[extropy-chat] Personal effectiveness

[JDP]

Adrian Tymes a écrit (30.11.2003/11:17) :

> --- JDP <jacques at dtext.com> wrote:
> > That's the typical reaction of course, when people
> > are first exposed
> > to the counter-intuitive notion of
> > washing-as-part-of-preparation. To
> > be sure, there *are* a few exceptions, things that
> > you *must* put to
> > soak and have no time to wash (especially true if
> > you are a bad cook
> > and things burn in the pan and get stuck). But in
> > *most* cases, first
> > you can wash a lot *before* you have finished the
> > preparation, then
> > the last things you can wash in seconds if you learn
> > how to do it.
> 
> Slight improvement: especially when preparing a
> complex meal, there are often moments where you must
> let things bake/simmer/marinate/whatever.  By this
> point, you will usually have accumulated certain items
> (ingredient packaging, if nothing else) that should
> eventually be cleaned or disposed of.  Use those
> moments to do so.  It's kind of like threads sharing
> time in a single-CPU system, where you're the CPU.

Absolutely! Thanks Adrian, it's good to feel understood :-) In fact,
over time I think I developped a kind of very precise synchronization,
so that I am almost never idle when doing the preparation, and I am
either washing something, or unpacking something, or cutting something
I will cook, or mixing what is being cooked, or seeing how it tastes,
etc. Very often, when you cook several things in the same pan, they
benefit from differentiated durations of cooking. If I fry, say,
zucchini, carrots and onions together, I first put carrots, then
zucchini, then onions. This adds more small time slots for cleaning,
throwing things out, starting the cooking of something else on another
fire, etc. (You're really master of the art when you can add to all
this a tricky conversation with a potential sexual partner that you
have just met, or with an intellectually sophisticated person arguing
about some novel philosophical point -- and if the same person is
both, then that's really spectacular.)

Which brings us back to time-management, prioritizing, and
synchronization, all integral to personal effectiveness.

I do it in an intuitive, experience-based way in meal preparation
(though I use a timer for pasta or rice for example), while I often do
it with written planning when planning my day or longer periods (if
anyone wants concrete advice about this I can tell my own way of doing
it). One of the reasons for this difference is that meal preparation
has built-in time pressure as things should not be overcooked, and you
are hungry anyway, while in longer and more complex activity, the risk
of drifting in perfectionism or digression is larger.

Let me close by saying that the intuitive synchronization for meal
preparation came with time and experience, and the will and interest
to make it better and better every time. I used to take unreasonable
amounts of times to prepare a meal, to be utterly unable to talk with
someone at the same time (still not obvious, and can make you forget
to put salt, neglect something that has just been said to you, or
other similar potentially catastrophic blunders) -- and have a
devastated kitchen afterwards.

Jacques