Liveblogging The Productivity Doldrums, Part I

SUMMARY: I was feeling very unmotivated this morning, but couldn’t quite figure out why. I decided to write out what I was feeling and thinking to see if I could self-diagnose the issue while getting a free blog post out of it :-) The end of the post shifts more toward the organizing principles behind various types of tasks, and the realization that if I know how all these pieces fit together I will be a better self-manager. It means understanding my own energy management, mental state, and how each task affects the system. I’ll be posting followup parts today and probably tomorrow.

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Groundhog Day Resolution Review 8/8/2009: Being versus Doing

SUMMARY: It’s the 7th review day for my New Year’s Resolution system, which starts on Groundhog Day instead of January 1st. The salient observation this month is that there’s a difference between “just doing” and “just being”. By just being, I’ve attained a level of self-comfort that is helping me find my groove. 

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Things I Like About People

I didn't always like people. When I was a kid, I thought people were mostly sources of confusing advice and judgmental scowling, sowing confusion and guilt upon my understanding of the Universe. It's not so surprising that I went into computers; I found computers were a source of needed predictability (so long as you understood a few simple rules), and mastery of computational machinery offered that locus of control I wanted to have over the world of causal relationships. Eventually this mental discipline helped me to understand people. Most people, I came to see, were just as confused as I, though perhaps they were better at managing it. Assured that I wasn't alone in my cluelessness, I came to enjoy the company of people---tentatively at first, but now with a growing sense of wonder. The sheer diversity of people's experiences is mind-boggling.

These days, what's important to me are the connections I can make between my work and the lives of other individuals. Projects that benefit people only in the abstract don't feel real to me. I find that I need to see the faces of people reacting to my words and my creations to feel a sense of accomplishment. One of my working theories, which I'm starting to actively test, is that I need to be around people who have that same emphasis on making personal connections, finding meaning in the making of a personal impact on a daily basis. In the past, I'd just assumed that talent was the critical ingredient in partnership, but what I really seek is the creation of empowering culture in the context of creating meaning.

While I was at the gym today, I was looking at the strangers around me and it occurred to me that while I'd finally admitted that I like people, I didn't exactly know what that meant. And I know that I don't like everybody. In the past I'd qualified this by just saying I liked positive-minded, self-empowered, conscientious and kind people, but I am starting to think that this is an inadequate definition.

I thought I'd try to make a list of things I like about people to see where that goes.

People who Deal Well with Perplexing Moments

There are times when a person becomes momentary perplexed. Suddenly thrust outside the realm of the everyday, the moment of perplexity is forced on a person, who must confront new aspects of reality on-the-spot. This is one of those moments when character becomes most visible, and in that moment I can extrapolate a sample history of a person's character development from the age of 6 to the present day. Of course I'm probably wildly wrong, but it makes for an entertaining distraction. And over time, the impressions can build to a fairly accurate impression.

When faced with the unexpected, some people get mad. Some people freeze up. Some just try to deal with the anomaly as if it hadn't occurred, using the same patterns that have served them in the past. Others are conditioned to look to another authority for guidance, and many just let the moment slip by unchallenged. My favorite reactions, though, are from the people who dare to test their skill against the unknown with the best of humor, seizing the opportunity to have a little fun, learn something, or break the monotony. That's awesome.

The practice of Design can be seen as a methodical manufacturing of perplexing moments. First, the perplexing moment is defined as the design challenge. Next, as designers we attempt to rise above the confusion that the unexpected has brought upon us. We force ourselves to engage with the perplexing moment with the totality of our character and life experience, in search for that response that transcends the ordinary. What we create is powerful and new. I love being in that moment, especially when it's shared with people who practice a complementary form of mental jujitsu.

People With Routines

On the opposite end of the unexpected is the observance of daily routines, each with a predictable call and response to action. There's a restaurant in Fort Point Channel near the Financial District in Boston, the A-Street Diner, where I occasionally had lunch when I was working in the city. What amazed me about the place was the efficiency of the lunch-rush ordering line. The employees expected you to know what you wanted to order at what counter, and there was a kind of thrill I got from learning how to play my part in keeping the line moving. Conversely, I get a little nervous when I don't know what's supposed to happen in a procedure. Taking a bus in a new city, for example...do you need to have exact change? Is there a ticket? Do you pay first, or after? I don't know why this makes me nervous, or why I find such things so fascinating. Probably it's because I have a desire to just fit in.

There's a comfort in walking into my local Starbucks every day. It's not that I like the coffee or the food, which is unexceptional. However, I love the routine of interacting with the people behind the counter. They're familiar faces to me now, and the ritual of ordering something every day helps establish a bond that, bizarrely, is the foundation of my local community. I'm like an actor in a production of Small Town Commerce, and we each have our lines to deliver. It's a show. For example, my best friend Erin orders a drink every morning, the 5-Pump Non-Fat No-Whip Mocha Grande 2-Splenda-Stirred. It took a few months for me to master this order without blowing my lines and sounding like a noob. Sometimes we'd get a new person behind the counter, and the momentary look of panic would often lead to one of the veterans coming by the register for some quick on-the-job training in drink customization. Erin's drink is part of the history of this place now, in the minds of maybe two dozen people, and it makes this Starbucks feel like home.

People with a Past and Future

I like to find out where people come from, and where people are going. Not everyone has both a past and a future. Some people just are in the place that they are, for no reason in particular other than this is where they ended up. It's interesting still to ask them about the events that lead up to our shared geographic location, but such people sometimes have a sad marooned-at-sea look about their eyes that is a bit depressing. Their futures are nebulous. Conversely, some people only have a future, having not learned anything from their past. Their futures are a little scary to me, because they're not anchored. The futures these people describe are sometimes fantastical and sometimes pragmatic, but because they have no past it's hard to imagine how they'll get to the place they're describing. It's perhaps a sign of an imagination that was allowed to grow in an unruly and undisciplined fashion.

