So Mike Nelson, former host of Mystery Science Theater 3000, current host of RiffTrax, and one of the funniest men alive, has decided to eat nothing but bacon for a month.
I’m no nutritionist. But based on our experience after a month of high-fat, high-protein Primal dieting, I can make one prediction confidently: he’s gonna lose some weight.
Stacey has lost 10 pounds so far, which is great for her. I’ve lost almost five pounds, which is not so great for me, seeing as I started at a scrawny 150lb and my goal was to gain, not lose. This after scarfing down as much meat, eggs, veggies, nuts, and dairy as I wanted every day. At this point I’m completely convinced by the argument that it’s carbohydrates, not fat, that leads to weight gain. I’m actually considering upping my carb intake just to maintain weight.
There’s a great article on Mark’s Daily Apple today that addresses the topic of hunting your own meat. This is something Stacey and I have discussed, especially as we’ve started practicing a primal diet plan and generally trying to live closer to the cycle of nature. Neither of us has ever felt the desire to hunt for sport, but we’ve considered the possibility of hunting for food.
Hunting is something I’ve thought about from time to time for years. When I was growing up we owned three acres of land which my dad would allow a few trusted individuals to hunt on, who would then give us a share of the meat. But I’ve never really felt the urge to take up hunting myself. On the other hand, practicing internal consistency is very important to me. And for a long time I’ve had the feeling that from a consistency point of view, if I’m not capable of pulling the trigger on a game animal I probably should be a vegetarian. I don’t have an ethical problem with meat-eating in general - I believe we are omnivores by nature and there’s no reason to feel guilty about our place in the food chain - but I’m troubled by how separated we’ve become from the sources of our food. We’ve already addressed that discrepancy in our own lives with regard to vegetables, by participating in a CSA and by gardening. Maybe hunting is the next step.
A post about people who do terrible things out of economic desperation, and the need for neighbors to look out for each other in hard times:
That said, think about it: how many of us really know our neighbors? I know most of my neighbors but I don’t REALLY know them. I mean we wave to each other and talk every once in a while but I don’t think that qualifies as really knowing them. Of course, my neighborhood is different. None of us seem to have financial troubles. Our part of the country has been somewhat insulated from the credit crisis. I’m thankful for that but I also realize that that could change.
This quote got me thinking. Stacey and I have dreams of living in community - an intentionally created family-like community where we look out for each other. In fact, that’s where the title of this blog comes from.
But I’m a big believer in the idea that if you don’t start practicing a value now, you’ll never be able to practice it. You can’t wait until the time is right and the context is supportive and the stars are aligned. You have to start right where you are.
And now that I think about it, we don’t know our physical neighbors all that well, and I don’t know if I’d know if they were in trouble. I think maybe I’ll try to organize a neighborhood barbecue or two this summer.
I’m a software developer by vocation. Over the past ten years a lot of software development shops have adopted a set of related principles and practices collectively known as Agile Methodologies. The theme of Agile development is summed up in the motto “embrace change“. Agility, in the software development context, is all about accepting the fact of change and working with it instead of fighting change and trying to make the world stand still.
A year or two ago as I started thinking a lot about personal productivity and reading books like Getting Things Done, I began to wonder if some of the practices I used every day ono the job couldn’t be applied to my life outside of work. I didn’t immediately do anything with the idea, but it never completely left the back of my mind. This year I’ve begun experimenting with using Agile practices outside of work, and I plan on writing about our experiences.
Why Agile?
The principle benefit I hope to see in applying some of these practices from the software world to everyday life is an approach to planning that embraces constant change. A lot of guides to realizing your full potential as an individual or a family have a strong element of long-term planning to them. My experience has always been that when I sit down to write a grand plan for life, I wind up with a document that bears little relationship to reality after a month or three. Interestingly, this is exactly what happens in software projects as well, and the reason Agile methodologies were invented. I wanted a way to plan just enough to move forward, without trying to over-structure our lives.
