Vitamin D supplements are recommended for special risk groups in order to increase the serum 25(OH)D concentration above 50 nmol/L in all countries of Europe and the Middle East. A vitamin D supplement of 10 µg/day (400 IU/day) is advised for all children of 0–1 year and preferably 0–3 year to eradicate rickets. Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is one of the most common oral mucosa lesions seen in primary care. The Greek term 'aphthai' was initially used for disorders of the mouth and is credited to Hippocrates. 1 The frequency of aphthous ulcers is up to 25% in the general population, and 3-month recurrence rates are as high as 50%. 2 RAS is an idiopathic condition in most patients. The mean overall Rating is 3.20 stars, and the subcategory means vary from 3.21 for Compensation & Benefits to 2.79 for Senior Management.The mode for each rating category is 3.0, with the exception of 1.0 for Senior Management (consistent with its lower mean), which generally helps mitigate concerns that only highly satisfied and unsatisfied employees feel compelled to write employer reviews.
- Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews 2017
- Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews Ratings
- Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews Consumer Reports
Anymp4 mac video converter ultimate 8 2 18 volt. Each vitamin was evaluated against four key parameters: composition, bioavailability, safety, and potency. Then each supplement was assigned a score from 0 to 10 so you can easily compare the different brands and determine the best multivitamin to take. Synthetic vitamins are by far the most cost-effective, and you can expect to pay anywhere from $0.06 to $0.35 per unit, blend and brand depending. Natural vitamins can cost a pretty penny, but for many consumers, the potential benefits are well worth it. Natural vitamins generally range between $0.20 and $0.70 and upward per pill/capsule.
Some of the best project management and workflow books come from the software industry. Programmers are an analytical bunch by nature, and most of their analyses port quite easily to other domains.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency takes the themes Tom DeMarco covered in his most well-known book, Peopleware, and congeals them into a single term that can be applied broadly to many resources and faculties — time, money, personnel, risk tolerance — to maximize an organization's agility and responsiveness to change. The term slack is defined as 'the degree of freedom required to effect change.' Obsession with absolute efficiency militates against change.
The book opens with a stark analogy. DeMarco depicts two slider puzzles with space for nine tiles. The first puzzle is the one we're used to seeing as children: of the nine spaces, only eight are occupied with tiles. The empty space is the slack that allows the tiles to shift, making the puzzle a game worth playing. The second puzzle, more efficiently, occupies all nine spaces with tiles, maximizing use of all available resources. The former puzzle is 11.1 percent less efficient but 100 percent more playable. The latter puzzle is incapable of change.
Busyness
In this chapter, the author argues that extreme busyness is counterproductive to an organization. He uses the example of a secretary, 'Sylvia.' Her usefulness to an executive is largely related to her availability to take on new tasks as they come up. To respond to her boss when he needs something filed, typed or scheduled, she can't be in constant motion — the current task will interfere with the new task, regardless of which one is more important. But a consultant observing Sylvia strictly on the basis of time and motion would conclude that if she's idle (available) 47 percent of the time, that idleness is waste that's ripe for recovering. He suggests putting her in a 'pool' for sharing with another boss. If the slack is taken up in this way, she'll be too busy to get started immediately on new tasks, and work will start to pile up. Efficiency programs drive availability out of the organization.
The need to look busy across an entire department results in inbox hedging. Since no one can look idle, employees become anxious to keep some work in reserve at all times, slowing down their current tasks to pace the reserve if necessary. An empty inbox means nothing to work on, compelling employees to create activities to keep themselves in conspicuous motion.
The Myth of Fungible Resource
A fungible resource is one that's freely exchangeable, or perceived to have equivalent exchange value. Four dollars might buy a latte or a gallon of gas; the cash is a fungible resource. The same logic can be disastrous when applied to human resources. The 'matrix management' approach of sharing a single knowledge worker across several projects who reports to several bosses incurs a task-switching overhead whose impact on productivity usually goes unquantified. Some task-switching penalties are mechanical: putting away one set up materials, pulling out another, changing venue, etc. Other penalties are intellectual. When conceptual work, like designing an ad campaign, is interrupted, the knowledge worker has to mentally retrace that work during the following session. There's usually an immersion time for each session necessary to overcome mental inertia. There's the emotional frustration of being interrupted, requiring time to regroup. If the work is done in a team, there's a 'team binding' effect that gets disrupted.
