Weeknotes 2021-06-27: Gradual shapes

On finding a way through

Thursday: Feeling tired, calm, a bit overwhelmed today.

A long walk on the downs was good yesterday, but now I see the end of the week approaching and so many thoughts and to-dos and bullet points flicking through my brain that it’s hard to concentrate.

A walk to the post office has helped (there’s a theme there), along with a chat with an old colleague last night, along with further reading of William Bridges’ ‘Transitions‘ and maybe, just maybe, I am thinking about things in an oh-so-human yet upside-down way. Maybe I am letting not just income, but identity lead me on, but in a way that is trying to force both to be something.

I am not my avatar

It is a strange time we live in where our name and our reputation hold so much sway over our lives. We live in public and we brand ourselves and our avatars to appeal, to sell. But (following William Bridges) when we reach certain points in life, we’re looking to reflect and to gather up who we are, in all of it’s messy glory.

There is maybe a crude juxtaposition between who we are internally and who we are publicly that has been given more contrast in my life. In the one hand, I have less and less of an idea of my own core (or it has become more general, systemic) and on the other, social media encourages us to brand ourselves so that we are instantly recognisable and understandable. That contrast between not-knowing and clarity is playing out for me this week. Or in other words, how much time and effort should I put into Twitter and LinkedIn?

What would make me happy? Interesting and diverse work. I don’t think that’s ever changed. Trying to turn myself into a ‘product’, say, seems to go against that grain. I have a badge somewhere proclaiming that "Everything is Interesting" which is not a great offer to other people, but rings lots of bells with me. Maybe I should take this as my core and move onwards with that sense of chaos.

The river overflows

In a moment of circling realisation, I returned to my recent I Ching reading which didn’t make too much sense on Monday, but today it clicked. "Restriction" (gua 60 for the studious) was a fairly blunt text compared to others, but can refer to a couple of things right now. The idea that too much water overflows, and needs to be contained and restricted, on the one hand can refer to my longer term focus on energy and efficiency in general.

On the other hand, it’s also about the overwhelming flow of ideas and attentions that has come along in the last couple of weeks. "The floodgates have opened", so to speak. To feel less overwhelmed, I need to cut things back and be more organised, so I wrote everything out, and used a highlighter pen to pick The Next Job to concentrate on, before moving on to the next. It was a productive morning, and sometimes just choosing a priority for the hour ahead can focus your mind for the year ahead as well…

A week is a long time

This week has been one of two worlds and back again. I started on Monday full of energy, feeding off the summer solstice. That energy didn’t mean doing lots, just small things – but scary, or symbolic things. I registered a domain name, which to me is like a ritual act of initiation – the Naming of Things is an act of yang, of birthing, of making something permanent and real. They who name things control them, someone once wrote.

And I started just asking causally about for bits of work. The offer is still too vague to be practical, but it was the first time I’d been public about doing something new and it’s lovely to have ideas in your head but, like photographs and stories, a whole nother ball game to let "other people" meet those ideas and interact with them.

Weeknotes 2021-06-20: Busy Rest

No running day-notes this week. It’s easy to slip out of habits once you’ve got used to them – evidence, perhaps, that they were novelty routines rather than subconscious habits.

Either that, or I’ve been busy. Too busy, maybe.

I feel tired, but I can’t quite work out if that’s from what I’ve been doing the past week, the last month, or for the last decade.

This week I’ve been flitting about a lot. I’m jumping between emails and comms for different charities, for setting up my own future, for catching up with old friends, and for just seeing what’s out there. I’ve attended and caught up on various videos and events (list below) and hastily written up thoughts about downtime as a productive thing. The writing course has come to an end but I’m a few days behind. Sometimes it’s too easy to multitask.

At the same time, I’m aware of this tug in the middle.of my mind, the plughole around which a lot of my thoughts and actions are circling. Somebody mentioned a person taking 2 or 3 days to rest after finishing up a job, to reset and get a new rhythm. I’m not really letting myself rest, I think, and even if I did, it actually feels like it will take weeks, not days, for me. After 1 week travelling and 2 weeks off, I’m only now dimly aware of things being processed properly, like I’m falling down through layers and layers of expectations and routines.

