I've got a treadmill under my work desk. I notice that when I'm walking I can focus on meetings and actually process auditory information way better. Makes me wonder how I would've done in school if walking was an option.
I did a 5 day wilderness backpacking trip this summer and it's a godsend for disconnecting and mental health though I guess what Sivers is talking about is a slightly different format. I'll have to think about this some for when I'm older.
>I've got a treadmill under my work desk. I notice that when I'm walking I can focus on meetings and actually process auditory information way better. Makes me wonder how I would've done in school if walking was an option.
I wish I had a desk treadmill, but I completely agree with you. We are not meant to sit at desks all day every day. We are meant to move, to exercise, to be active. I would have done SO much better in school (and in life) had I been able to move more.
I love tech, gaming, and solitary activities, but I really think that schools need to prioritize physical activity as well, because so many young children are diagnosed as ADHD and the reason for that is that they simply don't get the amount of exercise required. You show me a kid with ADHD, I show you a kid whose parents shoved a screen in front of them as a toddler, and a kid whose parents are afraid to make the kid work hard physically. I am one of them, although I did take to organized sports as a young teen (which helped me tremendously, but would have helped much moreso if I had started earlier). It carries into adulthood as well. People have concentration issues because they aren't physically conditioned to concentrate for long periods of time.
> People have concentration issues because they aren't physically conditioned to concentrate for long periods of time.
Like physical exercise is meant to help with that. If there's one thing that's invariably true about physical work, is that people adapt to it by pushing the movements down to subconscious, and letting their mind think of something else.
> You show me a kid with ADHD, I show you a kid whose parents shoved a screen in front of them as a toddler, and a kid whose parents are afraid to make the kid work hard physically.
How does that apply to the generation of the parents, though? Or grandparents, to compensate for US having a TV culture some 20-40 years before everyone else?
(Fortunately, we know the answer is, "it doesn't", as ADHD has a very significant genetic component.)
> I am one of them, although I did take to organized sports as a young teen (which helped me tremendously, but would have helped much moreso if I had started earlier).
I never liked organized sports, and avoided them (and most PE) since early school, for a very simple reason: I was diagnosed with myopia and wore glasses. Wearing glasses for anything non-trivial (i.e. -0.5/-0.5 doesn't count) makes PE a pain, and shuts you out of team sports: most games involve throwing or kicking around high-velocity projectiles, so you either suck at them because you can't see the ball (or teammates) at some distance, or you risk getting your eyes gouged out by the shattered lens after you get hit in the face by the ball. I know, I tried playing with glasses - but after couple cases of being hit in the face and having the (expensive for a lower-middle-class parents) lens pop off the frame and fly a couple meters out, I learned better, and forever since actively avoided any game whose name ended in "ball".
Why I'm writing this? 50% to vent my frustration, 50% as a defense of kids who hate to participate in team sports. Often enough, there are objective reasons for that. Now, I do blame my weight issues on the habitual dislike of PE I developed due to wearing glasses. But my ADHD? No fucking way, that was already beginning to manifest, and all the high-intensity aerobics or gym-focused PE classes didn't help at all.
Let me mention that I've got pretty severe ADHD if not outright mild autism and a pretty strong lack of executive functioning.
Now - with that in mind, let me respond:
>Like physical exercise is meant to help with that. If there's one thing that's invariably true about physical work, is that people adapt to it by pushing the movements down to subconscious, and letting their mind think of something else.
You have a great point, and you're not wrong. That said, having done some pretty intense labor myself over the years, sometimes the body is so shot by the end of the day that letting the mind wander is physically difficult, and concentration is easier.
>How does that apply to the generation of the parents, though? Or grandparents, to compensate for US having a TV culture some 20-40 years before everyone else?
Another great point - and I have a feeling that previous generations were simply called lazy, or dumb, or whatever, because ADHD wasn't really in the educational lexicon until the last of the boomer generation were parents (90s and onward).
The generation of parents who had a TV but not a ton else still got plenty of exercise and physical activity. There wasn't engaging content on the TV 24/7 and cell phones weren't a thing, and there was still encouragement to go outside an play. Kids don't do that anymore.
>I never liked organized sports, and avoided them (and most PE) since early school, for a very simple reason: I was diagnosed with myopia and wore glasses.
I can sympathize, because I had terrible vision problems too (also wore glasses; but also had amblyopia) and being short and skinny didn't help me in most popular team sports. I took up organized sports that didn't require perfect vision, such as tennis (still a team sport but played individually) and swimming (you can count how many strokes it takes you to go from one end of the pool to the other, and try to replicate that). I also ran or did plyometrics frequently. It all helped.
I have two kids with diagnosed ADHD and I can guarantee you that we did not shove a screen in front of them as toddlers and we push them both to exert themselves through physical activity, even though one in particular actively fights it every time.
