(last edited on August 5, 2014 at 4:43 pm)
Reflections from a (mentally) Foggy Tuesday.
The Morning
I got started at 1100AM after writing yesterday’s Foggy Monday post, which had taken an hour to do.
The day started with a number of small resistances (making a phone call), paying property taxes at City Hall, grabbing some peppermint tea, buying wine for a charity event, and picking up mail. I got home at 1PM, and put away my groceries.
OBSERVATION: The morning chores, which had loomed large in my head as “tedious chores”, were not nearly as unpleasant as my subconscious was making them out to be. I had imagined all these steps that I needed to do. The very act of thinking about them in the abstract created resistance. The actual part of moving around / picking up the phone was easy-peasy. Moral: STOP THINKING SO MUCH ABOUT WHAT I HAVE TO DO and just GET STARTED. Since I hadn’t put myself under time pressure, that helped.
OBSERVATION: Not feeling stuck, which comes from any forward motion, feel good. Feeling good reduces anxiety.
OBSERVATION: Organic whole chickens are surprisingly inexpensive. I could roast a chicken every week and get really good at it, and it would feed me for at least a couple days for under 7 dollars, if I read the prices right.
The Afternoon
It was 1:15PM, and I had a Skype call scheduled at 2PM. Tuesday is the day I assign to a particular recurring client, which is anchored by this Skype call. My brain is TOTALLY FUZZY. What to do for that 45 minutes? I don’t want to take a nap (though I really do) because I might just zonk out again in a post-lunch coma. I am already, though, feeling a bit fried and scatterbrained. I can tell by the number of times I check Twitter, Facebook, and Email in the span of 5 minutes.
OBSERVATION: I have yet to do anything creative today, and it feels like it’s not going to happen. Errands and meetings kill the impulse, and it’s harder to start it after lunch. I should have gone to the gym perhaps.
Maybe it is OK to just take a break. It doesn’t feel like I’ve done any real work yet, and this is why I don’t want to take a break. But I think I have to. I just bought some peppermint tea, after all. Let me just enjoy that in a quasi-meditative state and see what thoughts float up…
…and about 5 minutes later, I’m full of peppermint tea and STILL feeling fried and jittery. Yesterday’s experience of going into the Laundry Room when I was feeling fried came to mind. Maybe I just needed to get away from the computer. Maybe if I stood somewhere else in the house, something else would get done.
APPLICATION: Brain feeling fuzzy? GET AWAY FROM COMPUTER, which invites mindless clicking, and get in front of the Kitchen Sink, where that nervous/mindless clicking energy will end up washing dishes and decluttering. Wow!
This small victory at my back, I tried to kickstart again. Again, it’s a matter of getting into the workspace, which means gathering the relevant stuff up in front of me where I can see it. The first task is some bug fixing, so that means (urrrrr…brain resisting) loading Dreamweaver, the website in a browser (which URL was it? URRR), and Basecamp (which account, mine or the clients? URRRRRR) to start keeping a log of what I’m doing.
Upon opening Basecamp, I realized I had to make a “dev hour tracking message” for this time period (we go mid-month to mid-month). I summed up hours from last month in my Excel timesheet to make sure I wasn’t over the allotment. I still haven’t actually started work, but at least I’m in the workspace.
At 2PM, we chatted, and by 2:45PM I was ready to do some ACTUAL WORK. We had shifted the focus to add some features to a website. Along the way, the client showed me a cool website template that we wanted to use, and I liked it so much that I bought it for myself to use as the basis for a new-and-improved davidseah.com.
The Evening
At 5PM, it was time to make dinner and get ready to attend a Future Tech Women hangout to which I had been invited, where I could show off the Sparki Arduino robot I just got from a Kickstarter. Made dinner (Cajun Dirty Rice from a box, with turkey instead of ground beef). As I cooked, I marveled that I’d made progress on tedious tasks by just facing them and pushing just enough until I started. Not worrying about how long it would take seemed to be a key, as did trusting that I would figure it out somehow.
OBSERVATION: Just FACING something and figuring it out a little bit feels like progress, if you’re not freaking out about not getting it done RIGHT THIS FREAKING MINUTE.
