Achieving the MVA
Anthony Bourdain said:
There's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.
I think about this quote a surprising amount. My ADHD and modern society makes it incredibly easy to sit in my comfy chair or at my computer desk, and just fucking surf the web and play games hour after hour, day after day. Modern capitalism is about making you as comfortable as possible, and keeping you in front of a screen for as long as possible to enable more and more advertising to be shown to you.
I recently had the realization that often my daily striving, in the same vein as the Bourdain quote:
Every day, I need to achieve at least level of my MVA (Minimum Viable Adulting), and push to extend beyond that as much as possible.
Am I successful? No. Not often. Not even usually. I wrap myself in the blanket of my 9-5 job, and let myself believe that is that day's Minimum Viable Adulting. The shift I am trying to make mentally is that work is valid and obviously important to my livelihood, but my meaning for the Minimum Viable Adulting is just about being better at taking care of myself and my wife and our house.
But... I could reload Reddit for the 20th time in the hour. Or I can reload X / BlueSky / Mastodon. Or I can play another round of Team Fight Tactics. Or. Or. Or.
Or I can close the laptop and get up and do something. Today was fairly productive with me going out to get a much-needed haircut, doing some grocery shopping, working in the kitchen, assembling our new electric lawnmower and doing some vacuuming.
Today I managed the MVA.
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Collection of lifehacks from Reddit
Take some of these with a grain of salt, but they seemed notable to make note of:
If you have an itchy mosquito bite, hear up a spoon under semi-hot water (like 45-50°C), dry it off and tap or press it on the bite. Just as short as you can tolerate it but also as long as possible.
The heat dissolves the protein that makes the mosquito bite itch.
Percentages are reversible. Working out 4% of 50 will give you the same result as 50% of 4
Future you - always do things throughout the day that will benefit future you.
Hang dry your shirts inside out to avoid the little shoulder horns.
Simply call your partners phone to remotely turn off any of their alarms.
When driving for long periods. Turn off recirculating air. One of the reasons you get tired in the car is not from lack of sleep but from too much co2 in the car. You ever been so tired driving home and when you get home you’re no longer tired. It’s because of lack of oxygen in the car. Especially if you have passengers in the car.
And here's a link to a study which supports this lifehack.
Sharp(er) knives help prevent the sulfenic acid in onions from getting everywhere. Dull knives press and crush the onion and that causes the release of the enzymes.
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My Efficiency Matrix
Facebook reminded me that I first shared my simple template for an Eisenhower matrix on it. Which is wild to think because it is still my primary way of being organized for work. Interestingly, I don't use it for my home organization.
This is my current implementation:
The original version took the whole sheet of paper and quartered it into the above sections. After a while I found I needed space for general notes so I shortened the boxes, mostly on the bottom two as they are the least used. Since I don't manage anyone these days, the lower left is now for remembering emails to send or things to communicate to others (when I managed people, it was about items to delegate or follow up on with others.) The bottom right is now just general "actonable" stuff, which, honestly is used pretty infrequently. The bottom half of the page is what I use for general non-actionable meeting notes or thoughts.
The bubbles are my latest "innovation." Before, I would generally draw boxes to be checked off, now I use the bubbles. Filling one bubble shows I started on a thing. Two bubbles means I "finished" a thing.
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After the Covid years, and while my job is still hybrid (though I choose to predominately work in the office) - I remade my trusty daily work organizer. A 3-ring binder with single day-sheets. Each sheet is basically split in half, the top half of the page is what I had been always called an Eisenhower Matrix, but which others simply call a Priority Matrix. The bottom half is blank, reserved for additional notes from the day. I've tried various digital "Priority Matrix" tools, but I've never found happiness with them. I don't know what it is.
I tried using OneNote throughout Covid, when everything went virtual. It's good as far as a data archive and organizer goes, but it just never clicked with me for using it for my daily organization during a work day. So I might use it for taking full notes of a meeting, but in terms of capturing tasks and action items, etc. Nope, no good.
In addition to that, I've come to realize is that while yes, digital only notes are useful and in many cases faster, as a consumate data consumer and multitasker, if I am sitting with both hands on my keyboard and mouse then I am going to be multitasking. And, in some meetings, that is fine, but for others I need to force myself to focus. Minimize other windows, silence notifications, ignore email, etc.
Using my physical notebook helps me disengage from multitasking on the computer. Work stuff is shifting and that is what triggered me to remake the binder.
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68.3 - Demand deadlines
This is one of the musings I wrote as part of my "Wisdom of Kevin" project, which I wrote about before. I am taking the lines of advice or wisdom that Kevin Kelly has begun publishing on his blog on his birthday and writing a short essay as I think about them. The writing is not perfect, nor is it meant to be. These essays are written for myself and no other audience. This one comes from his 68th birthday and is the third entry, thus the key in the title of 68.3.
Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
As with most things like this, this boils down to clear communication. I have come to believe that being given a task is being given incomplete communication. The task is only half of the information needed, the deadline is the other half.
In my years working, I have learned that if I don't have deadlines things get dropped. How can I say something with no due date is more important than a thing due today, or this week, or this month? Sure, I can intuit some deadline, or I can assign an arbitrary one, but often if I know that I picked the deadline then I can change it.
The second half of this is the perfectionist angle, where I come at it solely from the procrastination and prioritization angle. I think he sees it that way given his career history and the length of time he has been self directed. For those in the trenches who receive jobs or directives from managers, it is crucial to get deadlines on tasks given to you. More so, get them in writing.
It won't save you everytime that manager comes asking for the thing that isn't done yet, but if you can point to the email where you remind them they asked for it to be done by next week, it will cover yourself in most cases.
Looking at it from Kevin's angle though, he also sees it from the side of being able to be done. If you give yourself a cut off for a project, it means that you can't iterate on it endlessly and that, psychologically, you give yourself permission to move on. Writing a book is a big task, but getting the initial story down is only a fraction of the work. It is incredibly easy to spin your wheels and iterate over and over looking for places to improve, edits to make, etc. If you don't have a deadline, you'll never be done with it. Same for art.
Even for my personal coding projects, when I decide a feature to work on I have to set deadlines or else I will either not do it, or I'll just sit and iterate and try to find new features or pieces of the thing.
Lastly I'll say that this is true even for interpersonal relationships. I've told my wife that if she has a task she wants me to do, it helps me immensely for her to tell me when she'd like it done by. Otherwise, similarly, I can't mentally prioritize it correctly and it will lead to me not doing a thing she wanted.
The heuristic I have settled on in regards to tasks from my partner - If she doesn't include a deadline with a task and I can't intuit one, I will then either A) ask her for one, or B) set the same-day as my deadline. I have found that going for B, when able, is almost always the most correct process for this. But, when it's a task which is obviously bigger than an after-work chore or something, communication is key.
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Moving Into Sprints
As Junio (my month long Spanish study project) nears its close, one takeaway for me is that a month was hard for me to hold complete focus on it. I've continued to reliably do vocabulary flashcards, but my drive to do much more than that (such as listen to Spanish lectures online, etc.) has dwindled as the month progressed. This leads me think that my new plan is to do two week "sprint" projects rather than month-long ones.
Sprint here is less about the speed of the projects, and more as a carryover term from software development. The idea is to have a delineated period of time, where a month is convenient and easier to track.
I can choose to make a project cross over multiple sprints, but in general if they are going to be learning or studying something then I have come to believe a two week dedicated effort period is going to be better rather than going for the full month. Also, I can (and will) take sprints 'off.'
So, for all of June I have been dedicating at least an hour a day to studying Spanish, though most of that time has been flashcard memorization. I will not stop with Spanish after this month, but it will recede to a more casual level of effort until I decide to put a more focused effort in as a sprint. I'm still finalizing my sprint plans, but a few items I have on my list:
- Editing my book - My bad novel from NaNoWriMo still needs more editing and generally trying to make it better, so a 2-week editing sprint is coming up.
- Re-writing my Match Picker - I have my soccer match picker software / website which has needed a rewrite from the ground up. I think a dedicated 2 weeks side project is doable.
- Redesign this blog - The design was purposefully simple as I wrote Glowbug, now though I want to refresh and improve the design.
- Spanish Study - As discussed.
So what does being my sprint focus mean to me? It means that I dedicate an absolutely minimum of an hour a day (usually two hours) to it, and that whenever I have the thought of "What should I do next?" that the sprint is my first answer.
Past changing the timeframe of projects like this, one of my other key takeaways from Junio is that I did not adequately design a rewarding feedback loop. When I wrote my novel in November of last year, I had a Google Sheet which provided me a simple way of tracking progress and between it's graphs and seeing my novel take shape in front of me, I had a very strong feedback and sense of progress.
Memorizing and learning a language doesn't have the same feedback system. I have to make do with seeing my streak of days using Lingvist, my flashcard app of choice. But I don't have a corpus of text, or another way of properly measuring my progress and thus while I know I'm learning more and more words and understanding more and more of the language, I haven't had the tangible proof of it as a motivator.
This learning is key for me as I can try and design these systems as I plan out sprints.
For example, editing my book is fairly straight forward using a lot of the same structure from writing it. Having the body of text in front of me, as well as tracking how many chapters I edit, and word counts, etc. Easy and straight forward.
Rewriting (or just writing) an app or website entails the creation of something in front of me, as well as the use of a to-do tracker, and seeing items checked off and moved, those should be suitable feedback to drive continued progress.
As Junio is definitely not my last language-centric project, it's important I figure out a good feedback solution for learning language. I have some time before I plan to put the next Spanish sprint on the docket, we'll see what I come up with.
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