My wife reminds me that I had plans to rest, and I guess that, now I’m actually living the time, I’ve put those plans to one side, or pushed them there by a fear and a lust to Get On and be productive, creative, GTD, etc. The sense that I have a stand-up meeting at 10 o’clock is only just residing (hey, I got through 200 fortnightly sprints, so maybe another 2 weeks to adjust to that change is only natural).

On the other hand, what I’ve done has been fun, and exciting. I’ve been developing short stories, playing with smart plugs and energy monitoring at home, watching indie game videos, and finishing and starting Zelda games. The potatoes are growing wildly, my childhood toy car collection is up on eBay, and it’s the solstice.

This week, I’ll aim to return to the plan. Writing up thoughts on downtime reminded me of someone saying that "everyone needs a duvet day every now and then". I think that’s true, especially among all the parenting and tidying up Pokémon cards and washing up as well. Duvet days are a form of decompression, and it’s weird being at a point where I can choose to do that.

When I’m writing a short story, I hit a wall when it comes to being outwardly emotional that I’ve realised I need to be brave and push through. The same is true of being restful.

Things I’ve been watching this week:

We Can Value Downtime Again

Ever wonder what you’re supposed to be doing right now? Ever get put off by having to switch away from coding or writing in order to have a meeting with someone? Or, vice versa, get pulled away into debugging something in the middle of a fascinating conversation? Ever tried to watch a video or listen to a podcast while also trying to finish off a document?

All of these things are different kinds of activities, and they each engage a very different way of thinking. Some of us prefer some types of work to others, but for pretty much everyone, we’ll find a pattern that balances all.of these types, a bit like the balance of differing weather within a certain climate. (Our calendar is the weather. Our career, or ourself, is the climate. THE ANALOGY WORKS I TELL YOU.)

Paul Graham’s essay on makers’ schedules vs managers’ schedules from 2009 is my jumping off point, here. It’s a good read that gets at one of the most common challenges in a knowledge-working organisation: how do you balance puzzle-solving and creativity, with communication and structure, without killing productivity or morale? (Is how I see it, anyway.)

I’ve found that both of these aspects are necessary – sometimes everyone needs to be in sync with each other, and communication is vital for that. Sometimes you need brainpower and meditative/flow state to find a way through a challenge in ‘the system’, and group think is often really bad for that. (It’s not an either/or, of course. "Augmented" thought is a continuum, taking in everything from talking to yourself or to a pot plant, to peer-working and collaboration through a variety of more-or-less immediate media.)

This month, I’ve moved away from the structure and routine of a team that’s shaped itself over time. that shaping process helped to smoothed out conflicting priorities, different stakeholders, and rapidly-changing calls for support and for meeting needs.

However, moving away from one team doesn’t mean sudden isolation – and even if it did, I’m interested in enough things, and involved in enough organisations, to keep myself overly busy for quite some time.

This, then, is a good chance to reflect on what ‘busy’ means for me. What does that "shaping" process look like when I start from scratch, and how can it account for a number of priorities and people interested in my time, especially now that those "stakeholders" are much less related now. (Previously, overlapping roles and the closeness of a single company made awareness of the whole system much more readily available. Not so, when each group is completely separate from each other.)

The first thing I’ve found is that if I divide all my time up (for simplicity’s sake) into "Meeting" and "Making", then I get worn out pretty fast. Both are pretty intensive (but usually fun) activities for me. And that goes against the principle of wu wei, or doing-by-not-doing. Constantly having a push on your own time is not sustainable, or natural. So what balances it out?

There are passive activities (passivities?) which are often overlooked, but which I value just as much as active activities – possibly moreso. On one hand, we can see this in the same way that we need to sleep and dream: our minds need to ‘catch up’ and process what we’ve been through consciously.

On the other hand, we can channel Chuang Tzu’s butterfly dream, and start to accept that our waking state is just as questionable – or as valuable – as our dream state:

The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person. He was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again. But then he thought to himself, “Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?”
(via Daily Zen)

In the same vein of questioning the certainty of being awake, we can also question the assumption of doing things as an exercise in productivity. To adapt Chuang Tzu, "was I a busy person who is now relaxing? Or am I a relaxed person who was busy?" Of course, the story ends with the question, and it is not a question that can have a definitive answer.

