possibilities

Single-topic emails

I've been experimenting for a few months with composing emails to friends, limited to a single topic and often fairly short. My intent was to reduce barriers to replying. If my friends are anything like me, and of course anyone's friends will be, they like doing complete jobs and have fairly high if unconsidered standards for themselves. Since people find it exponentially difficult to think through disjunctions*, I wanted to reduce the difficulty to O(one_matter).

This has worked well! My friends who share along with me multi-year backlogs have begun replying in the course of a day to single questions or short stories. The same strategy from my side to others' initiatives has brought benefits.

I do have a need for longer and more complex communications, and I hope to deeply catch up with certain of my friends in person ASAP, but there is a mountain to be said for currency, and it's nice to be current at least on less taxing topics.

Anyone of you who is holding back on writing things because it's got to be big and perfect, why don't you try letting up a bit and stomping on smaller problems? Just write on a single topic and skip spell-checking. It's marvelously freeing.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.—Henry Kissinger

* See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000352.html. I read Eldar Shafir's original paper a few years ago and it gave me a lot of insight into obstacles that I faced and how to redefine them. I recommend skimming the paper if you get a chance.

08:00 is the new pink

I've thought a lot throughout my life of what time to get up. I've tried lots of different times, from probably 03:00 to 09:30. (This is not to say I successfully got up at any particular time very often, but that I tried to make a habit of it.) One rule of thumb I've divined so far is that I feel like a loser if I wake up later than 09:00. On days like this I feel like the world has got a jump on me and I'm playing catch-up the whole time. I overwhelmingly just want to go back to bed and try again tomorrow. I think it's psychological/biological and probably has to do with the sun.

I've been getting better about both installing habits and choosing what activities I admit to fill my time. So, I have recently been considering what bed time to take given my current activities. Steve Pavlina wrote an article that drew out some of my thinking. Namely, I thrive on communion with people, and I think I'll live the fullest life the more I create and avail opportunities for seeing friends. I finally acknowledged the place that my friend's sleep cycles have in my life. When I stay up too late, I miss interacting with people in the morning, and when I get up very early, it can be hours till I see anybody. I've always leaned towards wanting to be an early riser (because of the plenteous writings and adages on the value of early rising for go-getting).

My job recently switched to a no-earlier-than-10:00 scheduling rule, which created an interesting opportunity to experiment with what I've always considered to be a fairly late time to rise, although a lot of the software types I like most don't roll into work until 10:00. I've been getting up around 09:00 itself for about two months now. As it happens, the past month has been my most productive month ever. I've been implementing lots of strategies from Getting Things Done and my focus has reached new heights for me. It remains to be explored whether getting up at 09:00 has helped or just been masked by my other breakthroughs.

Perhaps "early rising" is local: if my associates start work at 10:00, maybe getting up at 08:00 is early? I know modern America is somewhat slave to arbitrary and unnatural schedules, so maybe I shouldn't take corporate America as my norm.

Anyway, I'm going to try until 24 August making 08:00 my wake time. Like say, I've always considered that a late time, but I think it would fairly accomodate my friends' cycles and let me get two hours of activity in before work (one hour feels pretty hectic), and I had might as well try it. I'm going to set 00:00 as a soft bed time (let activity wind down to the onset of drowsiness) with 01:00 as a hard fallback (only reading in bed until I drop off). What the heck.