This is a belated announcement about Barcamp Manchester 2008, the free self-organizing tech conference spearheaded by uber-networkers and buddies Ian and Kelley Muir. It's happening Dec 6th, 2008 at UNH Manchester at 400 Commercial Street. That's thiscoming Saturday, starting at 9:30AM and finishing up at 5:00PM. Lunch is provided for registered attendees.
I'm not sure what to expect this time around, as I haven't been involved at all with it this year. Nevertheless, this Saturday I'll be breaking my hermitage to check out the local technology / internet / social media scene here in New Hampshire. There should be a few Barcamp Boston people there too. I'm looking forward to a mellow, informative time (and trying out my newish 50mm lens).
WHAT IS BARCAMP?
If you're not familiar with the Barcamp concept, it's a kind of informal gathering of people interested in the same topics. The organizers provide the venue and food, the costs are picked up by sponsors, and everyone else gets to attend for free. At the beginning of the conference, a big sheet of paper is put on the wall and people write in what they'd like to talk about during blocked-out times, and then people go to the ones that interest them. Usually there's places to hang out and talk or do things, which is part of the great appeal of events like this.
WHO'S COMING & REGISTRATION
You can get an idea of who's attending by looking at the Barcamp Manchester Registration Wiki Page. I see a bunch of web developers, some designers, a few senior technology people, and some bloggers right now. You can also check out the Upcoming.Org and Facebook Event Listing. Free lunch, meet a bunch of people in the area who are into creative and entrpreneurial uses of technology...not a bad way to spend a day.
Also, people from Massachusetts can take advantage of New Hampshire's sales-tax free shopping :-)
A few months ago Sean Johnson contacted me for permission to create an online version of the Emergent Task Timer (ETT), a form I had designed a few years ago to maintain focus in the face of unscheduled task chaos. Anecdotally I've heard that it's popular with graduate students and people who get pulled into a lot of meetings; a filled-out ETT provides documented proof that there's just too much crap getting in the way of getting real work done, in a compelling visual manner. While I had created a prototype of an online version of the ETT, I didn't have the back-end database expertise to create a full-featured web application. Others have asked for permission in the past, and I've generally granted it (ideas are free, after all), though few have actually followed through. Geoffrey Grosenbach was the first out of the gate a few years ago with his Online CEO, an implementation of my Concrete Goals Tracker, and now Sean Johnson presents his BubbleTimer application to fill another gap.
About Sean's BubbleTimer
I checked out the BubbleTimer for a few minutes today, and am generally impressed. Initially I wasn't sure I'd use something like this myself, suffering a bit from envy at someone actually having made a working version of my own tool, but as I clicked through it I again became excited by the possibilities, particularly with the task sharing feature. And it's nice to know that the data is saved and backed up on a server somewhere. Pretty cool! And unlike my prototype, Sean's version has the long-requested task reordering feature. Sweet! What's missing are some of the future planning features so you can block out how you THINK you'll use your time (something that didn't work well on paper, and was not implemented in my prototype). The basic idea is to mark future time as slightly-highlighted ovals, which are malleable right up to the time when the time-counter "fixes" them forever. This allows you to establish the intention to do something at a certain time, mark off meeting times and errands, and so forth, without being committed to them. Consider this a feature request :-)
I'm not involved in Sean's enterprise, and I have no financial stake or partnership interest, but I think it's awesome that he's made something that he really wanted to use himself. I asked him for some background information via email after he told he he'd gotten the application ready for release:
I've always had a lot of goals and I've been quite frustrated that poor time management was holding me back from achieving many of them. I've never been lazy, quite the opposite, I was working long hours, I was using GTD, but I was not really working smart. I just wasn't spending enough time on the things that I said were truly important to me. My time usage didn't match my goals and I didn't even have a good sense where all my time was being spent. I found a great tool in David's Emergent Task Timer printed worksheets that made a huge difference in my life in just a few weeks time. With emergent task timing I was able to quickly get a sense of where my time was being spent and I was able to start adjusting that to better match my goals. I knew right then that I wanted to take the method online and make it available to everyone. I found David's prototype flash application and knew that the technique could work as well online as it does on paper. I contacted David and then I went for it.
I created BubbleTimer using Ruby on Rails it was a key technology that made it possible. I never could have done this much development in my nights and weekends time without a productive platform like Ruby on Rails. This is my fourth Rails application now, but I come from the Java world, and this application would be twice as big, twice as complicated and would have taken twice as long if it was done in Java.