My favorite people are the ones who've made some sense of their past, and have set their eye on some distant landmark. They can tell you where they've been and what they thought of the experience; they're happy to save you some trouble if you happen to be headed in that direction. They can also tell you something about the place they think they're going, as best as they can reckon. They're excited and optimistic, and they're pleased as punch to tell you about it. I can spend hours with people like that.

I'm starting to think it isn't so much "people" that I like, but certain attitudes. Extrapolating from the three things I've listed about, apparently I like to face challenges together, participate in shared communities, and be on a journey that's going to go somewhere interesting.

There are at least two more elements--authenticity and heart--that I believe are underlying characteristics, but I'll reflect on that another day.

The Need for Nooks

I'm in Silicon Valley for work again, putting the finishing touches on a year-long museum interactive with my buddies at Inquirium. This is the 10th trip I've made out here for the project, and the monthly disruption of my routine has given me some insight into what I need to maintain my own peculiar sense of work-life balance.

First, there's focus. When I'm traveling I'm generally more focused on getting things done; the same applies when I'm away from home. The three aspects I've noticed on this trip have been:

1. REDUCTION IN OPPORTUNITY TO GOOF OFF

One reason I'm remarkably focused is that there's not that much to do. I didn't rent a car, and this time I haven't made an effort to contact other people in the area. The first few times I was out here I was meeting new people and getting acquainted with the San Jose / Campbell area, but by the 10th visit even the novelty of Fry's Electronics has worn off. I'm not feeling the same pull to get away that I do at home.

I found this very curious because once the novelty of a place has worn off, you'd think that I'd be looking for more opportunities to create something interesting. However, one critical difference is that I'm away from my local squad of friends, disconnected from the people that make my ocial context meaningful. Here in California, the readily-available context is work and hanging out with my cousin. Since I'm also working with my cousin, the context is entirely self-contained. We get along well and have similar but differently-grounded foundations in creativity, so it's a satisfying context to be part of. However, it's a context that I'm not in control of to the same extent that I am back home.

2. SELF-LIMITING SENSE OF ADVENTURE

Of course, If I were more adventurous I'd be getting on the BART and exploring the Bay Area. However, I've found that I really don't like exploring places by myself just to see what's there. Instead, I like knowing there's a clue or puzzle piece waiting out there for me; in other words, I tend to emphasize doing fieldwork over pure exploration. I want to solve mysteries and collect evidence first hand, connected the dots in ways that are non-obvious. I'm thinking I have to come back to California and spend a month here to do it right.

I think the reason that I feel on-hold out here is because I know I shouldn't be starting new mysteries. It's way too easy, way too fun, and way too distracting. I need to maintain the bleak programming mindset necessary for the type of work I'm doing, piling brick after logical brick on top of each other in a methodical and robustly-architected manner. So the limitations I'm putting on myself are not a sign of lameness, but are due to my need to limit new distractions. This is easier to do because I am also lacking the seasoned co-adventurers with whom I'd go exploring. If I were settling in the area the latter would be a priority, but I'm here for work. When I come back for that month of exploration, it will be an entirely different story.

3. BREAK IN CONTINUITY

Back home, I have several ongoing projects that all are based, in one way or another, on interests shared with my friends. Because friends are usually nearby--and I naturally like to spend time with them--I'm pulled toward shared adventures nearly every day. These are all going somewhere, and being able to tend to these projects is one of the great advantage of freelancing. When I'm on the road, however, these opportunities are no longer available, so there isn't as much of a reason for me to want to switch out of work mode. Work is, after all, rather interesting and represents its own continuity. So, when I'm on the road, work becomes the most accessible continuity train to develop. Admittedly, I spend a lot of time emailing people back home the first few days I'm on a trip, but they tend to dwindle off after the 3rd or 4th day as I readjust my focus to what's nearby, away from what I left at home.

...

Everything I've listed up to this point can be grouped under shared context and continuity of purpose and community. This is my number one priority. However, the number two priority is building up my resources so I can afford to spend more time creating that sense of purpose and community. In sundry terms, that means working on my website, clarifying and reorganizing what I've already written into more useful forms, and producing objects of utility for a market that shares my values.

Strictly speaking, this kind of work is largely independent production and doesn't require interaction with other people. In fact, it's work that is best done by myself, so I can adopt the "editor's mindset", the "designer mindset", and so on. There should be nothing stopping me from doing that, and yet I've found that being out here in California is very hard on me when it comes to following through with these activities. Instead, I sit and feel unsettled, not sure what to do. It just hit me that what I was missing was just a good place to sit, some corner where I can gather my thoughts and draw the right energies:

4. FINDING A CONVENIENT NOOK

A QUIET NOOK affords me the right blend of solitude and energy for whatever task I have at hand. This was not a problem for the programming work, as interaction with my cousin is the nook; he and I can talk face-to-face about what we're trying to do and it creates the necessary environment to be productive. For blogging, however, I realized that there just wasn't anywhere to sit in the house that wasn't subject to the whirlwind energies of his young children, with comfortable seating and lighting and spaces to put things. I had subconsciously been compensating for this by spending time at nearby coffee shops, an environment that provides abstract people energy with a measure of solitude. However, it just isn't quite the same as being truly comfortable; the quality of the thoughts I have at coffee shops tend to be more social than productive in the way I need. There is probably a special nook for every kind of activity I do, and I'm looking forward to finding those secret places that are lurking in plain sight.

