At least fairly often, I've had occasion to be tired, busy, overworked, overwhelmed, angry, sad, and uncertain, though blessedly not all at once. One peculiar thing is that all of these feelings have also meant different things to me at different times. That is, there are times I have been tired and thought "this is the absolute worst, I want to go to bed and I can't, and that just makes me so utterly miserable I can't bear it". However, other times I have thought "yep, I'm tired alright", and really not been bothered at all.
I've noticed a very similar thing with learning new stuff, something I'm quite fond of. You usually run into an early wall you run into where the number of things you don't know is growing quicker than the number of things you do. Each thing you learn leads to ten more things you haven't learned, and each of those leads to ten more. This situation feels so utterly overwhelming that it's hard to imagine ever getting through it and reaching any kind of understanding. I have distinct memories of that feeling, something like a hot crushing sensation coming at my brain from all directions.
But lately, perhaps just from experience, I've started to accept that feeling as being part of the process of learning anything new. The overwhelmed sensation doesn't go away, exactly, it's more like it stops being such a dominant and negative part of the experience. Instead of thinking that you're overwhelmed because the material is inherently too complex to understand, or you're inherently too stupid to understand it, you can just think "yes, this is what learning a lot of new things at once feels like", and not be particularly bothered by it.
To be clear, I'm not trying to advocate the idea that bad things aren't bad. I would take not-overwhelemed any day if it was available, and similarly I'd go for awake over tired, happy over sad, and leisurely over busy or overworked. Those things are, to my mind, objectively better. However, I think there are two layers to any situation: there's the thing that's happening, and then your reaction to it. A bad thing that's happened can't be helped, but a bad reaction can.
Imagine you're in a dinghy slowly filling with water, and while you're trying to figure out how to bail it out, everyone around you is screaming because the boat is sinking. Nobody would argue that the dinghy sinking isn't a bad thing. It's definitely bad. But although the wailing and gnashing of teeth might most accurately reflect that badness, the reaction of quietly acknowledging the situation and setting about making the best of it is, perhaps, more helpful.
There are still a lot of good reasons to avoid getting into bad situations in the first place, but they have a way of popping up anyway. When that happens, I think the best thing you can do is just accept the situation as exactly as bad as it is, and avoid the temptation to make it any worse.
I remember when I was younger, during one particularly unproductive period, thinking that I really just needed to find something I wanted to do badly enough. My problem was that what I was doing didn't align with my values well enough, and that was what led to being unproductive. I was convinced that all I needed was to find something truly motivating to focus on and then everything would fall into place.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, and later on when I was first able to just work on what I wanted for a little while, I was still very unproductive. That was a bit of a shock, and eventually I realised that my issue wasn't with my goals, it was with my work habits. I needed the skills and the discipline to work effectively, and without that it didn't matter what my goals were. So since then I have spent a lot of time trying to build good creative working habits.
But does that mean that goals don't matter? I don't believe so. In fact, there's an equivalent failure mode, although it's fortunately not really been my issue, where your working habits are very good, but you are doing things that don't actually meet your goals. The end result is still not getting what you want, but it's easier not to notice, because you are being very effective at doing the thing you don't want.
I previously wrote about intention, and the importance of connecting goals to actions, but I think there's an even more general point here. Not just goals and actions, but everything should point in the direction you want to go. It might seem like you only need to really want something, or that having good habits is sufficient, or creating a good work environment, social pressure, financial incentives, or even a higher power. But why not all of them? Every single thing you can muster, all aligned in the same direction like the electrons in a magnet.
I think sometimes it's tempting to dismiss low-level solutions as easy or cheap, because they shouldn't be necessary if you have the higher-level stuff sorted out. Little tricks like leaving your alarm on the other side of the room, forcing yourself to put your running shoes on before deciding whether to go for a run, or disconnecting your computer from the internet for a while. What about glib little rhymes and sayings? No screens in bed, have a good sleep instead! That might be dumb, but how dumb can it be if it works?
The point is to build yourself a kind of fractal fortress. At the very highest level, the direction of your life is going the right way. You zoom in and your goals are pointing you in that direction. You zoom in and your plans are designed to achieve your goals. No matter how far you zoom, you still see the same shape, all the way down to the silly tricks you use to get yourself through the day.
