thunderbird Email Backup Process A Piece Of Cake: Inventpure’s Mail Backup X not only takes mail backups from all the major email clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. but also supports IMAP and POP services by directly operating on your Mac system. More than that, it can save your emails in PDF format for quick conversion from soft copies into hard copies.
Maddy Roby
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition.
Robin MacArthur (Heart Spring Mountain)
Here’s what I had to accept: Cleaning my house is not a project. It’s a series of boring, mundane, repetitive tasks. The people whose homes are clean all the time do these boring, mundane, repetitive tasks.
Dana K. White (How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets)
Just as the globus pallidus fixes various body parts in particular positions, so does the striate body initiate and monitor many stereotyped movements. Cats and dogs and horses and pigs all graze and chew, prick up their ears at a new sound, coordinate various gaits, and so on. Humans also share a wide range of stereotyped movements, similar in their features because they are designed to accomplish the same things for each individual. And further, we have noted that although both dogs and cats do many similar things—sitting, walking, drinking, jumping, grooming, and the like—they each do them in distinctly canine or feline ways. Every species has a way of doing the normal tasks of living, a manner of movement that is peculiar to it. A good mime can represent “cat” or “mouse,” or “horse,” or “ape” with a brief imitation of these animals’ manner of movement just as effectively as he could with an elaborate costume. These too are stereotypes of movement. The striate body seems to control a wide range of such movements—individual movements that have common utility, movements which continually correct our balance, movements which are the synchronized background motions’ that necessarily accompany the use of a limb, or movements which establish such standard communications as sexual arousal, docility, fear, anger, or defensiveness. As with fixed positions, in the human being both the repertoire of stereotyped movements and the stereotyped manner in which all movements are done may markedly display habitual preferences built up by compulsions, training, job requirements, and dispositions. And as with chronic fixations, there is the tendency over long periods of repetition to confuse how I do things with who I am. My most common movements, designed to be controlled by my unconscious mind so that I can freely direct my attention elsewhere, become more than stereotypes; they become straight jackets, and I find myself the prisoner of the very unconscious processes which are supposed to protect and liberate me. Re-establishing for the individual the sense of a wide array of equally possible movements is the real significance behind the work of freeing a person from limited neuromuscular patterns.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
The sensory roles of the anulospiral receptor and the tendon organ are absolutely central in this process of exerting and adjusting muscle tone. These devices establish the “feel” for length and tension, and it is this feeling which is maintained by the gamma motor system, the reflex arcs, and the alpha skeletal muscles. All of my muscle cells—both alpha and gamma—are continually felt by the mind as they work, whether most of these “feelings” ever reach my conscious awareness or not. And it is primarily these muscular feelings which supply my central nervous system with the constant information necessary to successfully combine the demands of free motion with those of basic structural stability. The sophistication required for this maintenance of structure and flexibility can be appreciated if we remember that almost any simple motion—such as raising the arm out to the side—changes either the length or the tension values in most of the body’s muscle cells. If one is to avoid tipping towards the extended arm, then the feet, the legs, the hips, the back, the neck, and the opposite arm all must participate in a new distribution of balance created by the “isolated” movement of raising the arm. The difficulties experienced by every child learning to sit, to stand erect, and to walk with an even gait attest to the complexity of the demands which these shifts in balance and tone make upon us. The entire musculature must learn to participate in the motion of any of its parts. And to do this, the entire musculature must feel its own activity, fully and in rich detail. Competent posture and movement are among the chief points of sensory self-awareness. The purpose of bodywork is to heighten and focus this awareness. It is the child’s task during this early motor training to experiment by trial and error, and to set the precise lengths and tensions—and changes in length and tension—in all his muscle fibers for these basic skills of standing and walking. This is the education of the basal ganglia and the gamma motor system, as learned reflex responses are added to our inherited ones. The lengths and rates of change of the spindle fibers are set at values which experience has confirmed to be appropriate for the movement desired, and then the sensorimotor reflex arcs of the spindles and the Golgis command the alpha motor nerves, and hence the skeletal muscles, to respond exactly to those specifications that have been established in the gamma system by previous trial and error. And this chain of events holds true not only for the actual limb being moved, but for all other parts of the musculature that must brace, or shift, or compensate in any way. In this complicated process, the child is guided primarily by sensory cues which become more consistent and more predictable with every repetition of his efforts.
