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- July 8, 2009
Adrenaline and Action
July 8, 2009Read moreI’ve been thinking adrenaline and focus, after reading a comment by CricketB in which she describes how she gets things moving with her kids. It had never occurred to me that perhaps that there was a lack of adrenaline in my daily routine. I ticked through the relevant data:
- The recent project experience (pressure and stress and excitement) ended up being very productive, so there’s one point in favor of adrenaline.
- Usually I strive for peace and quiet. The entire life-balance thread is an attempt to formalize some of those elements; my assumption that with better balance, my productivity tubes will unclench and glorious things will happen. This may be mistaken. Result: feeling of well being. Non-Result: big hairy projects remain unshaven.
- I have bursts of enthusiasm with people, and it is in the context of this excitement that things tend to move forward. Could this be…ADRENALINE?
After a visit to Wikipedia, I learned that “adrenaline” is actually called epinephrine, and it does all kinds of interesting things that enhance our ability to survive dangerous physical situations. I hate the idea of tinkering with my body chemistry through drugs, so I am not thinking about ingestion or injection of any substance…I don’t even like taking aspirin! However, there might be a way of generating “adrenaline” (whatever that means) that could be added to my anti-procrastination toolkit.
Hypothesis
I’m reminded of that old saying, “Smile! You’ll feel better!” that is backed up by research in neuroscience; apparently, the physical act of smiling by itself has a positive effect on your emotional state. I keep forgetting how closely tied the body is to the mind. Perhaps physical and mental exercises that raise my stress levels in a challenging way will lead to a similar effect on productivity. I’ve heard of other people using games and deferred rewards to accomplish the same thing; in this case, I want to feel the raw energy.
Starting Conditions
I tend toward calmness and reflection. I enjoy sitting out in the sun and idly thinking about whatever happens to be in front of me. Ordinarily this sounds like it would be relaxing, but it has a big downside: when I have a great idea, the initial burst of excitement at its novelty lasts only as long as it takes for me to outline the major elements that need to be done. Then I lose interest and file it away as a “would be nice” thing to do. The result: I’m generally happy, but not accomplishing anything that I think would make me more happy.
To generate “adrenaline”, I’m really talking about generating “attention”. The mind, wandering by itself on a sunny day, is easily convinced to flit to another thought. The body, however, could force the issue by actually doing something. The mind, however, is responsible for telling the body to move in the first place, but it’s too busy thinking of fun things or being distracted. The three measures I use to deal with this are:
- remove or flee the distractions
- be near someone who is being more focused than me
- be responsible for the well-being of someone other than me
I have associated a detached professional demeanor as appropriate when doing work, something I probably absorbed from other focused people I’ve worked with. This is a calm demeanor, designed to quell fires and panic. However, it probably isn’t necessary when I’m working by myself. I need to generate some excitement and fire!
The Experiment
So yesterday, instead of calmly sitting at my computer and wondering why the heck I wasn’t actually getting anything done, I first berated myself for being lame. And did I want to be lame? HELL NO.
I let the displeasure and anger build, which increased my heart rate. I let myself breath deeper and more rapidly. I tensed muscles and balled fists, as if the task itself were a burly antagonist daring me to take it on. I paced back and forth, telling myself that I was not living up to my own ideals or taking my own medicine, and that made me a candidate for being a loser and a hypocrite. I let myself get angry. Then I told myself there was just one thing I could do to break the curse: finish a project
It seemed to work. I got a long-standing personal HTML/CSS project done, finally. Woo hoo!
Analysis
I don’t know if this approach would work again, but it’s interesting enough that I will try it in moments where I’m being distracted.
I have that bunch of task cards that I’m whittling down. We shall see if another one falls today. DAVE SMASH! WAAAARRGH!
A few side notes:
- As I was browsing Wikipedia’s entry on epinephrine and other neurotransmitters, I came across a mention of a subtype of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) known as Predominantly Inattentive. This subtype lists many symptoms that I could ascribe to myself. Whether I have it or not, there are drug-free regimens that are used with kids to help them cope with their attention deficit. I’d love to know what those exercises are.
