Workload Quotes

sleep is such a luxury, which i cant afford.

Day: Different. * Shit: Same. * Workload and Course Load: Big, steamy load. * Consider: Pro v. con of liquid diet. * Shopping List: One bourbon. One Scotch. One beer.

Gmorning. This feeling will pass. This workload will pass. These people will pass. But look at you, with the gift of memory. You can time travel to the good stuff just by closing your eyes & breathing. Then come right back to now, eyes up for the good stuff ahead. You magic thing. Gnight. This moment will pass. This fatigue will pass. Tonight will pass. But look at you, with the gift of imagination. You can teleport to where you're happiest just by closing your eyes and breathing. Then come right back to now, check in with the present. You magic thing, you.

What breaks you down is not the amount of pressure you feel at one time, but it’s the way you perceive and handle it.

And to think I survived this deadly workload, only to be murdered by the sight of my parents' bare asses, a tragedy that gives a whole new meaning to the word assassination.

Day of Employment: 362 8:11 p.m. * Day: Different. * Shit: Same. * Workload and Course Load: Big, steamy load. * Consider: Pro v. con of liquid diet. * Shopping List: One bourbon. One Scotch. One beer.

Gmorning. This feeling will pass. This workload will pass. These people will pass. But look at you, with the gift of memory. You can time travel to the good stuff just by closing your eyes & breathing. Then come right back to now, eyes up for the good stuff ahead. You magic thing. Gnight. This moment will pass. This fatigue will pass. Tonight will pass. But look at you, with the gift of imagination. You can teleport to where you're happiest just by closing your eyes and breathing. Then come right back to now, check in with the present. You magic thing, you.

If The Muppet Show had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98." (Jerry Juhl on the crazy workload of The Muppet Show)

In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird's nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She'd never before understood how much her life in this little house had felt to her like confinement in a sinking vehicle after driving off a bridge. ..... To open a hatch and swim away felt miraculous. Working outside the home took her about fifty yards from her kitchen, which was far enough. She couldn't see the dishes in the sink.

It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family.

You are likely to vomit your dreams if you take too much at a time. Take it one after the other and don't over-eat the dreams you have! Dream big, but start small!

[After discussing the importance of the Tuesday workload...] "...'Anyway, I spend a lot of time praying. And my knees are calloused.' ... 'I've spent a lot of time doing the same, ' I said as the light changed. 'That's the only thing that gets me through--on Tuesday's and every other day of the week.

the more you see yourself like a stranger, the more likely you are to give your future self the same workload that you would give a stranger, and the more likely you are to put things off to tomorrow—for your future self to do.

Parsons’ interest in the OTO had not been lessened by his new workload. Indeed, it had grown stronger as he immersed himself in the writings and philosophy of Aleister Crowley.

Mothers serve their families in all manner of dirty and undignified positions, willingly taking on a workload so extensive and ongoing you could never hire someone to to it.

I would outlaw literature exams entirely; I would also eschew the twin barbarities of 'attendance' and 'participation' as grading criteria, necessitated by workload increase.

if the partners don’t get workload distribution issues under control, the anger and resentment that builds up can end the marriage.

Traditional ways to deal with information--reading, listening, writing, talking--are painfully slow in comparison to "viewing the big picture." Those who survive information overload will be those who search for information with broadband thinking but apply it with a single-minded focus.

My personal view (and not the view of the LAS by any means) would be to prohibit alcohol, but legalise cannabis. Not only would it cut our workload by, at my estimate, 60-70%, but I’ve never had anyone high on cannabis try to hit me. Cannabis users are very rarely violent, tend to be generally easier to handle and seldom get loud and annoying. It’s true that there are long-term health consequences, and that heavy ‘stoners’ can waste their life away, but the same holds true of alcohol and alcoholics.

One down, fifteen to go.

A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.

It will add to your effectiveness, subtract from your weaknesses, divide your workload, and multiply your impact.

When we see non-normative rates of stress in a Circler or a department, we can make adjustments to workload,

Its not workload that kills you, its worry that kills you.

every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention from the task at hand.

The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust

There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.

would entail more work and more responsibility. And the office is largely staffed by shirkers and idiots, Raymond. Managing them and their workloads would be quite a challenge, I can assure you.

