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  • Groundhog Day Resolutions 2008: Closing Out With Charlie Brown

    November 11, 2008

    Today is Veteran’s Day, November 11, which also happens to be the last “official” day of Groundhog Day Resolutions Reviews 2008. At this point, the American High Holidays–Thanksgiving through New Years Day–loom over me. so I rest my side ambitions until February 2nd. The original idea behind Ground Hog Day resolutions is that on January 1st, the traditional time of making resolutions, I’m so tired from the holidays that I’m still catching up with everything I didn’t finish last year; I need some time to chill and reflect. Besides, Ground Hog Day is my favorite holiday, and it is under-celebrated.

    Fractal Patterns of Perceived Failure and Recovery

    2008 was the second year I launched GHDRs, and I maintained the follow up review days for March, April, May, June, and July. It was a mixed run, largely one of disappointment masked by the power of positive thinking ;-)

    After July, I decided to go on blogging hiatus due to an increased project load (largely mental, in retrospect), and suspended my GHDR Review Days at the same time. When I review the wistfully-optimistic first months of 2008, I find the following themes appearing:

    • March: The acute need to focus, to attain mobility, and to battle the forces of loneliness.
    • April: The recognition that I needed to be more specific to achieve goals. Also, the decision to reduce my material needs (a necessary aspect of mobility), and to commit to writing as a vocation, whatever that means.
    • May: Why oh why do I lack motivation? Theorizing on internal and external sources of said motivation. Gah!
    • June: Acceptance that there are certain “go-getter” attributes I lack, a decision to find alternate routes other than the “just do it” approach.
    • July: Ground down, I rediscover part of my core, and am surprised to find what’s there.

    If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because last week’s Productivity Reboot repeats the entire cycle of fevered commitment – perceived failure – diagnosis – acceptance – return to core – re-dedication. If I were to look back at the 1200+ blog posts I’ve written over the past three years, I am pretty sure that I’d see the same cycle repeated, fractal-like, in everything I do. This I find fascinating, and at the same time it’s kind of alarming because at first glance it seems that I’m not going anywhere. Yikes! Have I discovered my predestined pattern of doom?

    Sparky to the Rescue

    I flew to California last Sunday for a week of on-site work with Inquirium, which I look forward to for the shared working environment. While waiting for a change of plane at Chicago Midway, I happened upon Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis. Although I had enjoyed Peanuts as a child, I had never known much about the cartoonist Schulz himself and had mentally categorized him as “too popular to be interesting, coasting on past success”. However, seeing the book reminded me of my buddy Brad, who in the early days of our acquaintance had been working hard to get into a cartoon syndicate, and I decided to pick up the book to gain some insight. What I gleaned from my reading was profound insight into my own nature, by gaining a reference point of understanding about the nature of ambition and self-doubt.

    Charles M. Schulz, for all his success in life, was a man who seemingly kept himself from feeling actual happiness. He was a shy boy raised by emotionally-distant parents who demonstrated their love through duty, hiding their own insecurities behind thick walls of silent denial. Highly intelligent, talented but surrounded by people who couldn’t imagine–and therefore couldn’t emotionally support–the notion of cartooning for a living, he nevertheless was lucky enough to find himself in employ of a company that allowed him to mature his drawing as an unwitting means to express his own pantheon of insecurities; the book is liberally illustrated with strips that echo the goings-on of his life. Throughout his life, he insisted on thinking of himself as a regular guy from Minnesota who had done OK with a modicum of talent, though underneath the surface he was highly ambitious and competitive to the point of meanness. He held grudges against the people who he perceived to have bullied, slighted, or belittled him. When he was a child, his own doubts and insecurities were fed by people who he later realized were limited in their life perspective and experience, and despite his rise to massive success he just could not accept that he’d made it and was adored by millions. Although a gracious and generous person in spirit, he had a constant need for affirmation; without his cartoon, he said, “he would be dead.” He died in 2000, and one of his last interviews regarding how he viewed his life achievements produced a statement that struck me rather well. Paraphrased: “I took the talent I had and did not waste it.” Producing his comic strip was an intensely personal affair; he did not seek help or advice on his work, because in his mind it was the one thing that he did himself that provided affirmation that he was doing something right.