- I’m not suggesting that people should beat themselves up emotionally, particularly if they’re already feeling low. I think it may work for me because I already have a value system in place that says making stuff and showing it is the foundation to everything I want to accomplish. There is no alternative path; I’ve explored the ones that I’ve seen, and the conclusion I have now is there’s no avoiding the messy work.
Anyway, I thought I’d share the experience :-)
- July 7, 2009
Groundhog Day Resolution Review 7/7/2009
July 7, 2009Read moreYes, it’s July 7th, the official mid-year Groundhog Day Resolutions review day. It is also Tanabata, the Japanese Star Festival, when you get to write down your wishes on streamers of paper and hang them on bamboo trees. It’s time for some wish review.
Progress for the past month
Last month I had distilled my goals down to two basic activities:
- Assemble a Collective
- Create Something Every Day
These activities spawned a set of tasks:
- Continue to hold Collective meetings for local energizing.
- Get involved in other people’s projects by knowing what they are doing
- Resurrect the stalled freelancer network project, but this time I will apply the criteria I describe to create a dossier of freelancers based on my own assessments and personal interviews.
- Chip away at the description of what I do, but from a connection-making perspective.
Looking back at the last month, I can’t say that I made a lot of progress, but then again I didn’t create dates and deliverables for them either. I trusted instead that natural energy would flow. This was generally successful, given the number of meetings and shower thinking sessions I’ve had. However, it doesn’t feel entirely successful because I can’t point to anything that is finished. That violates the principle of create and show stuff that is the unofficial bedrock of my personal philosophy. This is the natural enemy of talk and hand wave, an approach I despise, but have apparently sunken into. Damn.
The Immediate Road Ahead
I’ve continued to test the Task Cards as a project memory device, and I’ve noticed that they tend to fall into the following categories.
- “Would be Cool” Projects
- Collective-Collaboration Projects
- Active Projects and Deliverables
- Business Infrastructure and Collateral Creation
- Habits and Household Maintenance
- To-dos, Errands, and Schedulables
- Collaboration Seeking / Networking / Social engagements
I’ll split these up into different groups while refactoring:
The Creative Group
- “Would be Cool” Projects –> these are the innovative revenue-generating projects
- Collective-Collaboration Projects –> these are the ones that involve other people
- Active Projects and Deliverables –> these are the ones that pay the bills
The Business Group
- Business Infrastructure and Collateral Creation –> these would increase the flow of new business and project opportunities, as one major bottleneck is
- Collaboration Seeking / Networking / Social engagements –> these use the items created to create reasons for people to get together
The Maintenance Group
- Habits –> the development of efficient patterns to make better use of my time and energy
- Household Maintenance –> the minimum level of maintenance to ensure that the house is presentable
- Accounting –> keeping track of not just money, but of time and effort so I know what my position is
- To-dos, Errands, and Scheduled Events –> the sundry chores that require my direct interaction
The Fun Group?
I have purposefully left out all the “fun” things that I do, such as meeting with friends, riding the scooter, and writing this blog. Perhaps it is a mistake to leave these out, not because I should “make sure I have fun”, but because they exist outside the system and are above the law. That creates problems for the rest of the system.
I’ve been starting to delve into the inner workings of my scooter’s 2-stroke engine. Unlike its 4-stroke cousin, the 2-stroke engine hacks four distinct phases of combustion into a couple of blurry states of exploding more or exploding less. That it works at all is kind of amazing, and by analogy I identify with this more. 4 stroke engines are quieter, more consistent in power delivery, and pollute far less in the process despite their added mechanical overhead. Part of me aspires to that kind of orderly efficiency, but it could be that I’m a buzzy oil-burning 2-stroke by nature. 2-strokes seem more impatient about the process of generating power, so they get it done in a hurry, without apology to the environment. But I digress.