Having identified this desire to have a nook, I have now escaped to a wooden bench in the front of the house, which is comfortingly close to humans I care about but still away from everyone. It is the right nook for writing this blog post. I can see the cars on the street outside drive by and feel that I'm part of the world, but I'm in a place that kind of feels like my own, just for an hour or so. I'm feeling more comfortable than I have in quite a few days, being able to sit here and type into my laptop.

Groundhog Day Resolutions 2008: Closing Out With Charlie Brown

Today is Veteran's Day, November 11, which also happens to be the last "official" day of Groundhog Day Resolutions Reviews 2008. At this point, the American High Holidays--Thanksgiving through New Years Day--loom over me. so I rest my side ambitions until February 2nd. The original idea behind Ground Hog Day resolutions is that on January 1st, the traditional time of making resolutions, I'm so tired from the holidays that I'm still catching up with everything I didn't finish last year; I need some time to chill and reflect. Besides, Ground Hog Day is my favorite holiday, and it is under-celebrated.

Fractal Patterns of Perceived Failure and Recovery

2008 was the second year I launched GHDRs, and I maintained the follow up review days for March, April, May, June, and July. It was a mixed run, largely one of disappointment masked by the power of positive thinking ;-)

After July, I decided to go on blogging hiatus due to an increased project load (largely mental, in retrospect), and suspended my GHDR Review Days at the same time. When I review the wistfully-optimistic first months of 2008, I find the following themes appearing:

• March: The acute need to focus, to attain mobility, and to battle the forces of loneliness.
• April: The recognition that I needed to be more specific to achieve goals. Also, the decision to reduce my material needs (a necessary aspect of mobility), and to commit to writing as a vocation, whatever that means.
• May: Why oh why do I lack motivation? Theorizing on internal and external sources of said motivation. Gah!
• June: Acceptance that there are certain "go-getter" attributes I lack, a decision to find alternate routes other than the "just do it" approach.
• July: Ground down, I rediscover part of my core, and am surprised to find what's there.

If this sounds familiar, it's probably because last week's Productivity Reboot repeats the entire cycle of fevered commitment - perceived failure - diagnosis - acceptance - return to core - re-dedication. If I were to look back at the 1200+ blog posts I've written over the past three years, I am pretty sure that I'd see the same cycle repeated, fractal-like, in everything I do. This I find fascinating, and at the same time it's kind of alarming because at first glance it seems that I'm not going anywhere. Yikes! Have I discovered my predestined pattern of doom?

Sparky to the Rescue

I flew to California last Sunday for a week of on-site work with Inquirium, which I look forward to for the shared working environment. While waiting for a change of plane at Chicago Midway, I happened upon Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis. Although I had enjoyed Peanuts as a child, I had never known much about the cartoonist Schulz himself and had mentally categorized him as "too popular to be interesting, coasting on past success". However, seeing the book reminded me of my buddy Brad, who in the early days of our acquaintance had been working hard to get into a cartoon syndicate, and I decided to pick up the book to gain some insight. What I gleaned from my reading was profound insight into my own nature, by gaining a reference point of understanding about the nature of ambition and self-doubt.

Charles M. Schulz, for all his success in life, was a man who seemingly kept himself from feeling actual happiness. He was a shy boy raised by emotionally-distant parents who demonstrated their love through duty, hiding their own insecurities behind thick walls of silent denial. Highly intelligent, talented but surrounded by people who couldn't imagine--and therefore couldn't emotionally support--the notion of cartooning for a living, he nevertheless was lucky enough to find himself in employ of a company that allowed him to mature his drawing as an unwitting means to express his own pantheon of insecurities; the book is liberally illustrated with strips that echo the goings-on of his life. Throughout his life, he insisted on thinking of himself as a regular guy from Minnesota who had done OK with a modicum of talent, though underneath the surface he was highly ambitious and competitive to the point of meanness. He held grudges against the people who he perceived to have bullied, slighted, or belittled him. When he was a child, his own doubts and insecurities were fed by people who he later realized were limited in their life perspective and experience, and despite his rise to massive success he just could not accept that he'd made it and was adored by millions. Although a gracious and generous person in spirit, he had a constant need for affirmation; without his cartoon, he said, "he would be dead." He died in 2000, and one of his last interviews regarding how he viewed his life achievements produced a statement that struck me rather well. Paraphrased: "I took the talent I had and did not waste it." Producing his comic strip was an intensely personal affair; he did not seek help or advice on his work, because in his mind it was the one thing that he did himself that provided affirmation that he was doing something right.

I can see a lot of parallels between myself and Schulz's conflicts about his desire for understanding, for affirmation, and being the best while being in conflict with his Midwestern values of being humble and unassuming. Instead of rationalizing them away, as I've been trying to do, Schulz actively appeared to embrace them, using his unhappiness to drive his muse. What's interesting too is that the biography makes a point of distinguishing unhappiness from depression. I still can't quite wrap my head around the distinction, but to be depressed I gather is to not be able to muster the energy to do anything, while unhappiness is something less debilitating. In my own case, I am feeling similar doubts about my direction, and I am also beset by desires to be the best at what I do for recognition by the world. I want a calling, and I don't want to fail. At the same time, I wonder if I am being immodest and prideful in a way that will damage my soul or, at the very least, bite me in my hypocritical ass: I want to be a good person, but I also want to be the best. And like Schulz, I want to the be the sole author of my creations, because this provides me with affirmation that I am capable of doing something right as well.

