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.