So we can – and should – balance out the maker/manager ever-so-productive side with something more yin, more chaotic and subconscious and butterfly-like. We should value this ‘down’time as part of personal development, and actively become non-active, handing the reins of control over to the systems which keep us ticking without our knowledge.

To balance the idea of busy-ness, I’ve adopted a couple of more passive mindsets (perhaps there are more? perhaps it is personal?).

Firstly, the fairly straightforward approach of unthinking, that is – a distraction and a rest from being deliberate active and"productive". This could be an actual rest – a nap, sleeping on "it", etc – or it can equally just be a rest from thinking: "pootling" around the house, going to the toilet, playing a game.

All of these aim to let the mind "switch off", although it is only the conscious aspect that is really "off". Like dreams, this form of passivity allows thoughts to shape themselves without interference. It is often an essential stage in solving something non-obvious, or allowing unrelated concepts and ideas to bash into each other.

(A note on meditation here. While the goal of meditation is often to allow such a state of mind to come about, a lot of the time we are so concerned about "doing meditation right" that it becomes an active, productive task in its own right. A quick nap is usually much more passive than a 10-minute sit.)

The second passive mindset is absorbing, which is still a conscious approach, but a less productive one. This refers to the state of learning, in which the mind is open to ideas. We do this all the time – when we read, when we listen to a podcast, or watch an instructional video, for instance. However, we can also refine it so that we can absorb without any intent – we can watch a video that we’re interested in, but not actively look for any specific solutions. This is different to digging out videos to work out how to fix a tap, for example.

The state of absorbing is also subtly different to watching things for watching’s sake, as noted under "no-thought" above. Sometimes we engage in tidying, watching, reading but in a disposable way – as mentioned, this can also be valuable. However, when we are absorbing, we are more open to taking things on board. Our minds are taking in information and ideas like a whale sifting through water, filtering out things we find useful and storing them for later digestion.

When you are in an absorbing mood, you will be engaging with something you think is interesting, but you won’t necessarily know why, or what you’ll get out of it.

So from this, we have 4 basic states, or moods, or modes, each of which has their own benefits and drawbacks:

  • Active: Making, Managing.
  • Passive: Unthinking, Absorbing.

Some of us will be drawn towards some of these 4 more than others, we each have our natural inclinations, of course. But all of us will also have a natural balance between the 4 without completely lacking any single one. They’re all essential in some form, at some time, depending on what we’re working on and how we feel, what’s going on in the world and our own body rhythms.

But by being conscious of these 4 states, we can also fit the mood to what we’re doing. We can remember to take breaks, and we can encourage rest when it is a more productive approach to what we do. We can set our calendars and our environments up, depending on which mood we want to be in, and we can stop trying to force ourselves to solve problems by banging our head aganist a wall, or by having yet another meeting.

Are there more than these 4? In theory, you can divide up frames of mind however you like! These are 4 which I think work for me, and which give me a way to quickly work out where I am, and what I’m doing. It gives me ‘permission’ to feel lazy, or to work more or less, as it re-frames what I think of as ‘achievement’ instead of it being defined as hours worked, words written, or metrics incremented.

Any feedback or ideas on this are greatly welcomed. I doubt I’m the first person to write all this out, and I suspect – hope – that everyone does it differently anyway. I do think there’s so much scope, though, to raise the profile of resting, and the value of inactivity, in a world that seems to love burning itself out mentally and environmentally. There are ways we can be more honest and open about getting the balance right, to re-define (for instance) the antiquated approach of "work/life balance" which represents such a narrow dichotomy.

We can value downtime again.

Weeknotes 2021-06-13: The right sort of fear

Lookahead

Looking forward to this week: Finding out what my brain is thinking, now that I have some time to listen to it.

Not looking forward to: First post-lockdown dentist appointment in a long while.

A square of light falls on a wall, alongside a dressing gown hanging from a door.