After reading the biography, I was struck by a few thoughts:

• Schulz, for all his insecurities, persevered through his unhappiness and consistently produced work day-in, and day-out. What drove him was an ideal of customer service he had absorbed from his father, a barber who meticulously found comfort in the daily routine of giving his customers individual attention. In time, Schulz worked it out and found success. My own belief that producing tangible things as a means to create opportunities and connections with people is similar; consistent production of items of value, as appraised by other people, is very important to me. Otherwise, how do people know what you're capable of?

• Schulz belated matured, growing out of his boyish ways as he took on responsibilities in WWII. He became a well-liked squad leader because of his intelligence, competence with weapons, and ability to listen to people who learned they could come to him. This is a model of leadership that I like, and it mirrors the sentiments I've been reading about in Seth Godin's Tribes (I have 3 copies of that book now, one for me, and two for loaning to people).

• If someone as massively successful as Charles Schulz could be deeply unhappy and beset by numerous demons, at least I was in good company. I lack the ability to hold a grudge for very long, and I'm not really that unhappy or depressed at all. But I am at times lonely and isolated, and seek affirmation and understanding. It would be great if I could find that affirmation in myself and be done with it, but there's something else missing. However, I don't want to be soooo dependent on external affirmation that I am a slave to it; reading Schulz's biography has put that scenario into perspective, and I want nothing to do with it. That is itself a self-strengthening realization.

• There is a commitment to excellence in Schulz's work, both artistically and in the pursuit of deeper truths. When he first started attempting syndication in the early 1950s, people tried to get him to steer his creations in more "popular" directions; his own mother suggested that he needed to draw sexier girls. But Sparky stuck to his guns, and when Peanuts (nee "Li'l Folks") debuted in the 1950s, his work was regarded as a kind of anomaly in comics of the time. His audience grew steadily, then explosively, over the next 25 years, and it is (I imagine) because his work wasn't made to appease the surface desires of a large audience, but because he constantly pursued personal truths in himself and in his observations of the times. His art was the means through which he strove to portray these truths as clearly as possible. For myself as a blogger and writer, I've struggled with the ideas of writing shorter, easier-to-digest, more digg-able, top-ten list style posts for the purpose of growing audience, but I don't. I'm well aware that I could write shorter and more concise articles, but there is something about the way that I write now that is truthful to myself; creating shorter articles that jump right to the point is a different product entirely, one that will come later. I am still very much in my formative years as a writer, deciding what truths matter to me, and learning to express them to unknown people far away. My best days are yet to come; this is the lesson I've learned from Schulz's biography. Artistically, I now have the sense of purpose that I need to keep doing what I'm doing.

What does this have to do with Ground Hog Resolutions? I think they've evolved into something else. I mentioned that Ground Hog's Day is one of my favorite holidays, and this is partly because of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a fantastical movie about self-realization and improvement. In the movie, Bill Murray's self-centered character moves from surface cynicism to something deeply truthful about himself and his needs. It's the continual pursuit of these personal truths that, I suspect, drive me. I am compelled to follow them. I have no idea what kind of "business case" I can make for this, but I am making a bet that if I continue to express these truths through my writing, design, and personal interactions, I'll be OK. And so, I can distill all my future Ground Hog Day Resolutions into a single Master Resolution that goes something like this:

Seek the truthful essence, and make it artfully visible so others can see it too.

So long as I do that every day, in some form, I'll be doing what I'm supposed to be doing, the equivalent of Sparky Schulz getting up every morning and producing his strip for 50 years.

Groundhogs, The Future, and Tanabata Too

It's 07/07, which is Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 5. This is one of the 10 days during the year when I review the progress of my resolutions. In 2007 , I did a fair job of keeping to task, but my zeal for process faltered this year. I've been all over the place, as you can see from my past posts on the subject. Last month's update was really just an admission that I didn't really like tracking my goals because I lacked real passion for it.

Today is the day when I reset my expectations.

From Goals to Business Outline

Here are the general goals I'd set this year. I've crossed out the ones that I've either achieved or no longer need:

• Work based on my vocation, so it's work that sustains me in spirit, mind and body.
• Figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator, because I like it.
• Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff
• Sell a Product
• Build Sustainable Social Networks ... done!
• Reduce my needs. If I can live cheaper, then I need less money, and can work less ... maybe I should focus on making MORE money instead :-)

On review, the first three items on this list are really the same thing: how to make a living doing something I love. My challenge for the past two years has been to figure out exactly what that means. The criteria for making that living is, functionally speaking:

• It's gotta be energizing, not draining.
• It's gotta be something that people can use in their daily life, and therefore be worth paying for.
• It's gotta be easy for me to do, yet relatively unique in the marketplace to maintain a leading position.
• It's gotta be appealing to people that I find appealing.

Then I have some additional criteria for satisfying work:

• It's gotta be functional and high-quality.
• It's gotta have my voice; in other words, I represent myself in plain english.
• It's gotta include your voice. If I don't hear your story, I will not be motivated to help you build you dream.
• It's gotta be bullshit-free. I reserve the right to define this in any way I see fit, within reason of course.

The rudiments of a business model came to me as I was visiting the studio of Sid Ceasar, a local photographer that is starting a local scooter club. I was quite enchanted with his studio, filled as it was with toys, posters, and other cultural artifacts that suggested an eclectic mind. Sid's studio told me the story of who he was and where he was going, and when it came time to describe what I did for a living this came out:

A the heart of everything I do, I like to share stories and experiences. All my media skills are employed in service to that.

Now, I've written about this thought before, but in the environmental context of a friend's working studio the words helped evoke a different shape. The follow-up epiphany was that my design business really aspires to the following:

I help people create stories they can live by.