It’s clear that the teaching profession in America was never designed to offer a lifetime of strong wages or a sustainable workload. Our schools have a 200+ year history of undervaluing the necessary skill sets of a good educator, offering low compensation, and making all-consuming demands on teachers’ personal lives due to the perception of the work as a “calling” which they should gladly sacrifice for.

Easier asked than answered,” said Mr. Olderglough. “For our days here are varied, and so our needs are also varied. On the whole, I think you’ll find the workload to be light in that you will surely have ample free time. But then there comes the question of what one does with his free time. I have occasionally felt that this was the most difficult part of the job; indeed, the most difficult part of being alive, wouldn’t you say, boy?

The benefits are due in part to the fact that a bilingual person’s brain must actively suppress one language when speaking another. Being able to handle that extra workload results in stronger overall control of attention.

In spite of being a marketing guy for over 40 years, I never realised how challenging it would be to gain global traction for the Irish romantic fantasy novel, Dolphin Song. It's succeeding, but the workload has been terrific.

It is ironic that we have more technology to make our lives more efficient, ostensibly reducing our workload, and we work harder than we ever have. I was dragged into email kicking and screaming. On most issues technological I’m wrong, but I think I had this one nailed. Given the way emails come like baseballs from a machine in a batting cage, I spend more time responding to them than I spent manually opening and responding to letters. My friends from England write beautiful letters: bonded correspondence paper, elegant penmanship, and prose that reads like poetry. I shoot back an email. To the equivalent of a well-prepared feast I reciprocate with the equivalent of a bag of chips.

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.

In this context, “focus” doesn’t mean locking our office door, selecting a task to process, and tuning out the world around us until that task is complete. That kind of self-exile is a productivity (fear) reaction—not a kaizen (growth) reaction—to a stressful workload.

Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes—one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a “series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin following cold-water immersion.” During this reflexive response, “blood pressure, heart rate, and the workload of the heart all increase, making the heart more susceptible to life-threatening rhythms and heart attack. Simultaneously,” an online text explained, “gasping begins, followed by rapid and deep breathing. These reflexes can quickly lead to accidental inhalation of water and drowning. This rapid and seemingly uncontrollable over-breathing creates a sensation of suffocation and contributes to feelings of panic. It can also create dizziness, confusion, disorientation, and a decreased level of consciousness.

we are qualified for Christian service by our praying not our preaching, by our desire to worship him and not our workload on his behalf, by knowing Jesus personally and not just by knowing a lot of interesting things about him. If you lose God’s presence you lose everything, but if you know his presence you already have everything you will ever need.

Parkinson’s law (coined by British naval historian and author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1957) states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

Time is a most versatile resource. It flies, marches on, works wonders, and will tell. It also runs out.

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.

It's not a good idea to cut back indiscriminately on what you read. The reason is that reading can save you time, because it gives you the opportunity to learn from other people's experience.

Even as more wives took paying jobs during the Depression, their unpaid workload increased. Less able to afford the conveniences that had begun to lighten the homemaker’s load in the 1920s, women had to sew more of their own clothes, can more of their own preserves, do more of their cooking from scratch. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was a popular saying of the day.

Middle school is prime time for failure, even among kids who have sailed through school up to that point. The combined stressors of puberty, heightened academic expectations, and increased workload are a setup for failure. How parents, teachers, and students work together to overcome those inevitable failures predicts so much about how children will fare in high school, college, and beyond.

The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust—the human touch—between patients and doctors. Not only would we have more time to come together, enabling far deeper communication and compassion, but also we would be able to revamp how we select and train doctors.

A man would lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized instead of being performed by his wife. In structural terms, there would be no antagonistic or irreconcilable interests. Of course, this does not mean that he is aware of this problem, as it may well be that he is so integrated into sexist culture that he has developed some severe form of narcissism based on his presumed male superiority, which leads him to naturally oppose any attempts to socialize care work, or the emancipation of his wife. The capitalist, on the other hand, has something to lose in the socialization of the means of production; it is not just about his convictions about the way the world and his place in it, but also the massive profits he happily expropriates from the workers. („Remarks on Gender“)

In our day to day life we go through various activities which may involve high work pressure and high workload and as per us, we feel that this burden of work is resulting in causing frustration. Though we don't realize that it is not the workload which causes this frustration and annoyance but rather it is our negligence in the proper management of that work. If you avoid mismanagement of your work and duties you are likely to face frustration, annoyance, and grievance much lesser.