I wrote yesterday about an issue I've had a few times, and I thought I'd expand on it a little more today. Often while I'm in the middle of a an uncertain situation, I also need to provide information about that situation. Sometimes that's because, like recently, I'm writing about what I'm doing. But it also comes up when I'm working with other people, and even in minor ways like when a friend asks whether I can hang out but I'm in the middle of something. In those situations, my instinct is to wait until I have a good answer before I respond, which often means I respond late or not at all.
I think there are a few angles into this one. The first is the value of certainty. Because I don't always know whether the thing I'm doing is going well or badly, I also don't know what kind of answer to give. That information has some value and I want to maximise it. If I'm optimistic, I also expect to be able to give a more positive answer later. So "I don't know" right now loses to "it's going well" later, which itself loses to "good news, it's done!" much later than that. Of course, that's assuming the situation is getting better over time and that the value of that certainty beats the cost of the delay. Both of those assumptions are pretty unreliable.
The second angle is the implies both ways fallacy. Obviously, if things are going badly, I will need to report that they are going badly. It is very easy, then, to put off reporting that things are going badly in the hope that it will prevent that from being the case. It would be nice if implication worked that way, but unfortunately it does not. I think this is especially pernicious in the face of uncertainty; when you're definitely going to miss the deadline, you're not going to convince yourself you can change that by keeping quiet. But if there's still a chance...
The last angle, and I think the one that probably trumps the other two, is just plain dependency hell. When I make one task dependent on other tasks, the situation becomes much more complicated and brittle, and that's no less true when one of the tasks is communication. If I'm trying to manage the communication about a task as a dependency of that task, it requires a lot more thinking and makes both more difficult. And the timelines around communication are often a lot tighter than those around work, so making the tight timeline a dependency of the loose timeline is particularly silly.
So it's pretty clear that there are a few issues feeding into this one. Fortunately, that means I have a lot of ideas for solutions. The first is to make sure I just keep the two goals separate in my own thinking. One goal is to do the thing, and another is to communicate about the thing. The strategies I mentioned in dependency hell should help. I don't think trading off the value of certainty is necessarily wrong, but I need to be careful to balance it against the value of time. In many cases, people are happy to trade timely communication for more accurate communication.
And that brings me to perhaps the main observation: this is sounding very similar to the philosophy I wrote about in feedback loops, done, and continuous everywhere. It's usually preferable to have more, smaller communications than one large communication, for the same reason it's preferable to have more and smaller tasks. It's actually a bit surprising that I didn't think to apply these ideas to communication, given how much time I spent thinking about them with respect to work.
I'm hopeful this bit of reflection will help fix that, by giving me a bit of time to reinforce the association. Relatively speaking, I spend a lot less time thinking about how to communicate than how to work, but it's still important to get right.
This failure was brought to you by my massive prototype blowout. I wanted to have my Monday post reflect the prototypes I'd done the week before, but I was still partway through doing them and so I put the post off until I'd finished. However, the prototypes took even longer than I thought and I ended up getting neither the post nor the prototypes done by the deadline.
If that seems familiar, it's because it's classic dependency hell, which I wrote about earlier. I think I could have easily seen this one coming, but I was perhaps a bit too overwhelmed by Christmas activities and my relatively new prototype workload. For next time I'll just make sure to keep the two commitments independent.
That should solve things for this particular project, but the problem of putting off writing about something until I've done it seems to come up with new projects fairly frequently. I'm also going to spend some time thinking about how to avoid that in the general case.
This is an idea I wanted to try out. Traditional word clouds are really distorted in favour of common words. Normally you filter the most common out with stoplists, but those are a really blunt tool. I thought it would be more fun to use a base set of words and do some Bayesian magic to make a word cloud showing the words that appear a lot in the sample text, but not much in the base set. Unfortunately, the statistics involved was kind of out of my league and I ended up spending way too much time twiddling numbers trying to get something I was happy with. That said, I am pretty happy with it.
Time: 12 hours.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that I didn't get any others done given the amount of time that I sunk into this one. However, I also really underestimated how much time the Christmas period would take up, so I think I could have still achieved the 3 if I'd planned things a bit better. I'm going to commit to 3 more for next week, and keep trying to get the time-per-prototype under control.