Flow with motivation

I believe that there is only a certain amount of tasks that humans can do where the prime motivator is that we have been asked or told to. I think these tasks use a very specific type of energy in the body and brain that needs to be replenished before it can be used again, and that this energy is different from the kind that is used when we are in a flow state where we want to do things. The motivation for these type of forced tasks is often money but it can also be things like household tasks or other obligations.

The interesting point for me is that how our mind interprets these things that we have to do can be informed, heavily, by how we frame them. A diary filled with tasks that NEED performed can easily begin to feel like work and tire us out, using up this precious slow renewing energy. The problem is that we chose to fill our diary with them so it feels like they shouldn't tire us out because we picked them, but they are still things we now feel obligated to do. If they don't get done, we will feel a similar guilt to missing a deadline or failing to deliver on a promise.

So how do we deal with this? The answer, in my mind anyway, has to do with motivation and minimalism. There are obviously some tasks that we will actually need to perform, but we can minimise the number of tasks that we perform in this way and try to ask the question "Do I really need to do this right now?". In this way we can simplify our lives and focus on the things that really matter and that we wish to do. Spending more of our time on things that we feel motivated to do allows us to tap into the state of flow that affords frictionless performance, fueled by our desire to work in the task space while in our current state of mind. Asking this question also allows us to weed out tasks that actually offer no value to our lives but we've been performing basically because we always have, or feel that we should. 

Working to a timed plan

One of the time management techniques that I have been fond of for quite a while now is setting out what I intend to do in each day in a mind-map. It's sort of a chore list, I guess, but has things on it like "work on music track" or "do exercise". The main idea was that I would check off the items on it when I finished them each day. This went through several iterations along with various tweaks but I just couldn't find a method of working or set of tasks that I could get done consistently. There was always something that got left off the list or just didn't get completed. This was both disconcerting and quite frustrating. I felt that the list of items was achievable, but no matter how much I paired it down I just couldn't finish it on any given day. How could this be so difficult?

Some time passed, struggling with this method of working, and I read a book called "The way we're working isn't working" by Tony Schwartz which laid out a lot of things about work and productivity. I don't agree with every point the book makes but a lot of them do seem very sensible. One of its main points was the idea that human beings have a well of will power each day that can be both replenished and withdrawn from when required. Every decision we make in a day takes some energy out of this well but decisions that require a lot of work on our part, against some resistance, are particularly draining. As such this brought me to realise that even though I had a plan for what I wanted to do with a day, the act of having to decide to begin doing an activity at any given time was actually draining a lot of my will-power. In short it was actually making the tasks more difficult as I was already depleted when starting them. The problem was that even though I had a set list of what I want to do on a day, I hadn't defined WHEN I wanted to do these things, other than on that day. It's the old problem of starting, but I had made it so I had to "decide" to start tasks lots of times throughout the day and often this meant stopping something else, making the decision twice as hard.

As such I decided that instead I would look at what I had planned each day and actually make a time plan. I set out what each block of time was going to be for and had it planned out for all the hours I intended to be productive during the day and for each day of the week. The difference? Well pretty astounding so far. Before doing this my productivity was sparse and fairly spasmodic. Sometimes I would gets lots done but often I would just not start or only do 10 minutes here or there, usually with not the greatest results. The first week of trying this new method, I did 8 hours over the course of two days and was really happy with the results. The week after, the same again and this week so far has been the same yet again. That's a whole lot of productivity for me! Probably more than i've ever managed consistently in my entire life (without making myself sick). I'm hoping this will help to keep things moving forward. Sometimes when I have these nice ideas I find it hard to stick with them, so it should be interesting to see if this time is different. The signs so far though are very good.

The Discontinuity of Life

So recently I've been thinking about the world and how most people seem to portion it out into little chunks and think of them as discrete units. This is in contrast to my understanding of the world as an interacting system. In my opinion this leads to issues which are largely systemic problems being treated as isolated incidents. Don't get me wrong I'm all for mental compartmentalisation but when it comes to external factors, understanding the system-wide implications of actions can go a long way to helping deal with life. For me one of the biggest examples of this is money.

