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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

CPU affinity can lead to improved performance if the application has a larger cache footprint and can benefit from the additional cache offered by aggregating multiple pCPUs.

VMware ESXi has the ability to detect the physical processor topology as well as the relationships among processor sockets, cores, and the logical processors on those cores. The scheduler then makes use of this information to optimize the placement of VM vCPUs.

the VMM might not always be

Any time spent by the VMM on behalf of the VM is excluded from the progress calculation.

At some point the skew will grow to exceed a threshold in milliseconds, and as a result, all of the vCPUs of the VM will be co-stopped and will be scheduled again only when there are enough physical CPUs available to schedule all vCPUs simultaneously.

Distributed Locking with the Scheduler Cell

A VM performs best when all its vCPUs are co-scheduled on distinct processors.

In addition to the size of the scheduler cell, this approach might also limit the amount of cache as well as the memory bandwidth on multi-core processors with shared cache.

Aislin points her finger at him. “Be nice while I’m gone. I mean it. And get some stuff done. You’ve been slacking and letting Gemma and I pick up your workload.” She waves at me. “See you later, Gemma.” I give her a small wave as she walks toward the exit, pressing buttons on her phone. Alex and I watch her until she disappears out the doors. When he looks at me again,

The first is referred to as a pull migration, where an idle physical CPU initiates the migration. The second policy is referred to as a push migration, where the world becomes ready to be scheduled. These policies enable ESXi to achieve high CPU utilization and low latency scheduling.

VMware has given you as an administrator the ability to restrict the pCPUs that a VM's vCPUs can be scheduled on. This feature is called CPU scheduling affinity.

slowest vCPU and each of the other vCPUs.

only the vCPUs that advanced too much are individually stopped,

The slightest pressure can be highly damaging to originality.

ESXi CPU scheduler has the responsibility to ensure that all vCPUs assigned to a VM are scheduled to execute on the physical processors in a synchronized manner so that the guest OS running inside the VM is able to meet this requirement for its threads or processes.

In other words, always allow the VM to be scheduled on at least one more pCPU than the number of vCPUs configured for the VM.

In addition, new multi-core processors make the problem even worse because multiple cores are now being starved for memory during memory access operations.

Many techies see themselves today as overworked, underappreciated lackeys of corporations that couldn't care less about either them or technology. Ballooning workloads will only deepen this attitude.

The substantia nigra is a ganglia that is particularly responsible for the interpretation and coordination of the overall sensory information coming from the muscle spindles and the tendon organs. The totality of this information is crucial to assessing and controlling the changes in lengths of the body’s muscles, the speed with which a movement is occurring, and the actual work-load that is being handled. This, remember, is sensory information that we do not “feel” in the normal sense, but when it is incomplete or scrambled, fine control of movement becomes seriously hampered. The step becomes unsteady, the reach inaccurate; motions become jerky; the limbs may tremble or even oscillate grossly in their attempt to find the correct lengths and speeds. These aberrations are among the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a syndrome which appears when the substantia nigra is damaged in any way. Thus the substantia nigra adds to the brain’s overall arousal the specific messages coming from all of the spindles and tendon organs: Which exact motor units are lengthening or shortening, how fast are these changes in length taking place, and how much force is being developed?

The new assignment with much more responsibility and a heartbreaking workload would be what Luke and Bill liked to call a "hard blessing.

You see, Bobby knew that when it gets hard we all have two responses to choose from: to moan, or to put our heads down, smile and get on with it. Remember: no one likes a moaner. Wouldn’t we all rather work with someone who, when the workload gets insane, simply says: ‘Right, let’s put some music on, divide up the tasks and get cracking. Breakfast is comin’!’ Life is full of rough patches. All big goals, however glamorous on paper, will inevitably involve a load of boring tasks along the way - it’s just the way things are. Moaning and being miserable doesn’t change the facts - nor does it improve the situation. In fact, it makes a bad situation worse. When I’m on expeditions, I value cheerfulness almost as much as fresh water. And when you’re in life-and-death situations, it’s priceless. You can’t always choose your situation, but you can always choose your attitude. Not only can positive thinking lead to positive outcomes, but there’s another very good reason why cheerfulness is good for survival: people are more likely to want to help you and stick with you. And in adversity, you’re going to want all the help you can get. So learn from the Commandos, smile when it is raining, and show cheerfulness in adversity - and look at the hard times as chances to show your mettle. ‘Breakfast is comin’!

