The Air Prayer Hack

Lately, I've been having a lot of conversations with my friends of a spiritual nature, and today experienced an epiphany that combines my two current preoccupations: improving focus and maintaining connections with people:

1. Angela, my music teacher, and I have been having some excellent discussions about Christianity and the nature of love with respect to the teachings of Jesus. We both agree that love is a vast and inclusive feeling. This is what "being connected" really is.

2. I have started making up rituals to get me focused in the morning, and this has led to an awareness of long-standing meditative practices. Breath control is at the root of many disciplines, I've realized.

3. Ashish had bought me that book I mentioned the other day, The Four Agreements, which has a prayer in the back of the book that equates the feeling of love with breathing:

   Focus your attention on your lungs, as if only your lungs exist. Feel the pleasure when your lungs expand to fulfill the biggest need of the human body--to breathe.

   Take a deep breath and feel the air as it fills your lungs. Feel how the air is nothing but love. Notice the connection between the air and the lungs, a connection of love. Expand your lungs with air until your body has the need to expel that air. And then exhale, and feel the pleasure again. Because when we fulfill any need of the human body, it gives us pleasure. To breath gives us much pleasure. Just to breath is enough for us to always be happy, to enjoy life. Just to be alive is enough. Feel the pleasure to be alive, the pleasure of the feeling of love...

I gave this a try, and found that mindful breathing is indeed pleasurable. As I reflected upon the feeling of being alive and healthy, I breathed deeply and felt thankful to the powers that be for that moment. I was actually in the moment, not thinking about lunch or work or whether I should ditch my old notebook for the shiny new MacBook Pro 17. To breath is the fundamental human need, primal and immediate. Not only is it a calming feeling, breathing is highly portable. I can bring this sense of peace with me wherever I grow, so long as I remember to be mindful.

When I was a kid, our family always said Grace over dinner. Our prayer was the old standard: God is great, God is good. Let us thank Him for this food. Amen. As I grew older, the saying of Grace turned toward the silent bowing of heads, excepting special holiday occasions when the most wizened / least starving of us would launch into a meandering monologue of thankfulness. So we haven't used the "God is great, God is good" prayer in quite some time, perhaps because it seems a little inappropriate to me as an adult. This is because I say it the same way I did when I was 9 years old, using a sing-song hop-scotch delivery that really tries to make the almost-rhyme between "good" and "food" work. I enjoy the playfulness, but as an adult I really can't get away with it anymore and be sincere.

But what if I prayed actively saying anything at all? It occurred to me that I could just pray with air. That is, through mindful breathing. I called it The Air Prayer, and it goes like this:

1. Take a normal breath, deliberately.
2. Take a longer, slower breath, savoring the sensation of the air entering your lungs.
3. Take a deep lazy breath, hold it for a pleasurably long while, and then exhale slowly.
4. Say "Amen".

It combines meditative breathing with the feeling of love and life that comes from it, presuming that you don't have lung problems. Call it love, call it life, call it a meditative mind trick: it was the most basic affirming prayer I've made in quite some time. When I was feeling stressed today, I found that I was always just a couple breaths away from completing the prayer; I just stretched the next breath out and uttered an Amen of thanks for being alive.

And so, I thought I would share. Enjoy!

That New Job Smell

A friend of mine has to get up early to head to work everyday, and makes a habit of stopping at a local place to get breakfast at 7AM to ease into the day. This sounded very interesting to me.

As a freelancer with tendencies to stay up late, my daily working hours tend to fluctuate with the particular mix of projects I have going on. As a result, I'm always constantly fighting my sleeping rhythm to keep some semblance of normal waking hours. Complicating my working rhythm is the ongoing effort to be more social, meeting friends at normal times after work. The net result is that I'm almost always tired during the day, which affects productivity and keeps me up late. I also like seeing the sun, however briefly, for at least part of the day. The net result: I don't really feel good about my working schedule, because doesn't synch my social life, sleep cycle, and working energy in a productive manner.

