When you see the pictures people take that other people like, often they react to the youthfulness, and the 'norms' of Body Mass Index and Beauty. What is easier for the shapely 20 year old to take a shot of their legs and think they have created Art? Try doing the same when you are 50 or if you are considered medically overleaf!
BTW: this is not a graph in the traditional sense, this is an expression of my Art. As a result I am not going to give you a full explanation, that is not the purpose of Art.
The further away from the 20 norm you are, the harder it is to find an appreciative audience, and you have to put more in to your Art to achieve anything like the same level of acceptance. That's good - if you can do that then you are a lot further down the road of Art than the 20-norms.
If you are a 20, then, sorry, but you are going to have to try a helluva lot harder than flashing your cleavage or wardrobe to impress me.
Showing posts with label quality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quality. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
021-Self Portrait Quality
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Quality Cheaper Better
Quality cannot be defined absolutely in terms of price, although a more expensive product might look better quality their is no guarantee that the quality really is any different to a cheaper product. Which we all know, great, it's good to know that we all understand the same things, but I would like to explore the idea in terms of some of my own experience, or maybe it is just that I feel a need to talk about my old motorcycle.
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience.
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become.
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university.
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items.
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position.
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike.
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along.
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience.
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become.
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university.
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items.
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position.
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike.
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along.
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Quality by Quantity
Yes, we all know what quality is, it's something better, something that lasts longer. OK, accepting that we know what quality is, and how important it is, why then do we ignore it and pursue quantity instead? Is it because we measure winners in terms of quantity as an indirect measure of quality, and is quality a fixed thing anyway?
If a new sport was created, and the original best time for one circuit was twenty minutes, does this remain a quality time if within a few years the best time drops to eighteen minutes? If you achieve twenty minutes now, are you as good as the original people were? Assuming that the techniques used by everyone had remained essentially the same and only training had improved, then yes, your time is of the same quality, just the sport lacks that feeling of edginess for your time because it has long been improved upon and you are too late to be recognised. If you are unable to improve despite making your greatest effort then you are operating at your point of maximised quality, and you should be happy because your mind and body can do no more for you.
From this we can see that there are two types of quality - the quality of the individual and the quality of the individual society. There are many possible ways of dividing up humanity, such as by nation, by era, by sport etc, and each individual may easily be compared with the society that they exist within, but to compare one individual with another individual, or one society with another society, then we must be aware of the differences in each individual or society that makes them what they are. If we enter a race we are choosing to compare our quality with that of other others prepared to undergo the same event, we have in common a desire to race and this makes us similar. All our racing qualities become comparable because we decide to train for that event, or at least we should train if we wish our quality to be comparable, and our racing qualities no longer becomes comparable with others who are not training - for they are not attempting to maximise their quality in that field. Our bed-ridden granny's racing quality is not challenged by our racing quality, because we each inhabit different societies.
However, if the same bed-ridden granny managed to overcome her disability, hopped out of bed and beat us in the race, her personal quality must be much higher than ours, and our ego may suffer because we still perceive her as inhabiting another society, that of the old for instance. Individuals from what we understand to be poor quality classes should not beat us, or so our ego may believe, but this is a problem that would not have occurred if we had simply put her in our class, the racing class, and left it at that.
We often fail to understand quality because we allow invalid classes to cloud our judgement, or fail to understand that no classification system can ever be perfect. 'You are woman, your job is to create new life' is a common religious theme, forcing women to be perceived as being best quality only when used as baby machines. Whether any individual woman has the ability to produce children is a question that is generally avoided (perhaps because words are cheap while intelligent actions are much more difficult). What is happening is that any class of objects or people has a perceived quality, and the 'baby machine' quality is forced onto each woman under the 'Rule of Should'. Why should I? Because you should! Imagine that a woman is born without ovaries, or they are damaged due to no fault of the woman - what mental pressure does the Rule of Should Make Babies put on that woman? What effort does the society make to deal with the individuals problems? Should it? I say of course, because by not dealing with it the overall quality of the society drops.