DeMarco puts the minimum task-switching penalty at 15 percent. He participated in conducting a study of over 600 programmers, monitoring and correlating their project completion against the number of tasks they switched between, working in their own environments. Each task switch averaged 20 minutes of lost concentration, and the programmers experienced an average of 0.4 switches per hour — a loss of over one hour of productive effort a day.
Business Instead of Busyness
This chapter discusses the benefits of designed-in slack, and the perils of its absence. Slack enables organizations to effect proactive, ongoing redesign instead of the reactive, crisis-induced restructurings characteristic of more rigid institutions. Slack reduces employee turnover, not just of star employees, but of all employees whose cost in human capital gets overlooked and unquantified. Slack increases the capacity to invest in the future by setting aside resources necessary for reinvention to happen (taking funding out of R&D to trim the fat is a faulty long-term growth strategy).
DeMarco has always stressed the need to recognize turnover in quantitative terms. As an example he uses the departure of Orin, who gets replaced by Oliver. Oliver is zero percent useful to the project on the first day, 100 percent useful on his last day. In addition to his technical skill, Oliver must have another faculty, which the author calls domain knowledge, 'some explicit knowledge of the area in which the skills are deployed' — the street smarts of knowledge work. If the replacement's ramp-up time factors in domain knowledge, there should be a cost in human capital, which DeMarco accounts as half of the ramp-up time. If Oliver takes six months to get up to speed, assuming a linear increase in his domain knowledge over that period, half of his monthly cost is human capital drain. Naturally, the higher the turnover percentage, the higher the human capital drain, which is true as true of average employees as it is of stars.
Working employees at full capacity over the long-term course of a development project will increase turnover as surely as a runner attempting to sprint the entire length of a marathon will abandon the effort. Exit interviews of employees find that one of their most frequent grievances was that they felt used. Aggressive schedules need to be reexamined for their impact on turnover.
The Cost of Pressure
DeMarco distinguishes knowledge work from rote work by quoting Peopleware co-author Tim Lister: 'People under time pressure don't think faster.' It's possible to speed up motion, but not thinking. Since think rate is fixed, knowledge workers are left with three avenues for accelerating performance: eliminate wasted time, defer tasks that aren't mission critical, and stay late. Since knowledge workers tend to be hired on the basis of their mental performance, they're usually inclined to eliminate wasted time and noncritical tasks without being impelled to do so from without; there's not much of an improvement opportunity here.
Staying late, on the other hand, is the contemporary hallmark of knowledge work. But long hours, being relative to normal hours, can only create a short-term boost in output, as demonstrated in a later chapter. Working twice as many hours as yesterday might show double the output today, but putting in the same long hours tomorrow is unlikely to show the same increase. Even if it did, the negative impact on personal and family life will create countervailing pressures.
A slight increase in pressure might reduce delivery time by 10 or 15 percent, coming from whatever poor triage and wastes of time remain for elimination. With additional pressure, workers become resentful and resort to 'undertime' (manufacturing personal emergencies to take care of on company time). With still more pressure, workers begin looking for work elsewhere.
Overtime
This chapter includes of fascinating account of what gets factored out of industry-wide predictive metrics on development projects in fields like architectural design, circuit design and software development. A typical practice used to predict completion time for a project is to create a scatter diagram plotting effort in workdays against so some correlative metric, like the number of circuit junctions tested and proved. For the correlations to be meaningful, the factors measured need to be defined in such a way that the scatter points fall as close to the trend line as possible — the object is to find the factors that improve prediction by narrowing the scatter. One possible refinement would be to substitute effort in workdays with effort in workhours. In theory, this would improve accuracy, since the number of hours worked from day to day can be highly variable. In practice, increasing the hours per workday makes no empirical difference. 'The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is hogwash.'
DeMarco returns to the turnover theme, reiterating the need for managers to explicitly note the cost of lost human capital. Showing a pie chart with budget breakdowns for research, prototyping, sales support, and the like, turnover is conspicuously absent. 'When I ask presenters, ‘Where is the personnel turnover in this pie chart?' they look at me blankly.' One example used in a previous chapter put the turnover cost at 12 percent of the cited manpower budget.
