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:

• Got to go to sleep by 10PM. No excuses.
• Got to drink a glass of water before going to be.

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:

• A good attitude melts resistance…the idea of Happy Bubble Time is really an attitudinal adjustment
• A useful attitude can convert dull tasks into useful datapoints…for me, an experimenter’s attitude helps

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.

• 4 minutes have elapsed after dumping laundry into washer.
• The major problems are clothing processing into STORAGE. I have no system for storing clothing, relying on tried-and-true bachelor methods of maintaining piles of clothing dubbed either “clean” or “dirty”. My bedroom has slowly become a storage room for Christmas gifts received and to be given. This must change.

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.