So having written the post on “Low Threshold of Inconvenience”, I’m putting some steps into practice. I made this list:
I attempt to apply this to a big hairy inconvenient mess: setting up PayPal for a smooth selling experience. Continue reading →
As I slowly woke from a deep slumber, I idly ticked through a list of possible things to do. All of them, worthwhile! All of them, just a little too much to get excited about. It’s a long-standing pattern, this, and I’ve at various times ascribed it to:
Today, though, I think I can wrap these all up under one malady, which I’m dubbing “Low Threshold of Inconvenience” or LTI. I have a remedy for almost all of the things I’ve listed above, but every one requires some effort on my part. When I’m feeling good or am “feeling the moment”, I can deploy any number of countermeasures and get through something. When I’m not, however, it’s tough. My basic proclivity, when I’m by myself in the comfort of my own home, is to avoid things that are inconvenient to start, unless the result is quite salient. Preparing food falls in that category.
When the productive choices in front of me are all inconvenient, then the non-productive pre-packaged choices are easy to fall into. Watching TV. Playing a video game. Driving somewhere to do some window shopping. Surfing the net. These are all rewarding with new ideas and inputs without having to do anything other than click a button or get into the car. It’s a noxious habit to fall into, especially if you’re desire is to build something new for yourself.
I was thinking about my particular level of LTI. The following things are inconvenient for me to the point I will not do them unless I am in the mood to push, or are being pushed:
The top of the list are things that are more work related, while the bottom of the list are more like chores. The list is pretty embarrassing…it seems that I find EVERYTHING inconvenient. I have no inherent desire to go out and do these things. The only thing that keeps it from becoming a desperate pattern is that that I like good stuff. And I’ve found that I can create good stuff, when I apply myself. And the ability to make good stuff is the gateway to being able to buy more good stuff, as well as create some stature for myself. In other words, I value good stuff. That desire to have good stuff means I either have to create it, make the money to buy it. The resistance is that I don’t particularly like the process because it’s (wait for it) NOT usually a good process. Every interaction pains me because it’s in some way not optimal or good. This drives me nuts.
For example, starting to write a program means that I need to have a collection of skills and software programs, with the ability to apply them intelligently. The skills are not difficult, once you find them and understand them. Most of the educational material out there is piecemeal, just fragments of the big picture, and lacking the organization to make the material truly accessible. That offends me on a basic level. The software programs themselves are often obtuse and poorly documented, and sometimes are shoddily coded or conceived. I find offense in that also. It fills me with such frustration that I often feel like giving up. I feel limited by factors that are beyond my control.
This is probably why I’m such a poor student, because I’m such a judgmental deconstructor of everything from presentation to accuracy to communication style. I used to be confused by bad material, thinking that I was stupid. Then, realizing it wasn’t me, I took it personally. These days I’m more relaxed about it and can go with the flow to privately construct my own understanding, but the frustration is still there. The making of things can be easy and obvious, I keep dreaming, if only the material was cleanly presented and explorable.
For stuff I know how to do, like design a page or make a webpage, there are many small inconveniences. I hate looking for files on my computer, remembering where I put them. My project filing system is fairly efficient, but it’s still a pain in the butt. I don’t like opening explorer folders, finding where the window pops up, and drilling down into a directory structure. It’s all so awful, the user interfaces. I’d write my own file manager if I knew how, but then I’m back to the problem of dealing with all that bad documentation to learn how, which doesn’t help me. What kills me is that I know I can do it; it’s just that there’s so much crud to wade through. But I digress…the next step to making something is managing all the thousands of bits of code and the dozens if not hundreds of graphic assets, each one a tiny gnat-bite of inconvenience. Compounding this are all the unknowns that have to be resolved, and the result may NOT be good.