Photoflow 1 2 6. The author discusses some of overtime's less controversial negative impacts, like the fatigue and lethargy characteristic over overworked teams, and the decline in quality resulting from doing work that requires peak concentration during past-peak hours. Somewhat more original is his argument that overtime encourages wasted time. Once employees recognize that they and their peers will be available well beyond their putative quitting time, they make time during the official work day for arbitrary meetings, they interrupt coworkers for non-emergencies, and allow themselves to be similarly interrupted. After all, there's always overtime to take up the slack.
The Second Law of Bad Management
A short, simple chapter. The First Law is an oft-quoted one coined by Jerry Weinberg. 'If something isn't working, do more of it.' DeMarco declares the Second Law of Bad Management to be: 'Put yourself in as your own infielder.' He makes a case for a strict division of labor, that managers should spend their time managing and not doing the work they're supposed to management. Management is hard because it requires focus on the shifting nuances of attitudes and relationships. Managers who take up production work are seeking refuge from the people skills needed to make the workplace run smoothly.
Quality
DeMarco nominates Adobe Photoshop as the best software product of all time, citing nine reasons such as: 'It redefines the whole notion of photo processing,' 'It allows you to do things that were unimaginable before,' and 'It is solid as a rock.' Only the latter reason quoted has anything to do with the lack of defects. Most initiatives that fall under the rubric of 'quality' consist entirely of defect prevention and removal. If absence of defects is only one component of the user's perception of quality in Photoshop, it stands to reason that the focus of quality initiative should expand to other criteria: uniqueness, usefulness, market impact and consistency with changing customer work modes. Quality, even by the conventional standard, takes time. To increase the quality of product, there must be a reduction in the quantity of products to those that are most essential or help redefine the company.
The need to look busy across an entire department results in inbox hedging. Since no one can look idle, employees become anxious to keep some work in reserve at all times, slowing down their current tasks to pace the reserve if necessary. An empty inbox means nothing to work on, compelling employees to create activities to keep themselves in conspicuous motion.
The Myth of Fungible Resource
A fungible resource is one that's freely exchangeable, or perceived to have equivalent exchange value. Four dollars might buy a latte or a gallon of gas; the cash is a fungible resource. The same logic can be disastrous when applied to human resources. The 'matrix management' approach of sharing a single knowledge worker across several projects who reports to several bosses incurs a task-switching overhead whose impact on productivity usually goes unquantified. Some task-switching penalties are mechanical: putting away one set up materials, pulling out another, changing venue, etc. Other penalties are intellectual. When conceptual work, like designing an ad campaign, is interrupted, the knowledge worker has to mentally retrace that work during the following session. There's usually an immersion time for each session necessary to overcome mental inertia. There's the emotional frustration of being interrupted, requiring time to regroup. If the work is done in a team, there's a 'team binding' effect that gets disrupted.
DeMarco puts the minimum task-switching penalty at 15 percent. He participated in conducting a study of over 600 programmers, monitoring and correlating their project completion against the number of tasks they switched between, working in their own environments. Each task switch averaged 20 minutes of lost concentration, and the programmers experienced an average of 0.4 switches per hour — a loss of over one hour of productive effort a day.
Business Instead of Busyness
This chapter discusses the benefits of designed-in slack, and the perils of its absence. Slack enables organizations to effect proactive, ongoing redesign instead of the reactive, crisis-induced restructurings characteristic of more rigid institutions. Slack reduces employee turnover, not just of star employees, but of all employees whose cost in human capital gets overlooked and unquantified. Slack increases the capacity to invest in the future by setting aside resources necessary for reinvention to happen (taking funding out of R&D to trim the fat is a faulty long-term growth strategy).
DeMarco has always stressed the need to recognize turnover in quantitative terms. As an example he uses the departure of Orin, who gets replaced by Oliver. Oliver is zero percent useful to the project on the first day, 100 percent useful on his last day. In addition to his technical skill, Oliver must have another faculty, which the author calls domain knowledge, 'some explicit knowledge of the area in which the skills are deployed' — the street smarts of knowledge work. If the replacement's ramp-up time factors in domain knowledge, there should be a cost in human capital, which DeMarco accounts as half of the ramp-up time. If Oliver takes six months to get up to speed, assuming a linear increase in his domain knowledge over that period, half of his monthly cost is human capital drain. Naturally, the higher the turnover percentage, the higher the human capital drain, which is true as true of average employees as it is of stars.
