Leaving Today

So this is it. Today we leave for our Guatemalan adventure. We fly this afternoon to Houston, sleep there overnight, and in the morning on to Guatemala City. From there we will take a bus for the 5 or 6 hours it takes to get to Xela (shel-lah), the 2nd largest city in Guatemala and our final destination.

Xela is the more common name for the city of Quetzaltenango. The name Xela comes from Xelaju', the old Mayan name for the city, which according to wikipedia was derived from "Xe laju' noj" meaning "under ten mountains". The city is in the western highlands of Guatemala, surrounded by volcanos and near to the deepest lake in Central America, described by Lonely Planet Guatemala as one of the most beautiful in the world, Lake Atitlan.

We are looking forward to studying Spanish, living with a local family, learning about the culture, meeting people, hiking, and otherwise learning what it is like to live in a place so different from where we have lived. We will be there for three months, returning at the end of July.

Reflection

One thing I've noticed as we've gotten closer and closer to the trip is how my focus and ability to write, meditate, etc has varied inversely to my stress and antsiness about the impending change. As I get antsier and antsier, my attention span shrinks and I find myself clinging to distractions more and more. In the last day or two, I have regressed on my political blogs bad habit, reading a number of articles about Specter's switch and Justice Souter's retirement. I also have had difficulty meditating, and gotten barely any writing done.

I think this is a good reminder that the idea that stress is a good thing for productivity is misleading. It's common to hear this said as an argument for having deadlines even for things that don't have any external pressure. The idea is that by adding urgency, you make yourself or the people working for you more productive. While this may be true for non-creative things (we got a heck of a lot of errands done yesterday), for creative things stress is inhibitory.

This also implies that procrastinating creative projects is a double whammy. You feel guilty for delaying, and if there is a deadline as you get closer and closer you not only get more stressed, but that actively inhibits your ability to work on the project and makes you more likely to procrastinate. Yikes! I don't think this will help me remember to timebox or use some of the other tricks I've found, but it should provide some additional motivation!

Going Forward

I'm going to try to use this blog to write updates about our time in Guatemala, as well as writing other things that are on my mind. We don't know much about what our situation will be like in Xela, but we do know there are plenty of internet cafe's, so I should be able to post reasonably regularly. The next post you see should be coming from Guatemala! Hasta luego!

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Improving Productivity beyond 1 Dish at a Time: Timeboxing

My wife and I discovered the 1 dish at a time trick for getting ourselves to do things a couple of years ago. Since then, I've worked at applying it to a number of areas in my life, and have gotten somewhat better (though far from perfect) at getting the dishes done, keeping up with mail, and making progress on some of my personal goals.

However, one thing that has continued to stump me is how to apply 1 dish at a time to things like getting myself to meditate regularly, write blog posts, or other things without an easily definable first step or chunk of work. Getting myself going in these areas seems to be much more of an act of will, as I don't have access to my usual trick of doing just one compact unit.

This morning, I was reading a personal development blog I've recently discovered by Steve Pavlina, and I think I've found the answer in what he calls timeboxing.

Timeboxing is a great way to deal with tasks where you’d otherwise procrastinate. With timeboxing you only commit to working on a task or project for a fixed length of time, normally 30-90 minutes. 10-15 minutes is perfectly acceptable.

Once you get past the first 15 minutes, you’ll often want to stick with the task. Timeboxing is a good way of coaxing yourself through the initial task resistance. You tell yourself, “It’s only 30 minutes. How bad could it be? I can handle anything for 30 minutes.” But then when you get through that first 30 minutes, it’s easy to keep going.

Like doing things one dish at a time, this technique works by making the cost of starting seem smaller ('It's only 30 minutes...') but then more often than not once you pass the activation energy you're ready to keep going. And just like doing things one dish at a time, its important to actually give yourself permission to stop if you don't feel like you're ready to keep going. If you don't do that, it won't actually be easier to get started because you'll know in the back of your head that you're going to have to make yourself keep going.

The great thing about timeboxing over doing the dishes is that it is much more flexible; it doesn't depend on picking out a unit that you're going to get done. This means that it's applicable to everything, including the areas that have been giving me problems. The downside is that it doesn't have as catchy of a name. :P Any ideas for a better one? If so, let me know in the comments!