Meanwhile Professor Binns, the ghost who taught History of Magic, had them writing weekly essays on the goblin rebellions of the eighteenth century. Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. Professor Flitwick had asked them to read three extra books in preparation for their lesson on Summoning Charms. Even Hagrid was adding to their workload. The Blast-Ended Skrewts were growing at a remarkable pace given that nobody had yet discovered what they ate. Hagrid was delighted, and as part of their “project,” suggested that they come down to his hut on alternate evenings to observe the skrewts and make notes on their extraordinary behavior. “I will not,” said Draco Malfoy flatly when Hagrid had proposed this with the air of Father Christmas pulling an extra-large toy out of his sack. “I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks.” Hagrid’s smile faded off his face.

In knowledge work, when you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. This overhead tax activates as soon as you take on a new responsibility. As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished. At moderate workloads, this effect might be frustrating: a general sense that completing your work is taking longer than it should. As your workload increases, however, the overhead tax you’re paying will eventually pass a tipping point, beyond which logistical efforts will devour so much of your schedule that you cannot complete old tasks fast enough to keep up with the new. This feedback loop can quickly spiral out of control, pushing your workload higher and higher until you find yourself losing your entire day to overhead activities: meeting after meeting conducted against a background hum of unceasing email and chat. Eventually the only solution becomes to push actual work into ad hoc sessions added after hours—in the evenings and early mornings, or over the weekend—in a desperate attempt to avoid a full collapse of all useful output. You’re as busy as you’ve ever been, and yet hardly get anything done.

During an incident, there are never clear clues. Many things are happening at once: workload is high, emotions and stress levels are high. Many things that are happening will turn out to be irrelevant. Things that appear irrelevant will turn out to be critical. The accident investigators, working with hindsight, knowing what really happened, will focus on the relevant information and ignore the irrelevant. But at the time the events were happening, the operators did not have information that allowed them to distinguish one from the other.

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

With the absence of subsidized childcare, paid federal parental leave, and rampant pregnancy discrimination, young women who have had a healthy amount of class advantages are left to ask themselves if they want to effectively lose them—because that’s what parenthood in the United States will ultimately entail: If they want to partake in a different kind of labor that will offer them fewer legal protections, limited pay, increased hours, increased personal financial burdens, and with zero support from the institutions to which they have dedicated expanding days and increased workloads. In

The temptation to quit was a traitor. It would not barge in boldly during the peak of my workload; often I was too preoccupied to contemplate on the dismal state of my personal life. Instead, it would reemerge during that silent minute in between surgeries, as I slumped on the floor and waited for the next patient to be brought in. It stared at me from a corner as I waited for the elevator doors to open, me holding both stretcher bed and oxygen tank and it's only an hour past midnight. It would whisper in my ear, to wake me up from a nap on the first Sunday afternoon that I got to spend at home in a long time. It would hold open my apartment door, as I donned my white coat, grabbed my keys, and rushed to morning ward rounds.

the biggest workload difference between these economic systems is not in terms of adult labor, but child labor. According to the anthropologist Karen Kramer, children in most hunter-gatherer societies work just an hour or two per day, mostly foraging, hunting, fishing, collecting firewood, and helping with domestic tasks such as food processing.39 In contrast, a subsistence farmer’s children work on average between four to six hours a day (the range is from two to nine hours) doing gardening, tending animals, hauling water, collecting firewood, processing food, and doing other domestic tasks. In other words, child labor has an ancient agricultural history because children are needed for their substantial contributions to a family’s economic success, especially on a farm. Child labor also helps teach youngsters the skills they will need as adults. Today

In one representative study of the situation in the nation today, the sociologists Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan found that for male-female partners who both worked full-time (roughly forty-hour weeks), first-time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten hours per week. Meanwhile, the increased workload for women was about twenty hours. So motherhood took double the toll as fatherhood, workwise. Moreover, much of the new work that fathers did take on in these situations was the comparatively “fun” work of engagement with their children—for example, playing with the baby. Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping their number of hours of housework by five hours per week during the same time period. Mothers decreased their hours of housework by only one hour per week—while adding about twenty-one hours of child-rearing labor, including fifteen hours of physical child care—for instance, changing diapers and bathing the baby. And mothers still did more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on average.

