I’m not a car racing fan, so my mental picture of a go-kart was that they were fast bumper cars that you drive for fun at an amusement park. If you talk to a go-kart enthusiast, or read the track rules at a serious go-kart facility, you’ll find that this is not the case at all. I was at F1 Boston with Fred Schechter recently, watching a bunch of people doing laps. Fred, a racing enthusiast himself, was casting an experienced eye over the competition and pointing out errors that were adding seconds to their already-lackluster lap times. As he was talking, I was reminded again that driving competitively means pushing the vehicle to the limit of its performance within the context of the road, which means you need to know the limits and how they interact with each other. Secondly, for consistent performance you also need to maintain your vehicle and treat it well, otherwise the capability you extract from it will be inconsistent (even self-destructive) and will perform below its maximum theoretical capability.

This got me thinking: a lot of new managers (myself included back in the day) tend to think of people as the “fun” kind of go-kart, instead of the performance go-kart. Since I’m managing myself these days and am impatient with my progress, I’ve been trying to gun my productivity accelerator by stomping on the pedal. I’ve been looking for better processes, better motivations, and better technology. It occurred to me this morning that by assuming that the goal was to create the idealized go-kart version of myself, I was setting myself up for failure. The alternative approach is to recognize that I’m a finicky high-performance vehicle that operates at its peak within a fairly narrow range of constraints. I think probably most people are like this, but the widespread assumption is that they are supposed to be ideal general-purpose work vehicles that have instant acceleration, instant breaking, infinitely sticky tires, endless mileage, and never break down. Any manager would love to have that, and some new managers assume that this is what they should cultivate and find in their employees.

Basic Maintenance

I’ve been getting back into my early morning routine this week, and am rediscovering the joys of feeling like I’m ahead of the day instead of constantly feeling behind. And because I’m up early, I’ve been going to the gym also; this gets the blood flowing for the rest of the day, and so long as I don’t mess up by eating too many carbs, my mind is clear and my productivity ticks up. One reason I like the morning is because I don’t feel so bad about spending one hour at the gym if I get there before 8AM and finish before 9AM. If I get there later, I feel I’ve missed the morning and I have to switch to project work. I’m starting to realize that the gym routine is essential to my feeling of physical well being, as is the controlled intake of certain foods and the avoidance of others. I wish this wasn’t the case, but it is the reality and I’ve got to work with what I have instead of wishing for a whole new Dave. Sure, there might be shinier carb-burning Daves out there that are theoretically faster on the track, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll succeed at what I want to do. I can still win based on what I can do with what I have; I just can’t eat junk food and miss the gym session, and that means I have to wake up early. And waking up early means I have to go to sleep earlier too, otherwise the day’s performance will not be as awesome as it could. Those are my physical parameters.

Then there is mental maintenance. I have been trying to suppress my impulse to write for the past few months so I could focus 100% on my current project, which is wrapping up in April. We’re in the home stretch. The assumption is that I need to spend every waking hour doing this, but I find that this has been a real drag. The reason I want to write is because I want to eventually write about stuff I find interesting and design more stuff based on what I’ve learned all the time. I really, really want to do this, and the writing/creating itself is a necessary part of my strategy to create some kind of self-supporting and highly-fulfilling enterprise around it. I’m not sure exactly what, but one thing I’ve learned in the past five years is that market definition works in two ways. The traditional way is to define an audience’s desires, then create a product that meets those desires within the constraints of the buying demographic’s available means of acquisition. The “long tail” way is to make your products as discoverable as possible, find what audience(s) are drawn to it, and then create a symbiotic bond of need and fulfillment. As with many endeavors, this is the classic duality of top-down versus bottom-up design. But I digress…for me to feel that I’m making progress on personal goals, I need to be creating every day. When I do not make progress every day, my mind is distracted and unsettled. This means I do not work on my other projects at peak efficiency.

With these two goals in mind, I’ve decided to accept these two conditions as basic and essential maintenance needs, and am going to allocate 1 hour for the gym and 1 hour for daily writing. In fact, my time is up for the writing, so I’ll continue tomorrow with the rest of my thoughts on this matter regarding how I can drive myself realistically and still perform optimally.

I woke up this Sunday morning feeling chock full of vim and vigor, but after checking email, showering, and feeding the cats I was struck by a wave of lethargy that robbed me of my initiative. Now, this wouldn’t ordinarily be an issue, as I would heartily say that everyone is entitled to as many naps as they can squeeze in on a Sunday, but I also realized that this productivity stall was a recurring pattern during the rest of the week as well. Just as I start to formulate a plan of action, I’m struck by a kind of fuzzy-headed feeling and I lose my focus. Hours later, I regain mental focus while browsing some website on the Internet I’ve never seen before, dressed only in the bathrobe I had on in the morning.