Greetings, Friends [or Esteemed Colleagues], Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily at 12:00 P.M. ET [or your time zone] and 4:00 P.M. ET. If you require urgent assistance (please ensure it is urgent) that cannot wait until either 12:00 P.M. or 4:00 P.M., please contact me via phone at 555-555-5555. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better. Sincerely, Tim Ferriss

Benny’s stories were more frequent in the days before the downturn, when we felt flush and secure. We were less mindful of being caught gathering. Then the downturn hit, our workload disappeared, and, though we had more time than ever to listen to Benny’s stories, we were more conscious of being caught gathering, which was one indication that our workload had disappeared and that layoffs were necessary.

Microsoft Project is a task administration programming item, created and sold by Microsoft. It is intended to help an undertaking chief in building up an arrangement, relegating assets to errands, following advancement, dealing with the financial plan, and breaking down workloads. microteklearning_com

One very simple way to compare the workloads of farmers, hunter-gatherers, and modern postindustrial people is to measure physical activity levels (PALs). A PAL score measures the number of calories spent per day (total energy expenditure) divided by the minimum number of calories necessary for the body to function (the basal metabolic rate, BMR). In practical terms, a PAL is the ratio of how much energy one spends relative to how much one would need to sleep all day at a comfortable temperature of about 25 degrees Celsius (78 degrees Fahrenheit). Your PAL is probably about 1.6 if you are a sedentary office worker, but it could be as a low as 1.2 if you spent the day in a hospital on bed rest, and it could be 2.5 or higher if you were training for a marathon or the Tour de France. Various studies have found that PAL scores for subsistence farmers from Africa, Asia, and South America average 2.1 for males and 1.9 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.4), which is just slightly higher than PAL scores for most hunter-gatherers, which average 1.9 for males and 1.8 for females (range: 1.6 to 2.2).38 These averages don’t reflect the considerable variation—daily, seasonal, and annual—within and between groups, but they underscore that most subsistence farmers work as hard if not a little harder than hunter-gatherers and that both ways of life require what people today would consider a moderate workload.

gaining shelfspace has become a more strategic challenge for manufacturers. Shelfspace has to be won by planning product offerings to satisfy not just consumers’ needs but also the retailers’ objectives. Because the retailer is overwhelmed with offerings that claim to have consumer appeal – that is now a given – it is in being seen to best meet the retailers’ needs that has become the battleground. Store management wants to increase category sales, improve average margins, provide a good range to shoppers and perhaps offer exclusive products, all the while looking to increase operational efficiency and reduce inventory costs by minimising the number of lines stocked and the workload involved in getting products on the shelf. Manufacturers now have to win shelfspace by working through these complex and sometimes conflicting needs.

Who is responsible for an agency’s operational response to growing workloads and declining fees? In today’s agency culture, it’s everyone… and no one. The agency management culture is fragmented and divided. Everyone does his/her own thing. An integrated counter-attack is hard to organize, and in practice, it simply does not happen. At the end of the year, the finance director has the ultimate responsibility to deliver the agency’s profit margin, and this is often done through cost reductions – a blunt instrument, indeed, but the laissez-faire culture does not allow for much fine-tuning during the year. The agency management culture is a barrier to change. It

Procurement sets fees based on a negotiated agreement about agency headcounts and costs, and (separately) marketing generates workloads for the agencies. Agencies, who measure client health through profitability measures alone, have no rigorous way to factor in client workloads. TABLE

The other caution has to do with coordinating what work is phased out as a result of lower staffing levels. Leaders often let any such phasing out proceed of its own accord because they have faith that when they eliminate layers in the organizational chart or increase leadership spans of control, people who feel the increased workload will wisely and naturally eliminate tasks that are non-value added or of reduced competitive importance. But this faith is misplaced if employees are not clear about the relative value of work or what the strategic trade-offs should be. If they do not know what work to eliminate, they may not eliminate any at all and instead pass it on to someone else. In this way the organization chart is like a square of jiggly jelly. If you squeeze the jelly from the top and the bottom, it is going to squelch out the sides, and if you squeeze from the sides, it is going to squelch out the top and the bottom. Increasing spans of control—giving leaders more responsibility—may soon result in more layers (for example, one firm created “senior technician” roles for technicians to fill as intermediaries for busy managers). Decreasing layers of the organizational chart may increase spans of control (for example, another company eliminated a layer of managers but then hired a couple of new directors to handle the additional workload when all the reports were reassigned to the next highest management level). The total headcount dollars are never reduced, just reapportioned.

Goal setting is more art than science. We weren’t just teaching people how to refine an objective or a measurable key result. We had a cultural agenda, as well. 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.

