Elf Sternberg

One of the interesting things that I've been following for the past couple of months is the willpowper argument-- that our willpower is a limited resource that we use up, like muscle power, and as the day winds on we use up more and more of it until, by the end of the day, we're out of "decision" power.

Now comes a new set of studies that indicates that, for some tasks, this isn't true. Obviously, people can play video games for hours and hours, making twitchy decisions that allow them to play successfully. And it turns out that if you believe willpower is limited, it is-- and if you believe that success generates the ability to attend more to continued success, then willpower is unlimited.

In Buddhist meditation, there are two forms of meditation: samatha, which is the kind of meditation where you focus on your breathing and calm yourself, considering only your capacity for compassion. The other form of meditation is vispassana, where you learn to appreciate the impermanence of your mind, you let the thoughts from your brain storm past and watch them go, letting them go without reacting to them. Through samatha you learn to make peace with the many modules of your mind, the skanhda, to their clamor and negotiation as they try to coerce you into action. With vispassana, you don't make peace with them. You just acknowledge them for what they are, let them rail without touching your inner peace, and go on with what you were doing before they rose to your attention.

In his recent TED talk on happiness and accomplishment, Shawn Archor shows that meditating only two minutes a day for twenty-one days will change your brain for the better.

And this morning, Zen guru Leo Babuta has posted the most succint guide to getting things done ever written, and it is a form of meditation. It has three parts:

Just start. This is the basis of all GTD. Just start.

Commit to working for two minutes. If at the end of two minutes you've made progress, don't stop. If not, stop. But that's it. Just two minutes.

Vispassana. As temptations to browse Facebook or Twitter or whatever arose, be mindful of them, acknowledge them, maybe even write them down. The urge will pass. Let it pass.

That's it.

Steve Dubner (Freakonomics) says some very nice things about Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, and give him much-needed publicity in the New York Times: Read This If You Hate Meetings.

Normally, I wouldn't be so vociferous about someone else's article to post it twice, but this is so critical it needs to be repeated: in a world of fractured, continuous partial attention, those of us who are members of the creative class (and make no mistake, software development is not engineering, it is craftsmanship) need to get this across to the people who manage the business side of things.

Every day, management is becoming more distracted, more driven by events, and yet feels more accomplished than ever. Yet in order to accomplish anything, their engineers, their craftsmen, must be left alone in their shops for hours, even days, to do whatever it is that they do. Even when you're pair programming, you and your partner need three hours of uninterrupted time while the task at hand is loaded into their heads and exists in that brief, two-man noösphere, where ideas and words act like multipliers and filters, eventually producing works that are functional and crafted.

Any business where both sides cannot talk to each other about their needs as managers and developers is doomed. I've worked for companies that understood this, and for ones that did not. Sadly, the ones that don't understand this seem to be much more commonplace.

I was struggling this past weekend to write. It shouldn't be hard for me to write; after all, I've been doing it all my life. Writing at home is hard, though; I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's comment in an interview about his being a "ruthlessly bad correspondent," because if he answered emails he'd never get any work done. One of the things he says is that he can do a lot with a four-hour block of time as long as he knows he's not going to be interrupted.

That's true for me as well. Not the four-hour block, but the lack of interruption. As most of my long-time readers know, I write during my commute on a county bus, or at a cafe' near my home, most of the time. I can get a lot done in a half-hour, as long as I'm absolutely confident that no one will interrupt me.

In the past three days I've written 5,596 words. All on one story, Moi Neuroses, which is a Shardik Journal Entry (gasp, yes I can still write those) in which Shardik and a Sterling woman develop a curious relationship, and how Aaden sort-of freaks out over it. After two weeks of no-writing-time madness, it was nice to be able to get back into a groove (or is it a rut?) that I had missed for far too long.

All I needed was a block of time, no matter how small, during which I knew I would not be interrupted by work or family.

I took the scalpel called rm to much of my projects list this morning. I keep getting overwhelmed by the list and deciding to do none of them. This made me happy, to make the list shorter, by deleting:

Emacs Diction/Rhyme/Thesaurus

While it would be nice to actually have a working dictionary, rhyming engine, and thesaurus linked to Wordnet in emacs, I'm not about to teach myself enough elisp anytime soon to actually pull this off.