So, on Monday I'm going to start a two week rhythm-establishing experiment. That is, I'm going to:

• Wake up every day at 630AM
• exercise (that's new, too)
• shower
• head out to the same place every morning to grab a cheap cup of coffee
• Review the day's work to be done, and compare to the previous day's progress
• Map out the course of the day, with some immediate tasks (probably using the Emergent Task Timer)
• Head home, and do a 4-hour work block
• Eat lunch
• Do a second 4-hour work block
• Eat dinner
• In bed by 1030PM

The theory is that since not having a daily schedule (my 2006 experiment) didn't quite yield the results I wanted, training my body to be awake at predictable times might be the way to maximize my productive juices. Also, I've been playing this game called Harvest Moon, which is a farming role-playing game for various console gaming systems. Every day my in-game alter-ego has to wake up at 6AM, hoe, seed, water, and harvest a variety of crops throughout the year for profit. On top of that, there are festivals to attend, search mines for treasure, fish, and make various farm improvements. You can raise chickens, sheep, cows, train your dog to fetch balls, so they can win prizes that impress various woo-able girls. It's a lot of work; in fact, there's no way you can do it all in a single game "day" because your character becomes fatigued and will pass out. As I played the game I got the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that I was learning stuff about life that I should have already known.

The last time I did anything like keep a regular schedule was when I worked in Boston, and I was very keen on maintaining a working rhythm for reasons of energy. The morning and evening drive would sap a lot of my energy, and ultimately I found it wasn't workable because I ended up not having any time to do my own things.

As I thought about the old job, I remembered the extra sharpness that a new job tends to bring to one's self, so for fun I am going to pretend I have a new job:

So I'm working for a company run by this guy Dave Seah, and my primary job function will be to get his business and design processes running smoothly to improve both workflow billables and customer service, to replace the ad-hoc system that's in place now. I'm sure I'm going to be horrified by what I see. My secondary job function is to build the tangible assets of the studio, both what can be "seen", and in terms of "packaged process" that can be readily shown or applied to client businesses. At the moment, the assets are scattered all over the place.

An overall consideration is that the systems I put in place support---not impede---the creative process that is at the heart of the practice. Mr. Seah hates accounting, but he's accepted that a certain measure of this (I'm thinking daily review, at minimum) is necessary.

Lastly, Mr. Seah wants to regularize the workflow and project management such that no one has to burn the midnight oil every single night. Steady, measurable, profitable progress is more highly valued...we want people to go home every night to spend time with their family and friends, and to feel good about the progress they're making in terms of the project work and their own growth. The challenge will be to maintain a high level of creative energy as well; innovation and original thinking is so very highly valued here. Creative energy and methodical process would seem to be mutually-exclusive ideals, but I've got some ideas.

Oops, it's 1045PM already, and I've got to get to bed. I'm working Monday to get a head start even though it's a holiday.

Three Mindsets for Making Things

I have tended to judge myself by what I know how to make. When I had my first stint at management, I wasn't directly making anything, and it was very difficult for me to feel good about it. Over the years I've come to appreciate what a good manager does, and have seen that what I did was worthwhile. I learned how to see beyond individual achievement as my primary metric.

Still, there's one thing that hasn't changed for me, and that's the desire to create quality product. It's supremely important to me, and I tend to scope projects to the ability I have to do them well based on my personal knowledge and expertise. Quality. Competence. Experience. Expertise: These are the foundation of the kind of practice I am trying to build.

And this may be just what's holding me back.

The Competence Model

I was chatting with a friend about our respective attempts at making some dough. He runs a growing agency that's expanded in all kinds of directions. Like me, he places tremendous emphasis on competence, quality, and expertise, going to great lengths to secure the very best for his clients. In fact, he's probably a lot more thorough than me, though otherwise we are pretty similar in our approach to determining what's good and what's not.

Anyway, we were talking about self-promotion and excellence, and got onto the topic of people who could sell vapor. He knows a few people who can do this, who are able, despite not knowing very much at all about HOW anyone could really build the thing, had no problem selling it. My friend made the off-hand observation that this was something that we could never do, the implication that we are so deeply rooted in having to know how to do something that we'd never be able to make a vaporous (and hence outrageous) claim.

His observation was on-the-mark, but saying "never" to me is a sure-fire way to get me thinking of loopholes and tricky bypasses; I like to think there's always a way in, if you can define "way" and "in" from a novel perspective. In my imagination, I'm James Kirk battling Khan at the end of Star Trek II, avoid the trap of "two-dimensional thinking" as I battle starship-on-starship in a battle to the death.

So, let's check some assumptions and see where they go!

The Curse of Vaporware

For those of us with a technical production background, the immediate reaction to "selling vapor" is extremely negative. It seems dishonest. We think of all the times we "bought on a promise", only to be screwed later when the vendor failed to deliver. Once burned, twice shy becomes our default state of interaction with products and services. Let's face it: the vast majority of products out there are just...well, kind of there. They're not terrible, but neither are they great. They're right in that zone of mediocrity that Kathy Sierra illustrates so well, and we as consumers would rather feel strongly: good or bad. With the bad stuff, at least we are confident in our decision.

