How best to talk to kids

I was talking with a friend yesterday who has a kid about Kenny's age (2). We were talking about all the advice you get nowadays on how to speak to your children. One particular piece of advice is that you should phrase everything positively. For instance, if they're running where they shouldn't be, say "Put your walking shoes on!" instead of "No running!". The idea is that if you say, "No running!", then they'll focus on the "running" part, and tune out the "no".

Later, when I thought about it again, I thought - what a bunch of baloney. Saying "No running!" is a much clearer and more direct way of saying what you want. The word "no" is one of the first words that children learn - they're not going to miss it, except deliberately.

It's this kind of advice that makes me skeptical of a lot of parenting books. Particularly the "kinder and gentler" ones that advocate more discussion, more understanding, more catering to children. My favorite child-rearing book is 1-2-3 Magic, by Thomas W. Phelan. Great book, very down to earth, and full of great ideas on how to make life with kids happier.

Big corporations function as socialist style command economies

This is my first ever economics blog, so please bear with me. I'm a small-time economics fan - have read some Hayek, read the latest popular economics books like Freakonomics, and read the Wall Street Journal every day. I'm a big believer in the free-market.

I'm currently work at a large online travel company, in a data services group. We do all kinds of stuff with data - purge, merge, consolidate, cleanse, report, etc., for the whole company. Recently there was a big reorganization. And because management felt that there were a lot of uncoordinated projects going on, there was a big effort made to gather all the project plans in one place, and prioritize them.

It was the master plan. And it struck me - this master plan is similar in one very important way to the old socialist style economic planning. There's no prices to determine what's actually important to people! Different groups in the company can't say, "It's worth $10,000 to me to have this new report ready by next week". Instead, they have to pressure management, and be a squeaky wheel to get what they want. If there were actual dollar amounts attached to the different requests, it would be much clearer what's actually valuable to people.

Of course, pricing is not as meaningful without competition. As in, "My group can create this report for you for $5,000 instead of $10,000". That would be interesting, to have multiple data (or other) groups in a company, all competing to provide services of one kind or another within the same company. It certainly wouldn't be a corporation as we currently understand the term.

It's not too likely that this kind of company will come in the near future. But I think that experimenting with some elements of a free market economy (meaningful prices, competition) inside the corporation could shake things up a bit, and introduce some of the efficiencies of a free market into the inner workings of large corporations.

Another productivity enhancement

I'll admit that I tend to think more than most people about how I could make my life more productive and efficient. Okay, okay, a lot more! Hey, at least I'm not like some people whose blogs I've read. They seem to spend far more time thinking and writing about the lastest time management methodology than actually doing anything.

One of my recent posts (My latest productivity enhancement - dump the junk!) was about how my new plan was to totally cut out all time-wasting activities. This eliminated web surfing, TV, and leisure reading. I knew it wouldn't last long, because it was pretty extreme, but it really didn't last long - about 3 days. That's 1 day after I wrote up a post on it.

What didn't work? It felt too punitive. I expended too much willpower in not doing things, as opposed to doing the right things.

Anyway, I'm back to the old standby now, which is

a.) making a list of things to do each day, and
b.) actually doing what's on the list

The main enhancement is that I plan to do this, without exceptions, for a full month. This is supposedly how long it takes to create a habit. I've done it now for 2 weeks, and have 14 little stars on my calendar to show for it. Halfway through! It feels really good.