Picking up from Friday and Saturday, Sunday’s activity log for production/consumption ratio tracking shows a marked increase in pure goofing off. It’s Monday afternoon as I’m writing this, and I can’t even remember what I did yesterday. So let’s look at the graph (which took 7 minutes to do, from start to upload):

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Reporting on Friday and Saturday’s production/consumption ratio tracking, as described here. Overall, these were productive days, but I’m surprised at just how much time went to non-production work. I’ve made some adjustment to my categories, and figured out how to make Excel plot colors the way I want so I can easily tell what time went where:

I’ve used color to group similar modes together:

• The orange areas are CONSUMING or REACTIVE modes, which are two types of activities that are not “mindful” or otherwise lack deliberate purpose/intent.

• Blue areas are INTERACTION (with people, not necessarily in-person or with people I know) and MAINTENANCE (which usually feels good). These provide a kind of “sustaining” energy, though not necessarily toward a given life goal.

• The green areas are PRODUCING, GATHERING, and PUTTERING modes, which are positive progress toward future goals of a deliberate (if not always crystal clear) nature. These require effort but deliver change-supporting assets. This is the hard stuff that I need to do to make progress toward my life goals.

• Lastly, the gray areas are CHORES that just have to get done. Sometimes the exact same task can be either a CHORE or a MAINTENANCE task; I have noticed that how I feel about it seems to depend on context.

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p>In addition to getting a better pie chart, I also have expanded the notation on my daily logs:

I found myself facing resistance during the day, and to track this I started noting this with an “R” in the ENERGY column. On Saturday I modified this by adding a two-digit “repeat resistance” count which increments each time I delayed starting it. For example, I had decided that I should update an ETP for an upcoming collaboration with another blogger, but found myself getting sleepy, napping, and mindlessly surfing the net instead of starting. Each time I saw the entry that didn’t result in a start, I incremented the R rating from R01, R02, R03, etc. I think this might be kind of a neat trick for tracking such non-starting tasks in the future.

Overall Observations for Friday and Saturday

They felt like good days, a good mix of getting some projects out of the way and doing a bit of personal project work with no feeling of pressure. The amount of consuming I did, through gaming and surfing, was much higher than I thought it would be.

I did, however, feel that there was something eating at me, and late Saturday I figured out what it was: I had not done a deep dive into work. Much of the work I’ve done this week, while productive, did not feel like a MASSIVE PUSH toward a conclusion. I think my best and more valuable work comes from that total immersion, but I also tend to avoid doing it because there are high costs that come with it. In the past, I’ve described it as “crawling into an isolation chamber” and “shutting myself off from the world”, which I don’t enjoy doing. The concept of Happy Bubble Time arose partly as a way to avoid isolating deep immersion into a project.

I’ll write about this a bit more in a few days.

Summarizing yesterday’s post:

• I accepted that I can never be as fast, efficient, and disciplined as I want. Reflecting on that today, it’s probably because I expect and want things to happen as fast as the speed of thought, which basically means I don’t want to wait or go through the effort. I need to change my expectation to having things happen as fast as the speed of action, which is more realistic. And I guess I’m finding out what that speed is, for me at this point in the year, by monitoring my ratio of production to consumption.

• There are two “producing” categories, which are (1) delivering tangible finished goods that I/others can readily use and (2) activities that assist the process in a direct way. The actual delivery gives me a boost of energy (yeah!), while the assisting activities (what I call “gathering”) tends to use-up energy.

• There is one general “consuming” category, which I am lumping under the term “puttering”, which my friend Colleen defines as non-hurried doing of any non-mission-critical activity. She makes the distinction, though, that puttering is not simple consuming of material, but is (I believe) somewhat constructive in nature rather than purely comsumptive. I probably should use “puttering” and “consuming” as separate categories moving forward, keeping her distinction in mind. My term “gathering” might be more related to “puttering”, though in my mind gathering is project-specific, and puttering is more speculative, not necessarily tied to a specific task-at-hand.

• Then there are the general energy drainers: “chores”, “maintenance”, and “interaction (with people)”. All of these types of tasks use up energy, but may offer some other reward. For example, maintenance doesn’t produce anything, but sometimes it feels good. Interacting with other people is highly rewarding, but it is also drains or disrupts my ability to focus; from past experiments with personal monitoring, I know I generally consume about 4-8 times as much “recharge/refocus” time to each time chunk of social interaction.

You’ll also notice I’ve moved away from using the paper timesheet from last week to using my regular Excel Time Sheet. There’s a place for using subcodes which I’m using for categories. I’ve also added a column where I can note whether the logged activity felt energizing or de-energizing. Here’s what Thursday’s report looks like:

The pie chart is a little different from yesterday’s report in that I’m using HOURS instead of PERCENTAGES for each category. Out of the roughly 14-hour period, the productive tasks are PRODUCE and GATHER, which accounts for around a third of the day at 5.25 hours. I also did some necessary maintenance and chores, which helps me stay in a condition to be productive tomorrow. I spent the rest of the time, some 7 hours, PUTTERING and INTERACTING. I didn’t think yesterday was a particularly productive day, though I can’t tell you why without digging deeper…

• Lack of closure on a big delivery? Nothing I did yesterday resulted in a BIG drop or EPIC CHECKOFF. Effort was expended. That is good. Massive return on investment? No received; check again tomorrow! I can only take a certain amount of this before I start feeling antsy, perhaps.

