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  • The Most Helpful ‘Laws’ of Productivity to Get More Done | Lifehacker collapsed:: true site:: Lifehacker author:: Lindsey Ellefson labels:: productivity date-saved:: Feb 10th, 2024 date-published:: Feb 10th, 2024

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      • structure your day around one major task, three medium-sized ones, and five little ones. ⤴️

  • Dig, If You Will, the Underground World of Hobby Tunneling - Bloomberg collapsed:: true site:: Bloomberg author:: Teresa Xie date-saved:: Feb 6th, 2024 date-published:: Feb 3rd, 2024

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      • ## Meet the DIY Diggers Who Can’t Stop Making ‘Hobby Tunnels’

        TikTok’s “Tunnel Girl” has focused fresh attention on the amateur excavators who build their own underground infrastructure — often in defiance of local laws.

        Two years ago, Bryan Ritchie was shoveling dirt to put a walking path around his house in Huiroa, New Zealand, when he just felt the “urge to keep going.”

        An environmental restoration specialist during the week, Ritchie, 58, now spends his Sundays with his well-worn shovel, indulging in his favorite hobby: tunneling. His hole now descends 16 feet underground and runs for 82 feet, stretching from behind his shed to the far end of his garden. “If I could, I would do it every day,” he said.

        Ritchie isn’t digging with any destination in mind; he digs for the pure joy and meditation that comes with it.

        “I just feel like a kid again,” Ritchie said. “It really puts me in the moment and relieves stress.”

        Bryan Ritchie’s tunneling habit is part therapy, part exercise.Photo courtesy of Bryan Ritchie

        Ritchie has descended into the curious depths of hobby tunneling. This largely unseen subculture of amateur burrowers emerged into the news recently, thanks in part a TikTok creator known as Tunnel Girl. The Northern Virginia woman, who goes by the online handle Kala, began posting videos showing her progress excavating a 22-foot deep tunnel under her house. However, the project has been in a standstill since late December, when officials in the town of Herndon issued Tunnel Girl a stop work order and generated heavy media coverage.

        Another extralegal dig made headlines in January following the discovery of a 60-foot-long secret tunnel beneath a synagogue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which destabilized adjacent buildings and led to several arrests.

        Those incidents arrived amidst a surge of online interest in DIY tunnels: Since January 2022, the number of Reddit members in an online community devoted to digging has grown more than 325%, according to Subreddit Stats, while the hobby tunneling subreddit blew up more than 4,800% in the same time period. There, users swap tips on tools and techniques, share videos of excavations and comment on the achievements of other hobbyists.

        Among the stars of this underground world is Colin Furze, a British YouTuber who documented the multi-year process of digging a secret tunnel connecting an underground bunker he’d built in 2015 to his shed. When Furze started the project in 2018, he was careful not to alert the neighbors, using a silent hydraulic press machine to help with the excavation. His two-plus-hour-long magnum opus (titled “IT TOOK ME 3 YEARS TO DIG.......” ) has more than 21 million views on YouTube.

        “It was good fun,” Furze said. “But I’d never really advise anybody to copy or do anything like that, because everybody’s situation is going to be different. Enthusiastic people take on these jobs, because they don’t see all the red tape. They just see some ground and think, ‘I’m just gonna dig it, and I’m just gonna keep going.’”

        Furze’s tunnel is no slapdash amateur effort: He welded an elaborate steel structure to reinforce his creation and rigged up a mine cart on rails to help haul out tons of earth and rubble. Upon inspection, the UK city of Stamford even granted him retroactive planning permission for his tunnel. Furze’s next project is to build a similar one connecting his shed to his house.

        The roots of hobby tunneling go far deeper than the age of social media. In the 1880s, the 5th Duke of Portland employed 1,500 men to excavate several miles of tunnels, plus a subterranean ballroom, under his estate near Sheffield in the UK. A century later, Irish civil engineer William Lyttle — known as “The Mole Man” — spent 40 years creating a network of tunnels beneath his home in East London’s Hackney neighborhood. In 2006, Lyttle was evicted from his house after neighbors complained about sinkholes in the pavement. When pressed about the source of his fascination, Lyttle responded, “People ask what the big secret is. And you know what? There isn’t one.”

        Leanne Wijnsma, an Amsterdam-based artist and designer, has tapped the human urge to burrow in her work. Her 2015 project Escape consists of a series of hand-dug tunnels in cities around the world. By digging for hours in places highly visible to the public, Wijnsma’s piece explores how tunneling can be an act of escape from urban life. “It was a response to this world in which everything seems possible, and in which we’re always connected and available,” Wijnsma said. “People feel powerless, I think. And with digging you can feel like you have control.”

        Here’s a video from Wijnsma’s Escape series that chronicles a 2013 dig in an Amsterdam park.

        Those determined to expand underground face any number of regulatory barriers, beginning with obtaining a building permit from local authorities. Broadly speaking, one should think of tunneling as an illicit hobby, according to Arnold Dix, president of the International Tunneling and Underground Space Association.

        “There might be some countries where it’s not illegal, but that’s only because no one’s ever thought of it,” Dix said.

        The risks go beyond the legal penalties, Dix says. A few months ago, he led the rescue of 41 construction workers who were stuck in a collapsed tunnel in Uttarkashi, India, for two weeks. “Professional tunneling people like me are not saying, ‘Don’t do this, kids, because we’re grownups, and we won’t get hurt,’” he said. “We die as well — regularly — and we do all sorts of work before we dig.”

        Other dangers include hitting a water pipe and drowning, being exposed to poisonous gases like carbon monoxide and having loose rocks fall on your head. “If something goes wrong, almost certainly you won’t be injured,” Dix said. “You’ll be killed.”

