My New Commute

My new commute, as of February 28.

Awesome.

Focus

Focus, and by extension one’s _involvement_ in something, is the key to quality work in a world that is awash in opportunities. Time ran a recent article on “twixters”, college graduates in their mid-20s who live at home, hop from job to job, and feel lost in the world:

Parents were baffled when their expensively educated, otherwise well-adjusted 23-year-old children wound up sobbing in their old bedrooms, paralyzed by indecision…

To them, the period from 18 to 25 is a kind of sandbox, a chance to build castles and knock them down, experiment with different careers, knowing that none of it really counts. After all, this is a world of overwhelming choice: there are 40 kinds of coffee beans at Whole Foods Market, 205 channels on DirecTV, 15 million personal ads on Match.com and 800,000 jobs on Monster.com.

Can you blame Galantha for wanting to try them all? She doesn’t want to play just the hand she has been dealt. She wants to look through the whole deck. “My problem is I’m really overstimulated by everything,” Galantha says. “I feel there’s too much information out there at all times. There are too many doors, too many people, too much competition.”

Fortunately for my generation, the article is generous and understanding; explaining reasons for such seemingly-irresponsible behavior and exploring possible solutions. Barry Schwartz explores this tendency in his book The Paradox of Choice, and in an interview with Mark Hurst, explains how he has observed it in action:

I teach very talented students at Swarthmore. As they near graduation, when they have to decide what to be when they “grow up”, I observe this complete panic and paralysis overtake many of them, because they realize any choice they make will be closing other doors that they’d like to keep open. There is an opportunity cost associated with every decision. It’s so hard for some of them to decide that they spend years working at Starbucks, waiting for the answer to emerge…

Some social science research says that one consequence of leaving your options open is that people are less satisfied with their decisions; if a decision is non-reversible, you’ll make yourself feel better about the choice you made. If it’s a reversible choice, you don’t do that. You don’t bring your romantic partner “back to the store,” but because you might, you don’t convince yourself that she’s the love of your life. If people know they can undo their choices, they get less satisfaction out of them. People want to keep their options open. And that’s not the road to happiness.

It’s obvious that for my generation going forward, limitless opportunity and limited time and focus are setting up to be the greatest battle we will fight (a pretty good battle, if you ask me–choosing from limitless opportunity–but that doesn’t make it any easier). We want to do it all, but instead we’re doing nothing well.

Focus has always been a double-edged sword to me. The benefit to extreme focus is that I can accomplish lots of work in a short time. Yet as a designer, my creativity depends on inspiration from a huge variety of sources. Focusing too closely on one can limit the influence of innovations in others.

Simply focusing more widely on the area of interest doesn’t really work–it adds few new ideas and hurts productivity on the now-less-focused area. David Allen, the productivity guru, argues that focus is the key to quality work:

Allen argues that the real challenge is not managing your time but maintaining your focus: “If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. Remember, you’re the one who creates speed, because you’re the one who allows stuff to enter your life.”

What I’m working on is absolute focus on one area, followed by a crazy, wild shift of focus to other areas periodically.

That sounds terribly unproductive, as most lifestyles like that are associated with schizophrenia or other mental disorders. Yet I believe that an intelligently-architected system, computer-based or manual, can create a “focus schedule” that helps people work more productively _and_ creatively.

In my application essay to Stanford, I noted that when I was racing bicycles at a professional level, the focus it developed in me helped me succeed in school, work, and the rest of my life as well. Yet while I succeeded at the things I was currently doing, rarely did I experience new and unexpected things. I was productive, but not creative.

Later at Stanford, I fell sick and had to take a couple quarters easy to recover. The time off opened my eyes to opportunities I’d never noticed before, and broadened my experiences for the rest of my time there. But it hurt my performance in classes and certainly cycling. I was creative, but not productive.

The world will continue to get more complicated, not less, and if we all expect to both explore the whole range of possibilities _and_ succeed in the one or two we deem most important, focus will be our most valuable asset, and things that help us schedule our focus will be our most important tools.

Transitioning to Autotelism

I haven’t written in a while, for reasons that include a renewed cycling career, spontaneous trips with friends, and busier-than-normal design work, but which really begin and end with an attempt to live my autotelic new year (yes, I realize it’s August). Somehow it just seemed disingenuous to be writing long essays about becoming a “man of action”.

I’ve still been writing–parts of long pieces mostly, justifying autotelism, exploring post-desktop computing, and following up on the importance of being incredible–but haven’t spent the time to collect and finish them all. Instead I am developing discipline and strategies for living in an autotelic way.