    I can see a lot of parallels between myself and Schulz’s conflicts about his desire for understanding, for affirmation, and being the best while being in conflict with his Midwestern values of being humble and unassuming. Instead of rationalizing them away, as I’ve been trying to do, Schulz actively appeared to embrace them, using his unhappiness to drive his muse. What’s interesting too is that the biography makes a point of distinguishing unhappiness from depression. I still can’t quite wrap my head around the distinction, but to be depressed I gather is to not be able to muster the energy to do anything, while unhappiness is something less debilitating. In my own case, I am feeling similar doubts about my direction, and I am also beset by desires to be the best at what I do for recognition by the world. I want a calling, and I don’t want to fail. At the same time, I wonder if I am being immodest and prideful in a way that will damage my soul or, at the very least, bite me in my hypocritical ass: I want to be a good person, but I also want to be the best. And like Schulz, I want to the be the sole author of my creations, because this provides me with affirmation that I am capable of doing something right as well.

    After reading the biography, I was struck by a few thoughts:

    • Schulz, for all his insecurities, persevered through his unhappiness and consistently produced work day-in, and day-out. What drove him was an ideal of customer service he had absorbed from his father, a barber who meticulously found comfort in the daily routine of giving his customers individual attention. In time, Schulz worked it out and found success. My own belief that producing tangible things as a means to create opportunities and connections with people is similar; consistent production of items of value, as appraised by other people, is very important to me. Otherwise, how do people know what you’re capable of?
    • Schulz belated matured, growing out of his boyish ways as he took on responsibilities in WWII. He became a well-liked squad leader because of his intelligence, competence with weapons, and ability to listen to people who learned they could come to him. This is a model of leadership that I like, and it mirrors the sentiments I’ve been reading about in Seth Godin’s Tribes (I have 3 copies of that book now, one for me, and two for loaning to people).
    • If someone as massively successful as Charles Schulz could be deeply unhappy and beset by numerous demons, at least I was in good company. I lack the ability to hold a grudge for very long, and I’m not really that unhappy or depressed at all. But I am at times lonely and isolated, and seek affirmation and understanding. It would be great if I could find that affirmation in myself and be done with it, but there’s something else missing. However, I don’t want to be soooo dependent on external affirmation that I am a slave to it; reading Schulz’s biography has put that scenario into perspective, and I want nothing to do with it. That is itself a self-strengthening realization.
    • There is a commitment to excellence in Schulz’s work, both artistically and in the pursuit of deeper truths. When he first started attempting syndication in the early 1950s, people tried to get him to steer his creations in more “popular” directions; his own mother suggested that he needed to draw sexier girls. But Sparky stuck to his guns, and when Peanuts (nee “Li’l Folks”) debuted in the 1950s, his work was regarded as a kind of anomaly in comics of the time. His audience grew steadily, then explosively, over the next 25 years, and it is (I imagine) because his work wasn’t made to appease the surface desires of a large audience, but because he constantly pursued personal truths in himself and in his observations of the times. His art was the means through which he strove to portray these truths as clearly as possible. For myself as a blogger and writer, I’ve struggled with the ideas of writing shorter, easier-to-digest, more digg-able, top-ten list style posts for the purpose of growing audience, but I don’t. I’m well aware that I could write shorter and more concise articles, but there is something about the way that I write now that is truthful to myself; creating shorter articles that jump right to the point is a different product entirely, one that will come later. I am still very much in my formative years as a writer, deciding what truths matter to me, and learning to express them to unknown people far away. My best days are yet to come; this is the lesson I’ve learned from Schulz’s biography. Artistically, I now have the sense of purpose that I need to keep doing what I’m doing.

    What does this have to do with Ground Hog Resolutions? I think they’ve evolved into something else. I mentioned that Ground Hog’s Day is one of my favorite holidays, and this is partly because of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a fantastical movie about self-realization and improvement. In the movie, Bill Murray’s self-centered character moves from surface cynicism to something deeply truthful about himself and his needs. It’s the continual pursuit of these personal truths that, I suspect, drive me. I am compelled to follow them. I have no idea what kind of “business case” I can make for this, but I am making a bet that if I continue to express these truths through my writing, design, and personal interactions, I’ll be OK. And so, I can distill all my future Ground Hog Day Resolutions into a single Master Resolution that goes something like this:

    Seek the truthful essence, and make it artfully visible so others can see it too.