A Matter of Simplification and Willpower
As impatient as I am, I need to make some progress. Now that I have my tasks sorted into index card form, there’s no reason not to apply some focus to get them done. CricketB noted in a comment on yesterday’s post that adrenaline is required for generating focus, which was news to me. And here I was trying to calm myself down so I would be in a state of peacefulness before I start. I wonder if the calm approach works for other people.
I’m also thinking that I can apply some of that crunch time methodology from yesterday’s post. Here it is again:
- Clear my schedule. Make warning calls. Nothing else matters.
- Provision the office with plenty of refreshing beverages.
- Throw everything on my desk in a box.
- Set up my development environment with shortcuts. Back up everything else.
- Get the music, crank it up, and start pushing.
- When tired, drink water, go for a walk.
- When tired again, take a shower, go for a walk and maybe eat something light.
- When tired again, go to the hot caffeinated beverages.
- If necessary, take a 2-3 hour nap. Do not exceed 4 hours.
- Repeat cycle once from step 5.
- At 48 hour mark, make detailed description of next steps, then go into deeper sleep. That way, it’s easier to remember where I left off after having slept.
- If I have to, repeat the cycle again.
Combining this with the generation of adrenaline might be very effective. At least it will be fun to try.
Additionally, for the 8/8 review I’ll want to be able to point to things that definitely got done and are generating energy by themselves, without my direct intervention. The idea has always been to create generators and concentrators of energy. Blog posts count, because anyone can read them at any time without me having to get out of bed. Software counts. Downloads count. Online stores count. Websites for my friends count. Those are all tangible and visible, and they create energy in the form of connecting great people with (1) other great people or (2) great ideas; here I define greatness as that which inspires passion-driven acts of creation.
Although I grow tired of constantly reporting a lack of major progress, I am certainly getting to explore a lot of different approaches to wasting time :-)
- July 6, 2009
Breaking Habits: Considering Saliency
July 6, 2009Read moreLast week I was feeling rather pleased with myself, having successfully rebooted the “going to sleep early” habit. I was well on the way toward creating a framework productivity-enriching habits…
But suddenly, a shot rang out! The maid screamed! And a project emergency loomed over the horizon, promising darkness and tragedy if certain drastic actions were not taken…
Yes, I ended up breaking my carefully-established sleeping schedule to pull a few all-nighters. The result: my optimal energy management plan completely went out of the window. And you know what? Instead of resenting it, I loved it.
This was very surprising. Thoughts follow.
Deconstructing the advantages of waking up early
Now, I still like waking up early and experiencing the first kiss of sunlight as I sip coffee outside of Starbucks. I really like being able to predict how many hours of sleep I’ll need every night. Contemplating the ruins of my habit, though, it seems that the greatest advantage was just having so many elements in synch with each other. First of all, I’m in synch with the sun. I L-O-V-E the sun. And everyone else local I know is synchronized with the sun too: people, work, restaurants, stores, and social gatherings.
The second advantage of waking up early, as I noted in my recent summary, is that it gives me time to start up. It’s a luxurious feeling, waking up early enough that I can take time to do all those other things in the early morning, and still have plenty of time to get to the real work.
What I find surprising is that losing these advantages did not freak me out, make me mad, or lead to a prolonged period of grumpiness. There’s something else at work here.
The upside of breaking the habit
I had to do a lot of on-the-fly graphic design and familiarization with a program that I haven’t used extensively, InDesign CS3, to meet an impossibly aggressive timeline. When things look that bad, it’s time to go into crunch time. Going back into crunch time reminded me of grad school and game development, and while I wasn’t looking forward to it I nevertheless knew how to prepare myself for it. There are several stages that I practice:
- Clear my schedule. Make warning calls. Nothing else matters.
- Provision the office with plenty of refreshing beverages.
- Throw everything on my desk in a box.
- Set up my development environment with shortcuts. Back up everything else.
- Get the music, crank it up, and start pushing.
- When tired, drink water, go for a walk.