Arriving at the venue in Manchester, I discovered my phone was dead (I almost never use it) so I couldn’t call the event organizer to let me in. I considered driving home because I didn’t want to bother anyone, but decided wait outside the building until someone else showed up, which I found a bit embarrassing. But it didn’t kill me, and I’m glad I showed up. There were all kinds of cool people showing off the cool inspiring tech toys and books, and I left feeling very positive and grateful for this community.
OBSERVATION: It’s good to be around people who love the same things you do. Which means I need to make some adjustments to other commitments I have that are more out of a sense of misplaced duty than love.
Wednesday!
I woke up later, and got downstairs at 9:30AM, if my twitter feed is to be believed. It’s now 10:30AM. READY TO ROCK. Sort of. Day 3 is always kind of a difficult day to get through when I’m doing a week-long logging experiment.
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2 Comments
Your writing on “paralysis” “feeling stuck” ‘being unproductive” etc etc is fantastic, at least for me because I get into that headset more than I care to admit. That said, those frequent 45 minute intervals where I just sitting here, sort of spacing out, drifting around the web, checking my email every two minutes –are at least sometimes indicative that I’m getting ready to write. If I pay attention to what I’m thinking, I am thinking sentences I end up writing. I consider this “nonconscious planning” and I suspect you do quite a bit of it –not to ignore what we’re doing, fact of being paralyzed on the couch etc., but certainly to be taken into account and showing more respect for that prosocial, adaptive brain –it’s planning even when we don’t know it, it’s under the surface of conscious awareness.
Psych journals, the academic kind, often ask me to review manuscripts that are somewhat related to my area of research, to my field. I usually do six or so a year.They are often boring and I’m expected to write a serious analysis of the manuscript, if there are problems I am expected to identify them concretely in my written review. Truth –I HATE doing these manuscript reviews for up tight academic psych journals. But I do them anyway, and end up saying “publish with these revisions” or “don’t publish.” A month or so ago I got a request from a fairly prestigious journal asking me to review an article reporting on a study involving the “Dictator Game.” I dreaded doing it, but I agreed to do it. Well weeks went by and I hadn’t even read the manuscript, the very thought of it repulsed me. The deadline came and went (the journals actually don’t expect us professors to get our reviews in when we’re supposed to, we’re always late, really really late because it’s such a pain in the ass to do them.
This week I was closing in on a month past the deadline. Two weeks before this (when I’d already passed the deadline by two or so weeks) I got an idea: Invite one of my really smart doctoral students to do it with me. I did, she was thrilled (because she’ll learn how to do this), and she went home and read the article right away (several times in fact –it was a very technical manuscript, and very confusing I finally found out when I read it). So Monday, when I realized it was almost a month past deadline, I sent her an email and said “come to my home office on Wednesday at 7PM, we’re going to do the review.” What I had figured out was that I wouldn’t even begin to read it unless someone was sitting there also reading it (or in this case, re-reading it), with whom I could talk after I read it. It was great. We found some serious problems (i.e. words were wrong –I think it’s from a University in Japan, a Japanese lab and they may have had some difficulty writing in English). The study was well done etc, but it was horrible in terms of basic assumptions and theories, at least from my point of view. Now when editors send me a manuscript it means they really WANT my point of view, that’s why they sent it to me. Usually (and in this case also) the journal editors have also sent it out to 3 or 4 other reviewers, because they wanted their particular perspectives.
Anyway, my student and I had a great conversation. Next, with her sitting with me, I wrote the review, and wrote it fast. I know how to do that in my sleep. She added important points, details, we had a great time. Case closed. She learned something about how to review an academic (science-based) manuscript for an academic Journal. Point is, I absolutely would have continued to procrastinate on this task. I have come to HATE academic writing, dread it, although I have to read new research all the time. From this experience I learned that I need to make onerous tasks social, and I’ll do them with no trouble. It really made me think about revising my whole productivity system, finally do a real “weekly review” a la GTD, seeing where I absolutely need to make a project or task social and line it up.
Keep on writing about this topic Dave, it’ s music to my ears.
For me, I’ve found that a high-protein, low-carb breakfast keeps me much less fuzzy-headed in the course of the day — provided I’ve had enough sleep, of course.