    So long as I do that every day, in some form, I’ll be doing what I’m supposed to be doing, the equivalent of Sparky Schulz getting up every morning and producing his strip for 50 years.

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    DSri Seah

  • Productivity Reboot Day 5: Recap

    November 7, 2008

    I started my productivity reboot by just stating the desire to get back into the groove, and it ended up becoming a declaration of belief. Here’s the abridged version of what happened last week:

    Starting with momentum and goals

    At first, I started with simple process goals to maintain momentum. If I maintain momentum, so my reasoning went, I will eventually get out of the doldrums. Over the past several years I’ve experimented with a few techniques: getting up early, using my various scheduler tools, and timer-based pacing tricks. Each of these tools failed within the first two days of the reboot, leaving me to acknowledge that there were deeper issues with my work now and the work I think I should be doing.

    Here’s what I want:

    • I want to achieve the financial freedom so I can meet awesome people, then write and design from the resulting inspiration.
    • In the meantime, I need to finish my current long term project commitments and not be distracted by the future.
    • I need to develop products and other services that bring me into alignment with my writing and design goals.
    • I want to be a major participant in a community of positive, self-empowered people who are of a similar mind.

    On the surface, there are clear actions one can take based on principles of maintaining focus and momentum. They just take discipline to implement:

    • Productivity is a byproduct of focused momentum. Maintain focus and momentum, and the right things will get done.
    • Remove environmental distractions that rob focus. Without focus, momentum is harder to maintain.
    • Create momentum-building habits like waking up at a regular time, using planning tools that emphasize timeliness, and delivery tangible intermediate results.

    Facing the internal demons

    However, as the week ground on it became clear that it was the motivation-related challenges that were the real issues.

    • I was unmotivated by the future, therefore the work felt pointless.
    • I was feeling unsettled and off balance, therefore it was difficult to push forward with conviction and strength.

    Diagnostically, I needed to dive deeper into myself to find the root causes undermining my dedication. After some reflection, I came to believe that these were the major underlying issues and desires that were throwing me off balance.

    • I was way too serious about being productive, and beat myself up about it. I needed to remember to laugh at it as well.
    • I needed to look deeper into myself to find the bad feelings and irrational feelings that were the source of my unease.
    • I needed to define and face those fears and uncertainties to see what I was facing.
    • I needed to rediscover what I believed, and why it was important so I could work toward the future with certainty.

    An unblinking look at myself, to see the shape of my despair:

    • There is a child-like part of me that is feeling sad, scared, and alone with regards to the future.
    • It needed to be acknowledged and accepted. And so I did.

    Affirming myself

    Having defined what was bothering me, I was able to make a reaffirmation of what I believe about myself with regards to the future. What followed was a declaration of secular faith, reproduced here in slightly shortened form:

    The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it’s been empty for a long time. It is lonely and filled with uncertainty, and there is no indication that the situation will change. My first response was the desire to indulge my sadness, like a frightened child. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, there is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something and change my situation. All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and my people. Even if those choices ultimately fail, even if I’m sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and otherwise refuse to face these fears is to choose failure. That is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are writing about ourselves should not end this way.

    Since then, I’ve felt a kind of steady calmness descend upon me, because I’ve defined a role for myself. In the absence of an organizational structure, with people at my side every day, I’d become disconnected from the strengthening hand of shared destiny. I have essentially manufactured my own structure out of thin air, establishing a tribe of one. The unspoken hope is that I find others in my tribe, so that we might all prosper together. And most importantly, I need to remember to laugh about this, to maintain mirthfulness and joy.

    I think with this, I can return to my regularly-scheduled productivity writing. Every once in a while, I just need to remind myself why I do it at all. If you are interested in the articles leading up to this epiphany, here are the links:

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    DSri Seah

  • Productivity Reboot Day 4: A glimmer of hope

    November 6, 2008

    Yesterday’s post about sucking it up ended with a declaration of intent: I would wake up no matter what and start the day! And when I woke up, the alarm clock read 6:30AM, which was a little later than my target, but still early! Encouraged, I closed my eyes in contentment and then reconfirmed that it was indeed…1130AM? Apparently my body had a different idea about how much sleep I was to have, hijacked my motivation, and did me in. Bummer. But the day ended up taking a hopeful path.

