Wti Scaffold Blog

So often I’m asked the same question: how do I get over my conservatory to get to the roof or gutters? Although I’ve been asked this several times, the answer is incredibly easy.

When the walls above your conservatory need to be painted, or the gutters cleaned, or you simply want to wash the conservatory roof, the easiest thing to do is build two scaffold towers: one on each side of the conservatory, and connect the hired scaffold towers with staging boards that stretch across the top of the conservatory. Essentially, you make a little bridge.

If you don’t have very much room surrounding your conservatory, you can hire narrow scaffold towers of a metre wide. If your conservatory spans the back of your house, then you may find that your neighbours are very accommodating when offered use of the scaffold towers, for letting you set up over the boundary fence. A little gentle negotiation and everyone will win; maybe they need to do some work at height: sort out their gutters, or neaten up a few loose tiles.

Putting up a scaffold tower is pretty easy work, some may even say fun! Unlike the scaffolding that hangs off city buildings, scaffold towers come with colour-coded components, presented with clear construction guidelines. Ladders and trapdoors are incorporated in the tower, so it’s just a matter of following the guidelines. Scaffold towers were designed with DIYers and individual contractors in mind; people who need to work at height quickly and easily – as well as safely.

Hiring two single-width 4.2 metre scaffold towers with staging boards would be plenty to get you securely and almost effortlessly above your conservatory in very little time.

Staging boards come in lengths up to 7.2 metres, so you can figure out the length staging board you require, simply measure the width of the conservatory and add 800mm each side, which will give you plenty of staging board to complete a safe bridge.

Each staging board is 600mm wide, so you’ll have enough room to move and have your tools to hand. To be extra safe, especially if you’re not wholly comfortable with heights, you can hire handrails to complement the staging boards. The handrails on both sides of the boards will make falls much more unlikely, and give you the confidence to work safely.

As I said, accessing your conservatory really is quite simple! Your best approach is to work with a contract hire business that will be able to provide you with good quality equipment and advise you on your own particular project.

There are many different types of scaffolding on the market and they can be used for a number of reasons. Basically a scaffold is a structure used to support people and materials when working on constructions high above the ground. They consist of vertical trusses erected and stabilised by interlocking tubes in a geometric pattern to create a sturdy frame, these tubes are held together by couplers. They also have resting platforms that are placed across these frames so that one can place materials needed for usage such as bricks and paint for example.

These structures are also called scaffolding towers because of they are vertical and rise quite high off the ground. Some of these towers come with built in staircases, but usually the tubes acts as rungs for workers to climb up and down on. Previously only used by construction workers, scaffolding has these days become more commercial and is used for a wide variety of uses by home owners and also by people in the entertainment industry when needed on movie sets to construct certain features or they are also used at music concerts to hold up lighting and other stage equipment.

Scaffolding can also come in handy is you are the DIY kind of person, and usually find yourself doing most of the work on your house by yourself such as painting or fixing the roof. It is much safer and sturdier than using a ladder and you can carry your equipment up on scaffold with you one time instead of going backwards and forwards.

Scaffolding comes in different types and are made from different materials ranging from bamboo and wood to steel and aluminium. Although bamboo and wood are not favoured because they are not sturdy and are dangerous, however they are still used in poorer countries such as India. I will briefly give the difference between two types of scaffolding:

Aluminium scaffolding
Aluminium moveable scaffolding is the most popular because it is light weight, it can be moved around easily from point A to B using wheels, so it does not need to be dismantled every time to move it to a different area. It can also be erected against any type of structure that they are being use for. And unlike steel scaffolding they do not rust. Even though aluminium is light weight it is very sturdy so you don’t need to worry about falling. They also last long they are durable and when done with them, they can be broken down and packed into a small storage space.

Tubular steel scaffolding
Even though tubular steel scaffolds are heavier than aluminium they are easy to assemble, and are designed in such a way that makes them great to use when needing to get to inaccessible places. As the name suggests, they are made of steel tubes and it is very important that they are locked at all connections very securely with the couplers, if not it can be very dangerous. They should be set up in strict accordance with the manufacturers’ instructions and recommendations. When tied to a secure structure they can reach up to 12m.

These are just two kinds of scaffolding available on the market, products and technical information is widely available so do not hesitate to ask.

A great deal of time and effort is put into developing schemes for the conservation of historic buildings but it sometimes seems that scaffolding and temporary works, the means by which the conservation schemes are successfully completed, receive scant attention. If not erected properly and with due care and attention to detail, these works can cause a great deal of damage to historic fabric.

