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- March 12, 2014
Word of the Day Followup
March 12, 2014Read moreTuesday morning I had the bright idea of sprinkling the word “Delightful” around the house to see if it would improve my attitude during the day. In addition to having a card next to my computer monitor, I cut-out the word and left it on various surfaces around the house, so every time I went somewhere it would catch my eye. The results were surprising. (more…)
- March 11, 2014
Adding Energy to My Day through Word Play
March 11, 2014Read more
For the past year I’ve been trying to be mindful about “attitude”, especially with regards to the subtly-negative reactions I have to mundane chores and tasks. For example, a scenario as simple as “oh, I have to go find something in the basement before I can start this project” carries a negative connotation with it which cascades into “I don’t know where it is, dang it” and “I also have to clean the basement, which is going to take a long time”, and so on. Any individual negative reaction can be overcome, but a cascade of them in the span of an instant can suck the life out of any spark that I’ve had in the first place. When a task has both uncertainty in duration/difficulty and deferred/uncertain reward as its main defining characteristics, those negative reactions will quickly make it FEEL like a bad use of energy. And that’s even when the task itself is part of the chain toward a DESIRABLE goal filled with rainbows and unicorns. The fuzzy-yet-bright distant future, though, gets trumped by the very real suckiness of the projected near future…unless we are on top of our attitude.
This experiment has been going fairly well. I’ve been able to push forward on long dormant goals by catching myself thinking negatively, then dismissing the thoughts as unproductive Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The answer is on the other side of the suckiness, and while I don’t know whether it’s the answer I want, it’s still better than FUD any day of the week. However, I have not been able to CONSISTENTLY push forward. Some days, like last Sunday, the FUD wins and I need to indulge myself in some way that is superficially rewarding. Instead of “making progress on my new website by creating a new front page that matches the old site”, I “bought newer, heavier spoons.” And don’t get me wrong…I love the new flatware I got (Oneida’s “Voss” line, for the curious), but if this behavior becomes a pattern the epitaph on my tombstone will read, “He never finished his website, but he had nice spoons”. And I don’t want that. I want it to read, “He finished his website, which gathered the people to see his products, and he died a wealthy man surrounded by people who loved what he did.”
That background is just the precursor to a tiny thought I had in the shower this morning, which was that I liked the word, “delightful”. I don’t usually use this word in day-to-day conversation, reserving it for describing the situations when I have a strong positive and unexpected reaction to someone or something that induces happiness. Such encounters are rare, and they are holy moments because they hint at what is truly and deeply fundamental to one’s existence. Assuming, that is, that happiness is important to you, as it is to me. But I digress…it’s been a while since I’ve had a delightful experience, not counting my recent spoon purchase, which gave me an idea.
What if I borrowed Pee Wee Herman’s “Word of the Day” and used “Delightful” to frame my day? Perhaps this would be a way to complement the negative attitude alert system that I described above. A good human-centered system design, after all, has both pushing and pulling mechanisms that do the work. The “anti-negativity” system identifies and disempowers poor attitudes, which REMOVES barriers to work. The “word of the day” system, by comparison, could ADD positivity to my thoughts, which gives me energy to DO work, barriers be damned!
Today I’ll give it a try. I grabbed an index card and wrote “Delightful!” on it, and also stuck it on my global browser home page. If I don’t see the word, I’m not going to be thinking it! I’ll stick with this word until “something happens” :-)
- March 10, 2014
An Extremely Foggy Sunday
March 10, 2014Read moreIt’s been about a week since I ended the “foggy brain monitoring” experiment, during which I was actively monitoring the circumstance surrounding lapses in concentration/motivation. It had been a great experiment, but I’ve been slowly sliding back into fuzziness since them. This past Sunday was about as bad as it gets, sluggishly oozing from bed to couch to the computer to engage in mindless clicking. Internally, part of me was thinking that I’d rather be filled with positive energy and excitement about working on projects, but I could not muster the energy to bring me out of the state of abject mindlessness that had stuck my bottom firmly to my chair.
Although it was Sunday, and particularly the Sunday that sacrifices an hour of the day to the demons of Daylight Savings Time, I still felt that there was something I should have been able to do to roust myself up. At the same time, I found it amazing that I was so adamant about not thinking…what can I learn from this?
- March 6, 2014
Foggy Brain Followup: The Thrill of Logging
March 6, 2014Read moreLast week’s experiment tracking my episodes of “brain fog”—those times when I found it difficult to focus on a designated task, or even think about starting any work at all—gave me a lot of insights into what worked/didn’t work, and I ended up having a busy, productive week. However, I know from experience that the first week doesn’t give me the whole picture. I like the excitement of a first week of experimentation, because I tend to prefer novelty over the dreariness of daily existence. That excitement gives me enough energy to push past my normal limits and focus on a single area of interest, and this can mask my ability to assess it objectively.