    Serial task switching

    I had a 1PM appointment with my music teacher, Angela, for a mutual “project regrouping” session. We met at Bonhoeffer’s, a local coffee shop, where I was planning to work for the rest of the day. What was on her mind was her upcoming professional website, a distillation of her public identity as a music teacher to the most impactful essentials. What was on my mind was maintaining weekly continuity with my music education, despite my piano practice being shoved aside due to my project work.

    I suggested that we ping-pong between our individual project discussion in 3-minute chunks, based on my thoughts yesterday regarding merciless time-blocking. In other words, she would get to talk about her immediate web site goals for 3 minutes, and then I would get to talk about my music lesson challenges. To maintain context between switches of topic, we each had a small whiteboard to write on.

    Three minutes, as it turns out, is just about enough time to get a thought going and draw it to a tentative conclusion. It’s not enough time, though, to really go off on a tangent because you feel the time pressure. The resulting meeting ended up being rather exciting and dynamic, with excellent momentum and lots of passion. What was surprising, in retrospect, was that the discussion was not disjointed in the least; I would have thought that the “hard context switch” would prevent natural continuity from developing. Angela and I have similar conversational styles, jumping from thought to thought, so this kind of serial task switching may not work for everyone. I could see this working very well, however, in a group brainstorming session. Having the whiteboard to record where we left off was critical, and the dissimilarity of topics may have laid a foundation for creative random juxtaposition. It rocked.

    Personal versus impersonal inspiration

    When I mentioned to Angela that I believed I needed to close personal connections with people so I could focus on work, she suggested that I find inspiration elsewhere by going to a concert. This would be an intermediate form of human connection; I realized that merely seeing inspiration etched across people’s faces would likely uplift me as well. And there’s another advantage: time-consuming personal conversations are not required. Now, I love having long conversations with people about their lives and their aspirations, but it’s a big time commitment that occupies a lot of my mental reserves. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could draw energy from inspiring public events, and this reminds me of my good friend S, who once told me that she likes to go to noisy public events to “be alone”. It totally makes sense to me in this context; sometimes you need the external source of energy to feel what you need to feel, without having the commitment of a one-on-one human connection. In my case, I am energized by expressive energy, passion, imagination, and inspiration. In the past I’ve gotten that primarily by maintaining very close relationships with multiple people, but as I said there is a time cost.

    Counseling the inner child

    After Angela left, I settled down to do some programming. The problem was that I was hugely inspired by the quality of the previous communication, but rather less inspired by the world of Visual Studio and C#. I caught myself checking my email, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr accounts—the automatic impulse to reach out for personal connections—and then stopped myself. The coding mindset requires an unusual clarity and singularity of purpose, and my mind was not cooperating.

    I recalled what I had written in my last Groundhog Day Resolutions post about shedding my armor, which had involved a mind-clearing technique I’d made up. The technique had given me a significant bit of insight about myself…maybe it would help clear my mind so I could write the GUI base classes I needed to implement. I jotted down an impromptu process to follow:

    1. Close my eyes.
    2. Identify each surface thought, and then respectfully tell each thought to fade away for now.
    3. Find what feels like the center of my consciousness.
    4. Note pains, tensions, and other discomforts. If they are not 911-level emergencies, tell them to fade away.
    5. Try to count up to 33 after getting to this state. This was an arbitrary number I picked.
    6. See if anything interesting happens.

    The experience was like peeling away the layers of an onion. The end result of identifying each thought was that I drew into myself. Once I’d tagged and cleared those thoughts, I was in my own mental space, and could then hear the little discomforts, pangs, and things going on in my body that I usually ignore. I determined whether these discomforts were life-threatening (which they were not), and dismissed them. I never did count up to 33, because I became aware of feelings and impulses that were unnamed and unknown. Strange denizens of the emotional deep, I imagined them, that usually do not see the light of consciousness. I listened.

    The foremost emotion, I am almost embarrassed to say, was a desire to cry from an ambiguous feeling of loneliness and abandonment. The second underlying emotion was an unspecific fear of failure, a feeling I was not “measuring up” to anyone and everyone. There they were, wreaking havoc with my sense of self.