I'm excited about the prospect of BubbleTimer helping people achieve more. I've been using it myself for months now and it's be a great tool for a goal oriented approach to time management. It's as easy to use as the paper version but without the dead trees. It also has some important improvements in terms of instant feedback on cumulative totals and graphs showing how your time is being spent that can't be done with only paper. More than anything, I'm excited to get people trying it out and giving me feedback so l can make it even better.
Check it out Sean's Ruby on Rails implementation of the ETT at BubbleTimer.com. I think it's pretty cool; just don't blame me for anything and complain directly to Sean by his request ;-) Congrats Sean on launching the app, and THANK YOU!
Today is Veteran's Day, November 11, which also happens to be the last "official" day of Groundhog Day Resolutions Reviews 2008. At this point, the American High Holidays--Thanksgiving through New Years Day--loom over me. so I rest my side ambitions until February 2nd. The original idea behind Ground Hog Day resolutions is that on January 1st, the traditional time of making resolutions, I'm so tired from the holidays that I'm still catching up with everything I didn't finish last year; I need some time to chill and reflect. Besides, Ground Hog Day is my favorite holiday, and it is under-celebrated.
Fractal Patterns of Perceived Failure and Recovery
2008 was the second year I launched GHDRs, and I maintained the follow up review days for March, April, May, June, and July. It was a mixed run, largely one of disappointment masked by the power of positive thinking ;-)
After July, I decided to go on blogging hiatus due to an increased project load (largely mental, in retrospect), and suspended my GHDR Review Days at the same time. When I review the wistfully-optimistic first months of 2008, I find the following themes appearing:
- March: The acute need to focus, to attain mobility, and to battle the forces of loneliness.
- April: The recognition that I needed to be more specific to achieve goals. Also, the decision to reduce my material needs (a necessary aspect of mobility), and to commit to writing as a vocation, whatever that means.
- May: Why oh why do I lack motivation? Theorizing on internal and external sources of said motivation. Gah!
- June: Acceptance that there are certain "go-getter" attributes I lack, a decision to find alternate routes other than the "just do it" approach.
- July: Ground down, I rediscover part of my core, and am surprised to find what's there.
If this sounds familiar, it's probably because last week's Productivity Reboot repeats the entire cycle of fevered commitment - perceived failure - diagnosis - acceptance - return to core - re-dedication. If I were to look back at the 1200+ blog posts I've written over the past three years, I am pretty sure that I'd see the same cycle repeated, fractal-like, in everything I do. This I find fascinating, and at the same time it's kind of alarming because at first glance it seems that I'm not going anywhere. Yikes! Have I discovered my predestined pattern of doom?
Sparky to the Rescue
I flew to California last Sunday for a week of on-site work with Inquirium, which I look forward to for the shared working environment. While waiting for a change of plane at Chicago Midway, I happened upon Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis. Although I had enjoyed Peanuts as a child, I had never known much about the cartoonist Schulz himself and had mentally categorized him as "too popular to be interesting, coasting on past success". However, seeing the book reminded me of my buddy Brad, who in the early days of our acquaintance had been working hard to get into a cartoon syndicate, and I decided to pick up the book to gain some insight. What I gleaned from my reading was profound insight into my own nature, by gaining a reference point of understanding about the nature of ambition and self-doubt.
Charles M. Schulz, for all his success in life, was a man who seemingly kept himself from feeling actual happiness. He was a shy boy raised by emotionally-distant parents who demonstrated their love through duty, hiding their own insecurities behind thick walls of silent denial. Highly intelligent, talented but surrounded by people who couldn't imagine--and therefore couldn't emotionally support--the notion of cartooning for a living, he nevertheless was lucky enough to find himself in employ of a company that allowed him to mature his drawing as an unwitting means to express his own pantheon of insecurities; the book is liberally illustrated with strips that echo the goings-on of his life. Throughout his life, he insisted on thinking of himself as a regular guy from Minnesota who had done OK with a modicum of talent, though underneath the surface he was highly ambitious and competitive to the point of meanness. He held grudges against the people who he perceived to have bullied, slighted, or belittled him. When he was a child, his own doubts and insecurities were fed by people who he later realized were limited in their life perspective and experience, and despite his rise to massive success he just could not accept that he'd made it and was adored by millions. Although a gracious and generous person in spirit, he had a constant need for affirmation; without his cartoon, he said, "he would be dead." He died in 2000, and one of his last interviews regarding how he viewed his life achievements produced a statement that struck me rather well. Paraphrased: "I took the talent I had and did not waste it." Producing his comic strip was an intensely personal affair; he did not seek help or advice on his work, because in his mind it was the one thing that he did himself that provided affirmation that he was doing something right.