For other chores like picking stuff off the floor, the frustration is a little different. First, I never see stuff like that unless there’s a reason to be concerned (like, someone ELSE might see it). And then, when I really look, I really don’t like what I see. I hate my kitchen floor, for example, but am too cheap and too judgmental about contractors (and even a too much out of my element) to take a chance and try to fix it with real effort and money. It’s a big project, in my mind, to get this done right. So I just seethe quietly inside, and don’t do it. If it really capture my attention, I will do something and spend a few hours on it, but it’s rare.
For less epic chores, like cleaning the cat box or doing the dishes, I’ve learned to just shut my mind off and do it without commentary. In fact, when I’ve done this, I end up coming up with ways of handling it more efficiently and with less stress. This is the “on-the-fly systemization of process” that I tend to do when locked into a task that I’ve given my promise to complete.
This isn’t quite where I thought this post would go, but I’ll sum up the takeaways for me:
Realizing this, I think the following realizations are helpful:
By not dwelling on the inconvenience, and focusing on the systemization pass, I may be able to push few a few more projects. In a way it’s a distraction from the actual task, but I think for someone like me it’s probably necessary. I loathe inconvenience and inefficiency, and have to deal with it eventually. It’s probably my greatest challenge!
I went to sleep fairly early for me, around 1130PM. I got out of bed 12 hours later, which is a long time to sleep. I actually woke up around 8, but lingered in and out of naps (some kind of extended “Glee” drama was playing out in a dream, though there were cowboys and mysteries also). It was cold outside, and warm in bed, and it occurred to me that I was experiencing Happy Bubble Time physically. The bubble of warm blankets shielded me against the cold reality of the day. If I’d drank enough water the night before, I would have gotten up far earlier. Two principles:
This creates the conditions for having a good following day, especially if I can get up at 6 or 7AM to start.
Today’s productivity challenge is to handle a pile of lingering emails that accumulated while I was away in San Diego on business. They weren’t urgent emails, but they need replying. The way I feel about them is that they are obligations to deal with in the abstract, and it feels like a weight on my day. Once I process them, though, I will feel good and also feel happy at having corresponded with people. I feel bad about not getting to them earlier, but I believe it was a matter of prioritizing. Some work needed to be done because it’s paying work and there are deadlines. Also, I’m very mindful of maintaining my own energy and not draining it. Maybe a little TOO mindful…figuring out the right amount of energy to reserve—and also figuring out how to measure it—will be something I have to address in the future.
Anyway, how to convert email processing to Happy Bubble Time? Or at least Work Bubble Time? The concept of Bubble Time, in addition to being a half-reference to the forms I make, is that I’m in a mental bubble. The bubble isolates me from the rest of the world so I can work in peace. This is a feeling I’d forgotten until I was out in San Diego working on-site; being away from the usual distractions meant I could focus on just one or two things. Combining this experience with other insights I’ve had on focus (being the elimination of distractions, not increasing intensity) and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, the idea of bubbling my attention seems a likely path to productivity. Also, recognizing that my best productive time, creatively speaking, is when I have no pressure on me makes it obvious that pressured time is a special case, and that there’s a different kind of bubbling required. A few more principles fall out of this:
Anyway, going to eat lunch (leftovers from last night) and then get to the work.
It took about 3 hours to process the outstanding items in my mailbox, probably some 20 emails requiring various levels of effort. About five of them ended going onto the “review later” list I just started in a list of things to maybe look at later, after acknowledging that I’d received them. The rest were straight replies. It occurred to me as I was replying to all these emails how great it is to receive them in the first place, which transformed this from chore to HBT. I allowed myself not to feel pressured, and not obligated, to reply. Which had the curious effect of me thinking of the chore as something fun and unbounded. That’s a useful bubble to keep this in.
So, what else can I do before Monday? It’s 7:30PM now. I’m still immensely pleased with the kitchen cleanup, so I’m wondering if I can systemize my way through some other domestic chore. Even dinner went smoothly, because I had food saved in my newly-organized plastic storageware ready to heat and eat.