The basic processes of design and erecting scaffolding and temporary works to an historic building are not greatly different from those necessary when any other existing building is affected. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the important points which need special attention if damage to historic fabric is to be avoided.

Where non-historic buildings are concerned, damage caused by improperly erected scaffolding and temporary works, whilst being tiresome and causing unnecessary expenditure, can often be repaired without serious harm. Where historic fabric is concerned any damage is permanent and significant detail may be lost. Once scarred, an important facade is scarred forever.

All badly erected shoring work, whether or not it is to an historically important building, has the potential to allow the collapse of part of the building with disastrous and possibly fatal consequences. Experience indicates that when things go wrong it is usually due to lack of attention to seemingly minor details.

Scaffolding and temporary works must be capable of being constructed without the need for major intervention into historic fabric. This must be borne in mind by designers and erectors of scaffolding and temporary works.

ACCESS SCAFFOLDS

‘Independent tied’ scaffolds will normally be provided for painting, pointing or other maintenance work. They consist of two rows of standards (the vertical supports) connected by ledgers and transoms (the horizontal elements). ‘Independent’ scaffolds are not quite what their name suggests. They are termed ‘independent’ because they derive no vertical support from the building and ‘tied’ because they must be tied to the building for horizontal stability. Because of the need to avoid damage, tying scaffolding to the facade of historic buildings can sometimes present difficult problems. Sometimes, if the historic building is fragile, it will not be capable of providing the horizontal restraint that the scaffolding needs and this must be achieved in other ways, such as by providing external scaffold buttresses or by tying the external scaffold to an internal birdcage framework scaffold.

‘Putlog scaffolds’, used for the construction of brick walls, have only one row of standards which are usually erected some 900mm from the face of the wall, with the boards carried on horizontal members known as ‘putlogs’. When used in new construction, the flattened ends of the putlogs are built into the bed joints as work proceeds and then withdrawn on completion, the resulting hole being pointed up. (100mm square holes used for timber putlogs can sometimes be found in medieval work.) Putlog scaffolds should not be used on historic building work as unnecessary damage is caused by cutting holes for the bearing of the putlogs.

SHORING OR SUPPORT SCAFFOLDING

Temporary works are often needed either because there is a risk that a structure might otherwise collapse or because it is necessary to remove some vital supporting member for renewal or alteration. The loads to be carried by shoring can be very great and the danger posed to passers by and the fabric by an inadequate design should never be under estimated.

The main difficulty with shoring historic buildings is to ensure that their installation does not cause damage. Shoring must be designed by a structural engineer or other competent person.

DESIGN

The design of scaffolding should not, unless it is very straightforward, be left to the scaffold erector. It is important that prior thought be given to the location of scaffold foundations, where standards can and cannot go and where boarded out decks are required to enable the work to proceed with as little difficulty and risk as possible.

All temporary works should be designed before the site staff begin erection and the level of design and drawing of scaffolding and temporary works must be commensurate with the scale of the works. A pencil sketch on a sheet of paper may well suffice, indicating that at least someone has thought about what is needed before work commences. A bigger job may well demand calculations and proper drawings.

RESPONSIBILITY

The failure of even a single telescopic prop supporting a major element of a building under repair could be fatal; therefore, as the dangers do not necessarily relate to the size of the project, the architect or engineer should examine the contractor’s proposals for all scaffolding and shoring. After all, the architect and engineer will have been dealing with the building for some long time and are more likely to be aware of its weaknesses than the contractor who, however experienced, may well have only seen the building briefly before being expected to commence work. It must be ensured that schemes are erected so as to conform with previously presented proposals.

Care must be exercised to ensure that the contractor’s responsibility for temporary works is eroded as little as possible. Contract documentation for works to historic buildings should always include a section concerning scaffolding and temporary works.

STATUTORY INSPECTIONS

It is a statutory requirement that all working scaffolds are inspected weekly by a suitably qualified person and that the results of these inspections are recorded in the ‘Scaffold Register’, an official book of forms which have to be completed weekly.

NECESSARY FEATURES AND COMMON PROBLEMS

The following features and problems are all basic and mostly fall into the category of ‘common sense’ rather than being highly technical requirements.

Foundations: Foundations should always be on firm, level ground and should never be undermined. Standards and props should be concentric on foundations. When scaffolding is to remain erected for six months or more, railway sleepers or similar sized treated timbers should be used as foundations.