I pleaded with Norman to use my first name, and he always agreed to do so: “Okay, Mister Regan, I’ll remember in the future,” he’d say with a wicked grin on his face. Eventually Norman explained that he had a reputation for remembering all his customers’ names, and that if he had to learn first names as well as surnames, his workload would be doubled, so I backed down. All would have been well with this had I not introduced Norman to Roy Finamore, who was the editor of the first edition of this book, some six months later; Mister Finamore joined the ranks of thousands addicted to Norman’s wit and his cocktailian skills. A few months thereafter I was informed that Norman had taken to using Roy’s first name at the bar, and I was livid. This called for action. I made the pilgrimage to Norman’s bar. “I hear that Roy Finamore is a regular here now.” “That’s right, Mister Regan, he’s here three or four times a week.” “And what do you call him, Norman?” “I call him Roy.” “And why is that, Norman?” He leaned over the bar until our noses almost met. “Just to piss you off.” It had taken Norman months to set up this one glorious moment. In my opinion, I was looking into the eyes of Manhattan’s best bartender.

But one can see exactly why Dr Ali is so successful - he seems to offer a solution within the individual's grasp: you may not be able to change deadlines and workloads, but you can make yourself more efficient. Ancient wisdoms can be adapted to speed up human beings: this is the kind of individualised response which fits neatly into a neo-liberal market ideology. It draws on Eastern contemplative traditions of yoga and meditation which place the emphasis on individual transformation, and questions the effectiveness of collective political or social activism. Reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture, massage - these alternative therapies are all booming as people seek to improve their sense of well-being and vitality. Much of it makes sense - although trips to the Himalayas are hardly within the reach of most workers and the complementary health movement plays an important role in raising people's under standing of their own health and how to look after themselves. But the philosophy of improving ‘personal performance' also plays into the hands of employers' rationale that well-being and coping with stress are the responsibility of the individual employee. It reinforces the tendency for individuals to search for 'biographic solutions to structural contradictions', as the sociologist Ulrich Beck put it: forget the barricades, it's revolution from within that matters. This cultural preoccupation with personal salvation stymies collective reform, and places an onerous burden on the individual. It effectively reinforces the anxieties and insecurities which it offers to assuage.

Teacher: Where is your homework? Student: I didn't do it because I didn't want to add to your already heavy workload.

HUMOR IS POWER." ~ Karyn Buxman, RN, neurohumorist __________________     Chapter 1 What’s NOT So Funny About Nursing?     12 hour shifts . . . Doctors with attitude . . . Cranky co-workers . . . Frequent flyers . . . Non-compliant patients . . . Frustrated administrators . . . Antibiotic-resistant superbugs . . . Healthcare reform . . . Disorganized supply closets . . . Dwindling budgets . . . Increasing workloads . . . Bad hospital coffee.

Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.

While Genesis 2 does address how male and female complement each other, the implications are broader to include all human relationships. In addition, the word “helper,” used here for Eve, speaks throughout scripture of the complementary nature of all human relationships. “Helper” is used primarily to describe a companion, not a fellow laborer. The reason we know this is true is that the word “helper” is often used to describe God’s relationship with his people. When used this way, it does not refer to God as our coworker or employee, but God as our ultimate companion, who brings things to the relationship that we could not bring ourselves (Ps. 27:9; 33:20-22). So God is not addressing Adam’s workload but rather the fact that he is a social being who lacks a suitable companion.

tasks, though? In these cases there is a second option, which is to reduce the cognitive workload by making use of the environment itself in strategic ways—leaving information out there in the world to be accessed as needed, rather than taking time to fully encode it; and using epistemic actions (Kirsh & Maglio, 1994) to alter the environment in order to reduce the cognitive work remaining to be done.

Edwards continues by arguing that all this automation has not reduced the workload of the pilot a great deal; instead, it has increased the operational effectiveness of the system.

workload has become more “bunched,” with long periods of inactivity and short bursts of intense activity. Both of these are error-inducing modes of operation.

Forget about collaborative ways of cleaning that count on the coworkers doing part of the job. You will be lucky if they put their dirty dishes in the dishwasher. You still need to educate them and insist so that they develop the right habits: this will make for a better working space and will reduce your workload. Make everyone responsible for their own cups, plates, and wares. Do not let your kitchen (if you have it) turn into a mess. Empty the fridge regularly unless you want to discover new forms of life. Clean, clean, clean. Coworkers are grown ups, most of them will behave. Internet

Because the health and well-being of these applications directly affect a company’s profitability, administrator and application owners are hesitant to make changes to a time-proven environment or methodology, even if it has flaws. But after working with virtualized servers in test, development, and QA environments, they are comfortable enough to virtualize these remaining workloads.

