Viewing Category: PickleJar
I've been working on getting to a regular sleep schedule so I wake up early and go for a healthy walk. I've done it for five days now, and am finding it actually is a good way to get the blood flowing in the morning, just like S. said it would. Except in my case, it's more like 10 or 11AM...I'm still not hitting that sweet spot of 6:30AM.
Anyway, the morning walk can be a bit boring. The first day, I focused on the act of walking, feeling where all the muscles were, what they were doing, posture, etc. A lot to concentrate on. I found myself wondering if I should get one of those portable headset radios so I could at least listen to NPR. As I was thinking about this I lost my concentration a bit and stumbled, so I refocused on stepping. Step step step step. Just to mix it up I did a double-step, kind of a funky down-beat, and I imagined some horns playing in time. Which gave me this idea:
MARCHING PODCASTS
Walk to the beat of your own theme music! Fun!
I enjoy the combination of music, thought and activity:
- That episode of Family Guy where Peter wishes for his own "theme music". It plays constantly when he's doing things, in perfect time. It's awesome (and hillarious)
- Ally McBeal's therapist tells her to pick a theme song, and play it in her head at opportune moments. John Cage had his Barry White moments and tells Fish to "listen for the bells".
- In live music, I love it when the singer is introducing the other band members. The bass player and the drummer maintain a nasty beat, the singer is calling out everyone's name and they're groovin' and jammin' along before launching into the final number.
- On a similar note, there are great intros...when the MC announces that James Brown is coming out on stage, he's got a great rhythmic way of saying it. Not quite rap. Not quite spoken word. It's just great. The beginning of Prince's Let's Go Crazy has a similar vibe.
- Marching drills, like they show in movies like Full Metal Jacket, maintain the cadence, and just sound cool. I dig the call-and-response format too, like in Gospel music.
- Games like Dance Dance Revolution tells you to do cool things, via the arrows, during the course of a round of play. When you master it, it's awesome and fun.
Combining all these together into a 30-minute workout, with great original music suitable to the mood and a great voice person to call things out...I think that could be cool. You'd want a different one every week though, hence podcasting.
Of course, I'm pretty sure that existing workout tapes already take this approach, and have since the 1980s! But mine would be so much cooler :-)
I'm sometimes distracted by too many project ideas. When the ideas pile up, my productivity sinks because I keep thinking about them, and multitasking slows me down. To keep focused, I evolved a mind trick called The Pickle Jar that, despite its hokey name, actually works for me. It got me through my thesis, when writing was the last thing I felt like doing.
The Pickle Jar is an actual glass jar that once held pickles. Next to it is a square pad of paper, about 4 inches on the side. To get unrelated thoughts out of my mind, I write down a brief synopsis down, fold it twice, and put it into the Jar.
The physical act of writing down, folding, and then "pickling" the idea for later consumption is weirdly cathartic. Since I'm no longer in danger of forgetting the thought, I can relax. The act of formulating on paper has also satisfied the urge to follow up on it. The size of the paper also prevents you from writing too much...there's just enough room to get the essence of the idea down.
The best part: You can see that you've got the ideas queued up, but it's hard to retrieve them. They're in a jar! Getting at the idea entails trying to stick your hand in the jar (which shouldn't fit, if you've chosen your glassware wisely), or dumping them out in a mess and unfolding all of them. It's just inconvenient enough that I tend not to look unless I really am in the mood. The use is similar to that of a piggy bank, in that it encourages easy deposit but prevents casual withdrawal. So you tend to deposit and get on with your life, which in my case is getting back to #&!@*! work.
One side effect of the Jar... after pickling, some of those ideas don't really seem that interesting anymore, so I end up tossing most of them.
Sadly, my official Pickle Jar was destroyed or lost during my last move, so I'm going to try using WordPress as the idea containment system. I suspect it might not work, but I'm curious to see if the physical act of pickling is as important as I thought.
(Update: I repurposed a canning jar as the new Physical Pickle Jar. See the picture!)
Related to the pickle jar is my Queue of Inquiry. After I lost my real pickle jar, I used to keep both project ideas and questions in a journal named "ideabox" on my PC, with convenient shortcuts scattered on my desktop and quick-access toolbars. The big idea was that I'd be able to look back at it someday and see what general fields of inquiry I kept coming back to, and this would be a Good Thing.
I'm finding that WordPress is a good system to use to keep track of stuff I'm thinking, so I'm going to try to use it to track the Inquiry Queue. The ideas in the queue tend to migrate into the pickle jar, or blossom full-blown into projects.
When hunting down good food, people follow the master chefs, not the owners. Can the same logic apply to technology leaders and teams? Perhaps headhunters and investors know how to find out who's hot. The trick may be recognizing who the standouts are in their respective area: leadership, execution, and creating product. [10.09.2004]
Is it possible to make turkey stuffing out of twinkies? There is precedent for sweet stuffing out of sweet potatoes and corn bread. [10.07.2004]
How do banks make money, and what's the most profitable? Am I getting screwed? [09.21.2004]
Personality Type testing has a weakness in that it doesn't establish any kind of context. I wonder what kind of work there has been in categorizing experience itself. Emmanuel Kant has 12 categories of experience, so this might be a good place to start. [10.03.2004]
