Cost Benefit Analysis in Procrastination and Binge Working

Yesterday I made excuses that I could not write often because my to-do-list is so long. In fact, it may be the long to-do-list that made me stress. So the question is how do I overcome it?

Thank God that a friend of mine shared this article. It reminds me that we procrastinate or working continuously because it makes sense. In other word, we do a cost-benefit-analysis and decide that procrastinate or keep working on something too much is the best alternative.

For example, we procrastinate because the cost is too high and benefit is too low. We put high expectations on doing something that the cost of doing it seems to be enormous especially if we fail to meet those expectations. Or we procrastinate because we already forget the benefits. This happens to me many times. When something new comes up, I take it on because of the excitement. But soon, that benefit is forgotten and I no longer have the motivation to do anymore. So in this case, I need to recall that benefit and if it is actually more beneficial, then it makes sense not to procrastinate.

This also happens when I binge on working. I overestimate the benefits over the cost. I forget that if I continue working on something till perfection, there are other things that will be sacrificed. For example, because of working on something, others can only be done on last minute as if there is no cost if we lose it because something more beneficial (like those urgent staff) comes up in the last minute.

So there is no need to be angry when I procrastinate or binge working. What I need is to check whether I value the benefit and cost wrongly. Recall what is the real benefit and the real cost and then follow up accordingly.

What is a standard deviation?

We often face a situation where we know how to compute but we do not know what is it for or what is the reason or history of it. One of examples is standard deviation. We can use excel to compute it easily given a set of data. But what does it mean? In what cases it is meaningful to compute standard deviation.

A good elaboration including reason behind computation such as using square instead of absolute differences can be found here.

So we just need to remind ourselves one step bigger, that is standard deviation is only one of several ways to measure dispersion or how the individual data spreads. In the case of normal distribution, it is meaningful to use standard deviation. In other cases, we need to be careful. For example, if we have non-normal distribution, what does the standard deviation signify? When there are only two data points, what does standard deviation mean?

There are other ways of measuring dispersion such as range (difference between maximum and minimum data) or interquartile range (difference between 75th percentile and 25th percentile which shows the range of 50% of the data).

Back to the main point, we need to remember the objective of having something. There is no point of showing standard deviation just because it is a standard procedure. Something is meaningful when we know why we are doing it. Of course we cannot know the reasons of all things we do in this world. But if there is a way to find out such as in the case of standard deviation, let’s find it out.

Your spouse is your most important customer

Recently I heard of many news on husbands with affairs case. It is easy to judge on them while it is actually wiser for us to reflect on the same danger that can affect anyone including us. Have we wondered what made them do that. Or how did they start sowing the seed of unfaithfulness? What kind of small habit that they do everyday which lead to where they now are?

One of possible causes that I can think of is that we often forget that our spouse is our most important customer. In this world where customers are kings and queens, we treat others with utmost priority while neglecting our family. For those who are family oriented, there is an equal danger of prioritizing the kids over the spouse while the best gift one can give to their children is to love their spouse.

And the most dangerous thing is that most of the time we are not covered by the media when we have affairs as the affairs may be more subtle. Perhaps we do not have affairs to another human being. But we start to prioritize our hobby or our work or our friends over our spouse. It is very easy to do as we tend to have an expectation that our spouse should understand us.

So be consistent in reminding ourselves that our spouse is our most important customer. Learn to understand our spouse better as a company continually spend efforts to understand its customer. At the same time, remember that this is not possible without God’s grace. Our spouse is our most important customer but is not our God. We don’t worship our spouse. We worship God and therefore we treat our spouse as the most important customer in our life just the way He loves our spouse.

Speed Control

One of the most valuable things I learned from motorcycle lesson is speed control. We need to learn to pick up speed so that we do not wobble and we can reach our destination fast. At the same time, we need to know when we reduce speed to have enough reaction time and stopping distance.

Likewise, in work, we need to strike the balance between trying to go up and try to maintain the speed or even reduce speed.

We need to have goals in life. We need to set target. Without a clear target we can be astray. But it does not mean that we cannot change the direction. God even allows us to make U-turn. So always be ready when to make a turn or even to make a stop if it is more like a U-turn.

Today I decided to pick up speed. I want to learn to go out from my comfort zone and fight for a recognition while developing and using my talents granted by God. At the same time, I could not forget that this recognition is only one of tools to be blessings. When God says turn, I must turn. When it is a U-turn, I need to be prepared to make a stop if the oncoming traffic is not clear.