    A couple of years ago I had the epiphany that I could split myself into a parent and a child. As adults, we’re used to thinking we know how to deal with the complexities of life in a responsible matter. We also crave being in comfort zones of competence and security; this is one measure of how “together” we feel our lives are. When faced with a challenge, we can cope by either telling ourselves a “look on the bright side” story or plan a “this is how I’ll get out of this” escapade. I have a good adult coping mechanism, but yesterday I came to believe that coping treats symptoms, not causes. To treat the cause is to treat all the symptoms with finality. The process starts by finding the root cause of the problem, calling it out, and dealing with it directly. In my case, merely naming these fears was enough. Once named, I could acknowledge that they existed, understand what they indicated, and move onward.

    It’s difficult to admit to yourself that you feel like crying because you’re lonely and unconfident about the future. The common wisdom is that this makes you weak, but that’s only the case if you are whining like a victim. This is my situation, as clearly as I can express it:

    The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it sucks because I realize that it’s been empty for a long time and I have no idea if and when the situation will change. My first response was the raw emotional one: the desire to hide and be sad. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, that is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something about it. All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and for people I can connect with in the future. Even if those steps ultimately fail, even if I’m sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance to me that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and so forth is to choose failure, and that is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are all writing about ourselves should not end this way.

    I closed all my browser windows and started writing code.

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    DSri Seah

  • Productivity Reboot Day 2 and 3: Sucking it Up

    November 5, 2008

    After the mixed success of day 1, the second day of my productivity reboot fared only slightly better in terms of raw hours worked. I got up early as I had the day before, and hit the polls at 6:15AM to cast my vote. Unfortunately, my late-night epiphany about the need for more mirth had tired me out, which led to an unplanned 2-hour nap in the middle of the day. The day, then, was lost to random socializing and following election result coverage late into the night. On Wednesday, I helped accomplish something critically important for my project that I hadn’t planned. This was good, but it was irking that the rest of the day was not directed.

    Disentangling what I want from what I must do

    A big part of this productivity reboot is about finding my work groove so I can reliably jack into it. On the surface the “solution” is simple: hunker down and do the work. That’s what my Dad would do! However, there is this nagging feeling that my “work” should be “my life’s work”. In other words, being productive isn’t just about self-discipline, it’s also about finding meaning in what I do. My assumption is that once I find the meaning, I can design my future so I can have the freedom to do that. So far, my best guess is that I want to create sustaining connections with people that I care about, and have this somehow be what I do for a living.

    Thus far, my productivity reboot has failed to power up, and this is due to procrastination. Looking a little closer, however, I realize that what I’m doing to procrastinate mirrors my long-term goals:

    • GOAL: I say that I want to create sustaining connections with people I care about. By sustaining, I mean that I get something out of the relationship that gives me energy. By connection, I mean the means through which we interact: common interest, desire to share knowledge, and the other benefits of good friendship. I think this will be the foundation for productive happiness.

    • PROCRASTINATING MIRROR FORM: When someone that is already a good friend contacts me, talking to that person feels like the goal is already achieved. The connection immediate and visceral. Even when I’m surfing the web, I’m looking for tidbits and inspiration that I can apply to the next conversation I have with someone; in all likelihood, I’m surfing the web based on something someone said to me earlier.

    <

    p>This desire to immediately cash-in on existing personal relationship does NOT help me in my short term responsibilities. It’s a short-circuit to immediate pleasure, just as addictive as indulging in ice cream to keep your mind from sinking into a funk. I tell myself that talking to friends and acquaintances on the Internet is actually a good thing, because it helps me see exciting new ideas and opportunities. In this case, however, it’s a distraction; there is important work that must be done first, and there’s no making it go away.

    I think most “normal” people happily split their work and personal lives in two separate halves, but for some reason I’ve never been able to do it. Possibly, this is because I’ve never had a “normal” 9-5 job. I’ve worked primarily at startups and game companies, and now I freelance. My parents were also missionaries, and their work was their life. As a freelancer I am the single room in which all decisions ultimately get made, and I think it will be necessary to compartmentalize further. In other words: create unbending structure and forcing myself to adapt within its confines. The trick will be to create the right structure and maintaining my physical well-being so I can follow through with it.

    Overcoming the mind’s desires

    The first takeaway is that I actually have to live in isolation for a while, or figure out some practical way to balance work with life. My ideal of balance is that it would be X hours of solid, uninterrupted work followed by Y hours of quality social time, something like an idealized 9-5 schedule. However, my personality tends to goes against this schedule. My mind likes to run and jump around from thought to thought, exulting in the interplay between incompatible ideas, crashing them together and challenging their underlying assumptions. I could attempt to squash that impulse, but am I fighting a losing battle against my nature? It would be far better to create a productive system that uses my “weaknesses” as strengths…but this is for the future. For right now, I do need to put aside my desire to have conversations and focus on doing some hardcore programming and website redevelopment.