This captures a lot of different impulses I have: design, storytelling, sharing experiences, and productivity. And most importantly, I realized that there was a tiny voice inside of me that was trying to say something.

Shedding the Armor

So what do I mean by "tiny voice"? Last year I posted about acting coach Susan Barton's approach to creating a "walking, talking human being" for her Oscar-award winning clients. There are three parts:

• The first is the need that is deeply planted in you by the time you're around 5 years old.
• The second is the persona you create to cover-up or protect that need.
• The third is the tragic flaw, which arises when there is conflict between the need and the persona. That's when things get interesting.

The little voice is that need, trying to express itself. As a little boy, I was pretty happy but tended toward feeling like an outsider. I spoke English and only English, and going to the Taiwanese Church where EVERYBODY EXCEPT ME spoke Taiwanese made me feel worse than stupid. It got worse when our family moved to Taiwan; again, although I went to an American/International school and could speak English every day, culturally and socially the rest of the island was a mysterious and frightening place. My need for understanding had a second dimension as well: I craved reliable and definitive references for my interests, and was often let down or put down by people who had "mastered" the subjects through some means I didn't follow. I came to the conclusion that I was probably just dumb.

To cope with the feeling of dumbness, I focused on things I liked doing: writing essays, drawing spaceships, and debugging computer programs. It was upon these competencies that I built my persona. Writing I could always do, so I went into Computer Engineering and generally did well. I went on to Art School for computer graphics design, got into the video game industry, burned out, and ended up doing Internet stuff before discovering blogging. Over this period of time, I developed a pretty sophisticated and comprehensive set of methodologies that I have come to rely on, both professionally and personally. It is my suit of armor, girded when the going gets tough.

Recently, I came to wonder if that suit of armor had become a substitute for interaction, masking something else very deep inside of me. I realized that it was "the need" again, making sad noises and emanating mild terror. These feelings had been there for so long that I no longer heard them; they were just part of my automatic reaction to the world. The armor, effective as it was with dealing with the nastiness of the world, had muffled it.

I was scared to look, visions of The Tell-Tale Heart coming to mind. What if I didn't like what I saw. But I had to look. Defining and facing your fears is just one of those things that you have to do.

I lay down on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. Then I closed my eyes and quieted every rational and analytical thought that was going through my mind. After a few minutes of this, I felt the desire to bounce around in the world without fear. The manifestation of this desire wasn't myself as a little boy. Instead, I envisioned a little bird, like the sparrows I see every morning at Starbucks. These birds had made an impression on me because they are aggressive, bold, and industrious in a cute sort of way. Now I was seeing them wrapped up and muffled by my persona, and they're clambering to get out to start talking to people without apology.

"Whoa", I breathed to myself, "I am going freakin' nuts. I should keep this to myself."

I came to the conclusion that these little birds actually were tough enough to face the world despite their small size. In other words, I didn't need to protect these innermost desires from the nasty world. They can face it. If the world gets REALLY nasty, I can strap on my armor of rational objectivity then. The armor, however, is not me. I have to lead with the little birds, which means I have to lead with what is important to me in my heart. I suspect this is one of the keys to following my bliss.

In the days following this epiphany, I've found that I've relaxed a lot more when dealing with people, and for the first time don't have trouble making eye contact. I don't even think about it anymore, as the little birds bustling inside of me will do what they want. Before, I would rationalize my behavior: "What am I saying when I look at someone? What will they think? Will I offend them?" These are old behavioral patterns that are obsolete. Now, I know when I look that I'm just looking and taking in those people in the environment that I find interesting, no big deal.

Next Month's Concrete Goals

For the coming month, I really want to work on the whole idea of a story-based design business that employs my particular powers of observation and analysis. I could write this up as a brief, but I think the form it will take is similar to my Make Your Own Museum approach on my public wiki. I think it will feel more "live". It will be fun to define what this "agency" would be like in my wildest dreams. Hint: there would be a professional kitchen :-)

Secondly, I want to start blogging more regularly. I've been letting my other project sap the energy out of me in this regard, and it's important to me to maintain momentum here because this is my main business. Shorter posts, with one idea per post, might do the trick. I'm thinking a 3-day a week schedule; we'll check on this on August 8.

Thirdly, I want to complete my online dating profile by incorporating some of the suggestions I'd received. Yes, it will be shorter, and I will keep in mind that you really just need 3 or so intriguing things listed. I'm not out to sell my entire being on the first read (which is what I was doing). I'm just trying to be interesting enough for a date...thanks for that tip, everyone :-)

Making Wishes

July 7 happens to be a Japanese holiday called Tanabata, a day when you write down your wishes on paper streamers and hang them from bamboo trees. I'm planning on deploying these wishes as goals for the rest of the year.

• Let the world directly touch my inner self (i.e. those birds) instead of impacting on the armor. And vice versa: let the inner self lead, not follow, the armor.
• Let my community grow and flourish.
• Have the guts to approach some women and ask them out.
• Stay real.
• Stay in motion.

Writers Block? Me?

I've never really had a problem sitting down and spewing out a bunch of words. My process is pretty simple:

• Start somewhere, see where it goes, then try to make some sense of it in a closing paragraph or statement.
• If I have the energy, proof read and tweak the text. Otherwise, let 'er loose!
• Hope no one notices that I'm a hack ;-)

I think think the process works for me because I tend to present in terms of conversational narrative. I write as if I'm talking to my friends, and I am constantly thinking of the best way to sequence a bit of information so it can be comprehended correctly. This actually doesn't play as well in real-life; in the process of establishing the context, iterating the supporting facts, and drawing my brilliant conclusion, attention spans tend to wander. This is good, because it forces me to try to be more visceral and succinct.