Still, I find vaporware interesting in two ways:

• When the vaporware does have great promise, it captures our imagination. The excitement of the possibilities is balanced by the likelihood of failure; this is something we've all learned through life experience. What results is a kind of dramatic tension, knocking our emotions around in a way that is actually pretty intoxicating. If the product, by some miracle, lives up to the hype, then we are swept off our feet. In every piece of vaporware lies the seeds of a whirlwind love affair, with all the excitement and passion and heartbreak that entails.

• It's a little different when we sense that the vaporware is a malicious attempt to manipulate us to someone else's advantage. If we allow for the benefit of the doubt, the disappointment of vaporware is perhaps due to incompetence undermining the best of intentions; at worst, it's outright fraud, and we are outraged. It's pretty bad when you're in the situation where you're working with someone who doesn't know what they're doing (a case of their reach exceeding their grasp) or is deliberately misrepresenting their abilities to take advantage of a situation. How do you know if they're able to deliver on their promise? Anyone can make up a product out of thin air, and if you've ever had to clean up after someone's lies you learn to distrust these people implicitly. Or you learn to develop a Cold War perspective, separating intention from action as you evaluate the evolving situation.

So what's the upside?

It came to me as my buddy was expressing with increduality at the sheer chutzpah these guys had in come up to him and explaining what they'd just sold. The thought that came to mind was, "well, they'd be fine if they worked with him", and then it clicked: I would entirely believe in someone who could "sell vapor" if I knew that they also possessed the ability to pick good people to do the actual work. Then "vapor" becomes "vision".

I also realized that we were thinking like consumers who had been burned, not like creators who build new experiences.

The Consumer Mentality

For those of us who grew up without much business experience in the family, we've been conditioned to think like consumers, not producers. We think a lot about the following:

• The Best Value for our Money!
• The Best Quality!
• The Best Features!
• The Most Effective!
• The Best Feeling!
• The Best Picked from Many Choices!

When I started getting to the point where I could create new things, I went through two initial stages of realization:

(1) That I can make a thing in exchange for money.

I realized I could make something, and in exchange receive compensation. However, that wasn't enough; hence, stage 2:

(2) That the people I'm working for have the same consumer values as I.

To respect myself and gain others respect, I need to create to standards that I hope to receive myself. This put my focus on developing expertise to create high quality product. I started to think like a craftsperson.

Stage 2 is where I'm at right now, thinking mostly about the things that I can make with my own two hands. When I think of expansion, I think of working with more people who share those same values of quality, expertise, and honesty. These values are all consumer focused; in other words, I'm thinking about customers in terms of what they will receive. This is a fine way to think about customers, of course, but it's also a limiting perspective: if I think about product craft all the time for my customers, I not thinking of how to really scale the business operation. Or indeed, how to grow it. I'm constrained by the ability to find other craftspeople to work with me.

Now, I'm not saying that I am thinking of NOT thinking about quality product, technical prowess, and expertise: those are all fundamental and necessary, otherwise who's going to buy your stuff? What I'm saying is that focusing entirely on craft doesn't allow me to focus on creating larger opportunities where that craft can thrive. Staying a craftsperson isn't the way to do that, and if you've ever tried to hire someone who works the way you do, you know how impossible that task seems. Small quality-oriented operations are largely constrained by the people they can find to expand. They do well, but growth is slow, often by design because the addition of the WRONG person can destroy a team. That's our assumption, anyway, often learned the hard way. But what is the wrong person? And is the assumption implicitly that the RIGHT person is "someone who is technically competent"?

To test this, I posed the following question to myself:

If I didn't have to worry about finding a quality production team to do the work, could I "sell vapor"? Could I even be good at it?

Selling vapor now becomes selling vision, and getting that vision made is all about leadership and communucation...you know, the kind of thing that Steve Jobs does, backed by people who really know what they're doing in their areas of expertise. Jobs himself has a highly-developed ability to pick the right people to bring his very intuitive sense of design to life. If there was ever a rule to apply to picking partners, it would be this: pick the people who demonstrably have picked great people to work with them. In the case of those guys who sell vapor so well, what's even MORE important is how well they can sell their own team. If I came across a guy who was trying to sell me vapor, and they said, "Oh, and your buddy is also working with us"...hell, that impresses me, and I'm much more likely to be on board. In other words: Don't shop product or talent. Shop the team.