Monday 7th June

Started the week and ended the holiday with a cold shower. Not out of choice, just the result of a small water tank, but I made myself enjoy it. Not as cold or as salty as the sea last week, anyway.

Drifted back along the coast after seeing the centre of Bournemouth and various family members. This past week, I’ve been switching off a lot – in terms of plans and timelines, as well as expectations.

I wasn’t sure (are any of us?) if it would be weird meeting up with the wife’s family after such a long time. Some of them have moved house. The kids have got bigger. New roads have been built.

So I’ve just enjoyed seeing what turns up with each busy hour, then relaxing when I can. It feels like a long time since I’ve just settled into days like that. It feels good.

This week I’m signed up to the Writer HQ’s free course on short story writing, so I spent the evening reading and watching some short stories. I peeked a bit at tomorrow’s lesson and wrote some stuff down. Maybe I’ll wake up and feel like a fraud.

Tuesday 8th June

Blogpost Dharma Nerds: The Art of Seeing seems to tie nicely in with storytelling – we use words to set a scene, imply actions and emotions, and trick the brain into filling in the gaps. Perhaps the same is true for setting out bold visions and grand strategies which, after all, are not much except a structured story of a possible future.

First day of a new chapter and you can do anything. Where do you begin? (After making coffee, obvs)

Wednesday 9th June

I can’t remember the last time I had two days off off, like no pressure to do stuff, or even to enjoy myself. Decades. It’s therapeutic, I tell you.

I’m happy exploring accidental conversations and links which look like they might be relevant (hello again, Twitter and Mastodon!).

I’m also really enjoying the quickfire Writers HQ course: I’ve always struggled to "shape" a story beyond some initial paragraphs, and the exercises are pushing me to think much more about endings, and about "being interesting". In practice, that means being more interested in myself firstly, which I tend to deprecate because, well, attention is scary. But I love words, and being able to wield them better seems like not just useful for flash fiction, but for the story I want to tell about what I want to do next – and how I tell that to myself as well as to others.

Thursday 10th June

Okay, day three has been… Fun?

I woke up with a chunk of energy seeping through my veins. I tore out the old, towering broccoli bushes with dilapidated flowers, and trimmed the bush by the front door. I closed down some browser tabs to save a handful of Watts and brain cells. I started some networking, came up with a new google doc to structure my plans (in my head it’s designed in the style of a board game board, so has been christened The Big Board despite it fitting on one screen*).

I looked up some free online events to start attending (wow so many!) and carried on writing for the week’s course. Also managed to get to the dentist. Feeling good.

A few things I’m trying to consciously avoid:

  1. Doing too little. Honestly, I do love slacking and gaming, and it’s too easy to just pick up Bomberman online and kill an hour. Save that for the evenings.
  2. Doing too much. Fingers in pies and apps in groups make it easy to over commit and get fragmented and frantic. The gameboard doc aims to limit focuses-in-progress (FIP?) and – ideally – will let me keep a balance, but let me adjust that balance on a regular basis. Not quite sure how yet, but that’s the intent.
  3. Getting lost. At least half of what I do should fit into some sort of longer term plan. Anything not part of a loose ‘roadmap’ plan should be kept fun, and not take over.

Having vague plans and unstructured time reminds me a bit of my MSc days (except I’m my own supervisor now). Mental note to dig out those memories and channel them.

Friday 11th June

Channeled the Masters days by setting aside an hour after the morning school run to read something of interest, sat In a cafe. Really fascinated by this permacomputing article/manifesto which sets out a lot of where my brain is at these days.

Carrying the pro(ductivity/fessonalism) into the end of the week. The big game-style board sheet is my fitness coach and sounding board, and reminds to do what I should, not what I’d like to. For me, procrastination comes from fear, rather than laziness – especially fear of completing/finishing and opening up my own ideas, in case someone rubbishes them.

But the Big Board demands progress and so I neatened up my personal "business plan" document and sent it to a prospective accountant. Let’s get this ball rolling.