So there is no need to push too much. In fact is may be as dangerous as over-speeding. But at the same time pick up the speed, especially if we enter into highway. It is equally dangerous to road slowly in highway. We need to speed up and at the same time ready to stop when there is a traffic light. And we also need to remember that we will not be forever in highway. There is nothing in highway. When we are about to reach our destination, in fact, we need to go out from the highway and slow down as we enter into a normal road again. In short, be adaptive, and heed the traffic signs given by God.

Learning a new language

I want to learn another language aside from English and Indonesia. So far, English is the only language where I experienced from not knowing to knowing and able to use it. It was possible due to a structured way of learning from the subject in school from primary 5 to some additional tuitions.

I often forget that a similar amount of time investment may be required to learn a new language especially if we do not sign up for any course. That means we need spend regular time to study, to listen, and to practice the language. Another word, it cannot come naturally. We need to create our own discipline. And then are we willing to track the progress?

So it is challenging to learn new languages, be it verbal languages or programming languages. We need to practise. It is not something we can study over a night or even over a full week. It needs to be repeated, it needs to be refreshed as we often forget. Just like when I write about this, I remember that I have not practiced learning R Programming even though there is already an automated instructor in form of the swirl program.

It is even more challenging to learn a language that there is no clear grammar or syntax with well-defined vocabularies. Body language is hard to learn. Even harder is love language. We already know that at least there are five love languages: Words of affirmation, gifts, quality time, touch, and acts of service. The question is that are we willing to spend the already challenging efforts for learning verbal and programming language, plus the additional efforts to bear through something that is not well-defined, so that we can communicate better with our spouse. One thing to remember is to cultivate our love. Just like the saying, no matter how many languages we speak, it is of little use without love.

Five times a day

When I got shingles, I had to drink an anti-viral medication five times a day for ten consecutive days. It is tougher than what I expected. At the same time, it gives me insights on what it means to really want to achieve our goals or build relationship.

It was tough because it is more than three times. If something is to be done for three times, at least we can match it with our meal times. In fact, we may even not be able to meet three times if we skip one of our meal or if we forget to bring the medicine during a meal. Five times means that we need to insert one between breakfast and lunch, and another between lunch and dinner. Of course we can do other things such as taking it before bed time or right after wake up.

For the first five days, it was fine because I was at home due to the medical certification. But the moment I started to go out, I started to forget. It became worse when I started to work as I did not have the habit of taking a meal break between breakfast and lunch. The busy activities in work also made me forgot about it.

What I learn is that by putting it into five days, we need to ensure that we really want to do it so that regardless of the time, we still allocate to do it. It requires us consistency to reach our goal which in this case is to get fully recovered from the virus. To do well, we needed a plan, we also need to adjust if we know the timing had a clash with something.

Five times a day also reminded me of our Muslim friends who pray five times a day. It is an amazing thing if they can remember those five times. Or perhaps at least they make an effort to put it in the calendar or use an app or something to remind them.

Interestingly, there are many times that we do more than five times a day. Going to toilet, drinking water, checking whatsapp, checking time are all done more than five times a day. It becomes easy as it has been repeated many years. So, let’s try to nurture a good habit and repeat it frequently in each new day.

One of the most important life skills is the ability to start over

I already forgot why I came up with this topic few days ago. But immediately I have seen many examples in the past two days.

First, is from watching football. We can see there are many times where we need to start over, both inside a game, and across games. In each game, the players need to build from the back or the middle to the front. And in football (I am referring to soccer), it is not easy to score goals. So there are more failures of scoring than success. This means they need to repeat on and on without a guarantee of a success as the game can end up with a draw. Then across the game, it does not mean that if they can beat a more successful team, then they can repeat it again with easier team. On the other hand, if they lose, it does not mean that they will lose again. One thing for sure is that they need to start over again.

Then, yesterday was my first meeting with a new team. Almost everything are new and I need to repeat again the process of adjusting. Of course, now I know how my company works and I know all my teammates as I am still under the same manager. But the process of learning from scratch is not something we can naturally like as we need to go out from our comfort zone.

By the end of yesterday, I was exhausted. I was stressed. I was overwhelmed. Perhaps because I did not want to start over.

Thanks to God, my wife, and my friend who encouraged me to start over again today. So I tried. I looked at again on the notes on perfectionism trap, set a time budget for each activity, and make a commitment to stop when time is up. And amazingly, today was a very great day to me. I completed what I wanted to do and I talked to people and learned a lot. It is very surprising as yesterday was a complete stress and today seems to be a complete success.

