Time Banking

...of our hard earned capital away from the Wall Street types? Get ready for time banking. With time banking, you get together with your local community members, friends and family and exchange hours rather than currency. Time Bank USA describes the concept succinctly: “For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you.” Time b...

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Deep Work

...even when you’re waiting in line at the post office. Rather than schedule time away from distraction Newport suggests scheduling time to give into temptation. Go ahead and surf the web, just do it in a scheduled block of time. We are, after all, human and need to view the occasional cat video (or catch up on Root Simple blog posts!). But we can’t let those cat videos define our schedules and inhibit our ability to focus on a single task. Newport...

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Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...Why? Because it’s really, really boring. Nothing ever happens. Most of the time it’s sunny. Around this time of year it rains occasionally. In June it’s kinda cloudy. That’s all there is to say. For those of you who live here in Southern Calfiornia I’ve found a few good sources for edible gardening information: The Digitalseed Vegetable Planting Calendar and the Digitalseed Flower Planting Calendar Books: The New Western Garden Book: The Ultimate...

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On Living in Los Angeles Without a Car: A Debate

...thout a bike. It’s possible by bus, but amazingly tedious and backward and time wasting. Basically, public transportation here doesn’t support your life, it becomes your life. Example: we went to visit Erik’s mom last week for a lunch date. She lives about 15 miles away. We left our house at 10 and came back at 5. We had a good long visit with her and about four hours of transit time total. Good thing we’re self-employed. So yes, the only way to g...

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A Plea to End Daylight Savings Time

...an hour late. It’s bad enough that our clocks are an abstraction of solar time. Why do we need to add another layer of abstraction by changing our clocks rather than adjusting our lives to the passage of the seasons? This is the time equivalent of taking honest labor, abstracting it into money and then turning that into a collateralized debt obligation. As the layers of abstraction accrue, we lose touch with the rhythms of the rising and setting...

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