It’s hard–even a stubborn individualist like myself has trouble putting aside the immediate, societally-supported gratification of pursuing heterotelic goals. “The Machine”–my cute nickname for the educational, governmental, and societal structures and conventions that define the status quo for an individual–does an effective job of keeping us busy, and for those so inclined, autotelic, as we grow up. Most of the autotelic people you see are children, and they remain that way for a long time growing older despite circumstances that might seem limiting. It is really only when they are allowed to make their own choices that the decision to become auto- or heterotelic is presented.

That’s what I’ve experienced since graduating college, with every option imaginable available to me. I’ve certainly made choices to blend in, and also some driven only by desire. I’m not sure that every decision could be one or the other, but for me the challenge remains to push personal and societal boundaries in the practice of autotelism. Society’s goals, especially those dealing with money and power, are well-documented, and Christ’s goals for us are similarly shared (though often enigmatic and requiring interpretation–one argument for autotelism, search for “heterotelic”). Whenever I decide to reference those goals, they will be there. But autotelic goals can come only from experience.

Movie Binge Week

Movies I like tend to be released in bunches, a schedule almost certainly determined by the Communists who also make the weather unbearably gorgeous at the same time. Because of the latter, I have yet to see any of this season’s crop.

Well, no more waiting–I declare this official movie week. My girlfriend’s headed out of town, I’m caught up on work, and all my movies are playing near my home. Here’s the tentative schedule:

1. Tuesday: Napoleon Dynamite–the story of a high school geek who loves taking his bike off “sweet jumps”. I’m hoping to catch the free screening in San Jose (sign up on the website, one in Palo Alto on Wednesday too), where I can get a “sweet t-shirt” as well. Lots of movies, got to save cash where I can.
2. Wednesday: Saved–while I’ve heard the theology is pretty flawed, I’m always excited to see someone take on overly-complacent Christian culture. “I still don’t think Jesus should be white” “Of course He’s white!”
3. Thursday: Super-Size Me–I’m a little worried about this one, which my roommate saw and immediately swore off all delicious food. But I’ve wanted to see it for a while now because I think it’s a fantastic performance art piece, along the lines of Stephen Sagmeister, who pulled a similar stunt in his piece Sagmeister on a Binge. If it has an overt political or social message, that’s a bonus–but I just think it’s cool.
4. Friday: The Corporation–I’m especially interested in this film because of a recent meme I’ve been following–the way corporations are simultaneously becoming more practiced in their financial dealings and also more entrenched in our personal lives. The combination is scary and intriguing.

The schedule will probably slip as I get tired of sitting in dark rooms, but at least I’m getting motivated for this finally. As design goes, you can’t get much more intensive than film–designing for an immersive, 2-hour experience is an incredible feat–and these films are promising to be star efforts.

Join me if you can.

My Friends

For some reason, I have the most brilliant friends.

Let me make this clear. I myself am not brilliant. Lucky, yes. Right place, right time kinda’ guy, you bet. But brilliance has never been my forte.

Steven Johnson writes about his visit to an MRI lab for a brain scan. When the results come in, it seems that no particular part of his brain is capable of extraordinarily high ability. There is no “special module”, like Einstein’s “unusually large inferior parietal lobes, which we think gave him his extraordinary spatio-logical skills.” However, an overall orderliness is found that is similarly unusual.

My dad used to say to me during my high school years: “You’re not a rocket scientist, but you’re smart and you’ve got a lot of talent.” I used to bristle at the remark. (If I wanted to, maybe I could be a rocket scientist!) But now I think he was onto something. I’ve met rocket scientists — and astrophysicists, and programming wizards, and architectural geniuses — and I don’t possess anything like what they’ve got mentally. I don’t have their special gifts. But those fMRI images made me think that perhaps I have something else, a little less dazzling, but nothing to be ashamed of either. Maybe I have a well-orchestrated brain — with no world-famous soloists but a nice sound nonetheless.

I feel that this may be my particular gift–sort of a “jack of all trades” deal; the “master of none”, of course, may be an unfortunate side effect. I have always been extremely good at connecting disparate things; seeing parallels between products, industries, and situations. To capitalize on this gift, I’ve considered myself a “metaphor designer” before–one who concentrates on stealing ideas from other industries and using them in a new application.

So it’s very interesting to work with friends who are brilliant, and hopefully I can use my metaphorical prowess to amplify the reach of their work. A mind is a terrible thing to waste; how much more the friendship of those with exceptional minds.

Getting Back on the Horse

Despite the best intentions, I have not yet accomplished the things I wanted to do this year. This could be due to one or more of the following four possibilities:

I may not be working long enough

I have made the choice separately to work a job only part-time, which allows free research and exploration during the rest of the time. But work toward my individual goals is not accomplished in someone else’s office anyway; by working my job part-time I have committed the rest of my time toward my goals, and fill each day with work, yet that has not accomplished my ends. I am working long enough to accomplish my goals, which if done ideally would take only a fraction of the time allotted.