    My Office The second takeaway is that I probably should remind myself constantly that I do have good friends. I know I say it a lot, but when I’m in my basement by myself it’s hard to remember. While I was talking to my friend Jenn online about my depressed state, she mentioned it was difficult to imagine because my buddy icon is so positive looking. I joked I should probably print it out so it would remind me that I am happy. Hm. The buddy icon photo was taken at Barcamp Boston 3 and is probably the best photo I have of myself. I went and bought a whole bunch of frames and filled them with pictures of friends and family, everyone smiling, and hung them behind my monitor (see photo below). My house has nothing on the walls at all, so this was a good thing to do. I immediately felt a little less isolated.

    Overcoming the body’s desires

    Two other problems are sleeping schedule and diet. I have a tendency to stay up late because my brain keeps racing until it is tired. My natural day seems to be about 27 hours long, so if I indulge my desire to stay up I quickly go out of sync with the rest of the world. With no morning commute, I can also sleep in. It’s pretty draining, now that I think about it, to constantly be in and out of sync, so committing to the schedule means ignoring my impulse to stay up AND having a reason to get up at the same time. It might have to be some kind of early morning class at the gym or something.

    As for diet, I have not been drinking enough water, which makes my head a little cloudy. Sugars, breads and starches also make me very sleepy, as does quantity, so I have to eat much more mindfully. I have a tendency to turn off my brain when I’m eating, and therefore the portions and type of food tend to be unregulated by common sense. Maybe I need to sacrifice yummy food for those meals in a can; if I know meals are going to be yucky, I’ll just get them over with as soon as possible. Am I willing to trade off a few moments of foodie pleasure for 90 minutes of clear thinking, so I can get my productivity groove going? Probably.

    Keeping the pace

    Having a schedule might help. Maybe I need some version of Adult Kindergarten…THAT might be a fun Coworking experiment. My schedule is completely arbitrary and flexible, which is what I thought I wanted but it is starting to drive me crazy. It’s very tiring to have to be responsible for all the decisions all the time, especially when you are completely by yourself.

    The problem with keeping the schedule is that I have tasks that are difficult to predict. I tend to want closure and completion on my work, so I work until things are done. Invariably things take longer, and when they do other things fall off the to-do list. It may be necessary to apply a time limit to how long I am “allowed” to work on any single area, mercilessly switching to the next scheduled task. If they don’t get done, so be it; I’ll pick it up again tomorrow. It would be possible to schedule more precisely if the exact nature of the task is blueprinted, but that requires more up-front planning. The Task Progress Tracker is designed somewhat around this, but I don’t believe I actually have a form that is designed to enforce time without the requirement of completion. It’s an intriguing idea, with a different set of context and continuity management challenges.

    A corollary to the “work strictly with the allocated time” approach is committing to feeling tired. I tend to sleep if I feel sleepy, reasoning to myself that if I’m tired I’m not going to be able to do the work anyway. Perhaps I should really just drink a Red Bull and keep moving instead of sleeping. That will tend to put me back into the schedule, maybe, though I don’t like the idea of chemically sustaining my mental processes.

    Re-re-re-rebooting

    Thursday is another day, and I’ve already blown my “go to sleep” window, but I will apply the “just stay up” approach. That means waking up at 6AM and pushing through. Unfortunately my experiment will be interrupted by a trip out to San Jose this Sunday, where I’ll be holed up for my project with the rest of the team.

    There are decisions to be made at every step of the way, and I am feeling the desire to design some kind of tracking / process form that handles all these problems. It would be something like the ETT, except what it would track decisions made in the face of dizziness, tiredness, lack of motivation, etc. However, if you choose to use a “cheat” to get by, or you decide to bail, the form would be able to tell you what you need to do to get back into synchronization and suggest appropriate recovery techniques over the next 24 hours.

    Anyway, that’s how the reboot is going right now. I wasn’t expecting this much angst when I started it, but it feels like I’m addressing some previously hidden resistances to my productivity.