Working employees at full capacity over the long-term course of a development project will increase turnover as surely as a runner attempting to sprint the entire length of a marathon will abandon the effort. Exit interviews of employees find that one of their most frequent grievances was that they felt used. Aggressive schedules need to be reexamined for their impact on turnover.
The Cost of Pressure
DeMarco distinguishes knowledge work from rote work by quoting Peopleware co-author Tim Lister: 'People under time pressure don't think faster.' It's possible to speed up motion, but not thinking. Since think rate is fixed, knowledge workers are left with three avenues for accelerating performance: eliminate wasted time, defer tasks that aren't mission critical, and stay late. Since knowledge workers tend to be hired on the basis of their mental performance, they're usually inclined to eliminate wasted time and noncritical tasks without being impelled to do so from without; there's not much of an improvement opportunity here.
Staying late, on the other hand, is the contemporary hallmark of knowledge work. But long hours, being relative to normal hours, can only create a short-term boost in output, as demonstrated in a later chapter. Working twice as many hours as yesterday might show double the output today, but putting in the same long hours tomorrow is unlikely to show the same increase. Even if it did, the negative impact on personal and family life will create countervailing pressures.
A slight increase in pressure might reduce delivery time by 10 or 15 percent, coming from whatever poor triage and wastes of time remain for elimination. With additional pressure, workers become resentful and resort to 'undertime' (manufacturing personal emergencies to take care of on company time). With still more pressure, workers begin looking for work elsewhere.
Overtime
This chapter includes of fascinating account of what gets factored out of industry-wide predictive metrics on development projects in fields like architectural design, circuit design and software development. A typical practice used to predict completion time for a project is to create a scatter diagram plotting effort in workdays against so some correlative metric, like the number of circuit junctions tested and proved. For the correlations to be meaningful, the factors measured need to be defined in such a way that the scatter points fall as close to the trend line as possible — the object is to find the factors that improve prediction by narrowing the scatter. One possible refinement would be to substitute effort in workdays with effort in workhours. In theory, this would improve accuracy, since the number of hours worked from day to day can be highly variable. In practice, increasing the hours per workday makes no empirical difference. 'The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is hogwash.'
DeMarco returns to the turnover theme, reiterating the need for managers to explicitly note the cost of lost human capital. Showing a pie chart with budget breakdowns for research, prototyping, sales support, and the like, turnover is conspicuously absent. 'When I ask presenters, ‘Where is the personnel turnover in this pie chart?' they look at me blankly.' One example used in a previous chapter put the turnover cost at 12 percent of the cited manpower budget.
Photoflow 1 2 6. The author discusses some of overtime's less controversial negative impacts, like the fatigue and lethargy characteristic over overworked teams, and the decline in quality resulting from doing work that requires peak concentration during past-peak hours. Somewhat more original is his argument that overtime encourages wasted time. Once employees recognize that they and their peers will be available well beyond their putative quitting time, they make time during the official work day for arbitrary meetings, they interrupt coworkers for non-emergencies, and allow themselves to be similarly interrupted. After all, there's always overtime to take up the slack.
The Second Law of Bad Management
A short, simple chapter. The First Law is an oft-quoted one coined by Jerry Weinberg. 'If something isn't working, do more of it.' DeMarco declares the Second Law of Bad Management to be: 'Put yourself in as your own infielder.' He makes a case for a strict division of labor, that managers should spend their time managing and not doing the work they're supposed to management. Management is hard because it requires focus on the shifting nuances of attitudes and relationships. Managers who take up production work are seeking refuge from the people skills needed to make the workplace run smoothly.
Quality
DeMarco nominates Adobe Photoshop as the best software product of all time, citing nine reasons such as: 'It redefines the whole notion of photo processing,' 'It allows you to do things that were unimaginable before,' and 'It is solid as a rock.' Only the latter reason quoted has anything to do with the lack of defects. Most initiatives that fall under the rubric of 'quality' consist entirely of defect prevention and removal. If absence of defects is only one component of the user's perception of quality in Photoshop, it stands to reason that the focus of quality initiative should expand to other criteria: uniqueness, usefulness, market impact and consistency with changing customer work modes. Quality, even by the conventional standard, takes time. To increase the quality of product, there must be a reduction in the quantity of products to those that are most essential or help redefine the company.