- When tired again, take a shower, go for a walk and maybe eat something light.
- When tired again, go to the hot caffeinated beverages.
- If necessary, take a 2-3 hour nap. Do not exceed 4 hours.
- Repeat cycle once from step 5.
- At 48 hour mark, make detailed description of next steps, then go into deeper sleep. That way, it’s easier to remember where I left off after having slept.
- If I have to, repeat the cycle again.
It helps when I have other people crunching with me, and in this case I was lucky enough to have such a person who had the right attitude to get things done, putting the project ahead of personal stuff. The constant feedback that someone else was in the room working kept us both going.
Admittedly, crunching is a terrible way to work for sustained periods of time. There’s an article called why crunch mode doesn’t work, with many fascinating historical citations, posted on the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) website. In my vicariously-derived experience, crunch mode sucks for family life, but it ceases to be a problem during extended crunch periods because you won’t have a family anymore. It’s really that bad.
The one saving grace of crunch time is that something gets done and delivered. And this is probably why I’m not mad about having destroyed my sleeping pattern in a matter of days. However, as the IGDA article notes, crunching is the single most expensive way there is to get the work done. That isn’t very productive at all! Is there some way to combine the positive elements of getting something with having good habits?
recovering the salient bits
Taking a step back, let us consider why I started to reboot the sleep habit in the first place:
… [to establish] a sequence of habits that I believe will be conducive to greater productivity; it’s a framework for maintaining a working store of time and energy.
In other words, these serial habits (sleep, exercise, drinking water, regular meals, regular chores) are supposed to create the conditions where productivity can flourish. I was trying to convince myself that these habits are mandatory overhead for managing my life, given my current resources. It’s hard to argue, however, that crunch mode working bypasses all that stuff and just gets stuff done. Sure, the aftermath was a couple of days feeling dazed and unfocused, but what had 3 weeks of early waking accomplished? Not all that much, in terms of cold hard finished tasks. I had been busy, but not productive. Nevertheless, that busy-ness took care of a lot of lingering crap that would have eventually built up to stress-inducing levels.
It is frustrating to not be able to be the way I want to be, which I think is a sentiment shared by many productivistas seeking to become model machines. If only I was more disciplined and focused. I happened to hear a fragment of the solution on NPR over the weekend. It was about how breaking an addiction is difficult because our mind is wired to select the most salient experience available to it at a given time. To break the hold of a bad habit, you have to rewire your brain to desire a better habit at a very fundamental level. Without this rewiring, it’s impossible. Finding something more salient than the bad habit is the trick. I have friends who only give up smoking if it’s for their children or for a loved one; for them, the emotional bond and commitment outweighs their need for the cigarette. For other people, though, the neurological hook is so deeply embedded that they can’t break it at all; it takes individual will coupled with a positive feedback social network to provide enough energy to break free.
What’s salient
If I come right down to it, the reason why I’m not productive (in the “task finishing” sense) is that I prefer conversing with people about their interests over working in isolation. As a freelancer, this is a real problem. The way I push through is by constructing scenarios in which I’m drawing conclusions from the work that can later be turned into a new product, blog post, or business opportunity. In hindsight, all these tricks fall into the category of converting work into conversation.
If I put my “waking early” experiment into this context, I can see that the entire reason it works in the first place is that it gave me the opportunity to spend more time working on blog posts, synchronizing with friends, and being able to meet people for coffee under the guise of “business development”. Perhaps what I need to do is transform the nature of my work from production to conversation, which is an example of the strategy of embracing so-called faults and turning them into strengths. I can do the technical production work too, but at a vastly lower efficiency. This suggests that management is a course of action that I should pursue, or perhaps as a producer that works through other people.
Recovering the habit
Another reason I’m not mad is that I believe I can get my body back on schedule fairly easily. I’ve noticed that no matter what time I go to sleep, I seem to wake up after 8 hours. And If I get out of bed immediately, then my mental clarity is fine.
