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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Reader Feedback About Facebook

...gularly updated blogs. I check in with Root Simple on Wednesdays (and oftentimes more often). As for RSS feeds, I found subscribing to these problematic; sometimes they do not push out or they take an eon and a half to update. There is more to say about the problems with RSS feed, and others have said it. You can read more of C.M.’s thoughts on Facebook in a blog post she wrote, “Adios Facebook! The Six Reasons I Deactivated My Account” Wayne says...

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Our new front yard: history

...adapted to hot dry lands. Still, we kept hanging on, giving the trees more time, hoping they’d find their way to health. Our waiting turned into denial and avoidance. The truth was the yard was not happy or healthy, and we just shut our eyes to it every time we came home, and tried not to think about it. The indomitable Mexican sage and lantana reasserted themselves from root bits left in the soil and threaded their way among the straggly trees. T...

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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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