Historic buildings often have basements outside the periphery of the ground floor which may well be incapable of supporting scaffolding, so thought needs to be given to the means of transferring loads to the ground. One site on which the author was involved had below ground storage tanks. A huge lorry-mounted crane was to be used to erect a temporary roof and it was vital to locate these tanks before the lorry arrived on site and found one accidentally!

If excavations for foundations are required, there may be a need to provide archaeological supervision of the digging operations.

If it is necessary to erect temporary structures on floors or roofs it is important to ensure that the supporting structure can safely bear the weight or that precautions are taken to ensure that the extra loads will be adequately supported.

As historic buildings often have overhanging cornices and other projections, correct setting out of the standards needs to be considered in the light of what is directly overhead.

Ties: When ties pass through sash windows, one sash can be raised to allow the tube to pass through, the resulting gap sealed and the sashes screwed to each other to prevent unauthorised entry. Casement windows are more difficult. If they carry leaded lights it may be possible to remove one small pane but casements with a single glazed sheet may need to be taken off their hinges and stored safely. Regrettably some scaffolders just smash a window (which may contain historic glass) to put their ties in place.

Fixings to masonry: Where fixings are made to stone or brickwork it is necessary to check that the masonry is adequate beforehand. Such a fixing to a facade could dislodge a stone or an area of brick thus endangering the safety of the scaffold and damaging the historic fabric. All fixings made to the wall of an historic structure must be of stainless steel. Listed building consent may be needed before permanent drilled-in fixings are installed.

Decking: Decayed, warped or split boards must never been used as they create tripping hazards. Boards that have become slippery or damaged should be discarded and precautions should be taken to hold boards down in high winds. Excessive loading on platforms should be avoided unless the scaffolding has been specifically designed to carry heavy loads. If dismantled masonry is to be stored on a scaffold platform the scaffold designer should be told of this before the design is commenced.

Scaffolding to building interfaces: However well constructed, scaffolding is always likely to move slightly and a tube end rubbing on a wall face can easily cause permanent scarring. All points of contact or near contact between scaffolding and historic buildings should be protected in some way. All tube ends that either touch a wall or are within 25mm of it should have plastic end caps. All standards should sit on timber sole plates to spread the load and floors beneath should be protected with polythene sheet, old carpet or similar materials to prevent damage. All scaffolding should be galvanised to avoid the risk of rust staining.

Sheeting: The wind loading created by sheeting, which is sometimes provided for weather protection, can be very high and special consideration needs to be given to the spacing of scaffold to building ties.

Telescopic props: These may need bracing if they are over two metres high or if they carry heavy loads. They must be plumb and be properly founded. It is common to find a missing support pin being replaced by a short piece of reinforcing bar or something even less satisfactory such as a big nail. Only the manufacturer’s high tensile steel pin should be used.

Temporary roofs and temporary buildings: In relation to their area or volume temporary roofs and buildings are, by nature, light structures. As a consequence their need for lateral stability and resistance to wind uplift is a major but often ignored requirement. It is usually advisable to seek the help of a structural engineer in the erection of such structures. The contractor should always be required to provide a drawing of his proposals and in any but the smallest of cases, supporting calculations.

Earthing: All scaffolding structures which are at risk from lightning strikes should be properly earthed.

Unauthorised access to the building: Scaffolding can make buildings more vulnerable to intruders; ladders should be locked away at night and extra security precautions may be wise.

Workforce: Efforts should be made to ensure that the workforce is aware of the value of the historic fabric. It is well worth considering giving the scaffolders, and indeed other craftspersons, a ‘conducted tour’ of the building so that they can begin to understand its importance and not assume that is ‘just another old building’. On one English Heritage site the house administrator took the scaffolders around the building before they began work. This seemed to engender some genuine enthusiasm and concern for the building and paid dividends in the extra care which they took.

FORETHOUGHT AND ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Scaffolding and temporary works are not always given the consideration that they deserve. Consequently there is risk of damage to the historic fabric either in relatively minor ways such as scarring of surface finishes or in more serious ways such as partial collapse. There is the additional risk caused to members of the workforce or to passers-by.

Documentation, both that produced by the architect or engineer and that produced by the contractor needs to be commensurate with the scale of the job, bearing in mind that failure of even a small element can cause serious problems. Even if only a single telescopic prop is proposed it is important that some proper estimate of the weight to be carried is made and reference made to literature to ensure that the prop proposed can carry the weight safely.

Architects and engineers involved in historic buildings work should have a clear understanding of the requirements of scaffolding and temporary works and be aware of the consequences if something goes wrong. The safety and success of scaffolding and temporary works in the historic building field relies heavily on two things; forethought and attention to detail.