Incidentally, it’s the process of system-making that I seem to enjoy, so facing an unwanted chore with this in mind is a good consolation prize. It can even surprise me. For example, when I had to process the podcast I was thinking of what a pain in the butt it would be to do it. I went downstairs to use the old speakers I use there for podcast monitoring (mostly it is making sure that the bass doesn’t overwhelm cheap speakers), and rediscovered that I’d solved this problem a few months ago by making a standing desk station with all the hookups right there, ready for plugging into my laptop. I haven’t been down there in a while, so it was kind of like a surprise gift to me from the past.
I think I will tackle laundry and clothing storage. I will allocate 30 minutes.
First, I think I will move all the packaged Christmas goodies to the guest room so I can sort the rest of stuff in my room. I’ll figure out what to do with them later.
40 minutes later…
Moved the boxes of old toys, Christmas gifts, and other office ephemera to the guest room. Also, found some stuff that needs to be in the basement: old computer junk that I should recycle after going through it all and purging the stuff I don’t need. At this point, I’m ready to start handling clothing, which I will divide into “casual daily wear” and “look sharp”, along with a place for storing underwear and seasonal stuff. I just put a load into the dryer, which gives me about 45 minutes more to work on this. First I’ll just grab the clean clothes and start folding it.
I just realized my laundry basket situation is bad. I have a few mesh-style ones, but you know what? The user experience sucks. I would like a nice, substantial laundry basket. Or a decent hamper that’s easy to move.
60 minutes later…
The part I loathe about doing laundry is actually the folding part. This is compounded by the lack of a good dresser, so I originally used to keep clothes laid out on a table (where it got dusty or sat upon by the cats) or in a cheap unit I bought at Walmart years ago (which makes me unhappy every time I touch it). In more recent years, I bought some clear plastic stackable storage that nested to create a temporary solution, but it still required folding and organizing. Bah.
As I was sorting the clothing in my bedroom for folding, I realized that if I hated folding so much, why don’t I just hang it up? I usually wear t-shirts, but there’s no reason I can’t hang those up. I actually have a custom closet, left by the previous owner of the house, that I’ve never really used. There are a variety of knick-knacks stored in there along with some of my lesser-used suits and shirts. So I hung everything up and this will work great. I moved all the crap out of it, except for some travel-related items, sewing stuff, and shoe maintenance gear. I can put my underwear and socks in baskets and put them somewhere in the closet as well. That works. I just need a place to hang my bathrobe and that pretty much does it. Woo hoo!
The moral of the story, in context of Happy Bubble Time, is that just working through the problem and treating it as a self-contained problem to solve is not a bad thing. Whether this continues to lower resistance to creative projects, I’m not sure, but I can say today has been a pretty productive day. Systemizing as I go is something I don’t ordinarily think of when I’m doing my own work. It tends to come up more when I’m working with other people, or am given a very limited-scope task that naturally lends itself to optimization over time.
After writing that last post on my desire to be in a bubble of happiness, I went into the kitchen and really looked at it. It was a mess, and has been a source of constant low-level frustration for years. Since I tend to live in my head, I don’t usually notice things like the kitchen until it becomes inconvenient for me. When that happens, I feel a little bad about not maintaining it—I’ve long since made peace with myself regarding this tendency to let household stuff go—and then I clean it up. It’s a little different when someone else is living with me; I tend to think more about how the guest might be comforted by a well-ordered kitchen.
Today, though, I approached the kitchen with the new-to-me concept of Happy Bubble Time. Cleaning the kitchen is a chore ordinarily, but could I convert it to a HBT moment? I started to empty out the kitchen sink, but the dish rack was full, so I had to empty that, and find places to put things. And then I noticed the garbage can was full. I felt a brief surge of frustration and despair at the rapidly-evolving chain of dependent activities. But instead of giving up hope, I made a conscious decision to just handle each thing as it came along, and systemize where I could to save time in the future. I wasn’t sure how it would come out, but I knew that the process of going through this would likely have positive outcomes. In other words, I decided to have faith that it would go somewhere, and it would be better, and that this would be satisfaction enough.