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Fighting my Internet Addiction

As I talked about yesterday, I recently decided to break a bad habit of spending hours reading political blogs. As this started to reveal to me the incredible amount of time I've been wasting online, I started working on trimming back other sources of unnecessary time.

Email

I've never had good email hygiene. In fact, when I looked at my inbox yesterday morning I had 7153 unread messages. Most of those email messages I had skimmed the title, felt it was not worth my time, and let it drift back into the ether of my inbox, buried by incoming mail, while some smaller but still significant portion I missed completely and have never seen. I'd spent some time a few months ago creating filters to reduce the amount of stuff coming straight to my inbox, and have been mostly keeping up since, but in general it was still a mess.

Today my inbox looks like this:

I declared email bankruptcy. Conceding that I would never go through all of those emails, I glanced through the first page to make sure I didn't have any pending responses, and then archived everything. Luckily, since it's Gmail, they're still all searchable so if I need anything I'll be able to find it. I've also been going through and systematically unsubscribing to email lists that I don't get much value from.

What I didn't realize was how big of a difference having an empty inbox would make in the feel of checking email. It not only makes email seem less frantic and cluttered, but it makes it way easier to check quickly if there is anything new, and then go away again if there isn't. I don't know why, but it also seems to make the act of looking at and processing every incoming email immediately easier as well.

RSS Feeds

I've also been going through and removing some of the RSS feeds that I've gotten behind on. Certainly not all of them; there are feeds that I'm behind on that I love to read, and would by no means stop following. The criterion has become: Does the idea of reading all of these posts excite me or discourage me? If the answer is discourage, I'm getting past my aversion to getting rid of things and stopping following them.

Upshot

Reducing the amount of time I need to keep up with my life online is really important for my trip to Guatemala, because we're not bringing laptops and will be completely dependent on Internet cafes for online access. Since I'm planning on trying to maintain this blog at roughly a post a day throughout that time, any extra time I can trim away is extremely valuable.

Longer term, I think that this sort of adjustment will be tremendously beneficial for my personal productivity and wellbeing. This morning, when I got up, I took 10 minutes to check my email and all of my RSS feeds. That process (when including the political blogs that I'm in the process of kicking entirely) used to take between 30 minutes and an hour! Since I do this roughly twice a day, and adding in all of the small time savings when checking email, no longer flipping to political blogs, etc, I'm saving somewhere between 2 and 3 hours of time a day!

This morning, this was actually a little uncomfortable! I had a moment of feeling something like "That's it? What do I do now?", but after a few minutes of unease I realized that this was now almost an entire hour extra that I could use for writing, thinking, meditating, or exercising at the beginning of my day. In other words, things that are actually productive rather than passive intakes of information. As my friend Brad recently wrote: Consume Less, Learn More, Create Most.

I'm not confident in my ability to stick to this reduced-information-consumption diet; as I mentioned, it's actually a pretty uncomfortable adjustment. Hopefully the shock therapy of having 3 months in Guatemala without an at-home internet connection will help me form the habit, and the increased productivity and free time will give me plenty of motivation to learn to adjust.

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Start Arbitrarily, Edit Relentlessly

Looking at a blank page, trying to figure out what to write on it has to be one of the most frustrating experiences in the world. When I can do anything at all, the most likely result is doing nothing. A dozen possibilities stream through my head, and none of them makes it onto the page. Trying to pick the best, I'm paralyzed and close the notebook.

Start Arbitrarily

I take a sip of my cappuccino, reopen the notebook, and write down a topic at random. A few words, a line or two... the pen picks up speed, and I'm off.

For many creative tasks, trying to optimize too much up front is not just doing more work than needed, it's actually inhibitory. Instead of trying to come up with the perfect idea ahead of time, I remind myself to just get started and get the thoughts moving. Don't worry about the quality of the writing; that comes later. Just go!

There's an activation energy to any activity, even one I enjoy. No matter how excited I am about writing, until the pen hits the paper there's still resistance. Once I've started, keeping going takes much less energy, and usually before long the ideas start pouring out.

Edit Relentlessly

Once I've got a lot of things written, now it's time to worry about quality. I try to not be afraid to change around something I've written, rewrite it completely, or even throw it away. As I work on something, I get more and more comfortable with it as I go. This is actually one of the reasons starting is hard: when I'm deciding what to write, I usually don't feel very confident about any of my possible subjects. By the time I've thrown away my first draft, I'm halfway to feeling like an expert.