Deane Juhan (Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodywork)
Another aspect of yoga has to do with our actions. Yoga therefore also means acting in such a way that all of our attention is directed toward the activity in which we are currently engaged. Suppose for example that while I am writing, one part of my mind is thinking about what I want to say while another part is thinking about something entirely different. The more I am focused on my writing, the greater my attentiveness to my action in this moment. The exact opposite might also occur: I might begin writing with great attention, but as I continue to write my attention begins to waver. I might begin to think about the plans I have for the day tomorrow, or what is cooking for dinner. It then appears as if I am acting with attentiveness, but really I am paying little attention to the task at hand. I am functioning, but I am not present. Yoga attempts to create a state in which we are always present—really present—in every action, in every moment. The advantage of attentiveness is that we perform each task better and at the same time are conscious of our actions. The possibility of making mistakes becomes correspondingly smaller the more our attention develops. When we are attentive to our actions we are not prisoners to our habits; we do not need to do something today simply because we did it yesterday. Instead there is the possibility of considering our actions fresh and so avoiding thoughtless repetition. Another
T.K.V. Desikachar (The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice)
There are three categories of criteria that an individual must meet in order to be diagnosed with ASD. The categories are listed below along with the typical traits, which may indicate whether the individual needs further assessment: 1.Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays: lack of friends and social life friends often much older or younger mumbling and not completing sentences issues with social rules (such as staring at other people) inability to understand jokes and the benefit of ‘small talk’ introverted (shy) and socially awkward inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings uncomfortable in large crowds and noisy places detached and emotionally inexpressive. 2.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: obsession with ‘special interests’ collecting objects (such as stamps and coins) attachment to routines and rituals ability to focus on a single task for long periods eccentric or unorthodox behaviour non-conformist and distrusting of authority difficulty following illogical conventions attracted to foreign cultures affinity with nature and animals support for victims of injustice, underdogs and scapegoats. 3.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: inappropriate emotional responses victimised or bullied at school, work and home overthinking and constant logical analysis spending much time alone strange laugh or cackle inability to make direct eye contact when talking highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, smell and touch uncoordinated and clumsy with poor posture difficulty coping with change adept at abstract thinking ability to process data sets logically and notice patterns or trends truthful, naïve and often gullible slow mental processing and vulnerable to mental exhaustion intellectual and ungrounded rather than intuitive and instinctive problems with anxiety and sleeping visual memory.
Philip Wylie (Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Autism Spectrum Disorder): How Seeking a Diagnosis in Adulthood Can Change Your Life)
The research will involve quantifying responses to a series of drawing tasks. All participants in the study will be female, roughly between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. In 1990, at the time of the war, they would have been between four and six years old. I will use Piaget’s model of the preoperational stage of childhood development to limit the study’s grouping parameters. From Utrecht in Chicago, I bought enough art supplies to quantify their qualitative responses. Each participant must complete the same tasks: First, mix a color that represents how she remembers the invasion as a child. Second, draw her first memory of the invasion. Third, draw the objects around her during the invasion. The study will use projective drawing tasks to elicit and examine the nonverbal mental schema of the subjects, all of whom lived in Kuwait throughout the invasion and eventual liberation. The results will be measured for repetition of color, image, and symbol (CIS). I hope to find the answer to these questions from these young adults: Can childhood memories of the 1990 invasion be more accurately recalled using nonverbal, rather than verbal, communication skills? If so, do the recollections contain patterns of color, imagery, and symbols?
Yvonne Wakefield (Suitcase Filled with Nails)
Agile software development needs teams to be motivated. But repetitive tasks are boring, not motivating, so they should be automated. Many
Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)))
Whether the task is mental or physical, interleaving improves the ability to match the right strategy to a problem. That happens to be a hallmark of expert problem solving. Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures. In that way, they are just about the precise opposite of experts who develop in kind learning environments, like chess masters, who rely heavily on intuition. Kind learning environment experts choose a strategy and then evaluate; experts in less repetitive environments evaluate and then choose.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 8o to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now)
Artificial Intelligence, often envisioned as a futuristic concept, is very much a present reality. In the context of HR, AI presents a powerful opportunity to automate many of these repetitive tasks, freeing HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Donovan Tiemie (HR in the age of AI: The Illusion of Control (Revolutionizing HR: Transforming People Management in the Digital Age Book 2))
Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, that everything happened and at the same time didn't, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences gradually cancels itself out, negates itself in its apparent repetitiveness until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. There's no such thing as a whole or perhaps there never was anything.