After about an hour, I had made some critical rearrangements of the kitchen. All the pots and pans are now in one place, and I’ve integrated lid storage back with them. Before, I had a lid rack that took up a lot of space, and was in an awkward place. Plastic storage is now contained in three bins: one for disposable plastic for which I have multiples, one for the good locking plastic containers, and one for all the “one-off” tupperware. It all fits underneath the pots now, instead of rattling around in one big box next to them. This freed up space to put the various coolers I have, nested in each other, for when I’m taking food out to a picnic. I consolidated the hot water pot and coffee maker onto an area in the dining room, where all the beverage-making materials are now located. The result is a more functionally-organized kitchen, and I am pleased. This wasn’t planned, but it’s what happened and I feel good.
By comparison, one task that is lingering is the processing of the last podcast we recorded on Friday. I have to check its levels, export a WAVE file, run it through noise reduction, and then monitor it on a pair of different speakers to test for frequency balance before dumping it to an MP3 and tagging it. Then, I have to upload it to the podcast website, write a meaningful description, and post it. I’m not looking forward to it at all, because it seems like a big pain in the ass. Unlike the kitchen task, which was unpleasant in concept but could be handled with some spirited on-the-fly decision-making, the podcast task is unpleasant but well-defined. How to convert this into HBT?
It’s now two hours later. It took maybe an hour to publish the podcast with notes, which included listening to it again. While I was working on it, though, I was multi-tasking between WordPress updates for a client’s website, monitoring a roast, and replying to some emails. Not the most focused use of my time, but I feel several things got done.
The drawback to this approach, however, is that the subtasks I got done don’t feel as real as a task that is part of a chain working toward an end goal. These are just things that happened, and didn’t carry with them any particular consequence. In that sense, they were distractions from the main task. I may have finished it sooner had I been more patient waiting for installers to install. The lack of mindfulness is disturbing, as it indicates the ease with which I was distracted from my “main task”. This didn’t feel like HBT, where the focus is clear and all actions are aligned with achieving a goal. This was more like being trapped into a task, and pushing forward only semi-engaged while allowing myself to wander into other tasks. It’s a useful mode, perhaps, for making some progress in the face of disinterest, but it’s not optimum.
I’m feeling quite sleepy, so I’m going to hit the sack and ponder this tomorrow.
I got back from San Diego a few days ago, and have been spending the time getting reoriented. I was there on business for almost a week, which doesn’t seem like a long time, but that’s long enough to give myself a new perspective on my home. It’s rather messy, for one thing, and not optimized to help me start the day. So I want to spend a bit of time this weekend on that.
Although I do not like traveling for business, I do enjoy how I can completely forget about everything else going on at home and focus on a limited set of problems. When I’m on the road for a project, my focus is largely on (1) packing in as much quality face time as possible with the other problem stakeholders and (2) maintaining energy balance. In a sense, it’s borrowed time, because when I get back home I have to unfreeze other projects and deal with the chore of daily living. Plus, the time away from home tends to drain me mentally, and it takes a couple days to recover. Currently, my sleep cycle is completely borked and I’m feeling overwhelmed by the logistics of marching my army of tasks forward.
So…what to do? In times like these, I have to remember to close my eyes and listen to what’s rattling around my brain. Which I will do right now.
So much to do. What to do? What is best?
Wish I didn’t have to do anything!
But if I don’t, then nothing cool will get done!
My sense of being is wrapped up in what I could do, and pushing myself to do it.
Why is there resistance?
I don’t know. A feeling of being trapped by responsibility, even my own. Would prefer to just exist in a happy bubble.
That sounds nice, but also I know it would be lonely.
Yeah, it would. The bubble of happiness needs infrastructure.
But where does that come from? Ideally someone else does it, but to have it done right I have to do it myself.
Or at least have oversight on it. Bleah.
What would you DO in your happy bubble???
Good question. The freedom from pressure, and the freedom to explore at my own pace.
