Happy Father's Day 2014 edition

I find it interesting that on Mother’s Day the impulse seems to be to take Mom out so she doesn’t have to cook and on Father’s Day the impulse is to let Dad grill or BBQ for the family.

I have had many good examples of fatherhood in my life and I feel very lucky that I did.

My own father was involved with his children’s lives in many ways. I didn’t find out until much later that many of my friends had fathers that were distant and only seem to do things with them on vacation. I found that rather odd.

I married a man who is an active father. Caroline has her dad pretty much around for a majority of her life. When she was younger she would get upset when he went away for conventions because that meant he wasn’t there with her.

I have met a lot of cool fathers in my time. Again it is that they are part of their children’s lives rather than their children being an appendage of their lives.

There was a commercial that ran up here in New York with an elderly woman looking out her window and observing a larger man doing a cheerleading routine. They pull back to revel his daughter next to him doing the same routine. The tag was “The smallest moments can have biggest impact on a child’s life. Take time to be a dad today.” You can find that video here

And I think that is so very true. Probably some of the biggest impact on my life that I remember to this day, my father might have a vague memory of because it wasn’t life changing or monumental.

Happy Father’s Day to all the various forms of Dads out there. I hope y’all have a good one.

I am grateful for the men I know who take time to be a dad.

The Real LJ Idol Season 9 Week 12 Barrel of Monkeys

When I was a kid I would play the Barrel of Monkey game with my friends. The rules were pretty simple. Here they are from the side of the barrel, Dump monkeys onto table. Pick up one monkey by an arm. Hook other arm through a second monkey's arm. Continue making a chain. Your turn is over when a monkey is dropped. Simple rules but a PITA game. There were strategies that you could employ but eventually the monkeys would fall of the chain.

There are some very interesting articles that have come out within the past year challenging our thinking on multi-tasking.

It uses to be a badge of honor that you were a good at multi-tasking then it almost became a job requirement.

Now scientists are saying not so fast. It may not be a good thing for one’s brain to do this. That people are not being more productive, but they are more emotionally satisfied with their work.

It seems, except for the rare few, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to be able to juggle more than one task at a time and most of our brains aren’t wired that way. It creates an illusion of productivity rather than actual productivity.

Tasks are not handled as well. Things slip through the cracks. The monkeys start slipping off the carefully crafted chain.

(Just FYI listening to music and doing a task is not multi-tasking according to scientists.)

Our brains seemed to be set up to handle two tasks if they are on either side of the brain and that’s about it. The rest may look good but the results are nothing to write home about.

There is also a lower retention rate for information when multi-tasking.

Plus with the bombardment of information from our various electronic and social means of communication, it takes some time to sort out what information is important and what you can just forget. In that constant input can be important information that gets lost in the signal to noise ratio. Again you have a lot of monkeys but it gets harder to string them together.

We do some of our best work and thinking when we are focused rather than distracted by additional input that has no relevance to the task at hand.

I can be very guilty of this when working on something and then I find myself on Facebook catching up with friends or tumblr looking at gifs and tiffs and all the other graphic formats. Then it is a half an hour later and the monkeys I thought I picked up are all over the floor again.

When push comes to shove, I can focus but, sometimes, to do so I have to shut down my computer and turn off my iPad, iPhone, and all the other electronic time sinks that we own. The act of having to spend the time to turn something back on and get it to boot up can be a mighty deterrent to doing so.

We can pick up the monkeys. We just have to learn how.

this has been my entry for LJ Idol. I had this idea back when the topic was first announced. It has just taken me most of the week to focus on my idea long enough to write this essay. I hope you will vote for me when the time comes. Thank you.