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    DSri Seah

  • Productivity Reboot Day 1: Failure and Laughter

    November 3, 2008

    I wasn’t even going to write this, because I went to bed at 9PM so I could be at the polls by 6AM. By my official schedule, I should be sound asleep to establish an inspiring personal track record of productive discipline. What I didn’t count on was a sudden blast of insight that jolted me wide awake about two hours ago. After I heard my Timex beep the hour twice, I gave up and decided to do some writing. The day started strong and ended haphazardly. However, failure has led to a series of epiphanies regarding productivity and mirthfulness.

    Starting strong

    ETP Sheet for the Day The first day of any habit usually goes pretty well, because I’m motivated and ready to go. And indeed, my morning started out great. I woke up at 530AM, dressed in real clothes, and got over to Starbucks by 6:40AM to start planning on an Emergent Task Planner sheet (see photo). This being the first ETP sheet in some time, it’s fairly choked with things to do. I had no illusion about getting them all done, however, so I just kept adding to it to rollover to tomorrow’s sheet. By 700AM, I pretty confident about what I needed to do overall for the day, and wrote down first steps for the day’s programming tasks in a separate notebook. By 715AM, I was ready to head to the gym for an hour, planning to follow-up with a quick trip to pick up a room divider screen plus adequate protein for the day.

    I also decided on a day’s personal challenge of sharing positive energy with strangers on the street. I found that I was unable to really muster the ability to power through other people’s default mood, which was that of casual preoccupation and indifference. I had never noticed this before, probably because I’m in the same place. The best I could do was mirror people’s mood in a reactive way. When people smiled, I could smile back. If they didn’t smile, I just moved my gaze onward. This was a disturbing realization, as this indicated a lack of positive energy on my part. And that’s a problem; if you want to be around positive people, you had better be positive yourself. Like attracts like, ya know.

    Getting back to the gym in the morning was nice. It had been quite some time (3 months) since I’d done an early-morning gym routine, and it felt good to just work through the muscle groups and sweat. I didn’t push myself too hard, as I wanted to be “clear headed” without the tiredness. Mission accomplished, I zooped back home to read my email. Several readers provided some very helpful comments regarding the productivity reboot, offering empathetic advice. “Clyde” noted that although cleaning up my space was one way to improve motivation, the real change has to happen in the mind. He suggested a particularly vivid mental trick, imagining that one is sucked into the task to create joy and openness. This would prove to be an important observation for later in the day…thanks Clyde! As much as I like to think myself the master of mind trickery, it’s good to be reminded that others have their own master collection of insights.

    Blowing my momentum

    The day started to go awry when I made some poor choices about the use of my time. First, I decided to go buy the room divider screen I’d seen at a store last week. It was no where to be seen, so I went to another store, then another, then another. I spent the next couple hours going to six stores where I thought I’d seen screens like this, only to find that they seem to have been completely erased from the face of the Earth. I knew the entire time that I was being obsessive about it, and decided to end my trip by at least buying some low sodium soy sauce from Trader Joe’s (my favorite for taste and cooking) to salvage the rest of the day. It being close to lunch time, I made my second mistake: I went to KFC and got a chicken breast meal with potato wedges. The combination of KFC plus the tiredness that had accumulated over the extended shopping after working out at the gym completely knocked me out. I would have slept longer if it wasn’t for the incessant calling and doorbell ringing from Obama supporters throughout the day.

    It being 2PM, the day wasn’t completely screwed, but I knew that by 5PM I would not be able to maintain any work momentum. That is when I made several more erroneous judgment calls. Three good friends of mine happened to contact me one after the other, and I chose to spend time visiting with them rather than telling them that I wanted to work. The first friend, A, is going through a similar bout of motivational reconfiguring, so I rationalized that this might pay off in the long run. We talked for two hours, outlining possible issues and strategies regarding motivation, all the while acknowledging the irony that we were also procrastinating. At 5PM, I went to meet my best friend E at Starbucks to restock on general cheerfulness, which is important to have stocked in New England during the cold months. Finally, at 615PM I met friend number three at Lowe’s to pick up some stuff, and offered to help him unload a new snowblower at home because it was a two-man job. And then, the day was gone. Poof!