As someone with ADHD who grew up in the countryside without any screens and with a lot of physical work, that sentence made you seem as clueless as you could be.
Not the OP but I use a Walkolution MTD700R WANDERLUST [1]. It's expensive as all hell but I've tried motorized variants from several other companies and they all have the same fundamental problem: they will try to throw you away from the desk if you forget to turn it off and suddenly come to a complete stop.
The self-powered ones allow you to suddenly stop when you need to talk during a meeting or if something urgent surprises you on screen.
I’ve been curious about the walkolution but am struggling with the price. How do you like it overall? Do you feel like your gait is much different from a powered treadmill? Is it much quieter than powered treadmills?
I like it a lot but I don't know how much of that is buyer's Stockholm Syndrome given the price tag. The gait feels significantly different. My understanding is the lack of motorization means that you spend an extra around 30% more energy and the slight curve means your feet meet the treadmill at different points.
It is much quieter but you have to keep up with maintenance.
> Every night over a private dinner, the entire group has a single conversation around one subject, which the group chose the night before. Everyone stays involved in this one conversation, exploring one topic to exhaustion.
All the other points make a lot of sense to me, but something about deciding on topics and sticking to these sounds a bit over engineered to me. I've never taken part in such a setting so maybe I just don't get it yet, but it seems very limiting.
there's beauty in the limitation, though. if you've never experienced a "single conversation dinner" I highly recommend it as a way to get fascinating, deeper insights on a particular topic.
find it works best when the conversation is less outward ("how would you solve healthcare in America?") and more inward ("how do you stay motivated when it feels like everything is working against you?") where each person's personal experience and sharing doesn't have to be directly relevant to you, but you can interpret your own thoughts/feelings/experiences through a different lens.
> I've never taken part in such a setting so maybe I just don't get it yet, but it seems very limiting.
Yeah, that's how it strike me, too. I suppose it depends on the purpose of the conversation. If it's for enjoyment, constraining it to a single topic sounds awful. Most of the joy of good conversation is in how it rambles across topics according to the mood of the participants and serendipity.
But if it's a focus group of some sort, then limiting to a single topic is desirable.
Perhaps it's why I've never been good at such dinner conversations. Invariably, just as I've thought of something to contribute to the current topic, someone interrupts the previous speaker to throw a random non sequitur, and the topic and/or mood of the conversation changes to something entirely different.
Oh, yeah, that happens all the time! I learned to just let it go and drop whatever contribution I had to add to the conversation before the topic shift. Instead, I switch to the new topic.
It's a bit like dancing with someone in that respect. You have to be ready to alter your moves so that you can stay in sync with your partner. The magic is in the coordination.
Walking and talking is my preferred method of communication. I use to wait until I had a call scheduled but now I just go (3-4X a day) and send/listen to audio messages.
also a great format for 1:1s, meetings, updates, annual events, etc etc (doesn't have to be 8 days, 1h is already very good. I haven't done 8 days, but after 2-3 days I felt like I was ready to have a bed and an office again).
The 'agreed group topics' sound awful to me, but I've also experienced this and it's really cool:
> Everyone naturally goes in and out of little 2-3 person conversations while walking.
Given that you're in NZ, one place that I could recommend doing this would be the Abel Tasman track. It gets very busy during peak season but there are definitely times that it is much less crowded and the weather is still good (the last time I experienced this was August some years ago). The reason that I think this track would be a good choice is that it is relatively easy (coastal - little elevation), a good length (i.e. around 5 comfortable days), and you can have the water taxis transfer your bags between huts/campgrounds. It's also absolutely beautiful of course.
On a related note, it's interesting to read this here as I'm an avid walker-and-talker and pretty sure that I live within about 20min walk of the author (unless he's moved of course). In fact, only last week I went on a great hill/bush walk in the area with an old friend that recently returned from Germany to work here doing materials science for a space-tech organisation. Not something I know much about, but I know a lot more about it since that walk!
Edit: Another walk where I think the same thing might be possible (using water taxis to transport bags) is the Queen Charlotte track in the Marlborough Sounds. I haven't yet done it myself but I understand that it is also an easy walk and might even have the added advantage of lodges with restaurants along the way!
This reminds me the Russian movie Stalker in some way.
> A guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone. Paying no heed to the dangers which lay ahead, they proceed towards the Room in order to fulfil their desires.
Not quite the same, but I negotiated my current role while on a stroll around the neighborhood with the CTO. Really gave me a fresh perspective on how to do important meetings differently from now on.
I did a 5 day wilderness backpacking trip this summer and it's a godsend for disconnecting and mental health though I guess what Sivers is talking about is a slightly different format. I'll have to think about this some for when I'm older.