I can see a lot of parallels between myself and Schulz's conflicts about his desire for understanding, for affirmation, and being the best while being in conflict with his Midwestern values of being humble and unassuming. Instead of rationalizing them away, as I've been trying to do, Schulz actively appeared to embrace them, using his unhappiness to drive his muse. What's interesting too is that the biography makes a point of distinguishing unhappiness from depression. I still can't quite wrap my head around the distinction, but to be depressed I gather is to not be able to muster the energy to do anything, while unhappiness is something less debilitating. In my own case, I am feeling similar doubts about my direction, and I am also beset by desires to be the best at what I do for recognition by the world. I want a calling, and I don't want to fail. At the same time, I wonder if I am being immodest and prideful in a way that will damage my soul or, at the very least, bite me in my hypocritical ass: I want to be a good person, but I also want to be the best. And like Schulz, I want to the be the sole author of my creations, because this provides me with affirmation that I am capable of doing something right as well.
After reading the biography, I was struck by a few thoughts:
Schulz, for all his insecurities, persevered through his unhappiness and consistently produced work day-in, and day-out. What drove him was an ideal of customer service he had absorbed from his father, a barber who meticulously found comfort in the daily routine of giving his customers individual attention. In time, Schulz worked it out and found success. My own belief that producing tangible things as a means to create opportunities and connections with people is similar; consistent production of items of value, as appraised by other people, is very important to me. Otherwise, how do people know what you're capable of?
Schulz belated matured, growing out of his boyish ways as he took on responsibilities in WWII. He became a well-liked squad leader because of his intelligence, competence with weapons, and ability to listen to people who learned they could come to him. This is a model of leadership that I like, and it mirrors the sentiments I've been reading about in Seth Godin's Tribes (I have 3 copies of that book now, one for me, and two for loaning to people).
If someone as massively successful as Charles Schulz could be deeply unhappy and beset by numerous demons, at least I was in good company. I lack the ability to hold a grudge for very long, and I'm not really that unhappy or depressed at all. But I am at times lonely and isolated, and seek affirmation and understanding. It would be great if I could find that affirmation in myself and be done with it, but there's something else missing. However, I don't want to be soooo dependent on external affirmation that I am a slave to it; reading Schulz's biography has put that scenario into perspective, and I want nothing to do with it. That is itself a self-strengthening realization.
There is a commitment to excellence in Schulz's work, both artistically and in the pursuit of deeper truths. When he first started attempting syndication in the early 1950s, people tried to get him to steer his creations in more "popular" directions; his own mother suggested that he needed to draw sexier girls. But Sparky stuck to his guns, and when Peanuts (nee "Li'l Folks") debuted in the 1950s, his work was regarded as a kind of anomaly in comics of the time. His audience grew steadily, then explosively, over the next 25 years, and it is (I imagine) because his work wasn't made to appease the surface desires of a large audience, but because he constantly pursued personal truths in himself and in his observations of the times. His art was the means through which he strove to portray these truths as clearly as possible. For myself as a blogger and writer, I've struggled with the ideas of writing shorter, easier-to-digest, more digg-able, top-ten list style posts for the purpose of growing audience, but I don't. I'm well aware that I could write shorter and more concise articles, but there is something about the way that I write now that is truthful to myself; creating shorter articles that jump right to the point is a different product entirely, one that will come later. I am still very much in my formative years as a writer, deciding what truths matter to me, and learning to express them to unknown people far away. My best days are yet to come; this is the lesson I've learned from Schulz's biography. Artistically, I now have the sense of purpose that I need to keep doing what I'm doing.
What does this have to do with Ground Hog Resolutions? I think they've evolved into something else. I mentioned that Ground Hog's Day is one of my favorite holidays, and this is partly because of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a fantastical movie about self-realization and improvement. In the movie, Bill Murray's self-centered character moves from surface cynicism to something deeply truthful about himself and his needs. It's the continual pursuit of these personal truths that, I suspect, drive me. I am compelled to follow them. I have no idea what kind of "business case" I can make for this, but I am making a bet that if I continue to express these truths through my writing, design, and personal interactions, I'll be OK. And so, I can distill all my future Ground Hog Day Resolutions into a single Master Resolution that goes something like this:
Seek the truthful essence, and make it artfully visible so others can see it too.
So long as I do that every day, in some form, I'll be doing what I'm supposed to be doing, the equivalent of Sparky Schulz getting up every morning and producing his strip for 50 years.
