{"id":2027,"date":"2018-05-31T06:49:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T11:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=2027"},"modified":"2018-07-05T21:58:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T02:58:26","slug":"horse-sized-ducks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=2027","title":{"rendered":"Horse-Sized Ducks"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a common internet question: would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck? I’m currently just being destroyed<\/strong> by a bunch of small tasks\/projects. A single big grant can be a lot of work to put together, with many lost hours of sleep (and potential pounds of weight gained) in the process of getting it done. But though it’s a grind, I don’t feel so completely overwhelmed in the process. Conversely, the cluster of small tasks is draining<\/em>: there’s always another little bugger ready to sneak up and poke you in the back, and there’s definitely high task-switching costs.<\/p>\n

So put me in the horse-sized duck camp. If project A is only 10% the work of project B, 10 project As together end up being way more draining effort (for me) than project B alone.
\nBlueberry is watching Star Wars now, and it looks like Luke Skywalker is also a horse-sized duck guy: the point where he really starts to falter and look really scared in the fight against Vader in Empire is not in the straight-up lightsaber duel (where Vader is legendary<\/em>, but admittedly not trying to kill him), but when Vader starts hitting him with Force-thrown objects coming from all sides. And then the rancor is no sweat. <\/p>\n

Conversely, my man Obi-wan seems to prefer having a bunch of smaller problems. Battle droids pose no problem for him, and he’s fearless walking alone into the heart of the Death Star, crawling with Stormtroopers. But he has real trouble with one-on-one fights with Jango Fett and Grievous, and Count Dooku WTFpwns him. Twice.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a common internet question: would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck? I’m currently just being destroyed by a bunch of small tasks\/projects. A single big grant can be a lot of work to put together, with many lost hours of sleep (and potential pounds of weight gained) in the process […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2028,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions\/2028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}