Faerybriar

This was a simple program written in Python that did automated layout of websites. Pylons and Rails do this so much better than what I achieved that there's no point to my finishing it. It did have a nice architecting system based on Conallen's Building Web Applications with UML, but it crashed a lot and I'm just not going to have time to finish it. One rule to writing software is that it should be something I want to use, and I never actually used it.

GoX

One of my favorite courses in college, and the big topic of my last year, was library databases. These were specialized compression and search engines designed to index huge masses of text. To give you an idea of how small we were thinking, the textbook was called Managing Gigabytes. These days I work at a company that manages terabytes and petabytes. MG databases were computationally expensive to build and compress and they could not be changed on the fly, but if you had a very large archive of unchanging text accessed often, they were computationally cheap and even faster than uncompressed accesses.

GoX was an idea I had to create a separate index space that would keep a tokenized, compressed index of an XML document's structure, the Huffman token keys built in a two-pass operation to sort by density, along with the textual word index. By combining the two indices, you could use XPATH to efficiently extract "the fifth paragraph," or "The paragraphs surrounding the word 'consilience'" or so on. But it's a huge amount of lifting for very small payout. People still seem to think that processing power and drive speeds are fast enough not to need the esoteric solutions of MG. While I disagree, that doesn't mean I have the bandwidth to engage in a project this massive.

ObjectiveWeb

No point to this one. It's been done, and better.

I am the chronic absent-minded middle-aged writer. To overcome this terrific affliction I've tried hard to adopt as much of the Seven Habits / GTD stuff as I possibly can, although the daily discipline of GTD often gets lost in the bad habits of a chronic infovore like myself. It's extremely difficult for me to just sit down at the start of the day and not want to suck up everything that happened in the last ten hours: the news, the views, the arguing and bickering and entertaining pwnage that is the world at large.

But I do try. And one of the things that's always bothered me about the Seven Habit method is the focus on so-called Roles & Goals. This is the part of the system where, on a weekly basis, you review your "roles" (as father, as employee, as citizen, and so forth) and then determine if your current projects and their goals are in sync.

I was looking through my day planner's major projects list and the associated roles and realized that I didn't believe it. I've never bought into the nonsense about roles. I think I've finally identified why: the people we admire don't have them. They have responsibilities. I bet you Patton never considered his role; he thought about his responsibilities. The same is true of Lincoln, or Ghandi. To take an amusing fictional example, Miles Vorkosigan's roles are determined by his responsibilities, and not the other way around.

Role implies an act and an actor, often one taken on with a sense of facade. "For the next three hours, Elf will take on the role of father," or "For the next hour, Elf will take on the role of writer." There are so many false notes in such an approach that I wonder how it ever became popular.

Instead, "responsibility" has a sense of authenticity (and not in the pomo sense of "authenticity"): my responsibility to my family is to keep the house in good shape, my responsibility to my kids is to make sure they reach adulthood healthy, hale, and with the tools necessary to take on the world and win, my responsibility to my employer is to deliver working and contemporarily styled user interfaces on deadline and with no defects, my responsibility to my readers is to deliver thoughtful and engaging stories, my responsibility to you is to stay interesting.

So I'm going to revise the "roles & goals" page into "responsibilities & projects," which seems to me a much more profound way of viewing yourself. Most importantly, to me, they imply a whole and integrated human being, not someone who puts on a different facade within different contexts. We do enough of that already: the vocabulary you use at work is very different from the one you use in the bedroom, I hope. Formalizing it into a collection of cheap suits and masks just makes the fragmentation of ourselves even worse. We do not wear "roles", and if we have goals then to be meaningful they must be subsumed into something greater, something which enables accomplishment. Those things are responsibilities, duties, projects, and deadlines.

It occurred to me that David Allen must not be a terribly creative person. Successful, clear-thinking, capable, and convincing yes. But not creative.

One of the principles that he advertises in his work is that if you follow the Getting Things Done process completely, your mind will be freed of the burden of coming up with "the next thing to do." You'll have it in your list, and you'll be getting it done.