• I took some time to be social, which was enjoyable but fleeting. I still was preoccupied by work, and the feeling that I wasn’t getting enough done.

• If I’m making any progress, it’s on this blog series. I feel like I’m gaining insights and am chaining them together somehow. This experimental approach feels pretty good, and is rewarding because I have DATA and a sense of REVELATION that can be converted into SOMETHING COOL, someday.

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p>It’s now around 1230PM, just after noon. I’ve eaten some organic eggs and break sausage to get some energy (car isn’t due to be ready until this evening). There’s a few changes I want to make to my categories:

• PUTTER will split into PUTTER and CONSUME, per Colleen’s definition (as I understand it).
• CHORE will go away, because this really is a form of PRODUCE; it’s just work I’m doing that I’m not particularly enthused by. I will use the energy column instead to designate how I feel about it.

In my ongoing experiment this month to observe when I am producing versus consuming, I’ve so far discovered that I’m not spending a whole lot of time actually producing despite being busy. Here’s a breakdown of the past two days:

The colors that I want to see are CYAN for PRODUCING (Tuesday’s 33%, at the bottom) and RED for GATHERING. Producing tasks are the ones that directly result in published words, working code, or a completed design. Gathering tasks are ones that contribute or support producing tasks: researching and learning new processes (like learning how to use pivot tables to create pie charts in Excel, a first for me), gathering the prerequisite materials so I can actually make something, and setting up tools.

The motive behind this month’s challenge, I must remind myself, is NOT to figure out how I can maximize my productivity. Initially it was to see how much time I spent “producing” versus “consuming”, but it since has expanded into something else. Instead, I want to see what patterns exist between WHAT I work on during the day, what the NATURE of that work is, and how they both CORRELATE with how I FEEL. The way I feel right now is that I’m not moving fast enough, and this is leading to a feeling of frustration and negativity, which only increases friction and reduces joy. In the past, I would have thought that maximizing productivity by becoming more focused, efficient, and disciplined would be the natural solution. Today, I am thinking that I can never be as fast, efficient, and disciplined as I want. I have to give myself a break and find out what I can actually do, and use that as the baseline that I can tweak.

Quantifying “feeling” is an interesting challenge in itself. If you’ve ever been responsible for charging for your work, you’re familiar with the idea of telling prospective clients “Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick any two”. We laugh about it because it’s SO TRUE: If you’re put under the gun to make something good, you are going to charge a lot because of the exceptional stress. Likewise, if you’re going to provide something fast and cheap, it’s not going to be really excellent…there’s no time and budget to ensure it. However, when it comes to OUR OWN work, I think there’s the tendency to believe we can do it: replace the word “CHEAP” with “DO IT MYSELF”, and you end up with the same conflict. It’s a recipe for frustration and resentment. Hence, this month’s challenge to establish a more realistic understanding of my time, and how I feel about the day’s work in terms of quality, speed, and cost.

Speed and Cost, in the context of this discussion, can be measured as TIME and ENERGY. My notion of Energy is also coupled to my emotional state; having high energy equates to having a positive attitude, which makes it easier to initiate action on my projects.

Here is the complete category list as it currently stands:

• chore – some task that I’ve committed to for someone else. These are energy drains, creating resentment.
• interact – social time spent either hanging out or meeting for work. These can be energizing, but have high energy cost due to recovery time needed afterwards.
• maintain – a mechanical labor related to maintaining car, health, home, etc. These are energy drains, but are necessary for maintaining one’s livelihood and are unavoidable.
• putter – time spent on Facebook, researching possibilities, napping, etc. These restore energy lost in the above, but cost time.
• produce – time creating the tangible results that move me forward on my goals and commitments, sucking energy but releasing a huge burst of positive energy on completion.
• gather – time spent collecting materials an supporting the production phase. Clerical support work, in a sense. Low energy cost, but can have high time requirements.

With all that out of the way…HOW DO I FEEL ABOUT THE PAST TWO DAYS?

Tuesday was actually a good day, since there were no chores and a few hours of actual production: new code was produced! I fixed an air purifier too, cleaning it out and lubricating the motor before reassembling the unit with new filters. The bummer was that at the end of the day, I discovered my car wouldn’t start. That set the tone for Wednesday.

Wednesday was a day of heavy interaction, more so than usual. My car would not jump start, so I called a tow truck (covered by my insurance) and had it towed to a reputable garage about 2.5 miles away. They weren’t able to get to it today, so I maybe carless for a few days. By the time all this was done, it was 3PM, with only a few hours left to schedule a conference call to discuss the code work and prepare a monthly report for a board meeting I was attending in the evening. I got a ride to the meeting, and it was an informative meeting during a moment of organizational transformation, so I found it rather interesting. However, the day was a complete wash when it came to actually producing anything of tangible worth. This bothers me a bit, but not as much as I would have thought.

Today, Thursday, I am feeling the desire to have a mostly productive day. It’s actually already 1130AM (I have been going to sleep around 3AM) and I don’t have anything scheduled until 630PM. I feel a little under the gun to get something done before then, and I may be interrupted by the need to collect my car from the mechanic in the middle of it. I like to have the feeling that there’s a large glorious block of time ahead of me, and today’s block seems fractured and time limited, which creates an unpleasant feeling in my stomach, a kind of jitteriness. It will be interesting to see how the day works out, now that I’ve called the feeling out into the open.