If there’s anything I learned from this experiment, it’s that the body has its own memory and momentum. It takes a few days for a new behavior pattern to set lightly, holding its shape delicately like a newly-poured bowl of Jello® that’s been in the refrigerator for only a couple of hours. If I plan for this, and stay generally in the range of hours that I prefer to maximize sun exposure, I think the habit will reform more naturally. We shall see in the next week. The emphasis, though, will be to pursue the salient qualities that I like about waking up early, not merely conforming to the schedule. Set schedules have their place, but the level of “hard set” perhaps can stand to be varied. Marina Martin has a great rant/post about why you should not wake up early tomorrow that is filled with great reasons why you should wake up whenever the hell you feel like it. I think the common principle is that different people have different priorities, energy sinks, and energy sources. Either habit by itself doesn’t guarantee success.
I suspect that sifting through the ruins of broken habits can yield justifications for why they broke: there’s some force offering an experience that’s more salient and more immediately accessible to you. You can try to fight that force through sheer willpower, knowing that it’s going to take much more energy, or you can run toward it and make that force a strength. In some cases you’ll have no choice to fight it; in which case, you must seek comrades and bind your destiny together.
A second direction to pursue: learning to apply the crunch time methodology in non-crunch time situations. For some reason, I’ve only applied it when the stakes seemed very high. I have to convince myself that the stakes are high ALL THE TIME, so I can enter that mental flow state.
So with that, I’m calling the WAKING UP EARLY experiment done, but I’m not giving up on the sequence. The next one up is GOING TO THE GYM. What’s going to help is a challenge I accepted with my friend Angela, which is to be able to run (Or jog. Or walk) for eight miles to her gym by August 3rd. I am not a runner by any stretch of the imagination, but I got some instruction and think I can take it slow IF I recondition my cardio-vascular endurance by going to the gym. It hasn’t degraded as much as I thought, but regular cardio sessions at a prudent level of exertion should be beneficial. We shall see!
Other articles in this series
If you’re interested in the other articles about rebooting the “Waking Up Early” habit, check out the following links:
- July 4, 2009
Dave’s Video Interview on Viralogy Blog
July 4, 2009Read moreA few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jun Loayza via Skype Video for the Viralogy blog, which is a kind of a “best blogs” social media aggregator. This was the first time I’d ever been interviewed on video, so I was all over the place with my responses. Jun, however, took out all those parts and produced a tightly edited video covering responses to these questions:
- Before starting the blog, did you have the same philosophy of productivity and transparency?
- How does your blog stand out from all of the other productivity blogs?
- Do you have a system to your productivity?
- What are some common misconceptions that people have about productivity and simplicity?
- Tell me a bit about yourself outside of the blogging world
- What makes you super passionate and excited?
- What advice would you give to your 20 year old self?
He also helpfully distills my responses into, as he interprets them, in his blog post. You can check out the video interview at his site or view it below:
Thanks Jun for the interview!
- June 28, 2009
Task Cards vs Cognitive Load vs Balance
June 28, 2009Read moreExcellent discussion on using index cards has been taking place on the recent index card post. Katrina Messenger even created a whole blog post about finding balance, with a followup article about living in balance. Katrina’s articles poignantly lay out all the problems that plague creative thinkers who lack the bandwidth or willpower to get it all done. This triggered some new thoughts about the broader context of task management, which lead to three observations:
- We focus on tasks because they produce results and invite immediate action (we don’t like being stuck). What’s interesting is that tasks are a form of communication. You know the saying: “Deeds speak louder than words.” Through tasks, we are engaging with other people who are depending on those tasks, or merely expecting them. Ideally those people also matter to us, but when they don’t tasks become a chore. While we tend to think that tasks are about us, a good amount of the time tasks are really about other people. How well you do a task, how fast, whether you meet that deadline…all these attributes of task-doing communicate something about you to them. At the same time, we’re communicating something to ourselves at the same time; the subtext of perfectionism, of responsibility, and of social value within a community. Yikes!