(The key thing to remember about Business Plans and Strategy is that they’re all made up, all stories dealing with the uncertain future, and just there as guides and references for You in 3, 6, 12 months. So they don’t have to actually be right, just they should make sense, and just writing one is better than not. So, scary-but-not-scary, and the completer-finisher brain needs to remember that a plan is never complete.)

I also dropped Marie Prokopets a personal development question on her ProductHunt AMA ("Ask Me Anything" – a chance to pick the poster’s brains on their experience). I focused on this time of personal transition that I’m going through, and she gave a lovely answer that reminded me that being scared is healthy – if change isn’t scary, it’s often not challenging or interesting.

And by happy synchronicity, a copy of Transitions, by William Bridges turned up, as recommended by Steph.

* Absolutely a Doctor Strangelove reference, well spotted. I’m happy running my life according to cold war paranoia rules.

Reflection

Do I know what my brain is thinking more now? Kind of. I think I’ve got a bit more confidence in the thoughts running through, and in myself. I know I just need to get out there and talk to people, and I’m getting some energy to do so.

Was the dentist as bad as I’d thought? No. Spent 5 minutes waiting, 5 minutes being checked over, and 5 minutes paying. Fastest £23 I’ve ever spent.

Scattered notes from leaving a job (Weeknotes to 5th June 2021)

A catch up on some fragmented journal entries…

Weds 19 May – Buildings

First time of not being in a team member’s annual review. Not my team member any more. Whoa.

Finishing the day with a glass of wine, and this feeling that I’ve built something. Built a codebase. Built a product. Built a company. Built careers, lives. I don’t think its the wine or the covid jab making me feel giddy there, but maybe I’m getting some brain space back and actually realising just what has happened in the last decade – what has always been driving me on, and where it’s got to.

Would I go through it again? Sure, why not?

Tues 25 May – The Codes

I am mostly handed over now. My last code commits are probably in place. I’ve dumped as much of my brain as is feasible. All 1-1 notes are reassigned and I’ve had final chats with all of my own team. I still have a few hundred emails to go through, but I’m pretty sure most of them are irrelevant. Just clearing out some files and saying goodbyes after that, I guess.

I jokingly made a comment that handing over control of the git repos would be the most emotional part.

But it was only half a joke. The code I’ve written and that the team has built up is probably what I’m most proud of.

It is sometimes beautiful, often messy, but here are all these magic words powering what we do everyday. Each finger press of a keyboard key has contributed to people going about their jobs in a different way.

It translates into client training, user feedback, policy shifts and lifelong careers. It’s been amazing fun building that up, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to do something like that again. Who knows…

Thurs 27 May – Journeys

9pm after signing out signing out. Seaford sea front with the sun hitting the hills and radio masts along the shore. The smallest waves collapse leisurely into the pebbles, throwing up the laziest spray, while the ferry wanders along out at sea, way past the buoys. I guess I’m here. A day after a full moon (the biggest, brightest and reddest of the year) and that’s me done?

To be honest, I’m feeling a little bit anticlimactic rn, and I don’t know if that’s a delayed reaction, good preparation, right timing, or a forlorn sense of stoicism stemming from all that damned meditation. Or all of that. Everything feels… “in place”, as much as it can ever be.

I have no regret, no major concerns, and an eternal sense of pride, of appreciation, and of satisfaction. Things have momentum now, and can be left to their own devices. Maybe I’ve not been needed so much the last few months, or maybe “need” is a subjective perception, but either way it’s all planned and played out about as well as I could have hoped, and for now I’m pleased about where it leaves me, others, and the world.

The ferry drifts from one buoy to the next. Its next stop is the sanctity of the harbour, and the off-ramp that leads home.

casting a rod
into a flat calm sea
sunset colours

Wed 2nd June – Fututes

Day two of being un/self-employed, although among all the traffic jams and family time, it’s been hard to tell.

One thing I’m really excited about is, for maybe the first time in my life, being able to set out a personal dream and turning into action. I’ve been thinking a bit about why I want to do anything, and Phil retweeted this thread from Vinay Gupta about the political and cultural narratives that Bitcoin and Ethereum are going through, or trying to go through:

”But if we don’t change the culture to focus on CREATING VALUE rather than just making the magic numbers dance up and down, one day people will tire of the hope of an infinite future, stabilised by smart contracts, and the speculative capital will dry up never to return.”

