Kelowna Real Estate

Some national recognition of the stupidity of the housing market where we live: Kelowna house prices move ahead of Calgary, Toronto. In Canada, only Vancouver remains more ridiculous.

Take Back Your Time Day

Bet you didn't know that today is Take Back Your Time Day:

"Overworked and time-starved Canadians and Americans need to take time Tuesday to cancel an appointment, play with their children, go for a walk or plant a tree, says a group promoting Take Back Your Time Day."

Update: I missed the CBC's In-Depth feature on the topic -- By the numbers: time poverty. Lots of fascinating stats about work and overwork, particularly in comparing the U.S., Canadian and European situations.

Work and Depression

CBC reports that 1 million Canadians are dissatisfied with their jobs, many depressed. Although that does sound like a bummer, does that mean that the other 90% of workers are pretty happy with their jobs?

Decision-Making Biases

I was fascinated by this Wikipedia list of decision-making and behavioral biases, with links to each one (including references!) like the
Planning Fallacy.

Update: Mutual Improvement deconstructed a suspect study connecting alcohol consumption and higher incomes with another list of cognitive biases taken from Wikipedia.

Update 2: I was looking through a list of del.ici.ous links on decision making and found this article: 10 reasons people make stupid decisions -- it's funny and references some solid background material.

More Happiness Research

A Jolly, Socratic Science takes a look at the best of happiness research and digs up this excellent presentation from Daniel Gilbert: How to Do Precisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times. The other item in the post was a link to How Not to Buy Happiness (pdf) by Robert Frank, which covers some very interesting territory:

"Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods–such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job–then the evidence paints a very different picture."

Aerons and Air Hockey

In Aerons and Air Hockey Kathy Sierra explains why cool workplaces matter, reminisces about the workspaces she's had that really worked, and gives everyone a peek at her new office -- a beautiful vintage Airstream trailer. Love it!

Consumer Life

I'm not a big fan of the title of CBC's Consumer Life section, but it's proven to be a great source of news about the choices people are making. The focus is particularly in how we spend our money, but covers safety, work issues, personal finance, housing market, and topics in those areas -- definitely worth following, and they even have an RSS feed to keep readers up to date.

Balancing Work and Aging Parents

Baby Boomers are having challenges balancing work with caring for their aging parents -- I'm seeing this coming up more lately as an issue for people I know in their 50s. The ones who have their own businesses seem to be in a much better position to make the adjustments they want/need to make.

Welcome Beckett-to-Be

Christian from think:lab is a prolific blogger, inspirational thinker, school designer, lifestylist and new dad. Congratulations to Christian and his family as they create a new life together.

More Income and Happiness Research

From Princeton this time: Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion. I thought this quote really captured the compromises we make without really thinking about how it will affect our well-being:

"In some cases, this focusing illusion may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting lengthy commutes (which are among the worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time spent socializing (which are among the best moments of the day)."

Via Mutual Improvement, which looks to be warming up nicely.

silverorange

Last year, I linked to some stuff about a cool design shop in PEI. This week, Robert Paterson interviewed the guys from silverorange about their unique approach to business. Self-actualization appears to be woven into their DNA, with recognition of how work might be better integrated into life. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's a taste:

"Rob: So what then is your organizational goal?

I think that it is to foster an organization that supports our 'Whole Lives'. To create and maintain a platform that enables each of us to do the things that we want to be able to do. To set in motion an organization that would be self-sustaining and that we can rely on to support all of us for a long long time."

Who wouldn't want to work there?

Nests Not Empty

There's lots of talk about Twixters, Yeppies, Boomerang Kids, Grups, and other labels that are supposed to describe people who are extending their adolescence for various reasons, but you rarely hear from the parents of these grown-up kids. In this column from CBC, the author takes a quick look and her findings might surprise you:

"When surveyed, parents with adult children living at home expressed no frustration over their living arrangements. In fact, they were more likely to be very satisfied with the time they spent with their children than parents whose children were out on their own."

Update: CBC followed this up a couple of weeks later with For Generation Xers, there's no place like parents' home, referencing a recent StatsCan study.

C'mon, Get Happy

This excellent article from In These Times looks at the common strands and differences in several of the more popular recent books on happiness. In reviewing Daniel Gilbert's work, the author summarizes with this gem:

"The vision we have of what will make us happy in the future is a mere reflection of our present. But our imagination is as unreliable as our memory; we can’t correctly foresee what will make us happy in the future."

Via Mutual Improvement.

Mutual Improvement Blog

Mutual Improvement is a new blog from the creators of 43 Things, which I'll be studying for my thesis (and I've written about it here before). The blog is ambitious, covering "ideas about personal development, happiness, statistics, emotions, neurobiology, cognitive science and all the things that make life worth living." Sound familiar? Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Why Best Buy's Employee Parking Lot is Empty

Nine Shift answers the question in greater depth, but I'll give away the punchline: Best Buy is encouraging employees to work from home.

"They have discovered (yes, it's true) that telecommuters are more productive than office workers."

An indicator of a larger trend? We can only hope. Driving around L.A. last week (and everyone apparently drives everywhere there) for the first time made me wonder if you could possibly conceive of a system that was any more dysfunctional than suburban sprawl combined with centralized offices.