With an historic building there will be no second chance.

A scaffold is a temporary structure that supports tools, materials, and people while erecting or repairing a building.  A similar construct can be used to improve your personal productivity.  Much like wearing braces to reposition crooked teeth, a personal productivity scaffold is something you temporarily insert into your daily routine to help create and establish new habits.  Once those habits are conditioned, the scaffolding can be removed.

Suppose you’re having trouble staying focused at work.  Your days keep getting away from you.  You go to your desk and start checking email.  From there you visit your favorite web sites.  Then you check email again.  Before you know it, it’s already lunchtime.  After lunch you check email again.  Then it’s back to web surfing.  Perhaps you finally begin doing some real work, but only from boredom with email and web surfing.  Since you’ve wasted so much time, you can only address the urgent items with no time left for doing anything remotely significant.  You end your workday feeling disappointed and mildly depressed.  Your evening is no more exciting.  Then you repeat the process the next day.

If you don’t break such bad habits, before you know it, you’ll have wasted years of your life.  This is entirely preventable, but wishful thinking and broken personal promises aren’t the answer.

When you find yourself stuck in the undesirable pattern of wasting time, it’s similar to having crooked teeth.  Imagine if you kept promising over and over again, “I have to straighten my teeth!  This time I’ll really do it!”  Will that fix your teeth?  Of course not.  They’ll probably just get worse.  The solution is simple though.  Get yourself some braces.  It will require a small sacrifice, but it will fix the problem.  And it’s temporary — you won’t have to wear them forever.

A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces.  It’s a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the “straight” course and away from the crooked one.  Once you’ve set it up, it’s fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.

Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want.  Who wants to waste hours a day on email and web surfing?  No one that cares about having a life.  But it’s way too easy to fall into this pattern by mistake, just as it’s easy to get crooked teeth.

I had to wear braces for 3 years when I was a kid, but I’m glad I endured it because my teeth remained relatively straight from then on.  I’m even more grateful for the personal scaffolding that has helped me stay focused on my goals.

A sample scaffold

Perhaps the best way to understand a scaffold is to simply look at one, so I’ll share one I’ve used from time to time.  To keep myself focused each day, I insert a scaffold around my workday, one hour at the start of the workday and one hour at the end.  I don’t work longer hours — the scaffolding replaces what would otherwise be part of my workday.  Here’s what it looks like:

Start-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1. Review and update long-term plans (25 minutes)
2. Write a journal entry about what I expect to accomplish today (10 minutes)
3. Review today’s task list, and visualize a successful and enjoyable day (5 minutes)
4. Meditate and listen to any guidance that comes through (15 minutes)
5. Breathe deeply to clear and focus my mind before beginning work (5 minutes)

End-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1. Record my morning workout results in progress tracking spreadsheet, plan next day’s workout (5 minutes)
2. Process paper inbox, update project/action list and calendar (15 minutes)
3. Equalize office (decluttering, filing, organizing) (5 minutes)
4. Conduct a postmortem of the day in my journal using my assessment template (10 minutes)
5. Plan next day (15 minutes)
6. Water plants (< 5 minutes)
7. Breathe deeply to clear mind and release work for the day (5 minutes)

I normally insert the morning scaffold at 8-9am and the afternoon scaffold at 4-5pm.

Your initial reaction might be, “This is way too much.  I can’t take two hours out of my day for this, especially not for weeks on end.”  I’m not saying you have to use my particular scaffold — this is something I created for myself, and it may not make sense for you at all.  But you’d be amazed at how productive your days can be when you create your own daily startup and shutdown routine as a wrapper around your day.

The intent of the scaffolding above is to help me stay focused.  I don’t always use it, but when I find my focus drifting and notice I’m spending way too much time on minor things, I return to my scaffolding and effectively straighten myself out.

The startup process gets me focused on my long-term goals and plans, so at 9am I’m jumping straight into my most important task.  I feel relaxed, alert, and highly motivated.

The shutdown process is where I close out my workday, so at 5pm I’m totally done with work and ready to spend time with my family, attend a Toastmasters meeting or a kempo class, or go out with Erin.

Together these two pieces of scaffolding create a productive wrapper around my workday.  In the morning I enter “work mode.”  I get my work done, starting with the most important tasks for the day.  Then I get out of work mode and into family mode.  This works very well, and the two hours it takes doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice at all.