That said, I think I had a GREAT first week, and notable in that I was able to make progress on several projects WITHOUT feeling frustrated about them not being finished and off my plate. In other words: I felt a sense of accomplishment instead of the usual impatience that NOTHING IS DONE. This is the result, I think, of my recent shift to a kinder, more realistic model of how anything worthwhile actually gets done: it’s not instant, it’s often challenging, and the outcome is not clear for most of the way. Before, I had an adventure movie model of how it should get done.
The other major achievement of week one was learning to deal with frustrating challenges. There were three distinct ways that I reacted poorly:
- Headache due to confusion: When trying to learn something new and not understanding it, the result was confusion + an actual headache. I would describe the sensation like my brain getting stuck in an endless loop of not finding answers to my questions, creating a situation where there was no satisfying resolution. The trigger was often bad technical documentation that overloaded by thought inputs with undefined concepts; without a model of understanding, my ability to remember and relate information is severely diminished.
Headache due to frustration: This is similar to the confusion headache, but is more of an emotional response to confusion. This is the headache that happens after I determine I’m in a situation that I can’t do anything. It’s more of an ambient weariness around the entire head, causing me to tune-out or become sleepy. Or, I get angry and impatient, feeling disgust and disdain for whatever powers conspired to put me in this terrible situation, which channels the energy into other action.
Foggy-headedness: This is not so much a headache as it is a mental dullness combined with the inability to initiate action. It’s a passive state of confusion and disinterest, brought about by the feeling that I “have” to do something that isn’t very exciting. Sometimes it is due to low energy or mental fatigue, and there is no driving desire to overcome it. For example, right now I’m feeling quite mentally fatigued because I have a meeting coming up related to (ugh) personal healthcare insurance, and I would like to take a nap, but I also want to share these thoughts on the blog. That desire to share overrides the tiredness. If the desire isn’t there, then the fogginess wins.
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p>Last week, I came up with some ways of dealing with confusion and frustration, and I think I’ve reduced the amount of friction there just by adopting a better attitude about work-related learning. I don’t think it will be a problem moving forward. What remains, however, is the challenge of managing Fog Brain and building better tools for creative synthesis. Fog Brain is a low-energy state that prevents me from initiating projects by even taking a first step. Creative synthesis is the challenge of making anything that combines multiple pieces and concepts into a new work; this is one reason I’m so interested in achieving information nirvana.
Which brings me to this week, so far!
I know that stuff is getting done, which I can verify by looking at this week’s ETP pages in the mini-notebook. However, the foggy brain has returned. I think last week, it was the daily logging of my activities (in the blog, as raw notes, followed by the summary the following morning) that helped me keep centered. I was very active in trying to resolve the Fog Brain mystery as I pursued various activities: “Why do I have foggy brain? What does it mean, and what can I do about it?” This week, not being active in this mystery resolution, I am instead left only with my project milestone goals and external possibilities. I don’t find this as compelling. It’s just work that needs to get done.
Perhaps I do need the energy that comes from writing about my day as I solve mysteries about myself in the context of my daily business. Although I have tried not to think of my life in adventure terms lately because it created misleading expectations about how I should evaluate how I work, I still like the idea that there’s an adventure role to play. That role may be to continue to identify, document, and solve the personal mysteries of my existence, as I go about my business of becoming a creatively-independent maker of interesting tools. It may be my sleuthing activity that is the anchor of my identity, not what I make or how I want to make my living. That latter stuff is important, sure, but I think it may be the investigation that is really close to me. Perhaps investigation is my passion, particularly investigation of how things are made? Making things is just the way I make a living, then, in service of investigation. It’s kind of backwards, but it also makes a kind of sense!
- March 3, 2014
Insights from Foggy Brain Week
March 3, 2014Read more
If you’ve been following my daily journals on fog brain, you probably have noticed the observations that have been accruing as I’ve fought the fuzziness.
I’ve rewritten each observation to try to capture its essence. They are presented in chronological order without comment; I’ll be mulling over them over the week to see what patterns become apparent.
I welcome any reader comments or reactions…together maybe we can figure something out that’s of universal interest to people like US: semi-neurotic thoughtful introverted process-oriented productivity-obsessed shiny goal-setting creatives that just want people to be happy about chasing their dreams while not starving to death! Or something like that :-)
From Foggy Monday
The fresh first hours of the day, just after waking/showering/eating protein, are sacred. Don’t sacrifice this time to distracting activities like email, news, or social media. Take that first hour and make something for yourself.
Email is a source of focus-destroying distractions and new responsibilities to process and react to. It is draining. Avoid as much as possible if you want to be creative.
Maintaining continuity helps make the day a productive one. For work that doesn’t have its own continuity baked-in, the next best thing is a tool process you can discipline yourself to use as your daily anchor. Keep it in the same place, with the rest of the materials and tools you need.