If I didn't have to worry about doing the production myself, and instead could rely on people that I KNEW could do the job, how liberating would that be? How would you like being the person responsible for directing the development of an iidea? Wouldn't it be great, if you too were 100% confident in your ability to be the vision setter? How many of you out there are in the same boat?

So here's what stage 3 is:

(3) That I can find people who are smarter / better than me to do the things that I am not good at, so I can focus on bringing the vision to life.

I saw an interview on Charlie Rose with Warren Buffett, and he said that he hired people who were smarter than he was. I thought perhaps this was a kind of company morale-building PR statement, but on reflection it really is the secret to effective scaling. The hard part, of course, is learning to recognize the smart people, because that takes considerable smarts of your own. Buffett is quoted as saying that he doesn't invest in businesses that he doesn't understand; without that understanding, perhaps he's unable to really tell how smart the business management really is. I think by "understand" he means total comprehension; Buffett is not saying that the business needs to be "simple".

What I don't know is whether I'm a vision person or not. However, recognizing that there is a valid way to think of vapor as vision is pretty liberating. The poet who coined that phrase about "reach exceeding grasp" in the first place meant it inspirationally; this desire is what moves us forward in the first place. The price of admission, however, is to really make the effort to be an expert in more than just one field, so you have a better chance of finding those people who are incredibly smart in the way that you are not.

Ways to Think of Making

To sum up, here's the three modalities I now know are accessible to my creative thinking:

1. Create the best possible expression of my soup-to-nuts knowledge, expertise, and experience to solve a problem hands-on. This is the craftsperson / engineering mentality, placing value on methodically and consistently being able to forge quality product from the primordial dust.

2. Declare, then sell a vision. Absolutely own it. Guide it to fruition personally, by working with people who operate in modality 1. This is the guy who sells vapor, but it's vapor only because the blueprint in that guy's head hasn't yet been taken by a production team and made real. On the surface, this has all the elements of a production disaster in the making. However, if one applies the Buffett criterion of making sure that "you understand what each other is trying to do" before you invest your time and energy...just maybe you'll find someone smarter than you to work with, and wonderful things may happen.

3. Pick the next easiest thing to do that seems like it would work, and do it. I haven't talked about this at all up to now, but as you might guess it's related to the Get Things Done (GTD) Two-Minute Rule. This modality is an iterative approach that works pretty well most of the time, and applied consistently I think it probably gets you 75% of the way to Excellence. That's often good enough; when you hit the 75% mark, then modality 1 or 2 might help squeeze out that last 25% of goodness.

Three Ways to Procrastinate

A commenter recently mentioned the idea of living in alignment with your values, and looking at the list above I'm thinking that procrastination may be a misalignment of creative modality.

While I believe in Modality 1, "High Quality Production Expertise" and practice it to the best of my ability, it's an approach that requires tremendous patience and meticulousness. I've trained myself to do it, and am regarded as being fairly patient and detail-oriented as a result. However, I am realizing that I may be misaligned: I really am quite impatient, and like things to happen very quickly. While I've learned to wait, I don't really like it. When approaching a project that takes research and planning, my natural impatience tends to sap my enthusiasm, which leads to procrastination and that feeling of non-productivity. Enthusiasm is restored when you're working with happy, empowered people; you're sharing the creative burden with people who think as you do, so the project goes more smoothly.

Modality 2, "Being the Visionary", may be more my speed. However, to be in that leadership position you need to either PAY for privillege or EARN it. It's better to earn it, of course. In the past, I'd been uncomfortable because I hadn't felt I've earned the right. Now, with more years of experience, I can feel more confident in the role of Benevolent Design Despot. Whether that would actually work out, I have no idea, but it is interesting to think about. It means letting go of the actual production work, and wholeheartedly accepting the role of visionary, teaching and guiding throughout the project because that's what you have to offer the team. You're splitting the creative burden across lines of expertise and responsibility, which I think helps keep people focused and productive. An example that comes to mind is doing Quality Assurance for software. When there's no budget for QA, it's tempting to just say, "Oh, just have the programmers do it, since they're the ones fixing the bugs." Wrong. Debugging is pretty draining, and for me asking me to then go into QA mode after fixing one is just asking too much. To be great at QA, you have to be a devious and unconventionally-thinking person. You try random things, and then when you find something you figure out how to reproduce it. It's a sufficiently different mindset that switching to QA mode afterwards will drive you a bit mad, especially if you're fixing several dozen bugs a day. Also, the idea of having the person fixing the bugs also clearing them as "fixed" is like asking a fox to guard a henhouse, or letting Congress approve their own raises in salary.