But I digress.

>> CONTINUE READING

To Running Silent or Not

I'm finding I have to hunker down and seriously reduce the number of activities I'm engaging in to push past an important milestone, so my posting frequency will be (if you haven't already noticed) drastically reduced. I was feeling very guilty about this, until I thought to myself that there was no reason to. My life is my own, right?

Well, not really. My life is now intertwined with dozens of other lives, and participating in the blogosphere has been very positive. I'm loathe to let go of it even for a short spell to again don the black clothes of the itinerant freelance codeslinger, but it's what I need to do. I call it "hermit mode", and last year I recognized that it was a kind of luxury to be able to shut out the world and focus exclusively on just a few things. As more of my friends start families, I see how their priorities change and how their schedules shift with the need to juggle many more balls.

I've never been particularly good at juggling, or perhaps more accurately I've never liked feeling the stress and fear of dropping the ball. My coping mechanism has been to run silent and deep, like a nuclear submarine on patrol hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, alone with my work and shut out from the world. It's during these times that I lose contact with the natural day, staying up later and later until I'm going to sleep at the crack dawn and waking up at noon. There's just a couple of balls to juggle then, and there's few distractions. It's actually not so bad a life, if you have a few 24-hour supermarkets near you, and with the Internet you're never completely isolated. Now that I think about it, since adopting the early waking schedule about a year ago (yes, I'm still doing it) I've lost touch with quite a few people that I used to talk to regularly in the wee hours of the morning, fellow hermits tapping greetings across the slumbering Internet.

I'm faced with a decision: I could manage my time better by applying any number of techniques I've used in the past, though frankly I don't really want to do it. I'm tired. Or I could shut out the world and pour all my attention into the tasks that I want to get done.

• The advantage of managing my time is that it's more sustainable---if I accept that what I get done every day is going to be incremental and feel very small. I personally have little patience for incremental change, which is why I probably suck at it. The one exception to this is when I am actually observing incremental change in PEOPLE...that fascinates me, because each small change in a person's behavior can indicate something much larger. I guess I am naturally curious about what makes people tick, not the number of ticks I can count.

• The advantage of shutting out the world is that it is a more exciting commitment to action; kind of an adventure, really. I like getting ready for adventures, strategically planning my moves, getting everything ready for the big push. The problem is that it is an expensive contextual switch, on the order of planning a vacation without the relaxation, and it always burns me out at the end. This may, however, be the natural way I work by myself. It is a recurring pattern.

My gut reaction is that I should avoid going into hermit mode, but instead triage what I am focusing on. Blogging is going to have to go on the sideline for a bit, because there is a lot of other stuff that I need to get done for both the business and for my projects.

I'm also considering my energy levels. Last week I tracked my hours using my excel timesheet and added two additional fields: energy level and what I ate. I had the feeling that I wasn't doing the right work at peak times, so I wanted to see if there were any patterns at all to my day. I discovered that in the morning, after going to the gym, I was at peak alertness. I checked my email afterwards and followed up with people, and found that after a couple of hours of this my energy levels were again drained. Surprisingly, activities like washing the dishes seemed to recover some of that energy. What I ate didn't seem to make as much of a difference as I thought, though the quantity might still have something to do with it (overly full = sleepy).

My tentative conclusions:

• I am getting eyestrain from looking at the screen, and this is making me dizzy. I can go maybe a couple of hours before the slight headache starts distracting me. I just ordered a larger monitor to alleviate this, hopefully it will get here tomorrow.

• I need to pace my eating so it's smaller amounts, more frequently. I hear this advice a lot from people who are optimizing their metabolism, and it's high time I did the same. This is a whole new kind of process I will need to learn. Also, I should be drinking a lot more water. Remembering to do this in the winter time is more difficult, for some reason.

• I need to shift the priority from communication to project, which is a reversal of my current values. I like to read email and respond to it, and I like chatting with people to see what they're up to. For the past half year I've been pretty bad at replying to email in a timely manner because I've been busy with more projects, and I've felt guilty and inadequate. I will have to face up to the fact that I don't have the bandwidth to spend 4 hours a day just writing back to people and exploring interesting opportunities. The "golden time" right after my workout should be devoted to project work, no exceptions. Email will have to wait to the end of the day, along with blogging. When I was responding to email, it was right after my workout. I'm still going to get eyestrain and dizziness after a few hours of staring at the computer screen (assuming the new larger one doesn't alleviate this), but knowing this I can at least make sure my best hours are devoted to project work.

I don't know how this will work out, and I've already frittered away some prime "work time" by writing this post instead of doing project work, but at least I am laying the groundwork for future productivity this week.

In other news, the initial wave of people who have pre-ordered Emergent Task Planner Pads has dwindled, and the remaining people who haven't yet ordered either have decided not to or have non-functioning email addresses. I am now going to start the process of collecting the names of people who have expressed interest in leftovers. I also need to figure out a better way of doing order fulfillment, as PayPal's initially-promising merchant tools are cumbersome and painful to use. The biggest obstacle to just opening up a store is the ability to track inventory levels; PayPal does not offer this, and I do not want to accept money when I do not have product in stock. Someone must make a combined ordering, payment receiving, inventory-counting e-commerce front end with integrated postage and packing slip management. Eventually I will probably go with Amazon Fulfillment, but for now I want to continue to ship myself as I work out the best way to package these boxes. Until that time, there are so many shopping cart options out there that it's going to take days to research them all. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Getting Focused 03: Certainty and Survival

If you've been following along with part 1 and part 2, you'll know that I've been frustrated with my lackadaisical progress on various personal projects. It's ironic since I have all these productivity forms that are supposed to help. Even more ironic, over the past year I've really learned the value of an hour, which makes me even more sensitive about the time I fritter away sitting on the couch, immobile and uninspired. If only I was more focused, I find muttering, like, uh, Jesus, John Wayne, or Oprah...then maybe I'd be further along in my plans.