I ticked off the usual suspects: eating bad, not working out, not drinking enough water, depression over lack of clear mission, etc. Yep, these are all possibilities, nothing that a bit of discipline and good habits can’t fix. But since I’ve been over this ground before, I decided to consider alternative explanations and decided to self-monitor my stream of consciousness. When I am steeling myself to take action I listen to a monologue in my head that essentially tries to persuade me into action. These appear as fully-formed sentences, and my writing is essentially the process of writing it all down with a bit of on-the-fly restructuring. This is the means by which I focus my thoughts into a single line of reasoning, which then becomes the basis for a plan of action. The process of polishing up–when I have the patience–is to “listen” to what I wrote and correct words and phrases that are not in the spirit of my intent. But I digress…I wanted to find out where this foggy feeling is coming from, so I plopped myself into a convenient sunbeam and closed my eyes.

I found that I was feeling quite irritated with myself, and that there were several layers of irksomeness to deal with:

• I felt physically restless. I can recognize this now as the “jittery energy” feeling that comes from not doing enough physical activity to tire out the muscles, one of the mysteries of the gym I had encountered when I started going a couple years ago. I’ve been a slacker for the last six months, though, being too pre-occupied with work and having fallen out of my daily routine. The solution: I can go to sleep at a regular time every night. This is harder that it sounds, because my mind tends to race and seek new stimuli until it is exhausted.

• A little more relaxed, I then started to formulate a plan for the day. I soon experienced the “fog of inaction” sensation that had so pissed me off this morning. I put a shape to the fog: I felt the need to write down my plan somewhere where I wouldn’t forget it or lose it. Ah…my lack of trust in my memory is an anxiety that stems back to early childhood. I have come to believe that I can’t remember any kind of arbitrary process, and subjects in school that required such memorization were much hated. This ruled out a lot of math, chemistry, history, and language courses. I’m not sure if I even have some kind of memory deficit, but at an early age I gave up on trying to remember arbitrary things and focus on learning principles. In fact, the way I look at the world is probably shaped by my anxiety about remembering things; I use principle as a knowledge compression scheme that allows me to re-synthesize from root concepts what I need to know. Freshman-level courses where reasoning is at the root of the process–Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Physics come to mind–worked well with my particular learning strategy. Anyway, I don’t know if my lack of faith in my own memory is even justified, but I had told myself this story a long time ago and I have believed it. It is time to test that belief and replace it with a better one. The solution: A simple list is enough to jog my memory, because my associative memory works just fine. Keeping the list handy, though, is the challenge that my anxiety about forgetting things keeps raising. I can try to create the optimal solution, but that is a form of procrastination in itself. It’s probably easier to just accept forgetfulness as a part of the process, but that also bothers me because I’m a freelancer; forgetfulness is not a virtue. There are so many ways I can go with this that this problem deserves several blog posts, so for now I’m sticking with “use one list”. I think I’ll use the new bright green Moleskine Volant I bought yesterday.

• The last issue was the desire for optimal execution. I almost didn’t write this blog post because I didn’t think I had the “optimal place to put it”. I’ve been displeased with the organization of my website for some time, perceiving the need for several topical content streams, and this has prevented me from posting anything at all that didn’t seem mandatory. I haven’t even started because it is such a daunting endeavor technically. Additionally, the desire to have an optimal plan of attack becomes a preoccupation in itself, and it seems worthwhile because this theoretically will make things “easier”. That may be true in very expensive and resource-intensive projects, but for personal projects at the scale I’m thinking? It’s probably no more than a 10-20% penalty, and even that is probably wrong-thinking. I’ve already blown the time allotment anyway through excessive non-productive optimization-before-implementation, which is a fundamental sin. It’s a lot easier to optimize once you have the complete process in place, when actual problems (as opposed to imagined “might be” problems) manifest. There is probably some anxiety about not messing up somewhere in here too, which is another deep-seated childhood fear. The reluctance is just an instinctual reaction, like learning to shy away from something that hurts you. As an adult, however, I know “messing up” is quite recoverable, and it’s even a sign of character if you’re the entrepreneurial type. The solution: MESS UP A LOT, and trust that the reassessment phase that follows swiftly will orient myself in the right direction. From experience, I know this is the case.

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p>At the very least, I got a blog post out of this morning’s crankiness. Now to fire up the new Moleskine! :-)