At the same time, a happy day today does not guarantee another happy day tomorrow. We just need to start over again and appreciate the process of being vigilant and hopeful at the same time for each new page that we are going to write.

The strongest doesn't necessarily win

Life is interesting that the strongest doesn't necessarily win. It is great to witness on how Portugal national football team beats France national football team 1-0 in the extra time, just 11 minutes before the end of the game.

There are stark differences between Portugal and France. France is the host while Portugal is just a guest. France wins almost all games except one on the road to the final. France even defeated Germany, the defending world champion. Portugal on the other hand only won against Wales in the official time. The rest, they got draws and require extra time or penalty in the knockout stage to win. In the final, France dominated the possession. France has also more shots on goals, more corner kicks. In other word, France is the stronger side.

But life is more interesting that it cannot be easily predicted. In fact, what happens can be beyond expectation. Ronaldo is the most prolific player for Portugal but he only played in the first 20 minutes or less due to injury. So, it is easy to think that the game is over. Portugal does not have the exposure like France and its best player is injured.

The match shows that we need to keep being humble. Portugal with its team rallied on to keep France from scoring goals. There were moments where France almost scored but only denied by the goal stands. And then it came the moment. Eder, a substitute, scored his first goal in the tournament, his only fourth goal as a national team member from outside the box. What an interesting drama.

So, let's not lose hope in anything. Even when we are not the favorite, even when it looks hopeless, do not give up, keep pressing. We never know how it ends. Especially as we have a great God. God who makes all things good for those who believe in Him.

All Analogies are wrong, but some are useful in certain contexts

All models are wrong but some are useful. That is what I learned from my statistics class. Models are only imitations of real things that we are interested in. So no matter how good is a model, it is still not the reality. But models are useful. It is also said that people who use a model make better decisions and people with many models make even better decisions.

Analogy is also a model. It tries to gain insights from a simpler situation with a hope of drawing some parallels and applying those insights. As it is an imitation, analogy is wrong. It can never be able to capture all sides of reality as it is not real. But they can be useful if applied correctly.

That is the difficult part. Often we are inspired by an analogy that we want to use that analogy even for a situation that may not be an appropriate.

Let’s take an example. There is a popular analogy of carrot, egg, and coffee when they are boiled. Carrot changes from hard to soft on its outside, egg changes from soft to hard on its inside, while coffee influences the surrounding water to become fragrant.

It somehow implies that all of us need to become a coffee. This may not be appropriate to use in all contexts. Because when there are people with different background, are we trying to say that all people should become uniform? What is wrong with being carrot? What is wrong with being egg?

Carrot, egg, coffee can become blessings for people. So it is fine to become carrot. It is okay to become egg. Each of us has different purpose of life but all can become blessings for others.

At the same time, that analogy can be useful given a certain context. For example, we human has the ability to learn from each other. So even if we are born by nature to be carrot, we can learn from egg so that we can still become strong from the outside when needed. An egg can learn from carrot that it is okay to become soft, it is okay to cry and to show our weaknesses as we are not robots. A coffee can also learn from egg and carrot so as not to easily dissolved by the surroundings.

Another good insight from the analogy is that there is no one size fits all approach. We have differences. Also, we may be conditioned by society to become one thing while we are not. We are not necessarily carrots even if we are born in carrots-family. Remember Einstein’s analogy, if monkey is demanded to swim and fish is expected to jump, they will think that they are stupid for the rest of their life.

So we need to be careful in using analogy to ensure that it suits the context. Also, if we can go without analogy, it’s better to deal with the issue of interest directly. Like I got a good feedback from colleagues that too much analogy is also not good as we shift our attention from the real things.

Shingles

Shingles, or Herpes Zoster, is another of my memorable part of my holiday in Europe. I did not know that I had shingles symptom in my second week of the trip. It started with a mere group of spots on my upper left of my back. My wife and I thought that it was probably due to bedbugs as our hotel room in Budapest looks old. Even when it started to be painful, I thought it was normal as we decided to poke the first spots.

It only became strange when few days later, another group of spots appeared on my left chest. But thank God that my holiday was not really affected, it was mild enough that I could still go around as usual.

Initially I thought of delaying to see doctor upon reaching Singapore. But as it was becoming more itchy on the plane, I decided to go an A&E department to get it checked. Apparently it was confirmed to become shingles.