If two hours seems like too much to you, you can certainly shorten it.  Just a few minutes on each end can make a difference, even if you do nothing but breathing exercises.  Through trial-and-error, I learned I get great results with the hour-long brackets.  I am in fact getting some work done during those scaffolding periods, including planning, processing my inbox, doing record-keeping, evaluating results, and of course keeping my plants from dying.  These are daily tasks anyway, so I find it useful to include them in the scaffolding.

How to create a personal productivity scaffold

To create your own scaffold, you need to identify where you’ve become “crooked” and what needs to be done to straighten yourself out.  Almost always this will require crafting a process to refocus your attention.  For example, you may want a morning scaffold that puts in the state of mind where you’re so focused on your goals that you wouldn’t even consider wasting your time on idle web surfing.

Design simple activities to funnel your attention towards a particular state of mind.  Do you want to be motivated?  Relaxed?  Creative?  Whatever state you want to induce should be addressed by your scaffolding.

Scaffolds work best when they’re naturally attractive to you… perhaps even fun.  Think of them as bait.  Ideally they should be inviting enough that you feel inclined to do them without too much resistance.  By the time you come out the other end, you’re immersed in your desired state of mind, feeling you could sustain it for hours.

The best scaffolding components are those which yield an additional benefit beyond their temporary focusing effect.  For example, daily meditation can help you clear and focus your mind, but it’s also known to have long-term health benefits, including a 30% reduction in the rate of death from cardiovascular disease and a 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer (figures are from a study of transcendental meditation practitioners).  Regular journaling can be hugely beneficial as well, helping you avoid problems and gain greater clarity.

Creating good scaffolding is largely a trial-and-error process.  Take a stab, try something, and observe how it works for you.  Every time you run through your scaffold, see if you can improve it.  Was it attractive enough for you to actually complete the steps?  When you came out the back end, were you in the desired state?  If you do this every day, will it make enough of a difference to compensate for the time it takes?

Even when you come up with a good scaffold that works for you, it’s a good idea to mix it up every once in a while to keep it from growing stale.  Reorder the steps, or insert a new activity now and then.

You can use scaffolds for just about anything, so don’t limit yourself to work-related productivity.  You can use scaffolding to motivate yourself to exercise, eat healthier foods, or to psyche yourself up for selling door to door.  The main idea is to create very simple, easy-to-establish habits that serve as the framework for installing much more significant habits.

Once your new habit is established, try reducing or eliminating your scaffolding, and see if you can still maintain that habit.  Keep whatever scaffolding continues to be effective, but feel free to drop it when it’s no longer necessary.  I frequently find myself returning to productivity-related scaffolding, but when it comes to exercising regularly, I don’t seem to need it.

Scaffolding and 30-day trials

Scaffolding is a terrific fit for the 30-day trial concept.  Once you design a basic scaffold for yourself, commit to testing it for 30 days.  At the end of each day, tweak your scaffolding based on your results.  Consider sharing your scaffolding in the forums, and invite feedback and suggestions from others to help you improve it.

A typical scaffold used in building construction can be a rickety, ugly, paint-splattered structure, but it gets the job done.  Similarly, your personal productivity scaffolding can be equally ugly to the naked eye, but if it helps you get where you want to go, you’re golden.

For decades, sidewalk sheds have been derided as urban eyesores. Their bolts have scratched and torn many a briefcase and shopping bag. They have been the bane, as well, of local businesses whose entrances — and signs — are blocked for months by all that wood and steel.

But soon, those sheds — also described as scaffolding — will join the gallery of obsolete urban icons, thanks to a new structure that seems more “Avatar” than “Mean Streets.”

On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that the city had selected a winning design for a new generation of sheds. Called Urban Umbrella, the new model will be made of carbon fiber, and it opens up like an umbrella. The goal, city officials said, is to make the scaffolding much simpler, with far fewer columns, to allow more light and air to reach the sidewalk.

The new design, which will first be used at a construction site in Lower Manhattan in the summer, will not be mandatory. But city officials, and some builders, say they believe that many building owners will quickly adopt the new structure because of lower installation and maintenance costs, and because of the enhanced aesthetics, too.

“It brings life, light and art to a space you usually want to scurry through and get out of as fast as you can,” said David M. Childs, an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who served on the contest jury. “I think people will want to walk underneath.”

There are an estimated 6,000 sidewalk sheds in the city, covering more than one million linear feet, according to the city. And sometimes, they feel ubiquitous: a recent survey by the city’s Department of Transportation estimated that 30 percent of Broadway, between 59th Street and Houston Street, was sheathed in scaffolding.