Management by Objectives
While MBO in name has declined as a buzzword from the 1950′s, the legacy of measuring departmental performance by a few quantitative measures assumed to be representative of the organization's goals lingers on. Trying to increase an organization's growth and profit by focusing on a handful of component performance characteristics is questionable. It induces stasis and risk aversion by ignoring most performance measures except for the ones judged to be 'key.' 'Do everything the same as last year, only this year do more of X.'
Reduction of organizational health to combination of lower-level objectives invites dysfunction. An initiative to increase throughput may also increase turnover. If the former is successful, the latter will be ignored despite its greater impact on the bottom line (selling more widgets at a higher cost-per-employee).
Fear and Safety
When an employee has to learn a new skill, or a manager has to guide a department in an entirely new direction, what is often at stake is not the risk of getting fired in the event of failure, but the more subtle risk of mockery from one's peers. This, according to DeMarco, is the main impediment to organizational change. 'Irony and sarcasm, public humiliation, exasperation, managerial tantrums, eye-rolling: These are the true enemies of essential change. To make an organization change-receptive, you need to rout all these kinds of disrespect from the culture.' Wonderpen professional writing software 1 7 2.
Danger in the White Space
The white space referred to here is between and across hierarchies in the org chart. Managers at the same level are would-be peers who spend their time communicating with those above and below them, but never interact between themselves to learn from other. Competition makes them insular, unable to share their managerial insights across the white space. The notion that some competition is healthy preserves the culture of stasis. Since competition involves offense and defense, it's easy to focus on the positive aspects of 'scoring' in offense while ignoring the inevitable stasis resulting from defense.
Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews 2017
Learning and reinvention in an organizational culture take time, and it's important to make that time by not assigning projects to carry out in the time it would take the trainer to complete. 'Training = practice by doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.'
Uncommon Sense
This is the first of several excellent chapters on risk management. Risk management acknowledges stochastic control over projects rather than deterministic control. With stochastic control, you only control the likelihood of an outcome. Turnover can be reduced, but not guaranteed, by controlling variables like scheduling, compensation and benefits. Deterministic control is linear. The flow of electricity through a bulb can be predictably controlled by turning the dimmer knob.
A stochastic overview of a project is created with a risk diagram, a curve that plots the odds of completing a project against a given timeline. The peak of the curve is the most likely completion date. The toes of the curve are the most optimistic and worst-case scenarios. Viewing a project this way allows you to focus on the entire continuum of possibilities, not just the most likely date or better. Subsequent chapters discuss the details of risk discovery and risk containment. It's important to budget additional time and money across the range of risk. If a part's supplier suddenly drops the ball, and you've identified that risk on the front end, you've kept a communication channel open with the next lowest bidder and are ready to tap into the allocated risk reserve to pick up the slack, without incurring a huge setback in schedule.
Working at Breakneck Speed
In the days of sailing ships, naval forces would advise their captains to 'proceed with all prudent speed,' not at 'top speed.' Sailing ships were inherently risky, due to keeping more sail aloft in high winds, fatigue, unknown waters and other factors. DeMarco advises knowledge work ventures to proceed with all prudent speed by looking at the entire risk diagram, not just the optimistic-to-likely completion scenarios, and contingency plan around setbacks. If time is spent on a risk that doesn't materialize, 'put that in the same category as the money you spent last year on life insurance that turned out not to be needed.'
Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews Ratings
Is Slack worth taking up?
Vitamin R 2 54 – Personal Productivity Tool Reviews Consumer Reports
Slack could be much thinner, more like Peopleware, if DeMarco consolidated the chapters that have similar points. But it's a fast read, and for managers not accustomed to books on project management, the section on risk management is particularly strong. Although the book is targeted for executives, it's a great read for employees in any type of knowledge work, especially to pick up early warning signs that his or her department is bitten off more than they can chew. Slack could save you from becoming collateral damage to an 'aggressive schedule.'