Practice 1: Time-boxed Iterations
One of the core Agile practices is to break the schedule into time-boxed intervals called iterations. Time-boxing simply means that they proceed for a fixed amount of time. Iterations are not deadlines which can be pushed back a few days or weeks. They end at a fixed time, and then the next iteration begins.
Agile teams plan their work on a per-iteration basis. At the beginning of the iteration, they get together with the client and decide which tasks they will try to accomplish in that iteration - and no farther. There is no grand plan showing what features will be done in each iteration all the way up to the end of the projects - planning is done one iteration at a time.
Iterations are typically from a week to a month long, although a month is considered widely pretty long by agile standards. They are intended to be long enough to make visible progress forwards, but short enough that little time will be wasted if it turns out the client doesn’t like the direction they’ve been going. The idea of frequent course corrections is fundamental to iterations. You plan a little, work a little, evaluate where you are, adjust course accordingly, and then work a little more.
Three-week intervals
For our family experiment I decided to try a three-week iteration schedule. Some of the considerations that went into choosing that length were:
No matter how you try and sweeten it, planning is always tedious and a little stressful. I didn’t want the planning to come at too frequent of intervals, or I figured we’d sour on the whole experiment pretty quickly.
On the other hand, intervals of a full month would mean only twelve chances to adjust course per year, and that didn’t seem like enough.
Someone once told me that three weeks is the length of time it takes to build a new habit.
The planning outing
One decision I made early was that I wanted to make a point of making the iteration planning/retrospective meetings special in some way, so that we wouldn’t start dreading them. So last weekend the family drove up to Borders and Stacey and I sat and sipped lattes while we planned. I intend to make it a tradition that we always get out of the house and go somewhere we enjoy - a bookstore, or a cafe, or a park - for our planing meetings.
What to plan?
Iterations are all about scheduling work. In the software development context, “work” is pretty well-defined - it usually involves adding features or fixing bugs in a program. In life the definition of “work” is a little more vague.
For our purposes I decided that what I wanted to focus on planning projects or tasks that fit a few loose criteria:
It requires more than one family member to complete. The iteration is for coordinating as a family, not for planning each person’s personal projects.
It will take more than an hour to complete. Iterations are for planning the major projects we intend to accomplish in the next three weeks; not every little task we want to do.
It will take less than three weeks to complete. The whole point of an iteration is to accomplish a measurable amount of work in the allotted time. “Build a new house” is too broad in scope for a single iteration. “Hire an architect” might be a more reasonable goal.
It is quantifiable. There should be some concrete criterion for determining, at the end of the iteration, if the task was accomplished or not.
It is non-recurring or rarely recurring. Iteration planning isn’t the time to schedule taking the trash out every Thursday.
These are only guidelines - not all the tasks we came up with for our first planned iteration fit all these criteria
Accountability and visibility
I think it’s important to make the current and past iteration plans easily visible. This is one area I’ve slacked off on, but I plan on publishing our plan for the current iteration (2/15) right here on this blog in the next couple days, and from then on posting it at the beginning of each iteration. I’ve also given thought to putting it up in our house as stickies on a whiteboard or index cards on a corkboard. As we collect iteration plans and retrospective notes (more on that in a later post), we’ll be able to gain insight into how much we’re capable of accomplishing in three weeks’ time.
A note on terminology
Neither of us are completely happy with the term “iteration” as applied to our family life. It’s a little too cold and technical. We batted a few other words around, but we haven’t yet come up with a satisfactory replacement. “Cycle” isn’t much better than iteration. “Period” has menstrual connotations. We’re open to suggections.
Welcome to The Lazy Faire, a family blog about the practice of abundance in every aspect of life. Your hosts are Stacey and Avdi. Together with our children we are building our dreams and writing about the journey.
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, I began to wonder if some of the practices I used every day ono the job couldn’t be applied to my life outside of work. I didn’t immediately do anything with the idea, but it never completely left the back of my mind. This year I’ve begun experimenting with using Agile practices outside of work, and I plan on writing about our experiences.