Balance is the sense that you are doing what you need to be do to live a good life, however you might define that. When this sense is sustainable and secure, a feeling of well-being results. A relative few tasks are about producing enjoyment, once you’ve carved out a bit of time and energy to do it. A lot of tasks are devoted to carving out that bubble of security to make it possible. The wriggle room is in how you define a task in the first place, and what parameters you place on their fulfillment to discern “success”.
Cognitive Load is, in my layman’s understanding, our brains ability to process information from both internal sources (our desires and memories) and external sources (our senses telling us what is going on). This is a limited resource at any given time, so learning how your brain reacts to certain stimuli is a good thing so you can manage it. I once had a partial insight related to this when I once compared myself to a go-kart with a certain set of performance parameters. Time management is a subset of this; really we want to manage our cognitive load such that our available time is productive.
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p>These are different approaches to the task management question, and it may appeal to a different kind of productivista. It invites comparison. For example, David Allen’s GTD system is explicitly engineered to process the elements of productivity in a methodical manner. It reminds me of a computer programming concept called Model View Controller (MVC), what’s referred to as a software design pattern in the field. Roughly speaking, the MVC approach is to divide a program’s code into three functional areas of responsibility: a “model” that organizes data within computer memory, a “view” that displays that data on the screen, and a “controller” that waits for “input events” (i.e. clicking a button on the screen) and interprets them as commands that update the model or change the view. This is a cycle repeats over and over again. The beauty of MVC is that you don’t mix the function of manipulating with the function of showing, thus avoiding a certain amount of error-inducing confusion; if you’ve ever tried cleaning up a pile of magazines at home and got stuck reading them instead, that’s the kind of functional mix-up I’m talking about.
Anyway, if you replace the word “task” for “data” in that description, you have a pretty accurate description of the GTD methodology. Where GTD gets interesting for many people is in the way that the model and view aspects are handled; this is perhaps why programmers get so excited about it. For example, how do you model the tasks and display them in such a way that the controller can be as elegant as possible? Answer(s): With a new Todo List application! Or with a tickler file! Or with index card bleachers! You get the idea.
Stretching the metaphor further, GTD puts you in the role of the “computer”. You are running the efficient GTD program, which is a kind of productivity operating system. So long as the human computer is reliable, GTD works. And that is also its greatest weakness, if you can call the need to be self-reliant and dependable a weakness. The Model-View-Controller programming pattern is effective when it comes to creating functional interactive software, but it doesn’t guarantee that the software will be pleasant to use. It’s just a pattern, and it has no soul of its own. That’s where Design comes in, structuring the elements of productivity in a way that naturally flows with our actual underlying desires and proclivities, at the same time elevating our expectations and abilities.
Secondly, from just a functional perspective, a great number of us are not very good at running a process consistently. The GTD system quickly destructs when not tended to in a task-by-task, weekly-reviewed manner. If you are not doing your weekly review, you’re dead in the water, and you lose the wonderful feeling of knowing exactly what you need to do. The GTD system is not at fault…it works great by design! It’s easy to point the finger back at ourselves and say it’s our fault, but perhaps we should have designed our productivity system to work analogously to computers in real-world situations, with unreliable connections, stormy weather, and intermittent service availability. We’re human. Dan Gilbert’s book Stumbling On Happiness reminds us that our mental hardware is, in many ways, broken and unreliable when judged by the standards of computing machinery. However, it’s those same quirks of our mental processing that makes magic possible. Productivity is, to some degree, an illusion that we create for ourselves. Some of us are so good at it that we create impossible illusions, and the trick there is to keep from falling for them. Perfectionists, I’m talking about us.
I think these observations on tasks as communication, cognitive load, and balance are nascent building blocks for a different kind of pattern. There are a different set of constraints, which requires a different set of operating principles. It might be a pattern that is designed to be opportunistically yet sporadically productive, like a kind of weird flowering desert plant. The various Printable CEO forms, now that I think about it, draw on this idea already. Making it more overt in the new forms in development may be fruitful.
