Five Insights from a Change of Place
SUMMARY: Sometimes, you don’t really see what you could be doing differently unless you can see yourself from another point of view. You can either ask someone (and most likely take their advice under advisement), or you can GET AWAY FROM HOME and see how life is different when doing what you normally do.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my recent trip to California would do just that. I learned five things about myself that will help me tune my work-life balance.
I recently flew out to visit my cousin's family near San Jose, California. The reason? I had an expiring flight coupon, and not having the money to spend on a proper visit to a new destination city, I figured I could at least hang out in a place that was "not here." I wasn't sure why, but I wanted to do it. Plus, perhaps I'd finally get around to visiting San Francisco; while I'd been in the area at least 12 times in the prior 16 months for the Big Museum Project, I hadn't had the time to really go explore.
I never did make it all the way to San Francisco this trip, but I had several insights relating to productivity and direction.
The first full day in California was one of wondering what to do. I'd been here many times before and knew the family routine, where to go shopping, and where to walk around. The options were limited: learn how to take the train to destinations unknown, read books, or do some work. I decided that I wanted to do some work, and I spent the next couple of days reading and researching Actionscript 3 and HTML in preparation for making a new website for my buddy Sid. This was surprisingly satisfying, and I realized Insight Number One:
I am over-scheduled with my socializing. I need enough alone time to actually create.
Socializing is a kind of drain on my productivity, and yet socializing is the motivation for me to want to do the work at all. In this case, I wanted to make a clean and functional website for Sid's photography business, so he could continue to grow his markets. However, the time I was spending maintaining the network of friends and collaborators took away from my ability to focus. In hindsight, it is pretty obvious; I had even written about this in my post on Making and Managing, inspired by Paul Graham's original article about the salient differences between them. In this case, being several thousand miles away from home didn't give me the choice to even arrange to socialize, and this complete lack of scheduling gave me the mental headspace to focus on working. The act of scheduling itself is a distraction. So my goal having returned home is to de-schedule as much as possible, and give myself alone time. I made socializing a big priority last year, and now that the network is in place, I can scale back a bit.
As I was doing my research on the proper way to establish my HTML/CSS design workflow, I came across many great resources from the web designers and developers around the world. Some sources were familiar; Eric Meyer and A List Apart, for example, are names I know I can trust implicitly when it comes to matters of the Web. A few sources were newer but impressed me with their quality; Smashing Magazine, for example, is a resource I can spend hours browsing for design inspiration and resources. And then there were the dozens of web pages written by everyday developers, describing how they solved a particular problem and citing their sources. In a matter of hours I was able to pull together a simple understanding for making simple websites behaved. I was tremendously grateful, and felt the desire to participate in kind, which led to Insight Number Two:
While being connected locally is great, don't forget to participate on the world stage as well.
This is an important insight to regain. About five years ago, I started blogging and gaining an audience for my own writing for the first time. Every year, I've gotten a little better at producing content, have met incredible people virtually and in-person, and have continued to grow the site. Then came the Big Museum Project, and my participation online dropped off considerably. Since that project ended, I've been making headway on various local projects, but I'd forgotten that I used to be more connected with the world through regular posting, commenting, and participation in online communities.
My cousin's family has a large wooden dining table that is probably my favorite work surface in the world. It's located near two french doors that open into an walled outdoor patio framed with trees, and the entire dining room is bathed with indirect sunlight. The table itself is very sturdy, anchored firmly on the ground and flanked by equally-sturdy wooden chairs that do not give of threaten to buckle under my weight. Free of distraction and tethered wirelessly to Silicon Valley broadband at 802.11N speeds, I set up my laptop and spread out with books. And then I realized Insight Number Three:
I lack a large work surface in a pleasant environment at home. Therefore, it is difficult to work at home.
