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Thursday, January 3, 2013
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
How Can I Make Deadlines Less Stressful?
January 3rd, 2013Top StoryHow Can I Make Deadlines Less Stressful?By Melanie Pinola
Signed, Dear Distraught, Make Sure Your Deadlines Are Realistic
The solution is to try to get a more realistic sense of how much time is needed and plan accordingly: Get a more accurate read on how long similar tasks take: Look to past projects or set up a time tracking system with a tool like RescueTime—and then try to add a padding for any unknowns. (As a rule of thumb, Paul Wilson writes in Calm at Work that things generally take twice as long, cost twice as much, and bring half the rewards that you anticipate,) See if you can negotiate a later deadline: If someone sets a deadline for you and it seems unreasonable or too tight, consider whether the deadline is flexible and if you can make a case for getting more time added (e.g., say "I've got X and Y and Z to do with this project, and I think it will realistically take this much time to accomplish—if nothing goes wrong. I'd rather do it right than rushed.") As negotiation training expert Dr. Karrass writes:
Just thinking of deadlines as flexible and not set in stone could be a relief to you. Think of each task or project as an unfamiliar one: The familiarity bias says when we're more familiar with the early steps of a project, we're more likely to delay starting it and, perhaps, underestimate how much time is needed to complete it. So think of each task as a new, unfamiliar one to make sure you're thinking of your given time appropriately. Get More Control By Redefining Deadlines as Time AllocationsSome people work well under pressure and think of deadlines as the ultimate inspiration. For the rest of us, deadlines are threatening. The difference between these two groups? It may be all about how you perceive time and how much control over your time you think you have. In other words, our minds are causing these time pressures, rather than the clock. Focus on how much time you have to work with: To take back control—and thus reduce the stress of a deadline—Wilson recommends translating a deadline into how much time you have to work with (your "time allocation") and then vary the time allocation a little so you are in control:
While it's practical to have deadlines on your calendar, you can implement this mind hack by adding the time allocation rather than the due date beside each item on your task or project list. Keep a record of the hours you spend against this self-assigned time allocation. Work Backwards
Break a project down to its smallest steps and note how long each step takes to complete, writing them down on a spreadsheet or other tool. This will give you a list of your priorities and when you should start working on them, as well as a sense of organization and purpose. It will also help you prioritize when everything seems important (e.g., you've got multiple deadlines around the same time). Remember, though, as with the ultimate deadline, it helps to have realistic estimates of how long each of these smaller tasks take and to think of the deadlines as flexible targets (as much as the project allows). Troubleshoot Your Deadline IssuesIf you've got a chronic deadline issue (e.g., you're always brushing up against or missing deadlines or you continue to loathe them to the point of having anxiety about them), lie back on our couch and tell us:
For all situations, if you start to worry when a deadline nears, take a deep breath. Relax, remember all the preparation you've done (or, if not, the skills you can rely on), and get to work. Focus on the work and what you need to do, and you may find you don't even need to give that deadline a second thought. Love, Have a question or suggestion for Ask Lifehacker? Send it to tips+asklh@lifehacker.com. Click to view |
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Why Journey Should Be Game Of The Year
January 3rd, 2013Top StoryWhy Journey Should Be Game Of The YearBy Kirk Hamilton
It had been a lovely experience, sure. I'd played it to around the halfway mark, taken a short break, then finished it. It seemed very nice. Remarkably pretty, and with a gorgeous soundtrack. Past that, I couldn't quite nail it down. The second time I played Journey, I thought, "That was one of the most beautiful video games I've ever played." I guess I just needed some perspective. Journey is the rare game that exists as a coherent whole, a fully-realized work in which each fifteen-minute chunk of its two-hour runtime is equally important. Because of that, it's a rare game that needs to be taken and digested as a single entity. Many good games can be stripped for parts, analyzed afterwards as a series of excellent, good, and bad levels. The train sequence in Uncharted 2; the Chernobyl level in Modern Warfare; the final chase in Assassin's Creed III. Most video games are collections of discrete ideas that have been unified, with varying degrees of success, by an overarching narrative. Not Journey. Sure, the game has separate sections: Anyone who's played it will remember the underground seaweed-platforming, the sandstorm towers, the great carpet-whale, and the terrifying mechanical hunters. And they'll remember surfing the sand alongside red dolphins, the radiant sun melting into the desert in the distance. But those moments pass into one another so quickly and seamlessly that the game demands to be taken as a whole. And so it wasn't until I drew near the close of my second journey (which, I'll note, I did in one rapt sitting) that I really "saw" the game. Climbing the snowy mountain, pushing forward against the wind and the ice, I realized that my scarf was gone. I hadn't noticed its departure; somewhere along the way, it had simply dissolved. I could no longer jump, let alone fly. All that was left was a brutal push forward toward a cold, lonely death. I thought back to that sunset, when I'd been so free and full of life; when my scarf had been so long, and my whole journey before me. I'm 32 now, and while some part of me still thinks I'll be young forever, I'm more