The Rule of Should is a symptom of the controlling faction being more interested in quantity over quality, and the more that quality and quantity appears to diverge then the more that the Rule of Should may be applied in an attempt to control the problem, but which instead creates more divergence until more violent measures of control may be considered in order to sweep the issue more firmly under the carpet. This is what is often happening when you meet religious or political extremism, a part of the population is unable to define quality of people as all they see is the quantity of people in what they perceive is their and other groups, and how much money, power or success their or another group has.
If the Rule of Should creates divergence between quality and quantity, does this mean there is any relationship between the two? Well, imagine that you have no cats: your quantity of cats is zero, therefore the quality of your cats must also be zero since quality exists only in possession, in the same way that having no cats also means you have no pink cats. Imagine also that you liked cats and I gave you one cat: how much would you get to know that one cat, and that cat to know you? Imagine instead that I gave you two cats: how much would you get to know those two cats by observing how they relate to you and to each other? Imagine now that I gave you two thousand cats.
No cats means you have no quality relationship with cats, while one or two cats means you have a high quality relationships with them. However, the average quality of relationship with each of the two thousand cats would be low. If we plotted the average cat-relationship quality for zero, one, two... two thousand cats we would see the quality curve would rise rapidly from zero cats to one cat, rise some more between one cat and two cats, but beyond that point the the average cat relationship quality would start to fall as we become unable to spend enough time with each cat to bond well with it. Eventually we might bond with a few cats, but mostly we would see the cats as things to be fed that we might or might not recognise. We might not even notice if we lost a few or gained a few strays.
By finding someone to buy and prepare all the food our cats needed should allow us more time to bond with a larger number of cats, although attempting to maximise quality over a larger quantity of cats results in us having to sacrifice something else in our lives as we simply do not have enough waking hours every day to do everything. Attempting to maximise too many qualities results in having to abandon other qualities, and eventually this might have an impact on our health, our circle of friends or, in the case of cats, the patience of our neighbours.
To maximise satisfaction in our lives it might be better if we chose fewer interests, and invested the freed up time in the chosen interests. Even so, we must be careful how much time and effort goes into these remaining interests because we are surrounded by people who care about us and they need our attention too.
Finally, mention must be made of one special quantity, that of duty. For most people their home life is very important, and yet they will impede success here by either avoiding duties or by allowing duties to take over. Duties can be seen as a set of tasks that need to be done to achieve a certain level of quality, but the pursuit of too many or taking some too far will again reduce quality because we must sacrifice other things, such as time spent talking with other family members. Work can also form a duty, as can being part of a social organisation, but all these duties need to be examined in terms of the needs of each group member, rather than having the results of duty or the lack of them being impressed on the individuals. By avoiding examining the feelings we have tied up in our need for fulfilling duties we apply pressure to the rest of the group, often leading inadvertently to a struggle for control of the group.
Every few months I reassess how many computer related tasks I have, and seek to slim down any areas that begin to dominate my time to the detriment of my home life or of the life tasks that would give me more pleasure by completing them. Trying to decide which elements of one's life one should pursue and which to drop is generally best done with someone else's help, someone who cares enough to observe the effect on your total life.
If a new sport was created, and the original best time for one circuit was twenty minutes, does this remain a quality time if within a few years the best time drops to eighteen minutes? If you achieve twenty minutes now, are you as good as the original people were? Assuming that the techniques used by everyone had remained essentially the same and only training had improved, then yes, your time is of the same quality, just the sport lacks that feeling of edginess for your time because it has long been improved upon and you are too late to be recognised. If you are unable to improve despite making your greatest effort then you are operating at your point of maximised quality, and you should be happy because your mind and body can do no more for you.
From this we can see that there are two types of quality - the quality of the individual and the quality of the individual society. There are many possible ways of dividing up humanity, such as by nation, by era, by sport etc, and each individual may easily be compared with the society that they exist within, but to compare one individual with another individual, or one society with another society, then we must be aware of the differences in each individual or society that makes them what they are. If we enter a race we are choosing to compare our quality with that of other others prepared to undergo the same event, we have in common a desire to race and this makes us similar. All our racing qualities become comparable because we decide to train for that event, or at least we should train if we wish our quality to be comparable, and our racing qualities no longer becomes comparable with others who are not training - for they are not attempting to maximise their quality in that field. Our bed-ridden granny's racing quality is not challenged by our racing quality, because we each inhabit different societies.