Javier Marías (A Heart So White)
Properly utilizing Ai allows for better choices on the most efficient use of resources and frees us from many tedious, repetitive tasks. An additional benefit will be what some call visibility or what I call transparency. While society may never be equal, it can have equal opportunity for all to create and succeed. Transparency helps build trust in the system.
Rico Roho (Beyond the Fringe: My Experience with Extended Intelligence (Age of Discovery Book 3))
In 2018, Arowana is working with RPA (robotic process automation) specialists to introduce robotic process automation software and tools into our companies. RPA will help them process menial, repetitive tasks faster, with zero errors and at much lower costs. In one case, an accounts payable robot can process in 1 hour what a human being can process in 1 week.
kevinchin
Running advertising campaigns on websites, placing relevant tweets and Facebook posts whenever the organization had a notable success, assisting with public relations and media inquiries and drafting press releases and other repetitive tasks.
E.A. Aymar (No Home for Killers)
As things stood right now, I would not miss my old life very much; my sister, Deborah, was apparently through with me forever, my home life had become an annoying millstone around my neck, and my job was no more than rote performance of repetitive tasks. I didn’t really have any actual friends—other than my boat, there was nothing to tie me to my life in Miami. Of course, there was the Nighttime Me, the Devil Dexter who delivered the Wicked to their just deserts with a sharp blade and a hearty smile. But that other me was portable, too, and from what I had heard about the movie business, I was quite sure there were plenty of deserving Playmates in L.A.—or, for that matter, anywhere I might go. Human nature being what it is, I could be certain to find quality entertainment everywhere on this tired old globe.
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter's Final Cut (Dexter, #7))
God has given us the privilege of discipling our children, grandchildren, and all who are following in our footsteps: "Let each generation tell its children of your mighty acts; let them proclaim your power." - Psalm 145:4, NLT The calendar gives both form and substance to that privilege. As we celebrate God's mighty acts together, we are connecting the next generation with a past. That past includes our individual family stories but also enfolds them in a story much greater and more beautiful than our own. The feasts form the structure for the task of discipleship God has given us. God tells us in Deuteronomy 6:7 we are to repeat and keep on repeating to our children the commands he has given us. This repetition was meant to take place within the structure of a family's daily life and inside the context of an entire community participating in a weekly and yearly rhythm of feasts, fasts, and festivals.
Michelle Van Loon (Moments & Days: How Our Holy Celebrations Shape Our Faith)
This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
ENLIGHTENMENT: RISING ABOVE THOUGHT Isn’t thinking essential in order to survive in this world? Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
Parity of esteem,” in the parlance of negotiation experts, is a simple concept but requires a fundamental reorientation of behavior on both sides. Each says to the other: “I know your narrative and I reject it in its entirety, yet I accept your right to define your own narrative as you wish, and I will respect that right and its aspirations.” The important component is respect; respect is more embracive than trust. Until each side reaches a level of understanding of the other’s narrative that facilitates a willingness to accord parity of esteem, peace agreements will likely falter, perhaps not immediately but in a corrosive ambience that slowly emerges and is conducive to disregarding some of their provisions. Peace agreements are pieces of paper. The task of translating them into sustainable reconciliation is a long and difficult process; former protagonists are in “recovery.” Unless they nurture that recovery, their peace agreement will fall apart or lapse into “frozen” pacts. In Israel and Palestine there is no parity of esteem for the respective narratives and therefore no trust. This is why the onset of any negotiation is often not welcomed by either the leadership or the constituencies of either side. Instead, the prospect brings latent fears to the foreground, and the leaderships play to these fears, feeding their constituencies the same stale and divisive pronouncements about “the other” that have been repeated ad nauseam over decades. They engage in debilitating tit-for-tat exchanges, talk only about what the other side has to do, what the other side needs to tell its people, never about what they themselves have to do, what their own people need to understand. All this prepares the way, should the talks collapse, for one more repetition of the blame game and violence, which becomes self-fulfilling and self-motivating.
Padraig O'Malley (The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine--A Tale of Two Narratives)
What all the positive psychology research and writing tells us is that you can reprogram your brain through some very simple exercises that are both simple and easy to do. Not any kind of huge, massive effort or difficult personal transformation, not some breakthrough, nothing dramatic or heroic or titanic—just simple, fairly mundane, repetitive tasks that are easy to do, and to do again, day after day. Simple tasks that, if you do them consistently and persistently over a long enough period of time, will get the results you are looking for.