This method for creative work is actually one of the core insights behind a programming methodology known as Agile Development. By planning less and focusing instead on making it easy to continually revise and iterate code, Agile developers not only end writing software faster but the result is often higher quality.

So the next time you've got a project where you don't know where to begin, try flipping a coin, or otherwise starting arbitrarily. Let me know how it goes!

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Five tricks for jogging your productivity

Ever had one of those days when you can't even get yourself out of bed? Where every time you try to do work, you end up checking your email? It's really easy to get sucked down into a spiral of less and less productivity. What's harder is how to get yourself out of it and going again. I used to think that this was a personality trait; I've always been a procrastinator, so it must be something inherent in me that I've got to learn a way around. More recently, however, I've started to think that procrastination is part of being human, and becoming more productive is less about changing your inclinations and more about learning a set of tricks. Here's a list of 5 tricks I've learned to help job productivity:

1. One Dish at a Time
One of the first tricks I learned (and wrote about) is the one dish at a time method. The name comes from doing dishes, and the trick is really about only committing to do one tiny thing. This makes it easier to do, but once you're started and have gotten past the inertia that was keeping you still, its usually easy to keep going.
2. Go for a Walk
Sometimes this is a long walk, especially if I've been feeling really stuck and it's nice out, but it can often be just a walk to the kitchen to boil water for tea. Somehow by getting up and moving, whatever sense of stuckness I'm feeling seems to drift away and be replaced with thoughts. By the time I get back, I'm activated and ready to make progress on whatever I'd been procrastinating.
3. Do a Mind Map
Mind Mapping is one of those techniques that seems a little silly in theory, but in practice makes a world of difference. Start by writing the topic you're thinking about in the middle of a big sheet of paper. Now start writing any fragment you can think of even vaguely connected to it, and connecting it. For each of these fragments, write down new fragments, and look for ways in which they connect. Don't worry if the first few things you jot down seem worthless or inane, keep going! Pretty soon you'll be generating new ideas, seeing new connections, and getting past your block. I've used these to get a better grasp on a subject area, to explore a new way of looking at an old idea, and to kickstart myself writing when I'm feeling uninspired.
4. Switch to Editing
Generating new content is hard. Really hard. Editing existing content, on the other hand, is much easier to do gradually and get going with. So you to write a new paper, and you don't know where to begin? Copy an old one and start hacking it apart. This trick works well for programming as well; cutting and pasting code is bad practice, but using existing code as a starting place and reference works strikingly well.
5. Talk to a Friend
Most programmers have experienced the embarrassment of spending hours debugging a particularly difficult problem, finally interrupting a coworker to get help, and in the midst of explaining suddenly seeing the solution, allowing your friend to walk away having helped you without saying a word. This has led to a form of debugging known as rubber-ducking... explaining the problem to a rubber ducky. This technique is useful not just for programming, but any time you're stuck on difficult problem. Havi Brooks, one of my favorite productivity bloggers, has taken this to an extreme. The power of relating why you're stuck to a second point of view, even imaginary, is not to be underestimated.

None of these tricks works all of the time, but its rare that I by going through my series of tricks I can't get out of a funk. What tricks do you use to get yourself going? Let me know in the comments! Liked this? Looking for more like this? You might like

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One Dish at a Time

If you're like me, doing the dishes is not something that you look forward to. There's something about the stack of dirty dishes after a nice home-cooked meal that makes stupid internet games and blog reading sound ever so much more appealing.

However, by accident a couple of years ago I stumbled upon a technique for getting myself to do the dishes. I fully commit to doing exactly one dish, and no more. If, at the end of doing that dish, I feel like being done, I can be done. Somehow this limiting of the scope quiets my inner naysayer and makes it much easier to get started.

The funny thing is, once you've gotten started, its really easy to keep going. After each dish, you can commit to doing exactly one more dish, and it really doesn't seem so bad. Dish follows dish, and before you know it the bottom of the sink is visible.

This method works well enough that my fiance and I use it as a way to get ourselves to do all sorts of things we don't want to do. Need to write a paper thats due a little too far away to feel anxious about, or know you should be writing blog posts but can't get yourself to start? Try doing it one dish at a time. Just write the introduction. Just open the editor and write the title. Before you know it, you'll be most of the way done.

Now excuse me, I've got a dish to wash...