However, if the same bed-ridden granny managed to overcome her disability, hopped out of bed and beat us in the race, her personal quality must be much higher than ours, and our ego may suffer because we still perceive her as inhabiting another society, that of the old for instance. Individuals from what we understand to be poor quality classes should not beat us, or so our ego may believe, but this is a problem that would not have occurred if we had simply put her in our class, the racing class, and left it at that.
We often fail to understand quality because we allow invalid classes to cloud our judgement, or fail to understand that no classification system can ever be perfect. 'You are woman, your job is to create new life' is a common religious theme, forcing women to be perceived as being best quality only when used as baby machines. Whether any individual woman has the ability to produce children is a question that is generally avoided (perhaps because words are cheap while intelligent actions are much more difficult). What is happening is that any class of objects or people has a perceived quality, and the 'baby machine' quality is forced onto each woman under the 'Rule of Should'. Why should I? Because you should! Imagine that a woman is born without ovaries, or they are damaged due to no fault of the woman - what mental pressure does the Rule of Should Make Babies put on that woman? What effort does the society make to deal with the individuals problems? Should it? I say of course, because by not dealing with it the overall quality of the society drops.
The Rule of Should is a symptom of the controlling faction being more interested in quantity over quality, and the more that quality and quantity appears to diverge then the more that the Rule of Should may be applied in an attempt to control the problem, but which instead creates more divergence until more violent measures of control may be considered in order to sweep the issue more firmly under the carpet. This is what is often happening when you meet religious or political extremism, a part of the population is unable to define quality of people as all they see is the quantity of people in what they perceive is their and other groups, and how much money, power or success their or another group has.
If the Rule of Should creates divergence between quality and quantity, does this mean there is any relationship between the two? Well, imagine that you have no cats: your quantity of cats is zero, therefore the quality of your cats must also be zero since quality exists only in possession, in the same way that having no cats also means you have no pink cats. Imagine also that you liked cats and I gave you one cat: how much would you get to know that one cat, and that cat to know you? Imagine instead that I gave you two cats: how much would you get to know those two cats by observing how they relate to you and to each other? Imagine now that I gave you two thousand cats.
No cats means you have no quality relationship with cats, while one or two cats means you have a high quality relationships with them. However, the average quality of relationship with each of the two thousand cats would be low. If we plotted the average cat-relationship quality for zero, one, two... two thousand cats we would see the quality curve would rise rapidly from zero cats to one cat, rise some more between one cat and two cats, but beyond that point the the average cat relationship quality would start to fall as we become unable to spend enough time with each cat to bond well with it. Eventually we might bond with a few cats, but mostly we would see the cats as things to be fed that we might or might not recognise. We might not even notice if we lost a few or gained a few strays.
By finding someone to buy and prepare all the food our cats needed should allow us more time to bond with a larger number of cats, although attempting to maximise quality over a larger quantity of cats results in us having to sacrifice something else in our lives as we simply do not have enough waking hours every day to do everything. Attempting to maximise too many qualities results in having to abandon other qualities, and eventually this might have an impact on our health, our circle of friends or, in the case of cats, the patience of our neighbours.
To maximise satisfaction in our lives it might be better if we chose fewer interests, and invested the freed up time in the chosen interests. Even so, we must be careful how much time and effort goes into these remaining interests because we are surrounded by people who care about us and they need our attention too.
Finally, mention must be made of one special quantity, that of duty. For most people their home life is very important, and yet they will impede success here by either avoiding duties or by allowing duties to take over. Duties can be seen as a set of tasks that need to be done to achieve a certain level of quality, but the pursuit of too many or taking some too far will again reduce quality because we must sacrifice other things, such as time spent talking with other family members. Work can also form a duty, as can being part of a social organisation, but all these duties need to be examined in terms of the needs of each group member, rather than having the results of duty or the lack of them being impressed on the individuals. By avoiding examining the feelings we have tied up in our need for fulfilling duties we apply pressure to the rest of the group, often leading inadvertently to a struggle for control of the group.
Every few months I reassess how many computer related tasks I have, and seek to slim down any areas that begin to dominate my time to the detriment of my home life or of the life tasks that would give me more pleasure by completing them. Trying to decide which elements of one's life one should pursue and which to drop is generally best done with someone else's help, someone who cares enough to observe the effect on your total life.
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