Jeff Olson (The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness)
Tiger, what are you doing out here hitting balls at three a.m.?” “It doesn’t rain very often in Northern California,” replied the kid who went on to become one of the most successful golfers in history. “It’s the only chance I have to practice hitting in the rain.” You might expect this kind of diligence from the best athlete in his field. What is fascinating is how narrow the exercise’s scope was. He wasn’t practicing putting or hitting from a sand bunker. He spent four hours standing in the rain, hitting the same shot from the same spot, pursuing perfection in an intensely specific skill. It turns out that’s the best way to learn. K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, has studied the acquisition of expert-level skill for decades. The conventional wisdom is that it takes ten thousand hours of effort to become an expert. Ericsson instead found that it’s not about how much time you spend learning, but rather how you spend that time. He finds evidence that people who attain mastery of a field, whether they are violinists, surgeons, athletes,144 or even spelling bee champions,145approach learning in a different way from the rest of us. They shard their activities into tiny actions, like hitting the same golf shot in the rain for hours, and repeat them relentlessly. Each time, they observe what happens, make minor—almost imperceptible—adjustments, and improve. Ericsson refers to this as deliberate practice: intentional repetitions of similar, small tasks with immediate feedback, correction, and experimentation.
Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
When you train yourself, through repetition and practice, to overcome procrastination and get your most important tasks completed quickly, you will move yourself onto the fast track in your life and career and step on the accelerator.
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
He hadn’t always been mute. He had always exhibited behaviors on the edge of the autistic spectrum, maybe Asperger’s. He craved routine, liked his things in the exact right place and excelled at repetitive tasks. But he had no truly obvious disabilities except when stressed he zoned out and would often crawl into small, cramped spaces and stay there for hours.
Toni Anderson (Cold Justice Series Box Set: Volume I (Cold Justice #1-3))
Back in the days of the industrial economy, building a successful workplace meant finding efficiencies through eliminating errors, standardizing performance, and squeezing more out of workers. How employees felt while doing their job was of secondary interest, because it had limited impact on their performance. The main thing was that the work got done. Today things are different. Our work is infinitely more complex. We rarely need employees to simply do routine, repetitive tasks—we also need them to collaborate, plan, and innovate. Building a thriving organization in the current economy demands a great deal more than efficiency. It requires an environment that harnesses intelligence, creativity, and interpersonal skill.
Ron Friedman (The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace)
Faced with the task of building a strong, cohesive corporate culture, many software companies have borrowed heavily from other organizations. Trilogy Software made headlines by sending its new recruits to a training “boot camp” for three months—with classes running from 8:00 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, for the first month. Other companies, such as Scient, subject their new recruits to intense pep rallies, with constant repetition of the company slogan— “I’m on fire!” The popularity of these tactics has even led to some hand-wringing about the cult-like character of many business initiation rituals. One writer for Shift magazine captured the dilemma quite well in a brilliant article entitled “Why Your Fabulous Job Sucks.” “Work is a blast. Your colleagues are cool and they dig having your dog around. But something evil lures you to the company beer fridge. Ever wonder why you’re never home?” The observation here is quite astute. Creating a cool work environment, holding fabulous office parties with great bands, letting people wear whatever they want, setting up the LAN for multiplayer gaming— this may all seem like corporate generosity. But it also has a sound economic rationale. All these devices help to build among young employees allegiance, loyalty, and a willingness to work. The easiest way to persuade people to pull an all-nighter is to make being at the office more fun than being at home.
Joseph Heath (The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets)
Anthony Robbins says, “Repetition is the mother of skill.” Repeat till you succeed. The more you practice, the better will be your skill. When you do the same things over and over again, you master it. So don’t hate mundane and repetitive tasks!   Lesson
James Derici (Tony Robbins: 31 Motivational Lessons from Anthony Robbins that Will Change Your Life)
You live here in Copper Creek, Miss Ashford?” She dipped a fresh cloth in the water and washed the bullet wound in the patient’s shoulder as best she could. “I do now. We arrived today.” She paused and straightened, the muscles in her back in spasms from bending over the table, and from too much riding on trains and coaches and wagons. She thought of Janie waiting at home, watching for her, and hoped she wasn’t worrying. Robert’s only concern would be that she’d left him overlong with people he didn’t know. He hated making chitchat. She just hoped he wasn’t acting sullen and stone-faced with Vince, Janie, and Emma, like he so often did with her. Hearing a clock ticking somewhere behind her, she rethreaded the needle and focused again on her task. Suturing a man was different from suturing a horse, and very definitely different from sewing saddles. Yet something about the repetition of the act felt similar, which made her wonder if she was doing it right. “We?” Finishing the third suture in the man’s shoulder, she peered up at Caradon, the needle poised between her right thumb and forefinger. “I beg your pardon?” “You said ‘we arrived today.’” Not wanting to talk, she tied off a fourth suture, and a fifth, aware of him watching her. “My brother and I.” “Where did you move from?” She raised her head to find him leaning close, their faces inches apart. “If you don’t mind, Marshal Caradon, could we . . . not talk right now?” The tanned lines at the corners of his eyes tightened ever so slightly. “Not much on that, are you, ma’am? Talking, I mean.” Though his expression denied it, she heard a smile in his voice, yet she held back from responding to it. Outwardly anyway. Someone like Wyatt Caradon was the last person she, or Robert, needed in their lives right now. “I don’t mind talking, Marshal. When I’m not exhausted, famished, and stitching up a gunshot wound.” Catching his grin before she looked away, she finished suturing and bandaging the wound.