As I am a world class navel gazer, I attempted to figure out what the heck was wrong with me in my first post. Essentially, I had to face up to two humbling character traits: I'm easily bored and I have a high activation energy threshold, which means that I respond best to very interactive and dynamic problem-solving situations, otherwise I need a lot of convincing that I will receive a huge return on my time investment. Otherwise, my butt stays firmly in "Park". In the second post, I realized that there was an additional issue: I have no idea what being "focused" actually felt like, or even how to do it. Sure, I could scrunch up my face like Hiro Nakamura and act like I was focused, but internally I didn't have a clue what that really meant. I lacked a methodology.

MEDITATING MY WAY TO MY DEMONS

OK, I have accepted that I'm an easily-distracted, lazy, and scatter-brained person by nature, so I can breathe easy and start rebuilding my focusing mechanism from scratch with these constraints in mind. My notion of focus is primarily based on observation: people who are focused seem to be drawn into their activity 100%, every quanta of energy and vector of motion channeled toward producing a purposeful result. The logical conclusion, taking my character traits into account, is this:

By eliminating unnecessary thoughts and external distractions, one's ability to focus should be enhanced.

There are two ways to approach this:

• One can remove those distractions from the environment, sure...
• But the ideal way is to learn how to ignore the environment and act only on those tasks that need doing.

A lot of the tools I've designed to date have been based on removing distractions by focusing the attention on activity-anchoring pieces of paper. Learning to ignore distractions is an entirely new trick. This suggests a mental approach, perhaps something like meditation.

The only time I've tried meditating was in high school, when I was taking "Theory of Knowledge" from our genial-yet-mysterious professor Dr. Livingston Merchant. On his direction, the class settled down as each of us tried a meditation technique to quiet our minds. I became aware of the background sounds of the classroom, like the squeaks of chairs as people shifted their weight from buttock to buttock and the sound of the 20 year-old air conditioners straining in the subtropical heat. I became cognizant of the whirring pulse of the blood vessels in my ear, thumping out the long minutes of our session. Then someone (and it is possible that it was me) made some kind of whuffling sound with their nose and I just busted out laughing loud and uncontrollably. I fled the room, choking and gasping, followed closely by two or three other students who had also exploded with mirth, and we stood in the stairwell laughing uncontrollably for what must have been 10 minutes, gasping for air, not able to talk, just LAUGHING until we thought we would die from it. Then we went back into the room, sheepishly, and miraculously did not get in any kind of trouble. I have not attempted to meditate since that incident...until a few days ago.

I decided to "wing it", and sat in the carpeted stairwell of my downstairs home office. I cleared my head any immediate deadlines and expectations, giving myself permission to just sit alone with my thoughts. They entered my head like a swarm of mellow bees, buzzing and swirling around in my head, and my mind touching lightly on each one for the briefest of moments. I thought about all the things I needed to do for the pre-printed Emergent Task Planner forms, which were awaiting my writeup of how they work and a mail-merge operation to inform everyone how much they cost and how to pay for them (we're so close...I'm the bottleneck right now). I thought about the giant conversion process I needed to make for my blog, converting from WordPress to Expression Engine so I could do a lot more interesting things with my content (and what a pain in the butt that is going to be). I thought of the dozens of interesting people I had made contact with recently, and needed to contact again (I am feeling very behind and disorganized in maintaining these dozens of new relations). I thought of the big projects that were coming, of software I wanted to develop, and of new opportunities that are just within my grasp if I just took the time to write a series of articles or pull a book together. My mind held each thought warmly, and after a few minutes of this I felt I had reached a kind of peaceful mental equilibrium. So I asked myself a question, quietly:

what is the pattern I'm seeing?

To my great surprise, an answer came back immediately:

YOU ARE NOT CERTAIN ABOUT ANY OF THESE THINGS. THEY MEAN NOTHING TO YOU, AND WORTHLESS.

I was shocked. I examined all the thoughts again, holding each one against the "certainty" metric. I discovered that though each and every one of those great thoughts were valuable and full of potential, but the only thing I knew for sure what that they would not make me happy implicitly. And therefore, none of them seemed particularly worth doing; my "high activation energy threshold" problem was expressing itself yet again. And even worse: I had bummed myself out.

It's important to make a distinction here: I am using "certainty" here in the emotional, not rational sense. I am fully aware that by following through on all these ideas I have will lead to greater opportunity and achievement. That's very rational. However, I am not certain that these things will make me happy. I think they might, but having been in this position many times before ("if only I had a...") I also know that this outcome is about as certain as betting on the weather.

CLARITY AND CERTAINTY

The kind of certainty I'm talking about is the kind that anchors us individually, the kind that takes worries away from us. I also suspect that certainty plays a big role in the kind of focus I'm craving. There are two kinds of focus that come to mind:

• Focus that Comes from Certainty -- When you are certain that something is worthwhile, it's a lot easier to do. Following through with that certainty is all that you need to focus; if you have any doubt at all, or lack faith, then your focus is doomed to waver and be tested. It occurs to me that this kind of certainty is a necessary component for following your bliss; in more mainstream terms, it's that one thing that puts everything into perspective; everything falls into place after that. I think this is a kind of focus that comes from within.