So to modernize the shed, the city held an international design contest called UrbanShed. And after receiving 164 entries from people in 28 countries, a panel of city officials, construction executives and architects chose “Urban Umbrella” by Young-Hwan Choi, 28, who moved to the United States last summer to begin graduate study as an architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some scaffolding companies, naturally unaccustomed to change, expressed trepidation.

“As an industry, we pretty much have the same opinion — we need to find a way to utilize the equipment that we already have,” said Peter O’Farrell, owner of Colgate Scaffolding and Equipment. “Who’s going to absorb the cost of a new design?”

But Richard T. Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, who attended the mayor’s announcement in Brooklyn, predicted widespread support, as long as the new shed was indeed less expensive than the current $80,000 or so it now costs.

“They’re very open to this,” he said.

A scaffold is a temporary structure that supports tools, materials, and people while erecting or repairing a building. A similar construct can be used to improve your personal productivity. Much like wearing braces to reposition crooked teeth, a personal productivity scaffold is something you temporarily insert into your daily routine to help create and establish new habits. Once those habits are conditioned, the scaffolding can be removed.

Suppose you’re having trouble staying focused at work. Your days keep getting away from you. You go to your desk and start checking email. From there you visit your favorite web sites. Then you check email again. Before you know it, it’s already lunchtime. After lunch you check email again. Then it’s back to web surfing. Perhaps you finally begin doing some real work, but only from boredom with email and web surfing. Since you’ve wasted so much time, you can only address the urgent items with no time left for doing anything remotely significant. You end your workday feeling disappointed and mildly depressed. Your evening is no more exciting. Then you repeat the process the next day.

If you don’t break such bad habits, before you know it, you’ll have wasted years of your life. This is entirely preventable, but wishful thinking and broken personal promises aren’t the answer.

When you find yourself stuck in the undesirable pattern of wasting time, it’s similar to having crooked teeth. Imagine if you kept promising over and over again, “I have to straighten my teeth! This time I’ll really do it!” Will that fix your teeth? Of course not. They’ll probably just get worse. The solution is simple though. Get yourself some braces. It will require a small sacrifice, but it will fix the problem. And it’s temporary — you won’t have to wear them forever.

A personal productivity scaffold is like wearing braces. It’s a way to redirect your time and energy back onto the “straight” course and away from the crooked one. Once you’ve set it up, it’s fairly easy to maintain, although you may still regard it as a small sacrifice.

Perhaps the most important function your scaffolding must perform is keeping your attention focused on what you want and off of what you don’t want. Who wants to waste hours a day on email and web surfing? No one that cares about having a life. But it’s way too easy to fall into this pattern by mistake, just as it’s easy to get crooked teeth.

I had to wear braces for 3 years when I was a kid, but I’m glad I endured it because my teeth remained relatively straight from then on. I’m even more grateful for the personal scaffolding that has helped me stay focused on my goals.

A sample scaffold

Perhaps the best way to understand a scaffold is to simply look at one, so I’ll share one I’ve used from time to time. To keep myself focused each day, I insert a scaffold around my workday, one hour at the start of the workday and one hour at the end. I don’t work longer hours — the scaffolding replaces what would otherwise be part of my workday. Here’s what it looks like:

Start-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1.Review and update long-term plans (25 minutes)
2.Write a journal entry about what I expect to accomplish today (10 minutes)
3.Review today’s task list, and visualize a successful and enjoyable day (5 minutes)
4.Meditate and listen to any guidance that comes through (15 minutes)
5.Breathe deeply to clear and focus my mind before beginning work (5 minutes)
End-of-workday scaffold (60 minutes)

1.Record my morning workout results in progress tracking spreadsheet, plan next day’s workout (5 minutes)
2.Process paper inbox, update project/action list and calendar (15 minutes)
3.Equalize office (decluttering, filing, organizing) (5 minutes)
4.Conduct a postmortem of the day in my journal using my assessment template (10 minutes)
5.Plan next day (15 minutes)
6.Water plants (< 5 minutes)
7.Breathe deeply to clear mind and release work for the day (5 minutes)
I normally insert the morning scaffold at 8-9am and the afternoon scaffold at 4-5pm.

Your initial reaction might be, “This is way too much. I can’t take two hours out of my day for this, especially not for weeks on end.” I’m not saying you have to use my particular scaffold — this is something I created for myself, and it may not make sense for you at all. But you’d be amazed at how productive your days can be when you create your own daily startup and shutdown routine as a wrapper around your day.

The intent of the scaffolding above is to help me stay focused. I don’t always use it, but when I find my focus drifting and notice I’m spending way too much time on minor things, I return to my scaffolding and effectively straighten myself out.