Modality 3, "Take the Next Step" is a great GTD concept. I think people who are "classically productive" in the sense that they "just do it" probably think like this all the time. They know that taking many steps leads to progress, and experienced creatives know that "chicken scratching" will eventually lead to something useful. They don't think that much about what COULD be, they instead take what IS. Taking a step will create a result, which provides new input for the next creative step; it's an incredibly powerful cycle once you've learned to be comfortable with it by not fixating on the distance goal. Instead, you focus on the what-just-happened and what-happens-next. If you can define many small steps to have a tangible immediate result, procrastination doesn't have enough time to set in.

Conclusion

I've touched on a bunch of different ideas that have been on my mind:

• That vaporware is not that different from vision. The difference depends on the team you can line up to do the production work, and how well "the vision" is disseminated.

• That there are three was to think about making things: as an expert, as an expert who is looking for the team, and as a set of simple steps that one "just does".

• That being able to choose someone "smarter than you" to work with means you have to be smart enough to recognize someone's brilliance in the first place.

• That one's "making style" and notions of "how one should make things" can be out of alignment with one's personality. I'm impatient, therefore I find modality 1 a little tedious to put up with if I don't have someone else to work with. So maybe I should think in modality 2 and 3 instead, and trust that my training in modality 1 will help me find the great people to work with.

True? False? Who knows? I'll be thinking of ways to apply modality 2 in the coming weeks.

Self-Parenting is Harder Than I Thought

Yesterday I split my personality in "parent" and "inner child". I probably am just crazy, but I am finding the experience rather illuminating so far. It's not unlike wearing two hats, but with a subtle difference. Consider the following dualities:

• Businessperson and Artist
• Visual Designer and Developer
• Producer and Production Designer
• Creative and Adminstrative
• Manager and Developer
• Architect and Builder

Since I'm a solo practitioner, I tend to flip back and forth between "manager" and "creator" roles as need be. It's no wonder that I lose track of which hat I'm wearing at any given time; I have to wear many hats, which involves an expensive context switch.

Now, consider the following pairs:

• Parent and Child
• Teacher and Student

The difference: instead of focusing on the work, you're focused on the success of a person. The first set describes roles that are tied to process or product. That is a different mentality entirely! Shifting the emphasis to people lessens my mental overhead.

How?

Instead of remembering and cycling through all those things I should be doing---accounting, advertising, making money, chores, and so on---I just have to think one thing: nurture the child. The rest follows in support of that. This is rather similar to an earlier epiphany about my passion: it's not the thing that's important, but who.

You real parents out there can tell me how delusional I am, but maybe I've caught a glimpse of a shadow of a bit of something that's important.

Day One of Parenting Myself

Even with the unfair advantage of parenting myself, I still managed to goof it up. The morning started well enough: I got a good chunk of work done on some ActionScript 2.0 work, using a new library and development process that will pay off in the long run. However, I did not get as far as I wanted, and clearly I could have pushed harder to finish up by 5PM. As it was, I frittered away my time until 8PM, upon which I remember I had to eat. In my bachelor days, this wouldn't have bothered me because I eat when I want. But with the responsibility of an Inner Child, this is an entirely different matter! Is that any way to run a household? What if this got out to Inner Child Services? I might have to get a real job!

So I belatedly cooked dinner and ended up eating around 1000PM. Tomorrow I'll set cooking time to start at 5PM, and shoot for no more than 30 minutes of preparation.

On the plus side, I ate a healthy meal of pan-fried chicken and collard greens. I thought about watching some TV, but my budding parental senses compelled me to do the dishes and tidy up the kitchen (though I didn't sponge off the stove...don't want to overdo it on the first day!) Only after that, did I allow some TV time, watching an episode of Full Metal Alchemist. It's a rather disturbing animated series, dealing with complex occult themes. Which of course makes it awesome to my 14-year old self...I just hope he doesn't get nightmares.

Anyway, after dinner I was back down in the office salvaging my less-than-productive day. My plan: hit the sack by midnight, start the next day early, instead of starting another shift of work and staying up to 4AM. Since time was short, I decided to just sort some bills. After much gnashing of teeth and popping of eyes, I realized there would be no Xbox-360 for Little Dave, but lots of government cheese unless I lay down the hustle more thickly. I am newly motivated!