From Foggy Tuesday
Chores are often much bigger in my head than in reality, especially when I’m actually facing them down. The trick is not to waste energy bitterly thinking about how I’d rather be doing something else. Instead, start and see what it’s like, and channel the thinking into doing the task quickly and well until a stopping point arises.
Any forward motion feels good, which reduces anxiety felt toward future deadlines and goals. Believe this, and progress is mine!
I have a problem being creative/productive after running physical errands and meetings. It is not clear to me why. A FUTURE EXPERIMENT FOR MARCH
When I am fuzzy-headed and unproductive, I end up doing a lot of mindless clicking on the Internet. GET AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER and harness that nervous impulse to click by getting in front of a CHORE like washing dishes or decluttering. Put other thoughts out of your mind, and clicks will turn into clean dishes. Amazing!
Just FACING a big hairy undefined task and figuring some piece of it out feels like progress, if you’re NOT FREAKING OUT about getting it all done ASAP and berating yourself for being stupid/lazy.
It’s good to be around people who love the same things you do. I must reduce the number of commitments that take me away from that (for example, a misplaced sense of duty).
From Foggy Wednesday
Meetings kill my ability to focus. Anticipation of the meeting is a distraction. After the meeting, I am often unable to focus. A general goal is to have as few meetings as possible per week, because they are highly damaging to my productivity.
Managing tasks and planning when to do them (as with Trello) can make the day seem more packed than it really is. The very existence of an upcoming task on a list creates a mental burden due to feelings of (1) responsibility (2) unknown amount of difficulty/time drain (3) loss of freedom (4) undefined expectations.
Productivity falls drastically outside a temperature range of 65 degrees to 75 degrees.
I live in my head a lot, constantly thinking and processing. The ability to TURN OFF REFLECTION and shift the focus to what is in front of me (both figuratively and literally) is a powerful focusing tool. Focus is the ability to NOT be distracted; it is not the intensity of thinking itself. When focused, the intensity of the thinking is a byproduct of not being distracted by other things.
Technical documentation is bad when it creates question after question in the mind of the reader, deferring understanding and causing frustration by never providing resolution. Bad nomenclature and architectural clarity in the product just makes it worse.
Learning something new will give me a physical headache when I am frustrated by the available material. The state of unknowing, when drawn out, creates confusion that is mentally draining. Knowing that, I have to adopt an investigative approach and create the complete picture from scattered clues.
When learning something new, augmenting the documentation with a look at the physical crime scene (i.e. working code) will help fill in the gaps. There are essential patterns that are often not conveyed by third party observers because of (1) familiarity blindness and (2) compartmentalized thinking.
I am ready to work with a system once I completely grok it. To get to that point, I have to expand my inputs beyond documentation. Synthesizing and documenting my OWN mental model of how it should work is helpful. Observing the system directly and inspecting its operations in detail is also helpful.
The brain fog of confusion has been with me since I was a kid. Hard subjects are the ones that “don’t make sense” to me, and create a confusion headache. I am just now learning to cope with it systematically, by being serious about defining and kitting a learning process that is compatible with my thinking. I’m not completely dumb…better late than never!
When grok’ing a new system, I like to “blueprint” the critical operating routes through it so I understand its conceptual underpinnings in the context of the problem it is supposed to solve. It is only then that pre-built “recipes” for doing common tasks (as most tutorials are) become useful, as do higher-level “patterns” for common types of goals. The ability to observe the processes as they happen (as in having a good debugger in the programming context) is absolutely essential for model-refining reflection.
From Foggy Thursday
Only a small percentage of my time is spent in “hard creative work”. The rest of the time is spent managing, researching, or gathering. What is the right balance? I feel like I should be doing more hard creative work, and less managing.
It seems to take me a long time to solve programming tasks that, if I were a competent programmer, should be able to solve much more quickly. This is an unrealistic, unkind attitude to have toward myself, but still it lingers.
Sometimes hard work doesn’t create a physical headache. Differences noted this time: the end was in sight; rate of knowledge absorption was rapid; major unknowns were resolved; didn’t let myself have a negative emotional reaction, just focused on task at hand in front of me.
Thinking tools on the market today do not have an actual workspace for arranging, refining, and synthesizing data in a reflective, process-oriented manner. Scrivener is one exception.
From Foggy Friday
The very act of recording my activities creates mindfulness.
Getting together with friends feels like procrastination when I am not making the progress I want with my work. However, socializing with friends also adds energy and opens new possibilities.
Spending time socializing, meeting, and/or driving places makes me very tired, making it difficult to work afterwards.
Server administration can be a tedious, frustrating task. However, when I am not in a hurry it is like tinkering and kind of enjoyable in the way a half-compliment is.