    Reflecting upon this massive failure to stick to the plan, I recognized two mechanisms in action:

    • Succumbing to the Easy Fix: I’d somehow had it in my mind that getting this room divider was really important to establish the right atmosphere to work. I really just wanted one. I think it will actually help the office for other reasons, but in terms of functional productivity it provided false positive feedback. Buying stuff feels like change. If you like what you got, and can rationalize the utility of your purchase, you feel like you’ve done something. It feels like you’ve added more potential to the system. Well, that’s not true. When my attempt to purchase to screen failed, I went into a backup reward recovery mode and indulged in a greasy treat from KFC. I knew all the time that I probably shouldn’t spend so much time looking for the screen, but there is always just one more store, and it’s just a few minutes away. And I knew that the KFC would probably make me sleepy, but I convinced myself that maybe this time it wouldn’t. But it did…my desire for immediate reward overrode the modicum of discipline I had mustered up for the day. Bah.

    • Shortcutting to the False End Goal: If it wasn’t clear yesterday, I’m feeling the need to break out of my rut of isolation. However, I have to get my projects completed and out the door, and I need to build a support enterprise that gives me the freedom to operate the way I want. This freedom will allow me, theoretically, to travel more and work on interesting projects that are based around human interaction. I crave this. And because I crave it so much, it was easy to succumb to my desire to be around more people. I gained a lot of insight about myself and my current process, mind you, and I feel good for having spent the time with my friends…but I didn’t get what I wanted done. It will take discipline to limit my social activities during normal working hours (and this includes shopping trips). This is one of the perks of freelancing in the first place, but for this productivity push I will need to maintain a firmer hand on my time.

    Discovering mirth

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    p>Despite the drawbacks of the day, they did lead me to an important personal observation:

    I’m silly and unrealistic.

    Ok, I already knew this, but instead of depressing me, this made me laugh at myself. My propensity toward silliness was evident while talking to my motivationally-challenged perfectionist friend. I worked myself up to a comedic fervor, vividly guessing an over-the-top version of his probably dreams. My friend pointed out that this was a kind of vision, and this struck me. The truth is this: I like being silly, and I like making up stuff that is improbable but awesome. This is one of my passions.

    For someone who likes silly things, I have nevertheless tended to chose to be serious about life. I’ve known that I needed to lighten up about life for a long time, and recently I’ve felt I need to project positive energy to have any hope of being productively happy in a self-sustaining manner.

    In retrospect, the approach I took to address my squareness was to address these three areas of discomfort:

    • To try not to care about details I can’t influence or control, because that accomplishes nothing.
    • To look on the bright side of everything, because life lessons are learned through hard knocks.
    • To not feel judged by other people, because they are not experts about me and my world.

    These are all good mental stances to have, but here’s the drawback: they are all reactionary methodologies! After all:

    • I do care about the details and get stressed out, and then I calm myself down.
    • I acknowledge the dark sides before I extract the positive lesson.
    • I do feel judged by people and feel uncomfortable, then I shrug it off.

    These are coping mechanisms. And because they are reactionary methods, I am reactionary. My experiment earlier in the day to spread positive energy fizzled because I didn’t have the energy to begin with; I only had the ability to reactively shape what is already was in the world. It would be far better to be able to create such energy from scratch.

    Cultivating silliness and mirth may change the equation, because it unlocks my sense of joy, which I think is inherently creative. My particular brand of mirth recognizes that there are a lot of crazy, obsessive, unique, and off-kilter people in the world who are completely inspiring. Their uniqueness is a source of excitement and change, and I like to amplify and share it wherever I find it. I also believe the the world is inherently sorta improbable to being with, and we exist AT ALL is a cosmic wonder. In my search for greater meaning, I’ve forgotten this. Maybe finding my bliss is as easy as finding something to laugh with to see where that goes. Is there anything more positive and joyful to share than a good laugh? If I can cultivate my natural silliness as a source of demonstrable mirthfulness, that might give me what I need to make more changes in myself and the world around me.

    Tomorrow’s plan

    Day 2 is usually harder, but armed with today’s insights I am hopeful of maintaining discipline. The challenge is likely to be more physical: I’m going to be tired. I need to make sure I don’t eat anything that makes me sleepy, which means avoiding sugar and carbohydrates. It is also Election Day here in the US, so it will be awfully tempting to spend the day watching the progress of the vote. We’ll see how it goes. I need more data to see where my patterns are breaking down.

    As I wind down to sleep, I’m struck by the Christian phrase, “God is Love”. Perhaps God is Laughter too?

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    DSri Seah