I started my productivity reboot by just stating the desire to get back into the groove, and it ended up becoming a declaration of belief. Here's the abridged version of what happened last week:
Starting with momentum and goals
At first, I started with simple process goals to maintain momentum. If I maintain momentum, so my reasoning went, I will eventually get out of the doldrums. Over the past several years I've experimented with a few techniques: getting up early, using my various scheduler tools, and timer-based pacing tricks. Each of these tools failed within the first two days of the reboot, leaving me to acknowledge that there were deeper issues with my work now and the work I think I should be doing.
Here's what I want:
- I want to achieve the financial freedom so I can meet awesome people, then write and design from the resulting inspiration.
- In the meantime, I need to finish my current long term project commitments and not be distracted by the future.
- I need to develop products and other services that bring me into alignment with my writing and design goals.
- I want to be a major participant in a community of positive, self-empowered people who are of a similar mind.
On the surface, there are clear actions one can take based on principles of maintaining focus and momentum. They just take discipline to implement:
- Productivity is a byproduct of focused momentum. Maintain focus and momentum, and the right things will get done.
- Remove environmental distractions that rob focus. Without focus, momentum is harder to maintain.
- Create momentum-building habits like waking up at a regular time, using planning tools that emphasize timeliness, and delivery tangible intermediate results.
Facing the internal demons
However, as the week ground on it became clear that it was the motivation-related challenges that were the real issues.
- I was unmotivated by the future, therefore the work felt pointless.
- I was feeling unsettled and off balance, therefore it was difficult to push forward with conviction and strength.
Diagnostically, I needed to dive deeper into myself to find the root causes undermining my dedication. After some reflection, I came to believe that these were the major underlying issues and desires that were throwing me off balance.
- I was way too serious about being productive, and beat myself up about it. I needed to remember to laugh at it as well.
- I needed to look deeper into myself to find the bad feelings and irrational feelings that were the source of my unease.
- I needed to define and face those fears and uncertainties to see what I was facing.
- I needed to rediscover what I believed, and why it was important so I could work toward the future with certainty.
An unblinking look at myself, to see the shape of my despair:
- There is a child-like part of me that is feeling sad, scared, and alone with regards to the future.
- It needed to be acknowledged and accepted. And so I did.
Affirming myself
Having defined what was bothering me, I was able to make a reaffirmation of what I believe about myself with regards to the future. What followed was a declaration of secular faith, reproduced here in slightly shortened form:
The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it’s been empty for a long time. It is lonely and filled with uncertainty, and there is no indication that the situation will change. My first response was the desire to indulge my sadness, like a frightened child. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, there is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something and change my situation.
All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and my people. Even if those choices ultimately fail, even if I'm sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and otherwise refuse to face these fears is to choose failure. That is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are writing about ourselves should not end this way.
Since then, I've felt a kind of steady calmness descend upon me, because I've defined a role for myself. In the absence of an organizational structure, with people at my side every day, I'd become disconnected from the strengthening hand of shared destiny. I have essentially manufactured my own structure out of thin air, establishing a tribe of one. The unspoken hope is that I find others in my tribe, so that we might all prosper together. And most importantly, I need to remember to laugh about this, to maintain mirthfulness and joy.
I think with this, I can return to my regularly-scheduled productivity writing. Every once in a while, I just need to remind myself why I do it at all. If you are interested in the articles leading up to this epiphany, here are the links:
Yesterday’s post about sucking it up ended with a declaration of intent: I would wake up no matter what and start the day! And when I woke up, the alarm clock read 6:30AM, which was a little later than my target, but still early! Encouraged, I closed my eyes in contentment and then reconfirmed that it was indeed…1130AM? Apparently my body had a different idea about how much sleep I was to have, hijacked my motivation, and did me in. Bummer. But the day ended up taking a hopeful path.
Serial task switching
I had a 1PM appointment with my music teacher, Angela, for a mutual “project regrouping” session. We met at Bonhoeffer’s, a local coffee shop, where I was planning to work for the rest of the day. What was on her mind was her upcoming professional website, a distillation of her public identity as a music teacher to the most impactful essentials. What was on my mind was maintaining weekly continuity with my music education, despite my piano practice being shoved aside due to my project work.
I suggested that we ping-pong between our individual project discussion in 3-minute chunks, based on my thoughts yesterday regarding merciless time-blocking. In other words, she would get to talk about her immediate web site goals for 3 minutes, and then I would get to talk about my music lesson challenges. To maintain context between switches of topic, we each had a small whiteboard to write on.