At OCSI (and before that, and in other parts of my life), I have to be careful in separating out professional activity from personal beliefs. I’ll still need to do that, but it feels, at least, that it’s much more up to me to decide where that line gets drawn. I can “invest” something very different into nt immediate future, something much more personal I think.

I’m excited about being able to weave together engineering with art and creative aspects more – while I have some aims for “building things” with an eye on computers and metrics, I’m finding it difficult to ignore broader questions and stories about what work is for – both for clients, and for myself. What’s it ultimately aiming to achieve? How does the nature of working compare to (overlap with, reinforce, block) the ideal outputs of the work itself? Can we actually separate how we work from why and what we do? All that kind of stuff.

Anyway, I’m going to drink Prosecco from a kid’s owl-emblazoned glass while I sport a natty Batman-logo temporary tattoo on the inside of my right arm now.

Weeknotes May 4-7 2021

Hello there. I’m having a go at weeknotes again, to see if there’s any chance I can do it as I venture into a world of freelance where time is more under my control (?). I’m going to try to keep things lightweight – gentle thoughts, poetic reflection, and interesting links. There may be no pictures though.

Tues 4 May

Thanks to the Bank Holiday, the earlier day had been a hybrid day of Monday and Tuesday (Muesday?) and some of us were still groggy from the weekend and the wind. I bounced a bit between checking through company policies for risk assessment (relentless, but oddly fascinating), clearing some tech debt (fun, but never enough time) and running a 1-1. Halfway through the 1-1, I realised it was likely my last one with this person, which caught me off-guard.

Had a nice catch up with A via Signal in the evening, while discovering RadioReverb is now listed on RadioDroid (also on F-Droid), which is great news.

Video: An ROI-based approach to technical debt – how to review and think through what debt to attack. I suspect the same things can be said about other debt, too: effort vs risk and time.

Article: Having a Healthy Pull Request Process for Teams – or how to discuss your work with others professionally.

Wed 5 May

I hadn’t realised how much I missed travelling by train until the hedges started rolling past. Even the rush to get coffee and a ticket – a familiar and also novel routine now – hadn’t triggered any real memories. But as the leafy mallows and cow parsley slid past in the foreground, set against the faraway wind turbines, I settled back into that slow glide that blurrily marks the edge between home and work life.

Thu 6 May

Well, some celebrations in order. The job role was defined back in January. The ad went out in February. We had a few interviews, we went to a shadowing fortnight, we got feedback from the Board and the whole team, and today we made a decision. I have a … "successor". A new Head of Tech.

Looking back, I’m pretty pleased with how the process has gone. I still don’t know if it’s a hard role to recruit for, or if the ad was ‘good at filtering people out’, or if the time is just generally strange, or what, but it was fairly different to the usual avalanche of CVs that you get when looking for a juior developer.

But here we are, we have someone we’re happy with, and the future, as they say, lies ahead. I’m not sure how I feel yet. Some relief, some excitement, some awareness it’s just a beginning and there are now a few weeks of actual handover. But things are going along as hoped ("planned" would be too strong a word) and sometimes the line between luck, strategy and synchronicity just can’t be discerned.

Article: What does the Schrems 2 judgement mean for cloud computing – actually really fascinated by the state of international data privacy, even if I roll my eyes when I tell people I’m looking into it, and it means filling out risk assessments is tricky.

Fri 7 May

Caught a train into Brighton again. I’m picking up and returning a few bits and pieces from the office while I can, and took the opportunity to meet up with a couple of old friends and contacts from many years ago. I wandered through the north Laine as the shops and cafes opened up, and found it strange to feel so normal. I popped some film in to be developed, and popped into my old hairdressers to say hi. I chatted board games at Dave’s, and watched the world go past from a warm bench in Kemptown.

I even lay on the grass for 10 minutes and watched seagulls and pigeons soar past. It’s been a long while since I’ve done that. Far too long.

Brighton train station's arched roof, seen through a train window