One bummer is that I had promised my inner child that we'd draw spaceships and shoot hoops. At best, we managed to watch some TV---I mumbled something about work taking longer than I thought. This is a disappointing precedent to set. Tomorrow I'll make it up to him, and already I wonder if I'm going to make this a habit, turning myself into a latchkey kid through neglect. Self-parenting is harder than I thought!

A Note On Silliness

I'm kind of amazed that this is such a compelling exercise. I suspect it's working because I have an empathic imagination, which makes it easy to objectify the abstract notion of my "inner child". As an example, when I bought my first new car in 2000, I had really wanted a "tornado orange" VW GTI. They didn't have one at the local dealer, so I settled for a silver one, which was also nice. The day after I said I'd take it, another dealer called me excitedly and told me that they had JUST GOT IN a new orange GTI, and that I could pick it up any time. A sane person would have ditched the silver one and switched, but I felt I had made a commitment to the silver one and didn't want to just dump it like that. Sometimes, I am saddened by uneaten cookies; here was a cookie brought into existence to be enjoyed by someone's happy mouth, but instead its potential was wasted and unmourned...

I should say in my defense that the main reason I kept the silver GTI was that it would be less visible to police, as I was planning to "fully enjoy" the capabilities of the car. And while an uneaten cookie is rather sad in theory, the reason they remain uneaten is because they are empty calories and lack a certain tastyness---a lot of cookies are just mediocre, you know. Still, part of me cares just a little bit, before I toss 'em down the garbage disposal. I am a such a monster!

It's not much of a leap from that to adopting an inner child :-)

Adulthood 101

Yesterday I had the epiphany that I'm still much like a child: given to indulging my impulses at the expense of long-term well-being, still in-the-dark about a lot of basic household processes, and not shaping my own development as a human being responsibly.

The trick might be self-parenting my inner child.

Adopting Myself

Now that I'm the proud parent of my inner child, I've got to think about what I want for him. Naturally, I want him to develop into an upstanding, happy, and confident human being. This is what I know about him so far:

• He's about 14, likes spaceships and cats.
• He doesn't really like sports because he's not good at them.
• He has some anxiety about being "good" at things.
• He's good at observing how things connect together.
• He's shy, but likes writing and using his imagination.

As an adult, there are certain things that I need to provide for us:

• Financial security to avoid unpleasant shocks and discomfort.
• Quality time, growing and learning together.
• A model for what adulthood is, so he learns this through osmosis as he grows older. Adulthood isn't all responsibility without reward.
• A program of general fitness, health, and mental stimulation.
• An environment in which self-discovery can safely occur.
• Physical security.
• Stability.
• Emotional support.
• Community connectivity.

To be able to do all that, I need to:

• Focus on my business prospects
• Manage my time, so I can spend quality time with my inner child
• Use myself as an example for how to be a happy adult
• Demonstrate the fundamentals of living and playing responsibly
• Demonstrate cause and effect of our choices
• Be dilligent in tracking the critical signs of a healthy household: cash flow, health & fitness, having good things to eat, stability of household services, and insurance against future crisis.
• Be pro-active in anticipating cause and effect

When I woke up this morning at a relatively early 730AM, I put myself into self-parenting mode and immediately got my ass out of bed, showered, and put on some actual work clothes. I even combed my hair; my stylist would be thrilled, as she says that one should ALWAYS look good. In my case, that just means looking slightly less rumpled, but that's still an improvement.

I cooked breakfast, because I knew that it's an essential part of the day. I took out some meat for cooking lunch, thought about what vegetables would be good to have for dinner. I also knew that providing regular breakfast creates a routine, and routines are good for establishing a sense of security and home, forming a comfortable base from which one can explore. So I (we?) ate breakfast, wished each other a good day, and then I got myself downstairs to the office to work. Blogging is work too, you know! :-) Later this evening, we'll probably draw some spaceships and do some chores, maybe shoot some hoops. I'll make a list that describes the whole idea of "balancing the checkbook" so we both know what's expected.

Does it Work?

This was a surprisingly fulfilling morning. I have a lot of things I need to take care of now, because I'm nowhere near having any of those items on the list in a secure place. But it's a fascinating exercise...particularly of my imagination :-) We'll see how long this lasts...I'll be running it for at least this week.