Random moosages as I see fit.

A book report!  Today’s book falls more along the lines of a reference book, so this is more of a review of what it’s trying to teach you than it is of the actual book.

A friend recently pointed me to a new time management technique and book called The Pomodoro Technique by Francesco Cirillo, the PDF of which is available for free on the website.  I have tried it out some, and I’ve found it to be rather interesting and definitely warrants more investigation.  The basic idea of it, but maybe not the whole technique, could prove to be very useful to me in the long term.

The basic premise is that many of us are not very productive in our work times because we spend too much of that time stressing and worrying about the things we need to do.  This is partly because we have an abstract idea of time in terms of the way we measure it and the way we view it on a temporal axis.  The book and technique tries to change your perception of time, at least while you are actively trying to work on something, back to a more basic definition as a series of concrete tasks or events, more like how you used to view time as a child (i.e. wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, etc), that you can do over a set time interval, usually 25 minutes.  It also tries to help reduce the interruptions interfering with your work flow.

To do this,  the technique utilizes a kitchen timer, originally a tomato (pomodoro is Italian for tomato), and a list of tasks and activities that need to be accomplished.  At the beginning of the day, or whenever you start to applying the technique, you list the activities that need to be accomplished for the day or larger period of time.  You then further separate the activities into what you plan to do for the day in order of priority.  You work only when the timer is counting down and then take a brief break at the end.  Unexpected tasks or interruptions that occur while you are working also are tracked and dealt with.  After four intervals with the timer, you take a longer break.  I’m not much inclined to write out the whole technique, so here is the handy cheat sheet that they provide.

I haven’t gotten that far into the technique, having time only really to test it out according to the book for one day.  I can say using the technique did cut down on the anxiety of needing to accomplish a lot of things because you only need to focus on one thing at a time in blocks of about 30 minutes.  I am less distracted by things as I know that I have a timer counting down and the intervals of time in which you are actively working is easy to manage.  Concentrating on what you are doing is easy enough when you know at the end of 25 minutes you can take a small break.

I do have a lot of difficulty dealing with distractions.  Currently at my workplace, a lot of information needs to funnel through me before it can be used by other people.  This means that interruptions are fairly constant and some are urgent and take quite a bit of time to deal with.  I haven’t done too well trying to defer the urgent tasks to the next time interval and finish what I am doing first.  I have a tendency to just abandon whatever I’m doing to help the other person.  Obviously, I need to figure out how to tell people that I’ll help them at the end of my 25 minute interval.  Generally even the urgent problems can wait about 30 minutes.

I haven’t gotten to the point where I’m tracking things long term and trying to improve on time.  I suppose I might try that later as I get used to the whole technique.

Overall, I would recommend that you try the pomodoro technique if you have issues with procrastination and sometimes feel overwhelmed by your schedule.  If nothing else, taking away the 25 minute work time intervals could be very helpful and it gives you some a sense of accomplishment and progress as you complete them.  Sometimes it’s all you need to get a handle on your day.

Huzzah!  A new category!  I’ve always been fond of reading and I still try and fit in at least half an hour for it, generally right before bed.  I found it’s easier to fall asleep that way.  Let’s me unwind from my day or something like that.  Anyway, because of the dearth of good fiction books recently, I’ve started to turn more and more toward non-fiction and (gasp!) even memoirs.  I don’t really have a thing against memoirs as a genre, I just don’t like how it’s become the fashionable thing to do even when you really don’t have anything of substance to put in a memoir.  Really?  Paris Hilton can write a memoir?  Seriously?  Justin Bieber has a memoir??

Anyway, I’ve been reading more non-fiction and I thought it might be interesting, as a writing exercise, to write book reports (of sorts) about the books I’ve read.  I don’t know why.  Sometimes I get these strange ideas about what is fun.  Well, they seem normal to me, but when I talk about them to other people, they think it’s really strange.  Like the time I thought it was relaxing and kind of fun to do calculus problems sometimes.  Yeah, only my sister agreed with me (she’s an astrophysicist).  Come to think of it, she’s the only one who will play basic arithmetic drills against me on Brain Age too.  I guess that’s not fun for most people too?  I don’t know.

I recently finished reading Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.  It was a very interesting read.  I initially found the tone of the book a bit irritating.  I was perfectly fine listening to him speak that way (I learned about the book listening to a radio interview), but it took me awhile to get used to the fact that he also wrote that way for his book, but in the end it didn’t really retract from the story.

Things I learned:

• Cancer is an ancient disease.  Now, I know it’s been around for awhile, but I didn’t know ancients (like Egyptians) had the ability to diagnose it.  They didn’t really call it cancer, that came later with the Greeks, but they knew what it was and that it was deadly.
• I think breast cancer might have been the earliest cancer ever diagnosed.
• Cancer is called cancer because the tumors they encountered reminded them of a crab with it’s legs and pincers coming off a central mass.  A lot of tumors don’t fall into this category.
• Leukemia was once thought of just a spontaneous suppuration of the blood.  If you think about that, it gives a really funny mental picture.  To suppurate means to form or discharge pus.  Physicians thought that the blood was just spontaneously giving off pus.  I can see how they would arrive at this conclusion.  A lot of advanced leukemia patients have blood that is so chock full of confused white blood cells that it looks like it’s just pus running through their blood vessels.  In fact, that’s where the word “leukemia” comes from, white blood.  But…can you imagine your blood just spontaneously becoming pus?  Blood is running through your veins and suddenly decides that it wants to turn into pus.  That’s a very funny picture to me.  (That’s not what happens in leukemia.  Blood cell production in your bone marrow is involved.)
• The preferred method of treatment for breast cancer used to be radical mastectomies.  I knew that, but I didn’t know how radical those mastectomies got.  Doctors, in their frenzy to get rid of the cancer, would cut away breast tissue, the muscle mass behind it, parts of the chest wall, ribs, the collar bone, lymph nodes all the way into the neck…you might as well just have removed the whole torso.  And it didn’t help.  Cancer cells metastasize and you can’t always see where they’ve gone to hide to sprout new tumors.  More than likely, they’re beyond what you can remove surgically and radical mastectomies only served to disfigure patients.
• The way cancer develops is very interesting and it makes it hard to treat.  Think of how long you’ve been hearing about the search for the cure for cancer.  Well, it’s probably not going to happen.  I think cancer will probably always be with us.  We might be able to control it to a certain point, but we’ll never get rid of it.  Cancer is a genetic problem at the core.  It takes normal genes that are used in cell production and it messes them all up.  The thing is, it doesn’t really take that much to mess them all up.  Sometimes, the only the tiniest thing is necessary to throw things out of balance and the cell starts growing and splitting uncontrollably.  And since it’s proliferates so rapidly and incessantly, more mutations are able to occur which may feed the cycle.  It may mess up the genes that allow normal cells to move from place to place, like those for your immune system.  And then the cancer can metastasize.  What I found so interesting is how much cancer is us and not so weird foreign element in our being.  Yes, some viruseseseses can cause cancers, but it’s because they were able to pick up bits of our genes, maybe even oncogenes, and bring them back to us causing cancer.  It’s just…so interesting.

Um…I would write more and in more detail, except I forgot I wanted to actually write a book report and I returned the book to the library this morning.  So, I don’t really have a reference anymore and I’m just writing what I remember.  I obviously fail at this book report.  But then again, I haven’t written once since…high…school…?  If even that?  I probably did some book related things in high school.  Surely, I must have.

Anyway, if you are interested in learning about cancer, I would recommend reading the book.  It’s quite approachable even if you don’t have a slightly obsessive interest in medical biology and medical history.