        That hasn’t dissuaded tunnel enthusiasts like Eric Sutterlin, who has created a 1,100-foot underground labyrinth in western Wisconsin. He’s confident that the sandstone complex, which he has dubbed Sandland, is unlikely to collapse.

        “Digging in bedrock is hugely different than digging in soil, sand, or loose sediment,” Sutterlin said in an email. “The Jordan sandstone in which we are digging is comprised of grains of sand cemented together well enough to keep the ceiling together as stone bedrock, yet the grains still easily come apart (in most layers) so we can chisel tunnels.”

        What lies beneath: Sandland’s “Donut Room” boasts mood lighting.Photographer: Micah McMullin, courtesy of Eric Sutterlin

        Sutterlin estimates that he’s hauled out 15,100 cubic feet of sand (so far) to create Sandland.Photographer: Micah McMullin, courtesy of Eric Sutterlin

        Sandland began as a project in 2011, when Sutterlin purchased a small rural property specifically for recreational tunneling. Over the years, other cave and tunnel fans have volunteered to help expand and maintain the network, using electric demolition hammers to carve out features like the “Globe Maze,” a curvy slide connecting a series of rooms. “Sandland’s mission and vision is to provide visitors with the experience of crawling and walking through many different shapes and sizes of tunnels, getting disoriented, and discovering something new and exciting around each corner,” said Sutterlin.

        While Dix strongly discourages hobby tunneling, he said that people should at least first look up their area’s codes of practice for mine work, which covers safety basics like structural support, ventilation and emergency evacuation. And when he’s asked for an activity prospective diggers might try as an alternative, Dix can only compare it to one thing: shooting heroin.

        “It makes you feel good, and then all of a sudden you die,” he said.

  • My experiment in phonelessness was a failure. It also changed my life | Mobile phones | The Guardian collapsed:: true site:: The Guardian author:: Rhik Samadder date-saved:: Feb 8th, 2024 date-published:: Feb 5th, 2024

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      • In the final update in Rhik’s journey to break his phone addiction, he manages a breakthrough. And a big one.

        “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” I ask Almond one day.

        She is leafing through bags of Thai basil, like record store vinyl. “I already am. That’s what this is,” she says patiently, giving my hand a squeeze. Oh, right, I say. OK. Yes, good.

        Two months after my last diary entry, something weird has occurred. Having written the experiment off as a waste of time, it seems to be bearing perverse fruit. I’m currently on my phone for 90 minutes a day. Five of those are spent on Instagram. I no longer feel addicted. My diminished online life is partly due to no longer having to scan the savannah for a mate. But that can’t be the whole story.

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        All the experts I spoke to gave reassuringly similar advice. Strangely, the most impactful tech conversation was in a wifi-less cafe, with a Buddhist. Sthiramanas is a meditation teacher from the London Buddhist Centre, where he runs Upgrade Your Mind, a six-week course on mindful screen use.

        “It’s a fundamental human weakness to look outside for satisfaction,” he says. Sthiramanas doesn’t just mean endless scrolling. Running to a silent retreat – or a digital detox cabin in the woods – is also an escape from day-to-day life. Their lessons often don’t survive the journey home. “If we want our lives to be happier and more creative, we have to experience them as they are, and change things from there.

        “What’s the desire underneath the desire to check your phone?” he continued. “If you’re addicted to dating apps, is it the desire to feel attractive? If you’re a news junkie, do you want to feel in control? Or in contact with something bigger than yourself? If you’re constantly texting friends, do you just want to be loved?”

        Ouch. When did these Buddhists choose violence?

        Since that chat, I see friendship as a mostly offline activity. Something we do with our bodies. My gang are good for this – arranging day trips to the seaside, dancing, cooking for each other. Laughing in the same space is nourishing. Sounds Waltons-esque, but it’s better than Meta. I do still often text friends through the day, but when not, I enjoy missing them. Maybe I’ve gone weird.

        

        Can I enjoy being in my actual, ‘boring’ life, without the fantasy of escape? Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

        Constant connectivity is a new expectation, exhausting to meet. My worst fear about turning my phone off has been missing a call from my mother, should she have a fall. But underneath my reluctance, I realize, is an anxiety of control. And one day we must all relinquish that. “You could get a landline for emergencies, and only give the number to loved ones,” suggests Sthiramanas. It’s a good idea.

        Another slow burn has been the increase in time spent reading. I think it’s also the reason I no longer lose whole days on Instagram. Opening any social media apps now, they strike me as … silly. Maybe concentration really is a muscle – that hungers to lift heavier things as you build it. Of course, plenty of people enjoy both. This isn’t to say all social media content is shallow and pointless! (Even though I do think that!)

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        Can I enjoy being in my actual, “boring” life, without the fantasy of escape? This has been the crucial question for me.

        I tidy my flat more, because I’m seeing it more. I’ve kept up my 10,000 steps. I still like filling up those fitness tracking circles, but am less obsessive. I can feel the effect in my body. I sometimes leave my phone at home. It’s a mental reset to feel the air, to not be somewhere else. And I’m much happier than I was.

        For any capitalism fans, I must note that my freelance income has risen, and I’m more productive. I don’t find it helpful to vilify tech companies so much, and no longer personify my phone. The shiny, infinite-content machine is not a muse, cold lover or nemesis. It’s a tool. More than anything else, it’s a barometer of my discontent.

        When I notice that weight in my hand, the pull toward distraction and escape, I try to diagnose what’s really going on with me. Am I worried about something? Am I lonely? What would be a better way to meet my needs? If I’m simply bored, I’m learning to trust there’s a creativity hidden in that place.

        Who could have foreseen this? The smartphone as canary in the coal mine, signposting what is most important to me: to not sleepwalk through these days. Thief of my life? No one gets to steal my life.

        Unfortunately, I am now addicted to sugar.