Monthly Archives: June 2020

Me wearing a mask.

I wore a mask all day while I worked. Here’s what I learned.

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As mask-wearing begins to take center stage around the country, there’s a lot of questions about how masks might affect the wearer as they go about their daily lives.

Is wearing a mask all day safe? Will I get sick from wearing a mask too much? Will it restrict my breathing? Will I learn that I need to eat more Altoids?

There’s nothing wrong with asking these questions. We’re in a new world, and you only learn by asking questions. But I decided to take it a step further by doing a little experimenting.

Now, I’m a healthy individual, and most of my work involves sitting at a desk looking at a glowing rectangle all day. So, I figured I would wear a mask, and see how it affected me. But to make things more quantifiable, I decided to log my oxygen saturation levels of my blood with a pulse oximeter that I purchased in the beginning of May. You can find the exact one I purchased here.

To try and replicate a typical workday, here was my methodology:

  • At 8 a.m., I put my mask on and took a reading
  • Around every 15 minutes, I took another reading
  • I put the results in a Google Sheet, along with any notes about that moment
  • I took the mask off at lunch time
  • I took the mask off at two other times when I gave myself a break
  • Every time I took the mask off, I went outside

A little bit about my mask: It’s a standard cloth mask that can be found for sale almost everywhere by people who can sew better than me. It has elastic loops, and a slot where I can put a filter inside of it. My filter is a blue shop rag from Scott I purchased from Home Depot.

So what did I find about my experiment?

  • I didn’t experience any negative health complications from wearing a mask all day
  • Around noon, the loops around my ears started to get a little uncomfortable
  • On video conferences, people appeared to be able to hear me fine
  • I felt a little silly wearing a mask while on video
  • I didn’t drink enough liquids because taking my mask off would require me to go outside (I really tried to keep this as realistic as possible)
  • I drank 1/2 cup of coffee, which is way lower than usual
  • I was happy to take it off at the end of the day

But what about the data? Tell us about the data!

I put my data in this Google Sheet. Feel free to check it out for yourself. I’m happy to report that my pulse oxidation levels appeared to stay above the norm for the whole day, according to Mayo Clinic. I don’t think I would want to repeat this daily, as that would certainly require a new mask every day, and it isn’t the most pleasant experience to work with a mask on.

However, it is doable — at least for me — and it certainly beats shutting down a business.

TLDR; I wore a mask all day and didn’t experience anything negative, aside from not getting nearly enough coffee.

Negative value

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You got to know when to hold ’em,
Know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to run.

— Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Recently my financial advisor called me and let me know about how my investments were doing.

A few of them aren’t doing well at all. In fact, they’re losing money regularly. There’s no sign that they’re going to get better anytime soon, and I was asked, “Would you like to keep holding onto them, or do you want to invest in something with a better return on your money?”

Man, that’s a tough call. I mean, I’ve poured a lot of money into all my investments, even those that are losing money. I don’t want to face the reality that I may have picked a few bad apples, but I’ve put so much into them. Should I go ahead and keep them, or take a chance on something that could produce a better return?

OK, I have to admit something: that story didn’t happen.

But I have been thinking a lot about negative value lately. However, I haven’t been thinking about it with money, but rather with regard to people.

If someone actually had come to me and said, “This thing you’re investing money in, it’s losing value all the time” then I’d have to consider what my next course of action would be. The way I see it, I would really only have two options:

  1. Stay the course. It’s possible that the investment will make an about face, and the returns will start moving in the right direction. All I need to do it wait it out. After all, you might have heard the phrase “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” and just because something is in the toilet today doesn’t mean that it won’t rebound in the future. Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1997 before Microsoft stepped in with a last-minute investment that saved the company. Today Apple is one of the most valuable companies in the world.
  2. Know when to fold ’em. Kenny Rogers said it best. You have to know when it’s time to throw in the towel and move on. Sometimes, you get to the point that you realize you’re not going to get your investment back. It’s gone, and the longer you hold onto it, the longer you push off admitting that you invested in a stinker, and there’s no coming back. This is also called the sunk-cost fallacy, and honestly, it’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes. But sometimes you realize that past performance is no guarantee of future results, and there’s no guarantee that you’re ever going to get your investment back.

But again, I’m not really talking about money here. I’m talking about people.

Sometimes, you invest so much in a relationship with someone, it’s hard to admit that you’re not going to get out of it what you put in. This is difficult, and painful. How can you just walk away after all the time and effort you put into someone?

I’ve seen this play out with people I care about, and I always give the same advice: ditch the people that drain you, and find others to invest in instead. There are people who add tremendous value to our lives, and those people are worth holding onto. But when it comes to people with negative value, people who that add no benefit and are actually costing you in energy, stress, worry, and depression, you need to think about how long you’re willing to hold on.

Is it time to cut your losses on a chance for better return on investments elsewhere?