aware of my mortality than ever. My back hurts. I cough, even when I'm not sick. I see pictures of myself and notice wrinkles around my eyes. I don't get as hungry as I used to. And I know how it happens, I can picture it: The moment when I'll finally realize I've well and truly become older, weaker, slower. The moment when I'll realize that my scarf is gone, and I didn't even see it leave. So… um, Journey. The story of a scarf. Game of the year, right? It's not just metaphorical mumbo-jumbo that makes Journey special. It's an immaculately constructed game, as well. Its visual wonders are unmatched by any game released this year. Its beauty is almost matter-of-fact at times; the billowing sands, the calls of the flying carpets, the fade-to-white as you come face to face with your elders. The way it moves, even the jumping connects on an emotional level. Click to view And the music…. sigh, the music. I really don't know what else to say about it. How else can I dance about this particular architecture? Composer Austin Wintory's work is essential. Like the game it accompanies, its themes unite into a single vision that is greater than the sum of its already-great parts. The third time I played Journey, I thought I understood it. It was a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to give the game another run in order to confirm that yes, I wanted to write this very article defending it as a nominee for Kotaku's Game of the Year award. It had been several months since I last played, and during that time I'd played a bunch of other great games. Would Journey hold up? Turns out it didn't just hold up; it surprised me all over again. More accurately, it allowed some other people to surprise me. Now that the game has been in the wild for months, there are scores of people still playing it, benevolent strangers swooping in and out of one another's games like so many controller-holding sand-dolphins. Midway into my third journey, a so-called "white robe" joined my game. This player, who had collected every glyph in the game and therefore had the longest, most amazing scarf I'd ever seen, was determined to help me get my own white cloak. Shortly after we met, I came upon a glyph I just couldn't reach. It was on a high shelf, and my scarf wasn't long enough to get me to it. And so my white-robed companion and I set about getting me to the glyph. We didn't explicitly decide to undertake this endeavor—after all, you can't talk to one other in Journey, you can only issue one-note "calls." But still, we knew exactly what we were doing. Time and again we tried, and time and again we failed. It got to the point where I felt uncomfortable, like, "Okay, this person probably has to go, I should just give up, this is getting weird." And yet we kept trying. And then, finally, we coordinated our jumps just so, and I reached the shelf and collected the glyph. I came soaring down from on high, jubilantly pressing the "call" button over and over. Rings of light radiated from my character's body as I landed next to my nameless helper, and at once he (or she) began to call back. For a minute we both just stood there, triumphant, calling out to one another. I have no idea who this person was; maybe it was a man, maybe a woman; maybe a child, or a grandparent. Together, we moved onward toward the mountain, until all at once, I was alone again. Just like that. Journey could have just as easily been called Journeys. It's a plurality of experiences wrapped into a single shell. The journey in the title is more than just the one we take the first time we set off across the sands, and more than the fifth. The title represents hundreds, thousands of journeys; men and women around the world pushing forward together, striving, climbing, falling, and getting back up. Beautiful and sad, immaculately constructed and quietly assured, Journey is so confident in its ambitions that it almost seems ordinary. It is anything but ordinary. Journey should be our Game of the Year.  |
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Tackling a Guest Who Bleeds Everywhere; How to Eat Lunch at Work and Other Questionable Advice
January 3rd, 2013Top StoryTackling a Guest Who Bleeds Everywhere; How to Eat Lunch at Work and Other Questionable AdviceBy Caity Weaver
Last Friday I woke up to find a large amount of blood smeared on the door of the bathroom. I was in a hurry so I didn't clean it, or say anything about it to my roommate. When I came home it was gone, so I figured my roommate had a bloody nose in the middle of the night and didn't realize. It wasn't until the next day I found blood in the living room; this grossed me out/intrigued me so I kept looking. This was some straight up CSI: Miami realness! Seven rooms had blood in them: the living room, dining room, kitchen, my roommate's bedroom, the bathroom, the laundry room, and our basement living room all had blood splatter. The laundry room and basement living rooms were the worst. There was blood everywhere, I mean everywhere, and a lot of it too. On stairs, on walls, in beer pong cups, on and in the washing machine, on the dryer, in and around a shower, on a toilet, on a couch, there was even the name of the girl my roommate has been doing painted on a wall in blood. I ended up cleaning this all up. When my roommate came home, I asked him what the fuck this was all about, and he said that the girl he's seeing had cut her hand on some glass she broke when they were drunk. He seemed sorry, but there was never an explanation as to why she wrote her name on the wall in blood, why or how she got blood in seven rooms, or why in the three fucking days the house had been a literal bloody mess he hadn't cleaned more than the blood on the bathroom door. I was under the impression that he wasn't going to have this girl over anymore because she's seriously crazy, and probably dead, but she's over tonight, and seemingly alive. Though I am curious as to why she left a blood trail through my house, I mostly think this girl is fucking bat shit scary. I want to tell my roommate that I don't want her visiting anymore. Is that okay? Thatz not okay. None of this is okay? Are you real? Are you okay? Right off the bat I'll note that, if the details you present here are true, you are very calm and collected around what are apparently vast quantities of blood. Consider opening a Manson-themed Bed & Breakfast in your giant-sounding house to capitalize on your unflappability. Now, let's say first that you are a real person who experienced this and second, that someone's daughter/sister/best friend—I mean the chick that your friend is "doing"— did get blind drunk off appletinis and smash a crystal ball at your apartment. Her night of boozing could explain many of the most disturbing details of this story:
So the mystery here is not how the blood got to be from inside this little lady's skin-suit to all over your home, but why your roommate did not clean it up. He is both inconsiderate and possibly a murderer. When a guest oozes bodily fluids in the home of another, the onus falls first to that guest and second (if the guest is incapacitated) to their host to clean up the mess. There is no reason why the blood should have been left to dry and crumble for three days, attracting all manner of shark and vampire to your property. And, why did your roommate clean the blood only off the bathroom door? That's the one place I would have left it, to ensure that the Angel of Death passed over your bathroom. Confront him about all of this. (Note: It's possible that he didn't notice the excess blood; you said yourself that you didn't realize it was all over until Day 2. In that case, you should have brought the trail of horrors to his attention and asked that it be cleaned. He should have apologized profusely and cleaned it.) It seems a little harsh to ban someone from your home because she was injured there. Apart from the writing her name on the wall in blood thing (which is bonkers and no way to get your security deposit back), it doesn't necessarily sound like the girl involved is too crazy. However, if she and your roommate keep reenacting that scene from The Shining on a weekly basis, ring the alarm and revise your guest policy. Eating at work can be tough for some people. For me, I just want to be able to enjoy my lunch or snack without feeling like someone is analyzing my dietary choices. I currently work in a very nice office where we are provided breakfast each morning, and if someone's in the kitchen when I'm in there, I'm 400 times less likely to go for the bagel tray. Motivation!! Anyways—the girl who sits across from me at work (in great shape, but clearly with food issues of her own) will ask me what I'm eating almost every day because she can hear me crunching my salad or unwrapping my tuna wrap. I know she's only asking because then when I say "What about you?" she'll get to say something dickish like, "Oh, I'm skipping lunch today. I have a big fat weekend coming up." I HATE IT. Not only that, but every now and then if she can smell my lunch, she will say "Mmmmm what did you GET??" while WALKING OVER TO MY DESK TO PEER OVER MY CUBICLE INTO MY LUNCH AND WATCH ME EAT. Get out of my face and get out of my food!! I want to find a way to ask my coworker to keep her nose out of my lunch and keep it in her damn protein shakes-am I insane or is that okay? Thatz not okay. Ho-lee hell do you guys have food issues. Are you sure your workplace provides breakfast each morning as a treat? Because it sounds like they only do it to foster cunning and animosity among the employees. Give my love to everyone at Vogue. Having said that, I empathize with your point about how eating food at work can be stressful. My spot at Gawker HQ places me at a long table, squarely between Max Read and Adrian Chen. Look down at your right elbow. Now move your gaze two inches to the left. That is pretty much where Max Read sits in relation to my computer. Shortly after I began working at Gawker, I decided it drove him CRAZY when I would eat. I felt like every lunch I had was composed of the loudest, messiest, most fragrant foods in the land; that my eating a sandwich was several orders of magnitude more distracting than him eating his bowl of oatmeal mush (or whatever he eats, I don't know, he eats dumb stuff). Max is having a room temperature glass of water and I'm slicing into a pie stuffed with four and twenty live blackbirds. Max is wiping his mouth with a napkin and I'm using a chainsaw to eat soup. I would push my plate waaaay to the other side of my computer monitor, as far away from Max's line of vision as possible any time I had food. I would wolf down meals like Kobayashi so he wouldn't get annoyed that I was eating lunch(?). "I'm eating right now and it is driving Max Read CRAZY," I would gchat to friends, every single day. Then, one morning: a miracle. Max Read IM'd to apologize to ME for always eating loudly. He said he "barely" noticed my eating. And that's when I realized: I have to get on Max Read's radar. He is not paying nearly enough attention to me and ALSO everyone is a total weirdo who thinks the world is obsessing about how and what they eat. NOT TRUE. From where I'm sitting (across from your cubicle, watching you eat), your coworker is just making polite conversation. If she hears you unwrapping food, or twitches her nose as the air grows thick with the odor of tuna salad, that's not on her – that's on you. You are the one who is eating at work. She is the one who is working at work. Here is a list of things it is rude to say to someone eating lunch:
Here is a list of things it is not rude to say:
It's not "dickish" of your coworker to say she's skipping lunch because she's got a big fat Greek weekend coming up. It is, perhaps, an ill-advised dietary habit. At the same time, it is weird if she's peering over your cubicle for an extended period of time to watch you eat, like a Dickensian orphan smudging her nose on bakery window glass. If she's doing that, will yourself to make unbroken eye contact with her while you chew, silently. This is a great way to get anyone to stop looking at you. If that doesn't work, the next time she asks what you're having for lunch, tell her it's just a little leftover nunya. Nunya-BIDNESS. Submit your "Thatz Not Okay" questions here.  |
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