The four biggest reasons you’ll fight Why will you fight? I mentioned four consistent sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood. Left to their own devices, all can profoundly influence the course of your marriage, and that makes them capable of affecting your child’s developing brain. I’ll call them the Four Grapes of Wrath. They are:        •    sleep loss        •    social isolation        •    unequal workload        •    depression

Fourth, I paid attention to every detail I could while working on my cases. I found that one of the most ironic facets of the law is that the correct answer to a problem often rests on small legal nuances and factual details. The presence or absence of a particular fact can frequently make or break the case. The senior attorney I worked for, Brad, was extremely adept at assimilating large amounts of information quickly, paying close attention to details, and using his mastery of them to weave brilliant defenses. His ability to identify the most critical of details while constructing solid defenses always impressed me, and I tried to emulate that particular skill. Fifth, I was conscientious about creating good first impressions. As I later learned, lawyers who work with new summer and permanent associates virtually always form quick conclusions about them, and give “hallway evaluations” to other lawyers in the firm. I often heard about or participated in these hallway evaluations, and know that even one negative impression can have a devastating impact. In general, young attorneys who get a reputation for sloppy work – earned or unearned – have a very steep climb up the law firm ladder. Sixth, I was vigilant about meeting deadlines, every time. This meant I had to carefully plan ahead, since partners, colleagues, clients, courts, and other parties often rely on assignments and legal services to be performed by a certain time. With the workload I had, and the interruptions I faced, of course this wasn’t always possible, and in those situations I found the best route wasn’t just to tough it out, but rather let the supervising attorney know as early as possible if I couldn’t meet a deadline. I learned this lesson the hard way. My first assignment as a summer associate was to research whether we could squeeze one of our clients into an exception to a well-settled legal doctrine. The senior attorney who gave me the assignment asked me to research the issue and then get back to him by Friday afternoon. I just didn’t feel comfortable with my research when Friday afternoon came around, and decided to buy some additional time by letting him contact me. He didn’t try to reach me Friday afternoon, so I took advantage of that and submitted the assignment on Monday. The incident later came back to haunt me, though, because in his evaluation of my work for my midsummer review, he mentioned that I didn’t report to him by the established deadline.

In terms of the workload, the best teachers for kids with slow processing speed tend to: Deemphasize busy work. Show a willingness to adjust homework assignments to “fit” with a student’s pace. Balance the common needs of all the students with the specific needs of individual students. Be excited by the use of technology in their classrooms because it makes it easier to adapt instruction. Be both organized and flexible.

As companies began to see the benefits of virtualization, they no longer purchased new hardware when their leases were over, or if they owned the equipment, when their hardware maintenance licenses expired. Instead, they virtualized those server workloads. This is called containment. Containment benefited corporations in multiple ways. They no longer had to refresh large amounts of hardware year after year; and all the costs of managing and maintaining those servers—power, cooling, etc.—were removed from their bottom line from that time on.

I WAS JUST SITTING DOWN TO DINNER THAT NIGHT WHEN MY cell phone began to chime. It was leftover night, which was not a bad thing at our house, since it allowed me to sample two or three of Rita’s tasty concoctions at one sitting, and I stared at the phone for several seconds and thought very hard about the last piece of Rita’s Tropical Chicken sitting there on the platter before I finally picked up my phone and answered. “It’s me,” Deborah said. “I need a favor.” “Of course you do,” I said, looking at Cody as he pulled a large helping of Thai noodles out of the serving dish. “But does it have to be right now?” Debs made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a grunt. “Ow. Yeah, it does. Can you pick up Nicholas from day care?” she said. Her son, Nicholas, was enrolled at a Montessori day-care center in the Gables, although I was reasonably sure he was too young to count beads. I had wondered whether I should be doing the same for Lily Anne, but Rita had pooh-poohed the idea. She said it was a waste of money until a child was two or three years old. For Deborah, though, nothing was too good for her little boy, so she cheerfully shelled out the hefty fee for the school. And she had never been late to pick him up, no matter how pressing her workload—but here it was, almost seven o’clock, and Nicholas was still waiting for Mommy. Clearly something unusual was afoot, and her voice sounded strained—not angry and tense as it had been earlier, but not quite right, either. “Um, sure, I guess I can get him,” I said. “What’s up with you?” She made the hiss-grunt sound again and said, “Uhnk. Damn it,” in a kind of hoarse mutter, before going on in a more normal voice, “I’m in the hospital.” “What?” I said. “Why, what’s wrong?” I had an alarming vision of her as I had seen her in her last visit to the hospital, an ER trip that had lasted for several days as she lay near death from a knife wound. “It’s no big deal,” she said, and there was strain in her voice, as well as fatigue. “It’s just a broken arm. I just … I’m going to be here for a while and I can’t get Nicholas in time.