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.

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.

Captivity of the Oatman Girls was published at a perfect moment for success—particularly for a female audience. It appeared at the height of the industrial revolution, when women were reading more because of increased education for girls, lower birthrates, and lighter domestic workloads, thanks to new technology. Middle-class women were becoming voracious readers not only because they were better schooled but also because they were trapped: their domestic responsibilities were reduced by manufacturing, yet they were confined to the home.

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.

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 this increasing neoliberal cultural terrain, where everyone is encouraged to optimize themselves for the best employment, the strongest partnerships, the most successful path, what strategically middle-class, somewhat self-aware woman wants to do more work for less money? If it wasn’t parenthood we were talking about but a white-collar job, Sheryl Sandberg would tell these young women to lean out. The pragmatics of having a baby are fundamentally incompatible with the dominant cultural messages surrounding economic security, class ascension, and performance aimed at women of these particular socioeconomic backgrounds. This is the tension that underlies many of these waffling motherhood essays and, I think, what young, professional, child-curious people are looking to reconcile when they click on these “Should I, a Middle-Class Woman Who Went to NYU, Have a Baby and Fuck Up This Good Thing?” headlines. But what often awaits them is a contemplation of “choice” and very seldom an expanded structural critique. They are placated into the numbing mantra that having children is “a personal choice,” encouraging increased individual reflection on what is actually a raging systemic failure that relies on women’s free labor. But structuring the conversation of having children around personal autonomy and lone circumstances also successfully eclipses the identification of parenthood as labor in the first place.

feedback on quality, and bug fixing. These accelerate beneficial changes entering production, limit issues deployed, and enable rapid identification and remediation of issues introduced through deployment activities or discovered in your environments. Adopt approaches that provide fast feedback on quality and enable rapid recovery from changes that do not have desired outcomes. Using these practices mitigates the impact of issues introduced through the deployment of changes. Plan for unsuccessful changes so that you are able to respond faster if necessary and test and validate the changes you make. Be aware of planned activities in your environments so that you can manage the risk of changes impacting planned activities. Emphasize frequent, small, reversible changes to limit the scope of change. This results in easier troubleshooting and faster remediation with the option to roll back a change. It also means you are able to get the benefit of valuable changes more frequently. Evaluate the operational readiness of your workload, processes, procedures, and personnel

If they really wanted to make the king work, they should’ve tied him down to his chair. Doing that would force the king to do his job, keep the prince’s workload down, and even prevent the king from bugging me. There, three birds with one stone—or maybe one throne. Also, ropes.

18. Consistency, consistency, consistency! Running well takes months and years of diligent work. Unfortunately, there’s no short-term fix or “get fast quick” plan out there. Distance running is a long-term sport and it takes the top athletes years - sometimes decades - to reach their genetic potential. Remember that what you run today impacts what you’re able to do next week, which impacts what you can do next month, etc. Consistency is king and you’ll often get better results by adding a little bit of running for a few months than trying to jump up your mileage over just a few weeks. Small changes, made over a long period of time, will ultimately help you be a better runner. 19. Don’t blindly follow the 10% Rule. The 10% Rule states that you should only increase your mileage by 10% or less per week. But this “rule” is too simplistic for most runners and you should modify it for your own situation. Listen to your body because sometimes 10% will be aggressive, while other times you’ll be ready for more. Figure out your “mileage baseline” - the number of weekly miles you’re comfortable at. You can aggressively increase your mileage to this baseline but then you should be more conservative once you’re at or above your baseline. It’s also a good idea to hold your mileage at the same level for 2-3 weeks before increasing it to ensure your body is fully adapted to the higher workload. 20. Don’t burn the candle from both ends. This is a rule I learned the hard way in college. If you’re partying too much, eating like crap, or not sleeping enough then you can’t train at your normal level. You’ll need to cut back on your training to allow your body to recover from your non-running extracurricular activities. When you’re sacrificing a healthy lifestyle at the same time as running and working out a lot, it’s a surefire recipe for injury.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to manage his assignments, workload, and deadlines. The crutch: We remind kids when their homework is due and when to do it—sometimes helping them do it, sometimes doing it for them; thus, kids don’t know how to prioritize tasks, manage workload, or meet deadlines, without regular reminders.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to cope with ups and downs of courses and workloads, college-level work, competition, tough teachers, bosses, and others. The crutch: We step in when things get hard, finish the task, extend the deadline, and talk to the adults; thus, kids don’t know that in the normal course of life things won’t always go their way, and that they’ll be okay regardless.

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.

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.

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.