☀️ week 11, day 5 - weekly reflections & intentionality practices
One week of RC left. Definitely a bit of inevitable sadness/apprehension in moving on from the (very free-flowing) structure of being in batch, but also very ready for my batch to end soon.
Since the week 9-10 mark, I’ve been losing steam trying to maintain fulltime focus on RC and am ready to shift part of my attention to other things. It’s time for the job hunt and the summer travel planning, as well as the summer everyday activities and exercise/movement. Next week I’ll finalize handoffs of all my accountability events, which I need to write about at some point because they’ve been quite useful.
weekly reflections: a study in intentionality practices
☀️
A few Weekly Reflections ago, I noticed that on days I took outside breaks in the sun, I felt vastly better and more clear-headed afterward. It completely resets my brain and makes me feel alive. So for a few weeks, I have been prioritizing taking an outside break every day.
They’ve mostly been quick gardening breaks, but I also found a few days to take a walk or give the cats leash-training practice outside.
Of course, these are completely device-free breaks. When working at my computer, I’ve also been keeping the window open or working outside in the backyard as much as possible. It is incredible to finally have sunny weather again after the very long rainy season.
🪨 fill a jar with big rocks before small rocks
Kevan shared an interesting programmer time management analogy that involves optimal packing of variable-size granular objects into containers.
Basically, if you need long, uninterrupted blocks of heads-down focus time to get work done, then set those big blocks first, and then schedule meetings and other flow-interrupty occurrences around those blocks.
⚓ anchor habits
My personal approach involves using anchor habits or low-activation-energy events to cascade into getting other things done. A few years ago, daiyi got me going on the trick of “anchoring” an aspirational activity to a well-worn habit that you naturally do every day.
I have had a habit of making tea every morning just about every day I’m at home, for over ten years. So when I wanted to practice Japanese more regularly, I anchored my practice time to tea time and successfully studied Japanese for an hour or two every morning for a couple of months.
(Unfortunately it was so wildly effective that I put a stop to it after a while because I had other things I wanted to do in the morning besides study Japanese for hours, and now I don’t have anything anchored onto my tea time.
I have a very all-or-nothing brain when it comes to habits. It’s not too hard for me to do something every day, if it’s an activity I’m willing to commit to having in my life every day. But I have no idea how to set, for example, a habit that recurs every two or three days.)
🌊 “productive” feeling flow vs. maintenance work
Minimum Viable Code (MVC) is one of my big anchor practices at RC. It is deceptively simple but gets me unblocked and fully revved into code flow state like nothing else.
I’ve thought about hosting MVC more often but I haven’t been able to gird myself up for it. It’s easy to burn out if I set myself up to be in full flow state every day; breaks are good. 1-2 solid code flow days per week are plenty, especially because I need to reserve some of my flow state energy for all the other pursuits in my life that aren’t computer-related.
Besides, I’ve started using the “unproductive” (unfocused) feeling days to do important maintenance and admin work that I don’t care to do while in flow state. Really interrupty stuff, like catching up on messages, emails, todo lists, and people’s asynchronous checkins. Cleaning out my tabs.
Another important maintenance/admin task is deploying and cleaning up the code I spew out during “productive” feeling times. This inevitably takes more time than the initial generative stage, which, by design, has no obligation to be performative.
If I leave a project sitting all alone on my hard drive, it’s only good to my present day self for the next couple of weeks until I forget the details. It takes time to deploy, publish documentation, and create writeups. When I take the time to do this work, I not only make my work visible to other people, but I make it easier for my future self to re-access the details and not lose my learnings.
In summary, “productive vs. unproductive” is an illusion – I’m going to start reframing things more accurately as “continuous vs. interrupty” or “novel vs. administrative”.