80% of the work you do, can likely be done by someone else. Learn to delegate your workload so that you are working less and accomplishing more. 

Examine how much of your daily workload is crucial to the operations of the company.

The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.

Consider the average worker in almost any urban industrialized city. The alarm rings at six forty-five and our workingman or -woman is up and at it. Check the phone. Shower. Dress in the professional uniform—suits for some, coveralls for others, scrubs for the medical professionals, jeans and T-shirts for construction workers. Breakfast, if there’s time. Grab commuter mug and briefcase (or lunch box). Hop in the car for the daily punishment called rush hour or get on a bus or train packed crushingly tight. On the job from nine to five (or longer). Deal with the boss. Deal with the coworker sent by the devil to rub you the wrong way. Deal with suppliers. Deal with clients/customers/patients. E-mails pile up. Act busy. Scroll through social media feeds. Hide mistakes. Smile when handed impossible deadlines. Give a sigh of relief when the ax known as “restructuring” or “downsizing”—or just plain getting laid off—falls on other heads. Shoulder the added workload. Watch the clock. Argue with your conscience but agree with the boss. Smile again. Five o’clock. Back in the car or on the bus or train for the evening commute. Home. Act human with your partner, kids, or roommates. Cook. Post a picture of your dinner online. Eat. Watch an episode of your favorite show. Answer one last e-mail. Bed. Eight hours of blessed oblivion—if we’re lucky.

The more open cycles of actions, projects and communication you have, the more stressed and drained you feel.

Within ten to twenty years, I estimate we will be technically capable of automating 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the United States. For employees who are not outright replaced, increasing automation of their workload will continue to cut into their value-add for the company, reducing their bargaining power on wages and potentially leading to layoffs in the long term.

THE COST OF ADULT EMOTION When adult behaviour is wobbly there are lots of hidden costs. The knock-on effect on the workload of others is considerable.

The list of intended features was long and seemingly unrealistic for a team so fatigued by the past years’ effort—but they all sounded like good ideas. The producer’s schedule was a bit ambitious, but the September 15 deadline was the first hard date the team had ever discussed…however, we still couldn’t tell if we were near the top of the mountain or if there was yet another rise over the ridge. One thing was true: We were exhausted and sick of WoW. We worked on it all day, played the test on weekends, and talked about it over every lunch and dinner. When we talked to someone outside the company, it was often the only topic of conversation they were interested in. It was decided for the last two weeks of February the team would work only forty hours a week—late nights would return again in March. But some were working those hours anyway. For the most part, morale was low among half of the employees. Some were doubting that our workload would subside after shipping, because there would be so many bugs to fix and pressure to create more content. With the game still unfinished, and with the imminent expansions and live updates ahead, we were beginning to wonder if we were ever going to reach a conclusion. The team’s spirits were somewhat buoyed by the enthusiasm of the design staff, who were coming in to work on weekends. But even the designers agreed that they never wanted to work on another MMO. They were just too hard and too risky, and took too much time and effort to make.

Damn, I did something good to have her suddenly drop into my life. “Up and at ‘em, Kate. We need to get to your place and I need to be at Alpha Corps by nine. We can call Evan from there and deal with your car in between my meetings.” “Are you sure? I don’t want to add to your workload.” “You’re not. You’re making me excited to wrap things up so we can go somewhere and fuck until neither of us can walk.” Her eyes go wide again and she sits up. “Oh. Not really sure what to say to that.” ‘I do’ is the usual response.” She rolls her eyes dramatically and gets out of bed. Damon (Olivia Sinclair)