Three minutes, as it turns out, is just about enough time to get a thought going and draw it to a tentative conclusion. It’s not enough time, though, to really go off on a tangent because you feel the time pressure. The resulting meeting ended up being rather exciting and dynamic, with excellent momentum and lots of passion. What was surprising, in retrospect, was that the discussion was not disjointed in the least; I would have thought that the “hard context switch” would prevent natural continuity from developing. Angela and I have similar conversational styles, jumping from thought to thought, so this kind of serial task switching may not work for everyone. I could see this working very well, however, in a group brainstorming session. Having the whiteboard to record where we left off was critical, and the dissimilarity of topics may have laid a foundation for creative random juxtaposition. It rocked.
Personal versus impersonal inspiration
When I mentioned to Angela that I believed I needed to close personal connections with people so I could focus on work, she suggested that I find inspiration elsewhere by going to a concert. This would be an intermediate form of human connection; I realized that merely seeing inspiration etched across people’s faces would likely uplift me as well. And there’s another advantage: time-consuming personal conversations are not required. Now, I love having long conversations with people about their lives and their aspirations, but it’s a big time commitment that occupies a lot of my mental reserves. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could draw energy from inspiring public events, and this reminds me of my good friend S, who once told me that she likes to go to noisy public events to “be alone”. It totally makes sense to me in this context; sometimes you need the external source of energy to feel what you need to feel, without having the commitment of a one-on-one human connection. In my case, I am energized by expressive energy, passion, imagination, and inspiration. In the past I’ve gotten that primarily by maintaining very close relationships with multiple people, but as I said there is a time cost.
Counseling the inner child
After Angela left, I settled down to do some programming. The problem was that I was hugely inspired by the quality of the previous communication, but rather less inspired by the world of Visual Studio and C#. I caught myself checking my email, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr accounts—the automatic impulse to reach out for personal connections—and then stopped myself. The coding mindset requires an unusual clarity and singularity of purpose, and my mind was not cooperating.
I recalled what I had written in my last Groundhog Day Resolutions post about shedding my armor, which had involved a mind-clearing technique I’d made up. The technique had given me a significant bit of insight about myself…maybe it would help clear my mind so I could write the GUI base classes I needed to implement. I jotted down an impromptu process to follow:
- Close my eyes.
- Identify each surface thought, and then respectfully tell each thought to fade away for now.
- Find what feels like the center of my consciousness.
- Note pains, tensions, and other discomforts. If they are not 911-level emergencies, tell them to fade away.
- Try to count up to 33 after getting to this state. This was an arbitrary number I picked.
- See if anything interesting happens.
The experience was like peeling away the layers of an onion. The end result of identifying each thought was that I drew into myself. Once I’d tagged and cleared those thoughts, I was in my own mental space, and could then hear the little discomforts, pangs, and things going on in my body that I usually ignore. I determined whether these discomforts were life-threatening (which they were not), and dismissed them. I never did count up to 33, because I became aware of feelings and impulses that were unnamed and unknown. Strange denizens of the emotional deep, I imagined them, that usually do not see the light of consciousness. I listened.
The foremost emotion, I am almost embarrassed to say, was a desire to cry from an ambiguous feeling of loneliness and abandonment. The second underlying emotion was an unspecific fear of failure, a feeling I was not “measuring up” to anyone and everyone. There they were, wreaking havoc with my sense of self.
A couple of years ago I had the epiphany that I could split myself into a parent and a child. As adults, we’re used to thinking we know how to deal with the complexities of life in a responsible matter. We also crave being in comfort zones of competence and security; this is one measure of how “together” we feel our lives are. When faced with a challenge, we can cope by either telling ourselves a “look on the bright side” story or plan a “this is how I’ll get out of this” escapade. I have a good adult coping mechanism, but yesterday I came to believe that coping treats symptoms, not causes. To treat the cause is to treat all the symptoms with finality. The process starts by finding the root cause of the problem, calling it out, and dealing with it directly. In my case, merely naming these fears was enough. Once named, I could acknowledge that they existed, understand what they indicated, and move onward.
It’s difficult to admit to yourself that you feel like crying because you’re lonely and unconfident about the future. The common wisdom is that this makes you weak, but that’s only the case if you are whining like a victim. This is my situation, as clearly as I can express it:
The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it sucks because I realize that it’s been empty for a long time and I have no idea if and when the situation will change. My first response was the raw emotional one: the desire to hide and be sad. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, that is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something about it. All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and for people I can connect with in the future. Even if those steps ultimately fail, even if I'm sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance to me that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and so forth is to choose failure, and that is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are all writing about ourselves should not end this way.
I closed all my browser windows and started writing code.