I may not be working hard enough

“Hard” differs from “long” as defined in A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted for Risk, by Seth Godin. It involves choosing riskier paths that may pay off bigger. I have made difficult choices to eschew traditional, ensured success in order to pursue what I believe in. Those were hard work. Committing to a singular goal, ignoring all others, is really hard work. I don’t do that yet. So this is an area I could improve.

I may not be working well enough

I am blessed with great talents and a deep and broad education, which ensures that when I do work on something, I am able to do a good job. The quality of my work is rarely questioned, so I do not believe this to be the holdup.

I may not be working on the right things

This is my biggest problem. I’ve realized that my time allocation is skewed wildly. I spend the majority of my time on trivial, urgent things; little is left for the truly important items. Steven Covey is the proponent of First Things First, the philosophy of doing the most important tasks before (or at least alongside) the ones with the most urgent deadlines.

I’ve had little success with programs to solve these problems in the past–the closest being Life Balance software for Mac, PC, and Palm Pilot. I even got as far as installing that one…but seriously, for those who would prefer not to spend half their free time scheduling the other half, there seems to be no solution. What I need is something editable in seconds, an interface that mirrors the way I think and live.

If only I knew an interface designer…oh yeah. So now I have Whassup.info, ComingUp.org, ComingUp.info, UpNext.org and UpNext.info . Revolutions are afoot…any ideas on how to fire the first shot?

More Bob Avatars

Since the South Park guy was so much fun, here’s me as a WeeMee and a Stor Trooper:

Bob as a South Park Character

From South Park’s Character Generator and a bit of Photoshopping. I think this guy might stick around for a while …

I love sleep

I got Epstein-Barr (“mono”) my sophomore year in college and ever since then I’ve been addicted to sleep. Before then, I was a typical Stanford obsessive, working myself into pits of sleep debt that had me falling asleep in class, staring at blank problem sets for hours with complete incomprehension, and getting sick at the slightest viral provocation.

Mono stopped me in my tracks, reminded me of my fallibility, and forced me to choose the few things important enough to continue doing with my limited energies. It also scared me enough that ever since, I have kept sleep as one of my highest priorities, choosing to go to bed many times despite having “miles to go before I sleep…”

After struggling through simple tasks while sleep-deprived, it is truly a joy to approach each day with energy and concentration levels at their peak, able to put myself fully in the moment. Sometimes I find that my increased effectiveness easily overcomes any extra work that piled up when I went to sleep early; other times it doesn’t, and my resting has put me behind schedule. But my enjoyment of work has always been increased by doing it well-rested.

So it is with skepticism that I read a report about too much sleep being bad for you:

The study found people who sleep more than eight hours a night (long sleepers) and people who get less than seven hours of slumber both report more sleep complaints than people who get just the right amount of shuteye — between seven and eight hours per night.

That’s my sleep pattern, averaging over eight hours per night. Seven is definitely not enough, making getting up in the morning an unpleasant chore. After nine hours, I virtually leap out of bed, eager to start the day (which, of course, is half-over by then). But perhaps I am a unique case, filling the rest of my hours with hard cycling and commuting by skateboard. I certainly don’t have the problems the study linked to “long sleepers”:

…Compared with people who slept seven to eight hours a night, long sleepers reported more problems with falling asleep, waking up during the night, waking up too early, feeling unrefreshed when they wake up and feeling sleepy during the day.

This is probably a Culture of Fear moment, where hysteria about a minor problem hides the bigger problem–that we in the United States are piling up sleep debt faster than financial debt (no easy task), and that the cost of problems and accidents resulting from that is much greater than “waking up too early”.

If you have the symptoms above, especially trouble falling asleep (I have during times I don’t exercise but still sleep lots), then maybe try sleeping less. Everyone else, go to bed.

Sky on Fire

Sadly, these pictures are barely a glimmer of what had been there minutes before. As I got off the train at 6:21 pm in downtown Mountain View, the sky was ablaze in reds, purples, and yellows, all swirling together in updrafts and downdrafts and sidedrafts in ways I had never seen before. The woman walking next to me simply pointed behind her and I turned to see a giant rainbow stretching across the entire sky, over a background of dark storm clouds.

I ran red lights and skidded around wet corners on my bike to get home and to my camera, all the while watching the colors fade.

By the time I got back out and to a good vantage point, this was all that was left. But it helps me remember what it was like…it was only 6:28 pm…