The problem I have with this is twofold: (1) the creative process is sufficiently time-intensive that one can't just put it onto a list and call it "scheduled," and (2) the anxiety of the creative process is not always a bad thing. When I'm driving, or walking, or lying down for a nap, my mind circles around something I'm working on, a story or a program, and begins to take it apart and re-assemble it. Not because I'm negatively anxious that it won't work, but because I'm positively anxious to make it better, to have those ideas hot and ripe and ready when my hand picks up a pen or a pencil or a keyboard. Any task that I undertake requires a certain minimal level of reinforcement or it becomes stale; if I don't write for two weeks, it takes two days for me to find my voice again. If I don't study Japanese for three days, it's a real struggle to awaken all of the structures I had built up. If I don't draw every day at this stage, I'm going to regress.

My Hipster PDA consists of a Moleskin notebook and two cards from the Hipster template: the weekly schedule and the to-do list. That's it. I use my Palm strictly for daily and long-term alarms; for the weekly horizon, a 3x5 card is all I need. But having that list does very little for teasing out the good lines and great scenes of a story, or having the program I'm writing "click" into place. That takes more mental playroom than there is in GTD.

One of the promises of GTD is this: if you write down everything in your head and get it into a system where you can and will refer to it such that whatever it is actually gets done, you'll stop feeling anxious about it and free up your braincells to pay attention to the current item on your list.

There is, however, one type of anxiety that you cannot exorcise this way. And that is the one labeled "Don't, even though you really want to."

Only time makes those go away.

I think I've reached a plateau about Getting Things Done, geek-style. I'm happy with the methodology I've hit, and I hope I'm done fiddling with it. I tried everything: Franklin/Covey paper-based planner, Palm-based planner, even a Hipster PDA.

The one thing that's always appealed to me as someone who tries to keep separate many disparate parts of his life (corporate programming drone, husband and father, kinky polyamorist) is the Covey method of defining your "roles." So when I started, I wrote mine out, with things like "Father" and "Husband" and "Homeowner" and so forth. I'm still not sure that's working for me the way I want it to; I think I like the GTD method of going on a project-by-project basis, but I have so many projects going that the roles thing helps me stay on track.

One of the nice things about the Roles feature is that it lets me have a completely separate system for the one thing that shouldn't intrude on my private life: my job. My corporate drone position seems cursed with a gazillion different ways of getting things done: email updates for both calendar and to-do, plus the normal human interaction of dropping things in my chair (or just dropping by), plus the weird expectation from the marketing department that doesn't understand, after five years, why we Unix geeks don't use Outlook and Exchange.

But where to keep all of this? That remains the principle challenge. As I see it, there are four important categories that my "stuff" needs for organization: Projects, Tasks, Calendered Events, and Notes.

And that's when I read Cory Doctorow's speech at Life Hacks Live where he said, "Real programmers use text files."

Boom. Projects go into a text file, laid out in Emacs Outline-Minor-Mode. Eventually, that text file was renamed "FrontPage" (no relation to the execrable Microsoft product) and put under Emacs Wikimode. That allowed me to use StudlyCapsMode to create notes and subprojects. (One reads "AtWork" and opens to a list of work-related projects, which means I can leave that screen open at work and no-one is the wiser to my private life if they happen to glance at it).

Tasks go under each project, one of which is listed as "NA", or "Next Action." Next to some of them there will be parentheses, into which go calendar-related project notes ("DL: Due 3/4", "PD: Won't be back until 7/12"). Those marked "DL" or "Deadline" are only marked for those items that have consequences.

It all really works, for once. For those things that I need to have immediate, or that I need for reminding, I put into my Palm. I may carry my laptop with me most places, but certainly not everywhere, but I can carry my Palm in my pocket. And as a reminder/alarm clock, it's perfect. I also transfer those "to do" items that I'll be doing out on the road, or when I'm away from the network. Since it also has enough memory for five or six novels, it fills in many of the needs I have when on the road.

For notes, I also carry a small notebook. People seem to think that a notebook is more friendly, analogue, and generally useful than the Palm notepad, and I agree. You can't draw, or be clever, with the Palm notepad, and it's certainly slower than pen and ink.

But the combination of Emacs wiki-mode and outline-minor-mode means that very complicated projects don't necessarily clutter up the main page, and if want to see just the projects themselves and not all of the subprojects or subtasks that go with it, I can just tell outline-minor-mode to show only the first two layers, and hide all of the details. And it provides sufficient real estate, in my case, to get a lot of organization done.

Now all I need to figure out is how to easily make my "Next Actions" list in Emacs port to the Palm directly...