The startup process gets me focused on my long-term goals and plans, so at 9am I’m jumping straight into my most important task. I feel relaxed, alert, and highly motivated.

The shutdown process is where I close out my workday, so at 5pm I’m totally done with work and ready to spend time with my family, attend a Toastmasters meeting or a kempo class, or go out with Erin.

Together these two pieces of scaffolding create a productive wrapper around my workday. In the morning I enter “work mode.” I get my work done, starting with the most important tasks for the day. Then I get out of work mode and into family mode. This works very well, and the two hours it takes doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice at all.

If two hours seems like too much to you, you can certainly shorten it. Just a few minutes on each end can make a difference, even if you do nothing but breathing exercises. Through trial-and-error, I learned I get great results with the hour-long brackets. I am in fact getting some work done during those scaffolding periods, including planning, processing my inbox, doing record-keeping, evaluating results, and of course keeping my plants from dying. These are daily tasks anyway, so I find it useful to include them in the scaffolding.

How to create a personal productivity scaffold

To create your own scaffold, you need to identify where you’ve become “crooked” and what needs to be done to straighten yourself out. Almost always this will require crafting a process to refocus your attention. For example, you may want a morning scaffold that puts in the state of mind where you’re so focused on your goals that you wouldn’t even consider wasting your time on idle web surfing.

Design simple activities to funnel your attention towards a particular state of mind. Do you want to be motivated? Relaxed? Creative? Whatever state you want to induce should be addressed by your scaffolding.

Scaffolds work best when they’re naturally attractive to you… perhaps even fun. Think of them as bait. Ideally they should be inviting enough that you feel inclined to do them without too much resistance. By the time you come out the other end, you’re immersed in your desired state of mind, feeling you could sustain it for hours.

The best scaffolding components are those which yield an additional benefit beyond their temporary focusing effect. For example, daily meditation can help you clear and focus your mind, but it’s also known to have long-term health benefits, including a 30% reduction in the rate of death from cardiovascular disease and a 49% reduction in the rate of death from cancer (figures are from a study of transcendental meditation practitioners). Regular journaling can be hugely beneficial as well, helping you avoid problems and gain greater clarity.

Creating good scaffolding is largely a trial-and-error process. Take a stab, try something, and observe how it works for you. Every time you run through your scaffold, see if you can improve it. Was it attractive enough for you to actually complete the steps? When you came out the back end, were you in the desired state? If you do this every day, will it make enough of a difference to compensate for the time it takes?

Even when you come up with a good scaffold that works for you, it’s a good idea to mix it up every once in a while to keep it from growing stale. Reorder the steps, or insert a new activity now and then.

You can use scaffolds for just about anything, so don’t limit yourself to work-related productivity. You can use scaffolding to motivate yourself to exercise, eat healthier foods, or to psyche yourself up for selling door to door. The main idea is to create very simple, easy-to-establish habits that serve as the framework for installing much more significant habits.

Once your new habit is established, try reducing or eliminating your scaffolding, and see if you can still maintain that habit. Keep whatever scaffolding continues to be effective, but feel free to drop it when it’s no longer necessary. I frequently find myself returning to productivity-related scaffolding, but when it comes to exercising regularly, I don’t seem to need it.

Scaffolding and 30-day trials

Scaffolding is a terrific fit for the 30-day trial concept. Once you design a basic scaffold for yourself, commit to testing it for 30 days. At the end of each day, tweak your scaffolding based on your results. Consider sharing your scaffolding in the forums, and invite feedback and suggestions from others to help you improve it.

A typical scaffold used in building construction can be a rickety, ugly, paint-splattered structure, but it gets the job done. Similarly, your personal productivity scaffolding can be equally ugly to the naked eye, but if it helps you get where you want to go, you’re golden.

THIS IS the moment a huge scaffolding structure came crashing down on to a Chelmsford shopping parade.

Miraculously, no-one was injured, but passers-by said if it had been minutes later they would have been crushed.

The accident happened in Kings Road on Thursday when a lorry driver accidentally crashed into the scaffolding.

Scaffolding company LPS, based in Rainham, put up the structure on Thursday morning and then left, but at about 3.30pm it received an SOS call from the Mojlish Indian Takeaway.

Mojlish is on the end of a row of shops on the Melbourne estate road, with a side street next to it.

The scaffolding was put up against the Indian takeaway.

Next to Mojlish is a Chinese takeaway, and a delivery truck had gone down the side street to drop off goods.