That’s where I learned more about shingles. My friend has got shingles this year but I did not pay attention to the details and background of shingles. Now that I have experienced it myself, I get the clarification from doctors that shingles cannot cause others to have shingles as it is from our own chickenpox virus which became active again after being dormant. The condition for triggering it is a low immune system. Therefore, shingles is usually happening for old people or those who have low immune system such as post-surgery patients. For me, it was perhaps the change of weathers in 5 countries that I visited.

It became a blessing in disguise when I got 5-day MC. It sounded bad initially as I had to forgo my work. But later on I realize it is a great blessing. I can stay with my wife at home as she has not started working yet. Also, I could have more time to recover from jetlag and to clear my e-mails in a small chunk everyday. So by the time I came back to work, I no longer had jetlag and my e-mails were all cleared.

At the same time, it is a good reminder to not take our health for granted. Anytime our immune system drops, there is a chance for a disease to come. So let’s take care of our health.

My self-centeredness

It is a hard truth to find out that I am very self-centered. No matter how I look to care about others, inside I am still self-centered. I care more about my interest, my feeling, my way of thinking. I get angry when things are not according to my plan. I get upset when people say I am wrong. I get envious when others do or look better than me. I want to do it my way, not God’s way.

And the worse thing is that I do not want to change. I want to stay where I am because it is more comfortable. I do not want to change to become more like Christ. Even when I want to change, it is because of my own preference and benefit, and not necessarily because I want to be more like Him.

When I am free, I care about others. But when my deadline is pushing me, I do not care how people around me are feeling. I did not even attempt to hear them as the deadline becomes near. Or perhaps I want to stay overnight just want to finish the task instead of acknowledging the risk of becoming sick and therefore will trouble other people. I also seldom maintain relationship as I only contact people when I need them.

Well actually I am not that bad. But the challenge is to be willing to change, to try something that looks hopeless, like being Nugi who is not last minute. Being Nugi that can say no and know when to stop.

It is tough, but hope is not hope if it is not hopeless.

Tipping: Cash, Card, and Culture

Another thing I learned from the trip last month is on tipping. Different cultures have different views on tipping.

I am from Indonesia where we don’t usually give tips in restaurants. But we perhaps give tips on other things on certain context such as administrative matters or service such as massage. I have been in Singapore for almost half of my life. So I am not that used to it anymore.

We went to Spain last year where tipping culture is also not that strong. So it was a shock that in Germany we even met waiter who specifically say that the price is not including tipping. We began to give tips in the meals. I tried to use the same standard as Singapore which is 10% of service charge. So I tried to gave 10% and then rounded up to the nearest integer.

However, as the days went by, I started to use credit card to avoid the possibility of not having enough cash that can last until the end of the trip. That is where the challenge came. When we pay using credit card, that means we have to prepare a small amount of cash for the tip. This is different than cash where we just need to indicate how much we expect back from the cash that we gave. Sometimes I don’t have small notes and so I didn’t give tips. So I think tipping is easier done when we deal with cash.

Habit is hard to change. Our last destination was Spain and on my first night I still gave tips as it feels usual to give one. Whereas when I compare to Singapore, we even still get the small coins when we pay to taxi.

I guess different cultures have their own views on tip. Some may consider as a requirement, some may consider it as normal, some may consider as rude or even contra to the meritocracy point of view. And we are human who may not be able to understand all cultures. So do our best, but it is ok to make mistake.

Familiarity is dangerous when we underestimate

It was a hard experience to remember not to underestimate just because we feel familiar with someone, something, or some places. Out of several cities that my wife and I went, I felt most confident about Barcelona because it was our second time going there. But I only became angry and cursing when I went to Barcelona as I got lost in its metro systems. Also, I thought it was easy to buy water when at the end we did not see a place to buy. I was so desperate that at the end I bought a 1.50-euro water when its usual price is 0.50 euro.

I thought it stopped just in Barcelona. But apparently it happened again after we came back to Singapore. I was confident that I could easily get water that I did not check twice whether I have a water bottle in my bag. I also was too nice to my uncle and aunt by giving the extra water I have from dinner to them. This results my wife not having enough water and experienced a lot of pain later on.

So watch out. There is time to sleep and rest. But when we are awake, be careful, avoid falling the trap of underestimating something. And listen to the subtle reminders. Like when I was in Barcelona, I already got the hint when the metro lines change. This perhaps could have reminded me that the line systems are different than in Singapore. Also, when I forgot to bring the water, it could have reminded me to treasure water. But I didn’t learn from those reminders. I hope by writing it out here, I could remember to avoid underestimating.