I spent a big chunk of the weekend digging into the Wordpress software.

As a result, the site has a new theme, some reworked pages (including some new graphics), and a horde of widgets.  I had a good time, and it took my mind off the cold that I fought most of last week.  Now it’s early Monday morning so I’m late to bed, but I sure feel better than I have in many days.  I’m actually looking forward to going in to work tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to blogging more on the redesigned site.

We were vacationing at the beach with some friends a few years ago when I learned the truth about economics.  Sure, I’d had Micro and Macro and Monetarist Theory classes in college, but this lesson was something else entirely.  My friend Dane, who is one of the smartest people I know, was the co-instructor.  The other teacher was my own experience with nature.

The point of the lesson was simple: there is no escaping nature’s cycles.  For the past few decades, the public has been told that the stock market will never crash again.  In these modern times, there are too many safeguards built into the financial markets and overall economic ecosystem to allow that.  Bull!  Or, more appropriately, Bear!

Perhaps it was being at the beach that week and seeing the wind, the waves, and the tides in action:  all three forces operating with unimaginable power, just as they have for millenia.  But listening to Dane’s analysis of the world economic system–plus seeing nature’s powerful cycles in action right before my eyes–led to a resounding certainty:  we were on the verge of a major economic “event.”

As Dane explained, there were a lot of technical and fundamental analyses to back this up, but the real reason is simple: it’s all part of the cycle.  The stock market is the ultimate confidence game: literally, if investors are confident that there are good times ahead, stocks go up; but if the future isn’t so bright, the markets will go down.  And, on a particular cycle of about four generations (i.e., 80 years or so), certain cyclical conditions align that make a decline in the public’s mood a near certainty.  If the public ain’t happy, then ain’t nobody happy.

If we go back 80 years from today, it was October 9, 1929.  Although the roaring twenties were still roaring, there were plenty of dark clouds on the horizon and later that month…well, we know what happened.  By the way, about 10 years later there would be a war.  Roll back 160 years ago and it’s about 1850.  In 1850, the US was expanding rapidly and the economy seemed to have entered a never-ending growth stage.  As with 1929, 10 years later would see a devastating war nearly split the country politically and destroy half of it economically.  Flash another 80 years and you’re in the decade of the 1770’s and the American Revolution.

My point is that we’re due for a drop in public confidence and, considering the precarious position of the world economy in terms of debt, energy prices, debt, home mortgage problems, debt, corporate greed, and DEBT–it’s likely going to be a major adjustment.  Today the Dow Jones Industrials closed at its lowest value in over 5 years.  My prediction, and I hope I’m wrong, is that this is going to get worse before it gets better.

I’ve much more to say on this topic in future entries.

One of the best things about slowing down, even a little, is regaining the ability to say “Yes.”  Today I was scheduled to assist with a training session for a half-hour or so, until a student worker would be available to take over my role.  When she bowed out due to illness, I was asked to stay for the entire 3 hour session.

At HP, this would have been out of the question; with insufficient time to keep up with core, assigned tasks, how on earth can one give up 2.5 hours of prime, morning “real estate”?  That’s why it felt so good to look at my schedule and say, “Yeah, I can do that.”  It was good teamwork, and training is an important part of what we do in my group, so it made sense.

As it turned out, we had nearly a full class and it was a lively and productive session.  I was very glad that I had said “Yes”.  Best of all, I feasted on the positive energy all afternoon: I only had one unchecked “to do” left on my list at day’s end and that was a stretch goal anyway.

Life is not meant to be lived under the gun.  Time is a precious commodity, for sure–but we all need to learn to slide gracefully from task to task, and to keep some open spaces on our dance cards.  This will allow us the option to say “Yes” every so often, and the clearer perspective afforded by slowing down will allow us to choose our dance partners wisely.

Today was the worst day that I’ve had at my new job.  It’s been about six weeks since I started and it’s been a blast!  I’ve thrown myself into learning the technical, interpersonal, and political components of my new role and it’s been wonderful.  In retrospect, the nearly two months off that I took over the summer were incredibly therapeutic and really helped me store up some creative energy to bring to the new job.

Today was the worst day because something went wrong late last week, I didn’t know to check it, and I had to write an email to the user community and tell them we wouldn’t have an update today.  That’s it!  The problem should correct itself tonight and we’ll be back on track.  Yes, I was being sarcastic–it was a comparatively tough day, but that’s because the rest have been pretty darned good.

The way I think of “slowing down” does not, in any way, preclude hard work.  But work, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “makes a good servant and a poor master.”  Working at HP had become physically painful.  It seemed that I was expected to work more or less any time of the day or night, and–to have any hope of keeping up–all the in-between time, as well.  We joked that “work/life balance” had gotten much simpler: 100% versus 0%.  The work, for the most part, wasn’t even something I enjoyed or even felt qualified to do.

This was hard work to a destructive degree (see my earlier post, “Hopes and Fears” for more info on the destruction).  I submit that hard work can also be healthy work, if we acknowledge certain truths.  Chief among these truths is this:

“Work has a point of diminishing returns, where an hour’s investment returns only a few minutes of productivity.”

My curve of productivity, relative to time invested, falls off sharply after 8 hours.  What would be a low-productivity time outlay at work can turn into a great, and restorative, experience by going home, working in the yard, authoring a blog, or exercising.  Work can be as psychologically addictive as food, or booze, or CSI:Miami.  It’s often tempting to just stay another hour or two and “wrap things up.”  In my experience, this is a seductive mirage.  Too often I’ve found myself doggedly staying on some task, feeling my mental acuity and physical stamina ebbing, and knowing that I’d accomplished very little in the past hour.  Staying until 7 turned into staying until 9:30 and, worse yet, all too often the clear light of morning revealed that last night’s work was unnecessary or fatally flawed.

Instead, I am trying to learn to do a productive wind-down at a specific time.  This involves bringing the work to a logical stopping place, leaving myself “flow notes” to help ramp up into a productive pace quickly the next day, saying goodnight to my co-workers, and then still making the bus without running.  I’m only a C student where this practice is concerned, but I’m staying at it.  And that “staying at it” is how I hope to slow down in what seems to be an ever-accelerating world.