Tamera Alexander (The Inheritance)
In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate.
Moisés Naím (The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be)
Everyone has a need to feel a sense of self-worth and self-actualization – that he or she believes his or her existence is meaningful. Unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution wrongfully instilled a social norm that self-worth should primarily come from work ethic – if you work hard, you will be rewarded. But because of AI, jobs based on repetitive tasks will soon be gone forever. We need to redefine the idea of work ethic for the new workforce paradigm. The importance of a job should not be solely dependent on its economic value but should also be measured by what it adds to society. We should also reassess our notion that longer work hours are the best way to achieve success and should remove the stigma associated with service professions.
Kai-Fu Lee
Each tool symbolizes one of the four things to keep in mind when supervising any project. •The conch-shell trumpet stands for clear communication. The yajaman needs to clearly communicate his expectations to his team. •The wheel stands for repetition and review. The yajaman needs to appreciate that all tasks are repetitive and need to be reviewed periodically. •The lotus is about appreciation and praise. It complements the club. •The club stands for reprimand and disciplinary actions. It complements the lotus.
Devdutt Pattanaik (What makes an Organization Succeed? (Management Sutras Book 6))
All of this told of harm done, of a drug that made a child depressed, lonely, and filled with a sense of inadequacy, and when researchers looked at whether Ritalin at least helped hyperactive children fare well academically, to get good grades and thus succeed as students, they found that it wasn’t so. Being able to focus intently on a math test, it turned out, didn’t translate into long-term academic achievement. This drug, Sroufe explained in 1973, enhances performance on “repetitive, routinized tasks that require sustained attention,” but “reasoning, problem solving and learning do not seem to be [positively] affected.”26 Five years later, Herbert Rie was much more negative. He reported that Ritalin did not produce any benefit on the students’ “vocabulary, reading, spelling, or math,” and hindered their ability to solve problems. “The reactions of the children strongly suggest a reduction in commitment of the sort that would seem critical for learning.”27 That same year, Russell Barkley at the Medical College of Wisconsin reviewed the relevant scientific literature and concluded “the major effect of stimulants appears to be an improvement in classroom manageability rather than academic performance.”28 Next it was James Swanson’s turn to weigh in. The fact that the drugs often left children “isolated, withdrawn and overfocused” could “impair rather than improve learning,” he said.29 Carol Whalen, a psychologist from the University of California at Irvine, noted in 1997 that “especially worrisome has been the suggestion that the unsalutary effects [of Ritalin] occur in the realm of complex, high-order cognitive functions such as flexible problem-solving or divergent thinking.”30 Finally, in 2002, Canadian investigators conducted a meta-analysis of the literature, reviewing fourteen studies involving 1,379 youths that had lasted at least three months, and they determined that there was “little evidence for improved academic performance.”31
Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)
A worker in Adam Smith’s pin factory, or Henry Ford’s automobile factory, performed a single repetitive task with no real connection, emotional or intellectual, to the overall product. Nor—unlike those old-time craftsmen—did factory workers have much of a connection to the economics of the business. Although factory workers did much better economically than peasant farmers had done, their share of the proceeds was trivial compared to that of the people who financed and ran these large capital-intensive operations— people who became known as “capitalists.
Glenn Reynolds (An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths)
The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation—similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks—and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.
Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)
As psychologists, Ericsson and the other researchers in his field are not interested in why deliberate practice works; they’re just identifying it as an effective behavior. In the intervening decades since Ericsson’s first major papers on the topic, however, neuroscientists have been exploring the physical mechanisms that drive people’s improvements on hard tasks. As the journalist Daniel Coyle surveys in his 2009 book, The Talent Code, these scientists increasingly believe the answer includes myelin—a layer of fatty tissue that grows around neurons, acting like an insulator that allows the cells to fire faster and cleaner. To understand the role of myelin in improvement, keep in mind that skills, be they intellectual or physical, eventually reduce down to brain circuits. This new science of performance argues that you get better at a skill as you develop more myelin around the relevant neurons, allowing the corresponding circuit to fire more effortlessly and effectively. To be great at something is to be well myelinated. This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination. By contrast, if you’re trying to learn a complex new skill (say, SQL database management) in a state of low concentration (perhaps you also have your Facebook feed open), you’re firing too many circuits simultaneously and haphazardly to isolate the group of neurons you actually want to strengthen.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task.
Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)
This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task. This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.
Dalai Lama XIV (The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living)
TASK: KETTLEBELL SNATCH Condition: Snatch a kettlebell for repetitions with one arm and then the other. Standard: 1. All of the points that apply to the swing, (see pages 44-45) minus the requirement to keep a straight arm. 2. Pick up the kettlebell, swing it back between your legs, and snatch it overhead in one uninterrupted motion to a straight-arm lockout. The snatch. At the lockout, the arm must be level with the head or behind the head. 3. Catch the kettlebell softly without banging your forearm or jarring your elbow and shoulder. 4. At the lockout, the arm must be level with the head or behind the head. 5. Maintain the fixation for a second with the arm and legs straight and the feet and body stationary. 6. Lower the kettlebell between your legs in one loose, uninterrupted motion without touching the chest or the shoulder, and snatch again.
Pavel Tsatsouline (Enter the Kettlebell!: Strength Secret of the Soviet Supermen)
What is sensory integration therapy? This form of occupational therapy helps children and adults with SPD (sensory processing disorder) use all their senses together. These are the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Sensory integration therapy is claimed to help people with SPD respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, and others; and change challenging or repetitive behaviours. Someone in the family may have trouble receiving and responding to information through their senses. This is a condition called sensory processing disorder (SPD). These people are over-sensitive to things in their surroundings. This disorder is commonly identified in children and with conditions like autism spectrum disorder. The exact cause of sensory processing disorder is yet to be identified. However, previous studies have proven that over-sensitivity to light and sound has a strong genetic component. Other studies say that those with sensory processing conditions have abnormal brain activity when exposed simultaneously to light and sound. Treatment for sensory processing disorder in children and adults is called sensory integration therapy. Therapy sessions are play-oriented for children, so they should be fun and playful. This may include the use of swings, slides, and trampolines and may be able to calm an anxious child. In addition, children can make appropriate responses. They can also perform more normally. SPD can also affect adults Someone who struggles with SPD should consider receiving occupational therapy, which has an important role in identifying and treating sensory integration issues. Occupational therapists are health professionals using different therapeutic approaches so that people can do every work they need to do, inside and outside their homes. Through occupational therapy, affected individuals are helped to manage their immediate and long-term sensory symptoms. Sensory integration therapy for adults, especially for people living with dementia or Alzheimer's disease, may use everyday sounds, objects, foods, and other items to rouse their feelings and elicit positive responses. Suppose an adult is experiencing agitation or anxiety. In that case, soothing music can calm them, or smelling a scent familiar to them can help lessen their nervous excitement and encourage relaxation, as these things can stimulate their senses. Seniors with Alzheimer's/Dementia can regain their ability to connect with the world around them. This can help improve their well-being overall and quality of life. What Are The Benefits of Sensory Integration Therapy Sensory integration treatment offers several benefits to people with SPD: * efficient organisation of sensory information. These are the things the brain collects from one's senses - smell, touch, sight, etc. * Active involvement in an exploration of the environment. * Maximised ability to function in recreational and other daily activities. * Improved independence with daily living activities. * Improved performance in the home, school, and community. * self-regulations. Affected individuals get the ability to understand and manage their behaviours and understand their feelings about things that happen around them. * Sensory systems modulation. If you are searching for an occupational therapist to work with for a family with a sensory processing disorder, check out the Mission Walk Therapy & Rehabilitation Centre. The occupational therapy team of Mission Walk uses individualised care plans, along with the most advanced techniques, so that patients can perform games, school tasks, and other day-to-day activities with their best functional skills. Call Mission Walk today for more information or a free consultation on sensory integration therapy. Our customer service staff will be happy to help.