To have that kind of freedom, though, you need to win the lottery or you need to build something yourself.
Yeah. And I don’t want to just be someone who is known for sitting in a bubble, though that’s kind of how I feel.
Hm. That’s a problem. To get into the bubble, you need to work to make and then maintain the bubble!
Yeah…catch 22!
Sounds like a timeshare…50% bubble time, 50% bubble maintenance time?
That’s a start.
So…the shape of the resistance is the pull of happy bubble time. It’s not quite laziness. It’s more like a desire to have a serene, undemanding lifestyle. But if I have to do something, it would have to be the best I could possibly do, because I like good things. I like that the possibility of good things is even there, and perhaps this is the dreamer’s mentality. I am pragmatic enough to know that nothing comes to dreamers except by accident, and I am stubborn enough to not want to be dependent on luck, and I also am social enough to care about how people perceive my worth. I also don’t like asking people for help, which is partly pride, and partly shyness.
The takeaway for me is, I think, this:
Happy Bubble Time is readily accessible! I just do what comes to me without a care about anything else. If I feel guilty, it’s called procrastination. If I don’t feel guilty, it’s happy bubble time! I sit in my bubble and feel the currents of love and passion flow through me, and am re-energized. A weird concept, but emotionally it feels very accurate.
Happy Bubble Time (let’s call it HBT from here onward) can be extremely productive, but it isn’t easy to harness or schedule.
Knowing that HBT is readily available makes me feel rather good. There is a required amount of maintenance needed, though: chores, bills, paying project work. Some of this may be convertible to HBT, if it’s work that I’m interested in.
HBT is a goal worth sharing with people too.
How does this fit in with my overall work development plan? The store full of cool tools? The establishing of myself as a purveyor of possibility tools and wisdom? Hm.
The first thought is that work should be HBT as much as possible. The hardest work is building the machinery that will capture and harness HBT productively, even when the outcome isn’t entirely planned. The machinery consists of the store, the e-commerce platform, and reaching people so they know it’s there and what it means to them. This is what the store is about. That’s an ongoing project that can be HBT’d.
Productive Happy Bubble Time is just APPLIED time toward making a finished product. The idea of producing a finished product on a deadline is a pressuring thought, but doing it without a deadline productively to see what comes out may be less so. Some finishing mojo is necessary, though, and that requires pressure or extreme dedication. I can do that from time-to-time if I see the finish line. That suggest that I just allocate work-chunks of 15 minutes to an hour, and commit to that. My tracker then becomes a HBT moment list.
Interesting. I didn’t expect this concept to fall out, but that’s the power of HBT. Writing my way through a problem is kind of an application of the bubble. Maybe there’s Happy Bubble Time as exploring, and Directed Bubble Time as thinking through the issue. HBT is kind of like “Flow”. Directed Bubble Time is more like introspective thought gathering, seeing where it goes. In both cases, time is a chunk that is entered willingly. The measurable unit here may be Bubble Time Chunks (BTCs). The challenge is converting BTCs into valued work.
I’m in San Diego for business in early February, and it’s quite a difference from the February we are having in New Hampshire. The expectation of year-round sunny weather can be seen everywhere from the design of the buildings to the expressions on people’s faces. I’m staying in a small rental room in what I now understand to be an upscale neighborhood, with quiet curving streets and tiny artisan shops dotting the intersections every few blocks. I saw a few mid-day joggers and several bicycles as I walked to a local deli. If I lived here, I would have to take up running I thought. It looked enjoyable, running along roads that were designed for bicyclists and pedestrians alike, through the lushly maintained landscape. Running in New England strikes me as a dangerous pastime, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen any runner in my part of the country look happy about it. It makes me wonder if I should move.
After 14 hours of travel, starting at 3AM New England time, I’m glad to be freshly showered and relaxing. Starting tomorrow I’ll be hopefully immersed deeply into a collaborative design project until the weekend, when I’ll have some time to myself to explore.