Textile archaeologists have calculated the amount of cloth that would have been required to equip the Ladby ship, a good example of a medium-sized warship found in a burial mound on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Based on a sail size of eighty square metres (probably a conservative estimate), it would have taken two person-years of ten-hour days to make just one mainsail weighing about fifty kilos, and nobody would put to sea without reserve sailcloth that might save their lives. This workload is also something of an ideal figure, so the reality would have been closer to three or even four person-years for one sail. This was not solo work, of course, but the permutations of time for increasingly large teams of textile workers are easy to calculate. Then there were the sea-clothes. As far as we can tell, these were multi-layered assemblies of coarse, thickly lined, insulated fabric able to withstand the weather of the open ocean. The Ladby ship had a crew of thirty-two, judging by the oar positions. Using the same ten-hour-day production pace as for the sails, it would have taken perhaps twenty-four person-years to fit out the crew. And added even to this are rugs, tents, a variety of other clothing (including a change of clothes for wet conditions), plus ropes, cordage, and the like.

Shifting scope works better than moving people because it avoids re-gelling costs, and it preserves system behavior. Preserving behavior keeps your existing mental model intact, and if it doesn’t work out, you can always revert a workload change with less disruption than would be caused by a staffing change.

On top of the potential for restructuring the business, there are significant bloated costs to trim. General Insurance is paying for expensive sponsorship deals with sports teams that offer little benefit. It needlessly maintains two Gulfstream private jets. Some managers work four days a week because their workloads are perennially light. Bonus plans have targets that are far too easy to meet. Pensions are inexplicably overfunded, and the company’s contributions to pension programs can be scaled back to the lower end of targets set by regulators. The IT department is overstaffed and full of pet projects that the business will never realize value from. Low-grade IT can be outsourced to Asia.

Whereas many felt burdened by the workload, for me days spent in the library—or, better yet, on the couch of my off-campus apartment, a ball game on with the sound muted—felt like an absolute luxury after three years of organizing community meetings and knocking on doors in the cold.

Easy!,” you think. “Gently lower the collective pitch lever and you’ll descend gracefully to the ground, a hero.” However, when you try it, you discover that life isn’t that simple. The helicopter’s nose drops, and you start to spiral down to the left. Suddenly you discover that you’re flying a system where every control input has secondary effects. Lower the left-hand lever and you need to add compensating backward movement to the right-hand stick and push the right pedal. But then each of these changes affects all of the other controls again. Suddenly you’re juggling an unbelievably complex system, where every change impacts all the other inputs. Your workload is phenomenal: your hands and feet are constantly moving, trying to balance all the interacting forces. Helicopter controls are decidedly not orthogonal.

This concept can seem a little daunting when doing your first swings. These first swings can feel tiring, as I described my first 25 swings with a 30 pound weight. This is not unlike the first minutes of a jog, where sometimes the transition from resting state to vigorous exercise seems punishing. Within minutes of beginning jogging, though, your body adjusts to the new workload and any unpleasantness is reduced. The same occurs with kettlebell swings and soon you realize that your 50th swing feels no more tiring, even less so, than your tenth swing.

One of the first studies to demonstrate this benefit recruited patients with major depressive disorder who had been taking antidepressants but were not responding. The patients provided a blood sample so researchers could determine how inflamed they were. Then, the patients were assigned to one of two exercise interventions: high-frequency exercise or low-frequency exercise.29 The high-frequency group completed (or exceeded) the recommended physical activity guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise each week, for a total workload of 16 kcal/kg body weight/week. The low-frequency group completed only a quarter of the recommended physical activity guidelines each week, for a total workload of 4 kcal/kg body weight/week. Workouts were done on a treadmill or stationary bike at a self-selected intensity for 12 weeks, and depressive symptoms were assessed at the end of each week. By the end of the 12 weeks, everyone benefited from the exercise, but the inflamed patients benefited the most. Exercise not only reduced their depression symptoms, but it also downgraded the symptoms from moderate to mild — a clinically significant change in symptom severity that was similar to the relief that responders get from antidepressants.30 The best part? Both the high- and low-frequency exercisers benefited equally.

By design, it is crucial that SRE teams are focused on engineering. Without constant engineering, operations load increases and teams will need more people just to keep pace with the workload.

Once we finish our report, I must begin my studies,” Charlotte declared, trying to pump herself up. Marianne rested a hand gently on her shoulder. “Lady Charlotte, you need only do the best you can. The first-years were in a truly miserable state last year after Lady Rozemyne forced such an excessive workload upon them. Please do not try so hard that you repeat her mistake and bring suffering to others.

