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from the left-as-an-exercise-to-the-reader dept.
Why We Focus on Trivial Things:
Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here's why we do it, and how to stop.
How can we stop wasting time on unimportant details? From meetings at work that drag on forever without achieving anything to weeks-long email chains that don't solve the problem at hand, we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on the inconsequential. Then, when an important decision needs to be made, we hardly have any time to devote to it.
To answer this question, we first have to recognize why we get bogged down in the trivial. Then we must look at strategies for changing our dynamics towards generating both useful input and time to consider it.
[...] Bike-shedding happens because the simpler a topic is, the more people will have an opinion on it and thus more to say about it. When something is outside of our circle of competence, like a nuclear power plant, we don’t even try to articulate an opinion.
But when something is just about comprehensible to us, even if we don’t have anything of genuine value to add, we feel compelled to say something, lest we look stupid. What idiot doesn’t have anything to say about a bike shed? Everyone wants to show that they know about the topic at hand and have something to contribute.
With any issue, we shouldn’t be according equal importance to every opinion anyone adds. We should emphasize the inputs from those who have done the work to have an opinion. And when we decide to contribute, we should be putting our energy into the areas where we have something valuable to add that will improve the outcome of the decision.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @03:42PM (2 children)
A sense in my brain - how do you drive this thing? There seems to be a place upstairs (head) and a place downstairs (heart) for understanding/evaluating things. You have to constantly inhabit one then inhabit the other to get an answer.
There's a transition - back and forth until resolution. Transition is not always successful. In fear, one is unable to inhabit the heart.
The human is the car (the hardware). The controls are mind boggling. It takes years to learn.
So what is the Cartesian truth: I think therefore I am. Not what I see. I see the head and the heart. The machinery. This is the deepest reality. Before the head and before the heart, is perception. Perception is what drives the process. The transition is actually perception. The transition from focused eyes to unfocused eyes is identical to the head to perception transition. Probably the eyes trained the brain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @05:44PM (1 child)
Yes, become the observer. The observer is like the dude. It abides. When you're completely passive and observing your thoughts come and go, then you might notice, after a while, that there are interludes where the brain has nothing more to say... for a few moments at least. But if one is not thinking, how can one be, observing that for a moment there are no thoughts, simply feeling what there is to feel? If there are no feelings in that moment, how can one be, observing the absence of feelings?
Just observing and accepting, breathing with your perceptions of being human. God will take care of the rest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @07:23PM
The perception finds itself in the human. The human has machinery, perception inhabits the machinery but is not the machinery. It puts the lotion on its skin.