Missionwalk - Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation
In general, poor PFC function leads people to make repetitive mistakes. Their actions are not based on experience, or forethought, but rather on the moment. The moment is what matters. This phrase comes up over and over with my ADD patients. For many people with ADD, forethought is a struggle. It is natural for them to act out what is important to them at the immediate moment, not two moments from now or five moments from now, but now! A person with ADD may be ready for work a few minutes early, but rather than leave the house and be on time or a few minutes early, she may do another couple of things that make her late. Likewise, a person with ADD may be sexually attracted to someone he just met, and even though he is married and his personal goal is to stay married, he may have a sexual encounter that puts his marriage at risk. The moment was what mattered. In the same vein, many people with ADD take what I call a crisis management approach to their lives. Rather than having clearly defined goals and acting in a manner consistent to reach them, they ricochet from crisis to crisis. In school, people with ADD have difficulty with long-term planning. Instead of keeping up as the semester goes along, they focus on the crisis in front of them at the moment—the next test or term paper. At work they are under continual stress. Deadlines loom and tasks go uncompleted. It seems as though there is a need for constant stress in order to get consistent work done. The constant stress, however, takes a physical toll on everyone involved (the person, his or her family, coworkers, employers, friends, etc.).
Daniel G. Amen (Healing ADD: The Breakthrough Program that Allows You to See and Heal the 7 Types of ADD)
One of our central tasks with patients with eating disorders is facilitating the capacity to postpone action in favor of reflection. We inevitably find especially early on, that this is challenging: the pull to binge, or purge, or restrict is difficult, often impossible, to resist. To understand this fact, in this chapter we begin with a discussion of Freud’s (1914) notion of the compulsion to repeat and then formulate the eating disordered patient's symptoms as repetitions against traumatic themes from childhood, never-ending (because never fully successful) attempts to magically undo the pain of the past.
Tom Wooldridge (Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction)
equally adept at consuming information on the Web. Most web sites are created for people, but quite often you want to automate tasks that involve accessing a web site in a repetitive way. Such tasks could be as simple as saying “here’s a list of URLs; I want to be emailed if any of them stop
Sean M. Burke (Perl & LWP: Fetching Web Pages, Parsing HTML, Writing Spiders & More)
created for people, but quite often you want to automate tasks that involve accessing a web site in a repetitive way. Such tasks could be as simple as saying “here’s a list of URLs; I want to be emailed if any of them stop working,” or they could involve more complex processing of any number
Sean M. Burke (Perl & LWP: Fetching Web Pages, Parsing HTML, Writing Spiders & More)
Rebels tend to resist committing to a schedule. Seeing an item on their calendar can make them feel trapped, and when they do make plans, they often cancel them at the last minute. Rebels resist doing repetitive, boring tasks—such as taking out the garbage or filing expense reports—unless the consequences become serious enough. Many Rebels mention that they use automatic bill paying, and when they can afford it, they often pay to outsource routine obligations.
Gretchen Rubin (The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People's Lives Better, Too))
easier to tolerate the repetitive nature of care tasks if we let go of moral messages and isolate the functional reason for doing them.
K.C. Davis (How to Keep House While Drowning)
AI enables marketers to: •​Accelerate revenue growth •​Create personalized consumer experiences at scale •​Drive costs down •​Generate greater return on investment (ROI) •​Get more actionable insights from marketing data •​Predict consumer needs and behaviors with greater accuracy •​Reduce time spent on repetitive, data-driven tasks •​Shorten the sales cycle •​Unlock greater value from marketing technologies
Paul Roetzer (Marketing Artificial Intelligence: Ai, Marketing, and the Future of Business)
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a marketing strategy that focuses on managing interactions and relationships with customers. CRM enables businesses to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by providing personalized experiences that meet their needs. CRM is an essential aspect of modern marketing as it enables businesses to understand their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs and develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. In Go High Level, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a core component of the platform. The CRM functionality in Go High Level enables businesses to manage their customer interactions and relationships more effectively, improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. The CRM functionality in Go High Level includes a range of features and tools designed to help businesses automate and streamline their customer-facing processes, as well as provide them with insights into their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs. In essence, CRM is a set of practices, technologies, and strategies that businesses use to manage their customer interactions and relationships. The goal of CRM is to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers by providing them with personalized experiences and tailored solutions. CRM in marketing can be divided into three main categories: operational CRM, analytical CRM, and collaborative CRM. Operational CRM focuses on automating and streamlining customer-facing processes, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. This type of CRM is designed to improve efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and providing a centralized database of customer information. Operational CRM includes features such as sales pipeline management, lead nurturing, and customer service management. Analytical CRM focuses on analyzing customer data to gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and needs. This type of CRM enables businesses to make data-driven decisions by providing them with a better understanding of their customers' needs and preferences. Analytical CRM includes features such as customer segmentation, data mining, and predictive analytics. Collaborative CRM focuses on enabling businesses to collaborate and share customer information across different departments and functions. This type of CRM helps to break down silos within organizations and improve communication and collaboration between different teams. Collaborative CRM includes features such as customer feedback management, social media monitoring, and knowledge management. CRM is important for marketing because it enables businesses to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers. By understanding their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs, businesses can develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. This results in higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. CRM can also help businesses to improve their sales and marketing processes by providing them with better visibility into their sales pipeline and enabling them to track and analyze their marketing campaigns' effectiveness. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions to improve their sales and marketing strategies, resulting in increased revenue and growth. Another benefit of CRM in marketing is that it enables businesses to personalize their marketing campaigns. Personalization is essential in modern marketing as it enables businesses to tailor their marketing messages and solutions to meet their customers' specific needs and preferences. This results in higher engagement and conversion rates, as customers are more likely to respond to marketing messages that resonate with them. Lead Generation: Go High Level provides businesses with a range of tools to generate leads, including customizable landing pages, web forms, and social media integrations.