Most people tend to view money as a thing, an object, something having intrinsic value in of itself. The truth, in my opinion, is that money is actually just a piece of a larger system. Money is a method of transferring goods and services, so in some sense it is actually more of a social contract than an object. It doesn't have an intrinsic value without the system that it operates within. By thinking of money as a discrete, we allow ourselves to become caught up in the pursuit of it. It becomes the end goal, rather than the facilitator. It leads to money becoming a status symbol, because of our possession of it. Me personally, I like to think of money as part of a system. If the money is flowing correctly through the system, I don't require to think about it or have it burden me. When I check my bank account to see if I have enough money to pay for something, I'm not thinking about how much money I have, I'm looking at the state of a system in flux. I understand that the aquiscion of money is only determined by my circumstances surrounding it. For instance, if I work so much that I cannot spend the money, then I have no real benefit from it. All the status or possessions in the world won't change the fact that I'm not better off for my inflated bank balance. What that bank balance actually represents in that state is a blockage in the system, a bottleneck. I think many things can be understood in this way.

So how do you deal with this mentally. How can you compartmentalise without trying to understood the world around you through a discrete lens. Well take for example the following:

I pick up a JIRA ticket at work and write some code. While I'm writing that code I'm focused and blocking some things out, I'm allowing myself to be in the pocket of the moment. When I'm finished I check that code in for code review. At this point I don't sit monitoring what has happened to that piece of code, I let it sit for a period while the reviewer goes over it. During this time I look into some other work, I research what I'm going to do next. My understanding is that my work isn't a discrete unit of work, its part of a larger system. That system is now handling the next step of the process. Most things we do have an effect, some influence on the system around them. Allowing the system to work and not focusing on the possession can go a long way to helping us act more effectively within the wider system.

Maintaining focus over the festive period

I love the festive period. Spending time with family, eating nice food and taking some time off from work can be great. Unfortunately though this usually means i'm less productive and that makes me, for want of a better way of putting it, twitchy. I have what most people who create have, a sort of voice inside you that won't let you rest. It constantly wants you to be creating and putting stuff out there. If you aren't it can get quite insistent and make you aggravated, disagreeable and just generally not a great person to be around. What that little voice doesn't understand is that you have to take down-time to be productive at other points, and the festive period is the perfect excuse. Its made even more so by the close proximity to new year's.

New year for me is a time to set objectives, think about the year ahead and try to decide on ways to tackle some of the year's problems. If i'm knee deep in actually doing project stuff, I can find it really difficult to do this kind of big picture thinking. I just want to work on what i'm working on. Taking a break from this project work lets my brain have that little bit o' space it needs to step back and think about what it wants to do. This year i've decided to try to tighten up my general daily routine. I had let my daily habits slip a bit over the last year and I wasn't happy with that. Its okay, i'm not going to beat myself up about it, because I was doing other things but now I want to work on them again. I also want to do some DIY stuff round the house, particularly in the summer,  and I want to try to spend a bit more time with my family. Obviously I want to keep making music and grow my youtube channel but these goals are not mutually exclusive to any others I might have. I just have to figure out how to spend less time in a mindless state and be aware of it. Mindless entertainment is like drugs. Your brain reacts in the same way it would to a hit, and it can be equally as difficult to break the habit. Purposeful planning and goals can help, alongside mindfulness training. Another trick i've found is to tell other people about what i'm doing. This works great with planning to spend time with family. If I tell me little girl that we will play a board game in half an hour, she will expect me to be ready to play in exactly half an hour (She's very precise with timekeeping). The thought of letting her down is enough to make me actually stick to the plan rather than if i'd simply thought to myself that I would play a board game with her at some point. Making the commitment, with a negative result if I don't follow through, forces me to do the right thing with regards to my plans and goals.