February 28, Home office

I have to thank Dan Webster for getting my butt in gear. The Grainews reader from Wingham, Ontario phoned yesterday to give me pointers on keeping a blog going — even when I'm busy. And I have been busy. For seven months of the year, Grainews comes out once a month. It comes out twice a month in October, January and April. And three times a month in February and March. I've been editing streams of copy for the past month solid. My eyes are sore, and my jaw is so tight it's giving me a headache. In this fix, I haven't given any attention to my blog.

I started the blog on day one of my January trip to the U.S. I got home January 26 and haven't written a blog entry until today. Dan suggested I invite you -- the reader -- to help provide content. He reminded me that Grainews used to have all sorts of stuff that didn't always relate directly to production agriculture. He said my blog would be a good way to bring some of that back. What a great idea! So, Grainews readers, here is your invitation. If you have something you think Grainews blog readers would enjoy, please e-mail it to me. For my address, click the "contact" link at the top right of the home page at www.grainews.ca.

Dan also gave me a link to one blog with "blogging tips," which gave me a link to another blog by Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired magazine. He had an entry is his February 25 blog (at www.collisiondetection.net) that reinforced my new love of the home office concept. Farmers will also find this interesting. They usually work alone even if they've got family and staff around the farm doing other tasks. Thompson writes: "For years, I've worked in isolation -- either sitting alone in my office, or, recently, sitting in a rented cubicle in New York. I haven't had a job that required me to work physically alongside coworkers since 1998. And maybe that's been a good thing for my productivity -- because according to a new study, when you can see other workers performing different tasks out the corner of your eye, it slows you down. Tim Welsh, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary, organized a nifty experiment in which he asked a subject to perform a task on a computer, alongside a partner performing a different computer task. Then he'd get the subject to perform the task while his partner went off to another room. The result? When subjects were working alongside companions, they worked more slowly. Welsh theorizes that when we watch someone else performing a task, it triggers our mirror neurons, and mentally we begin modelling the task ourselves. If we're simultaneously trying to complete our own, different task, the signals get crossed -- and we slow down."