I have a number of smaller workable surfaces at home. The dining room has a small wooden table with a glass top protecting it, but it is slightly wobbly and the glass kind of sucks. The chairs are not much better. The light isn't bad, actually, and I have all my books next to it. However, access to the table is constrained by the living room furniture. Downstairs, I have a largish desk, 3 feet deep and 6 feet wide, that I used for my giant 20" CRT monitor; I needed the extra depth (a typical computer desk is only 2 and a half feet deep) for the CRT monitor's bulk and still allow for a place to write. This table is playing host to my backup workstation and 20" flat LCD screen. Behind the chair is a cheap white folding table on which I sometimes arrange things. The whole setup, however, is not well lit and cramped. I hate working down there. And so, I spend a lot of time at coffee shops on my laptop (which has terrible color fidelity). I need to get at least one great working surface in the house to be more productive here.
Although I didn't get all the way to San Francisco, I did make it to Palo Alto to visit my friend Senia, who is among other things the editor of Positive Psychology News Daily. It's been several years since we've hung out in-person to review what we have going on in our lives, and one of the important ideas to arise from it was this one:
When a door closes, close it for good. Apply your energy to opening new doors.
The door is a metaphor for a past opportunity that didn't play out, but didn't die. There are dozens of such doors in my life: the idea of being a game developer, an interactive designer, a company builder, an online consultant, and so on. Initially, I resisted this idea of closing doors for good, because I think I like the idea of doors flying open unexpectedly, and to deny possibility seemed counter-intuitive. On the other hand, I realized that I was expending a lot of energy monitoring these doors, and realized that if I close a door for good, I don't have to think about it. That's energy that can go into opening newer doors with just as much possibility as the closed one. In a way, this is a kind of optimized search strategy; the payoff from opening a new door is probably greater than an old door that had already been investigated. I suppose one reason I keep old doors around in the first place is that I keep thinking that I've "missed" something that I didn't see before (I like finding stuff like that), but the unanticipated side-effect is that I revisit old ground more than searching the new. This is a mentality that inhibits growth. That said, if an old door were to kick itself open, that's intriguing enough that I would go investigate.
Because I was conserving money and eating with my cousin's family, I ate conservatively but well. Home cooked meals on some nights, smallish portions of Indian food, coffee, and pastries on other nights. With a Trader Joe's and Whole Foods within walking distance, I didn't lack for fresh high-quality food. I didn't even notice that I was benefiting from this diet until I stopped by the supermarket on the way home from the airport. Since it was late and I was starving, I bought a rotisserie chicken, some pre-mashed potatoes, some pre-cooked meatloaf, and a lot of gravy. After I ate a good chunk of it, I fell asleep. The next day, I felt fuzzy-headed and bloated, and just awful. I hadn't felt like that since...well, since before I had gone to California. Wow. And thus Insight Number Five is this:
I'm eating way too much terrible food at home.
Too much. Not good. I was eating considerably less per meal in California, and less frequently too. I actually remember feeling hungry, and waiting until dinner time to get out of the house and go walk for lunch or dinner. So now I'm actually waiting for legitimate hunger pangs once a day to help me monitor the eating. Before, I'd snack when I was bored, or eat too much at dinner.
So that's what I learned from my trip to California. It was an unexpectedly productive trip.
We’re driving down route 5, headed to Southern CA, to attend H.H. the Dalai Lama’s teaching in Long Beach, then to Pacific Palisades to see my 96 year old mother, then to Pasadena with my younger son and his wife, and back to SF. I am reading your blog post to my husband, an archivist who develops web sites among other things. His ears picked up, as he listened to your musings. I think he’s going to start reading your blog, after hearing about it for years. We identify so thoroughly, even down to portion control and how to get better at it. The door metaphor is almost painful. I’m trapped in one of those that I should have shut tight years ago, but couldn’t and can’t, simply because of money. It would be OK if it didn’t capture so much of my time, or brain-space. As usual, your prose hits the nail on the head. We’re smiling, at the pleasure of recognition. Next time you’re out here, lets make a plan that will drag you all the way up the peninsula to SF. We can angst and have a healthy dinner together.
Lynn