What is CRM in Marketing?
The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behavior. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes both automatic and easy to do.
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
This understanding is important because it provides a neurological foundation for why deliberate practice works. By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you’re forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill. The reason, therefore, why it’s important to focus intensely on the task at hand while avoiding distraction is because this is the only way to isolate the relevant neural circuit enough to trigger useful myelination.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
Humans are unable to conceive of the optimal set of instructions to guide a machine to personalize thousands of unique experiences. This is where AI excels. It takes data-driven, repetitive tasks, and makes them look easy. But AI doesn’t stop at setting up the initial rules to maximize performance. It uses machine learning to constantly evolve. In other words, it learns, it gets smarter, and it creates its own algorithms.
Paul Roetzer (Marketing Artificial Intelligence: Ai, Marketing, and the Future of Business)
Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.”25
Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
A century on in 1984, black feminist, activist and poet Audre Lorde wrote in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches: ‘Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women – in the face of tremendous resistance – as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.
Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, that everything happened and at the same time didn’t, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences gradually cancels itself out, negates itself in its apparent repetitiveness until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable. Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. There’s no such thing as a whole or perhaps there never was anything. But it’s also true that there is a time for everything and that it’s all there, waiting for us to call it back
Javier Marías
What are humans for? Humans are for being more human than we’ve ever been. More human in how we work. More human in what we learn. And more human in how we share that knowledge with each other. Our giant opportunity for tomorrow is to rise. To rise above our long history of using specialist knowledge to do repetitive tasks. Whether it’s the backbreaking work of harvesting rice year after year or the mind-numbing work of assembling a product on a manufacturing line, most humans, for most of history, have made a living doing the same thing over and over again. Our future won’t be like that. Anything that can be automated or calculated ultimately will be. Now, we can be fearful of that, or we can embrace it and take the chance to discover a richer path to life fulfillment.
Chris J. Anderson (TED Talks: The official TED guide to public speaking: Tips and tricks for giving unforgettable speeches and presentations)
In the end, the answer is the men. They have to do the work. Why do we tie ourselves in knots to avoid saying this one simple truth? It's a daily and repetitive and eternal truth, and it's a dangerous truth, because if we press this point we can blow our households to pieces, we can take our families apart, we can spoil our great love affairs. This demand is enough to destroy almost everything we hold dear. So we shut up and do the work. No single task is ever worth the argument. Scrub a toilet, wash a few dishes, respond to the note from the teacher, talk to another mother, buy the supplies. Don't make a big deal out of everything. Don't make a big deal out of anything. Never mind that, writ large, all these minor chores are the reason we remain stuck in this depressing hole of pointless conversations and stifled accomplishment. Never mind that we are still, after all these waves of feminism and intramural arguments among the various strains of womanhood, treated like a natural resource that can be guiltlessly plundered. Never mind that the kids are watching. If you mind you might go crazy. Cooking and cleaning and childcare are everything. They are the ultimate truth. They underpin and enable everything we do. The perpetual allocation of this most crucial and inevitable work along gender lines sets women up for failure and men for success. It saps the energy and burdens the brains of half the population. And yet honest discussion of housework is still treated as taboo.
Megan Stack