• Focus that Comes from Danger -- The other kind of focus arises when your survival is at stake. It's the boss breathing down your neck, or that big deadline, or the competitive thrill of crushing your opponents. It's feeling that you've got skin in the game, that the lives of others are in your hands, or that you don't want to let someone down. This is an entirely different mechanism, I think, from that which drives "focus from within". What we've got here is something that's fueled by adrenaline and competition.

If we were to take an inventory of other primal emotions, we could probably come up with a few more kinds of focus. The one that I am really craving, however, is certainty: a form of acceptance, and perhaps really a declaration of faith. The feeling of certainty underlies our feeling of home, security, love, commitment, and calling. This is the kind of certainty I'm looking for.

MAKING THE CHOICE

From the above, I am theorizing that my focus should come from certainty: if I can be certain about anything and really believe it, then focus should come a bit more naturally. There are many ways to game the system to extract "good reasons" for doing something (though I don't find very motivating by themselves):

• I can be certain about doing work because I know it is the right thing to do.
• I can be certain that I want to do good work for someone, because this is one of my principles.
• I can be certain that while I don't know everything, I know that I can find my way through.
• I can be certain that doing anything at all is worthwhile.

More powerful is making the commitment to myself, so that I am acting on my own behalf to become the kind of person I can believe in:

• I am certain that creating anything at all makes the world a better place.
• I am certain that putting myself as much as I can into the work I do helps the world connect with me.
• I am certain that by continuing to push myself to improve, I am putting myself in the position of making the world a better place for the people who are important to me.
• I am certain that I am the sum of my positive influences, not the sum of my failures
• I am certain that I am my own metric for what works for me.
• I am certain that I just have to pitch in where I can, and keep moving as I must.

I AM certain that these statements reflect what is important to me as a person and as a friend, and when I cast all my prior thoughts and activities in this context, By following through on these statements, I build the foundation of my own certainty. I think this is one of the missing connections I was looking for.

Generalizing the process, by itemizing what you are certain about is useful---presuming you can make that list in the first place---for establishing your own set of "is it worthwhile" criteria. In other words, if you are in that place where you're not certain about any of your goals, connecting them to something you believe in can help forge that sense of purpose. You are then playing a role in fulfilling something greater than your To Do list. If you can't do that, you probably just aren't "that into it" in the first place. Mind you that I am talking about Focus that arises from Certainty, not from Survival.

WHAT ABOUT EXECUTION?

Being certain about something doesn't guarantee that you'll get off your ass; I think it's just the compass by which one can align the subconscious mind with conscious intention. Getting the ball rolling, as I discovered today, may require more extreme measures. Sometimes the brain isn't all it's cracked up to be, you know...but that's a story for tomorrow.

Getting Focused 02

A few days ago I was feeling grouchy about not being that productive, and wrote about two personal quirks that may have something to do with it:

• I have a high activation threshold for starting tasks. That is, it takes quite a lot of energy to actually get my butt moving. I seem to have the expectation that anything I do must meet a minimum level of return approaching 2x. I think of this as the two-fer (as in "two fer one"); if I can think of two or more things that will happen as the result of my action, I'm more likely to do it. The other form of activation energy comes from people; if I'm working with a good partner or working to a deadline for someone else, that gives me the energy to continuously create.

• I am very impatient when it comes to waiting for results. I like to see results right away. If I can't see results, I want to at least see something happening that is immediately useful to me. For many drawn out technical projects, I need to ensure that I have the necessary incoming people energy to stay motivated. I need to see things happening, or I lose interest.

So here's the theory: for me to get focused, I need to take those two traits---high activation threshold and impatience---into account. To deal with my high activation threshold, I need to have people to work with and choose interesting projects with multiple applications.

Unfortunately, the work I have to do right now (which includes such exciting things like paying bills and cleaning my bedroom) have no such payoff implicit in them. There are ways around this, of course. I could make a game out of it. I could promise someone I'll do them. Or I could actually figure out what focus is and do that.

How does one focus, anyway?

It occurs to me that while I understand the concept of focus, I have never really practiced it like I knew what I was doing. If I were a movie director, I'd know how I'd depict focus: steely eyes, intense yet detached, coolly fixated on the task at hand with dramatic tick-tock musical undertones. However, drama is no replacement for the real thing.

I've been reflecting a lot on how my ability to do certain things has been shaped by subconscious observation and passive experience. For example, I never learned directly how to socialize in large groups when I was a kid, and was intensely shy. For a long time I thought this was because I was just introverted by nature, but as I've learned to put together my own socializing methodology a competing theory has come to mind: I just never saw anyone I know do it in a language I understood. In other words, I never had a clear mental picture of what great socializing was. Likewise, I don't think I have a role model for focused action.

So I really have no idea how people are focused, though I understand plenty of theory about what it is. There's a big difference between the "being" and the "what" of something. Being, in my mind, is the integration of the principle into living action. The "what" is merely identification and categorization: essentially, it is labeling. Labeling by itself isn't very useful. I remember seeing a CEO-type person lead a meeting once to figure out how to raise revenue targets. His solution was quite logical: revenue comes from sales. Therefore, we need more sales. Ergo, we need to hire more sales people. Problem solved...except it wasn't. This act of executive leadership identified a "what" without the underlying methodology that would create the what in a meaningful way. If you don't understand sales from the one-to-one perspective and integrate that with accounting practices, you are pretty much just leading your people bravely into nests of machine guns.

There are plenty of people who will tell me what to do to be focused, and that's all well and good. But I need to discover what it means to "be" focused in addition to having the mechanics. I shall reflect upon that today.