But as the driver left to turn back on to Kings Road, he crashed into the scaffolding – and the whole thing came toppling down.

“I thought there was going to be a punch-up,” said witness Mike Osang, who lives nearby.

“The lorry driver gave his details to the man in the Indian takeaway, but he said part of the scaffolding was sticking out too far and into the side street.

“He said it was the scaffolding company’s fault.”

When asked about this, the owner of the scaffolding company, who was busy scrambling the structure back up, said: “Tell him to say that to my face.

“There’s nothing wrong with my scaffolding. He got into the side street all right, so why couldn’t he get out?

“It’s all the driver’s fault. It was really dangerous and could have hit someone.”

Witness Mike Osang, 29, added: “I am a regular at Mojlish and if I had arrived a little bit earlier I could have been injured or killed”.

Crowds gathered to watch three scaffolders frantically bolt up the structure and put it back in place.

“It’ll take us about two hours,” said one of them.

“Why did the driver run off so quickly if he hadn’t done anything wrong?”

 One man fell to his death and another was injured Monday afternoon when a work crew’s scaffolding collapsed at a waterfront condominium complex in downtown Charleston.

The men were working on windows at Laurens Place, beside the Charleston Maritime Center, when the metal scaffolding gave way about 4 p.m., said Charles Francis, police public information officer.

One man plunged to the ground and was pronounced dead at the scene, Francis said. The other fell into Charleston Harbor. He was rushed to Medical University Hospital for treatment, Francis said. The extent of his injuries could not be determined.

The Charleston County Coroner’s Office confirmed the death, but authorities did not release the name of the man or the company he worked for.

Laurens Place, on Wharfside Street, is between the Maritime Center and Union Pier, a tony complex with sweeping views of the harbor. The incident occurred at a section of condos with balconies facing out on the water, between two docks.

Witnesses said they saw at least three workers on the scaffolding shortly before it went down. The scaffolding was about 20 feet off the ground, and workers had set up an extension ladder on top that reached to the third floor, they said.

Craig Morris saw the setup as he set out on the Carolina Belle. “When I saw that I was like, ‘What are they thinking?’ That is so dangerous.”

When the boat returned, Morris saw the crumpled scaffolding and emergency workers surrounding the scene.

The scaffolding and extension ladder lay in pieces, stretching from a path beside the condos across a jumble of rocks leading to the water. The dead man’s body appeared to have landed on the path, just before the rocks.

Four co-workers of the men sat behind the yellow police tape, pacing and looking down at the ground as they waited to give their statements to authorities. They declined to comment when they finally left the area shortly before 6 p.m.

Authorities say one man fell to the concrete below and died. His name has not been released. The other man fell into the Cooper River and was taken to Medical University Hospital. His condition was not known.

Officers are investigating what caused the scaffolding to collapse.

Not only buildings have scaffold but also the lung.We human beings are so brilliant to invent the lung scaffolding of the lung enginnering.Even if  the science is so developed ,we should also pay a lot of attention to the health and the public health ,for example ,smoking should be forbidden for your family and the ones you love.

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have the potential to mature into virtually any type of cell and tissue type, but they require an appropriate environment and chemical signals to drive their differentiation into specific cell types and to form 3-dimensional tissue structures. Alternatives to available synthetic tissue matrices are needed to drive this technology forward and develop clinical applications for engineered lung tissue.

Joaquin Cortiella, MD, MPH, and colleagues from University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston), Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), Brown Medical School (Providence, RI), and Duke University (Durham, NC), describe the first attempt to make acellular rat lung and use it as a biological matrix for differentiating ESCs into lung tissue.

The authors present evidence of improved cell retention, repopulation of the matrix, and differentiation into the cell types present in healthy lung. They also report signs that the cells are organizing into the 3-D structures characteristic of complex tissues and are producing the chemical signals and growth factors that guide lung tissue function and development.

Cortiella and coauthors describe the process used to remove the cellular component of natural lung tissue and create a growth matrix for ESCs in the article, “Influence of Acellular Natural Lung Matrix on Murine Embryonic Stem Cell Differentiation and Tissue Formation.”

“Organ-specific extracellular matrices, properly prepared, are serving more and more as the appropriate structural scaffold for the recapitulation of a specific organ’s tissues. This turns out to be especially true in an organ such as the lung, whose parenchyma must have a structure that accommodates atmospheric gas transmission as well as vascular, lymphatic, and neural systems,” says Peter C. Johnson, MD, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Tissue Engineering and Vice President, Research and Development, Avery Dennison Medical Products.