Health on Manuel Bernhardt

Smartphone Detox

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:04:41 +0100

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Someone (not Einstein)

Smartphones are addictive and highly distracting. Their mere presence reduces cognitive ability. I tried getting rid of mine - or at least of its intensive usage - many times over and have failed. Here’s my attempt at another shot, inspired by this article.

Day 1 (27.03.21)

Attempting to setup my old Ericsson T28s, which stores all contacts on the SIM card. iOS doesn’t allow to copy contacts to a SIM card anymore, so I found an old Android phone and connected it with my Google account to synchronize contacts. Tried 3 different SIM tooling apps but none of them manages to copy contacts over the SIM card. After a bit of research it turns out that most SIM cards issued by operators these days are read-only.

Disciplines for getting out of the stream

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:38:34 +0100

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon

But what if you’re not making plans. Or if all the plans you are making are more reactions to address short-term goals, needs or issues, rather than stepping back and looking at the general direction you’re headed?

I think this easily happens to most of us. When caught up in daily chores without the time to think - really think - it is very difficult to go meta and ask yourself about what it is that you really want. Add to this the plethora of interruptions and distractions we’re subjected to these days thanks to the attention economy and you get yourself a state of “constant drifting in a stream”. If you also have kids, replace “stream” with “torrent”.

Three key findings from ten years of home-office

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:30:20 +0200

It’s been nearly ten years that I have worked mainly from home (or more accurately, homes, as we moved around a bit). As it turns out, many people now work from home, less so by choice than by ~~dystopian scenario C~~ circumstance. Whilst I’m sure that there are already hundreds of articles on the topic I thought I’d write a bit about my experience and especially about some aspects that may not be that obvious and that took me a while to prioritize.

You got to hold the frame – Avoiding burnout or Lessons learned from six years as an independent consultant

Mon, 08 May 2017 09:15:06 +0200

There’s a scene in the 1987 classic movie Dirty Dancing in which Johnny (Patrick Swayze) explains the concept of dancing space to Baby (Jennifer Grey).

“Lock your frame. Lock it, lock it, lock it.
Look. Spaghetti arms.
This is my dance space, this is your dance space.
I don’t go into yours, you don’t go into mine.
You got to hold the frame”

— Johnny, Dirty Dancing

Baby, who is a quick learner, later makes fun of this:

Early rising

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:43:01 +0200

The headache is bad, the coffee tastes bitter, but I still keep on fighting.

This is what a diary of mine would sound like, if I were keeping track of my journey of becoming an early riser.

I got inspired by this post and decided to try out if I could get up earlier. Doing the switch from getting up at around 8 AM to 6 AM when the summer time started (effectively getting up 3 hours earlier each day) doesn’t make it any easier. Let’s see how it goes!

How I stopped reading the news and feel much better now

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:12:30 +0200

Over the past years, we have been given the access of increasingly more and more information. Not only are we given the opportunity to get nearly real-time information about all the terrorist attacks, accidents, revolutions and other events happening around the world, but with the evolution of mobile services, we get access to this information just everwhere.

Like Tim Berners-Lee points out in his last TED talk, there is an even greater potential to the world wide web - the interlinking of raw data, and not just documents, making it possible to get a new kind of understanding of the world.