But preventive advice for thrashing doesn’t help you when you find yourself in the midst of it. Besides, when it comes to human attention, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. Another way to avert thrashing before it starts is to learn the art of saying no. Denning advocated, for instance, that a system should simply refuse to add a program to its workload if it didn’t have enough free memory to hold its working

Bordio is the industry standard for project management software. Your current schedule, goals and workload are viewable on your phone, laptop or desktop to keep you organized no matter where you are. As an alternative to online-only solutions that often drag down company servers because of their high bandwidth needs, Bordio has partnered with Cutting Edge Technologies to provide a solution that can be used anywhere whether offline or wired.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air and saying, ‘Enough!’ I immediately feel my brain seizing up when I do that. Then, instead of being smart in handling the workload, it’s easy to make bad decisions,” he says. “You can end up catastrophizing, worrying about worst-case scenarios like missing deadlines and even losing your job. None of which helps you think any more clearly.” It’s a good description of how stressful it feels when our brain’s deliberate system gets swamped with demands, and how the resulting tumble into defensive mode makes it hard to be our most sensible selves.

Why is transparency important? Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals? And why does what we’re doing matter? What is true accountability? What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)? How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”? (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.) How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective as a priority and help assure that we reach it? When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle? When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely? In building contributors’ confidence, timing is everything.

There is no easy fix for someone in my friend’s situation, but a vision for shared power offers one possible solution. If my friend could have assembled a diverse lay leadership team, it could have benefited everyone. Not only would it have lightened his personal workload, but the congregation could benefit from the varied giftings of people on the team. In addition, each person would benefit from space to develop in her/his particular gifts.

Taylor and Greve expected a typical industrial production learning curve: creators learn by repetition, so creators making more comics in a given span of time would make better ones on average. They were wrong. Also, as had been shown in industrial production, they guessed that the more resources a publisher had, the better its creators’ average product would be. Wrong. And they made the very intuitive prediction that as creators’ years of experience in the industry increased, they would make better comics on average. Wrong again. A high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance. Years of experience had no impact at all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate? The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.

Workaholics are addicted to the solace they find in extreme fatigue; it’s like the high that a marathon runner might get in her last mile. I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion. There’s a masochistic pride to overworking. How heavy a workload can I truly handle?

Eve, the girl who’s running a 3.97 in “Doing School”—she is carrying four APs her junior year, plans to do seven her senior year, and copes with the workload, among other ways, by studying in class (that is, for other classes)—has this to say: “I sometimes have two or three days where I only get two hours of sleep per night. . . . I really really fear failure. . . . I am just a machine with no life at this place. . . . I am a robot just going page by page, doing the work.” She “surviv[es] on cereal” but is usually “too stressed and tired to feel hungry”—though not so stressed that, like some of her friends, she talks about killing herself. And yet she wouldn’t have it any other way: “Some people see health and happiness as more important than grades and college; I don’t.

kensi Gounden says, However, keep in mind that combining evergreen solutions with contemporary tech will allow you to cater to the entirety of the modern market. Sometimes your team members are simply so busy managing the hectic daily workload that they don’t have the time or the resources to be creative or innovative. Instead of putting innovation on the backburner until an opportunity presents itself (which it never will), you can allocate some of your resources to create departments and divisions intended for this purpose.

If you have such an intense workload that you feel like you don’t have time to take care of yourself in a basic way on a continual basis, talk to your manager.

I always wondered why my coworkers disliked my resignation. It was because those that were left had to do more work!

When considering tasks to delegate, you should also consider tasks that aren’t appropriate to delegate. Tasks that have unclear objectives, high stakes, rely on your unique skills, or a personal growth opportunity should be completed by you. Once you identify the tasks, it is easier to identify the person. Now, we recognize delegation as growth opportunities for our team. We must also consider the skill sets for the tasks. Take a moment to identify the skills and competencies needed. Consider the individual and assess based on the following: skills, strengths, reliability, workload, and development potential. As the tasks are delegated, keep the individuals’ skills in mind. This will be a new endeavor for them and require you to build their self-confidence.  This is why strength-and-skills matching is important. Set clear goals and routine check-ins. Also provide good feedback to the individuals on the progress