The weekly review is something that has eluded me for a while, and I keep coming back to it as a really important part of living a deliberately good life. Here’s my review for last week:

Do this every week:

1. Upload week report screenshot
   1. Week’s points: 143 (all time best, due to attending all the neglected household duties that having our window replaced caused us to neglect)
   2. Week’s animal: hawk (high energy, high focus, low enjoyment, low stress).
2. Review my manifesto for enjoyable living
   1. Make your own meaning.
   2. Make your own advice, then take it.
   3. Have good intentions.
   4. Be your word.
   5. Do not dilly-dally.
   6. Do not feel sorry for yourself.
   7. Take time to make a vision worth striving for.
   8. Rally others with your vision.
   9. Tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
   10. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
   11. Stake your reputation on your better self.
   12. Take responsibility for the consequences of being who you are.
   13. Manage your stress, health, and clarity of mind.
   14. Enjoy things.
   15. Share.
   16. Study your mistakes.
   17. Retry things you don’t like or are afraid of every once in a while.
3. Review my projects, rate challenge versus skill
   1. TI (5 challenge, 5 skill: flow)
   2. Standards (4 challenge, 5 skill: control)
   3. Mirror Mirror (4 challenge, 3 skill: arousal)
   4. Locavore – neglected (5 challenge, 3 skill: arousal)
   5. AS – neglected (4 challenge, 2 skill: anxiety)
   6. Track Your Happiness (4 challenge, 4 skill: flow)
   7. 5 minute life stores – shelved for now
4. Review my goals
   1. Removed “plan something exciting for friends this summer”
   2. Added “finish Infinite Jest”
   3. Marked complete “start a fruit and vegetable garden”
5. Go through email to make sure I’m not forgetting anyone or anything – check
6. Review next week’s calendar – check

I followed Andre Torrez’s link to a neat image to a very nice blog called Monoscope (that I’ve since added to my RSS reader) and from there found what is perhaps the most perfect watchmaker (which I didn’t even know was a category one could belong to).

And by most perfect I mostly mean perfect for me.  LOOK AT THESE WATCHES!

My favorite, The Cyclops, has a color for every hour. I like the colors and I like how the little black circle moves around from hour to hour. Beautiful.

The New Decider is like a constantly flipping coin. Every second, either YES or NO will appear next to the time, and it’ll help you decide on very important matters.

The New Decider may not always be right, but as Tony Soprano observes,“a wrong decision is better than indecision.”

The Average Day lets you travel along your average activity rather than worry about hours.

The Accurate is a bit morbid in an awesome way. The hour hand says “REMEMBER” and the minute hand says “YOU WILL DIE” and the rim of the watch is a mirror. A bit of a momento mori for modern times.

My second favorite is this one, The Mantra, which has a positive and negative mantra for each hour, designed to make the cocky man more humble and the insecure man more confident.

To see all of Mr. Jones’s Watches without the broken frames (since that was the only way to direct link to particular watches), check it out here.

My Standards project is starting to show some signs of usefulness.

This week, I added my various work projects, requiring various frequencies of meaningful work to occur in them lest they start feeling neglected. Meaningful work is an important distinction for me, as there’s all kinds of work and most of it isn’t meaningful. But there’s a certain kind of work that, when done, feels like it was meaningful. It’s the kind of work that makes me feel like I was productive that day.

It generally also means that there’s a certain level of challenge matched with a certain level of skill put into the work. The interesting thing is that almost all kinds of work can be meaningful… it’s about finding that nugget of challenge (for example, to instill a level of attention to detail beyond what is called for) in the work you’re doing. Investing your interest and your eye for how it’s done. The difference between doing something and doing something with love.

Is this working?

This system is striking a chord in my brain.  I’m not sure if it would for anyone else’s brain yet.  At the very least I need to wait until the novelty wears off before I know if it really works in a novelty-free vacuum.  Then, I need to see if the use of it actually leads to more energy, focus, enjoyment, and calm in life.  But, after two weeks now I feel like I’ve been able to stay on top of things in a way that I rarely ever feel.  Especially when I’ve got so much freedom to do whatever I want and have a million little projects going on.

For me, I think there are three secret ingredients in this system:

1. Positive reinforcement only. By having more things than I could possibly do in a single day, I don’t feel pressured to do every single thing that is supposed to be done in a single day.  Some things will get neglected… it’s the nature of our busy lives.  But, by making neglected things rise in points over time, I feel good about attending to neglected things rather than guilty.  And feeling good about it makes me more likely to attend the neglected things.
2. Sort activities differently when I feel differently. This is a magical part that I think I will continue to tweak over time.  I think that our brains work by always shuffling our priorities around to best suit our current state of mind.  Only problem is that our brains can’t hold all of our tasks in our memory at once, and the sorting becomes a little sloppy past the first few items on the list.  And when you have too many things to do it adds a new stressed out state of mind on top of it that just doesn’t really help all the time.  By trying to imitate the sorting with giving certain tasks a boost when I’m feeling low energy, low focus, or low enjoyment I’m trying to mimic what my mind normally does but be more explicit about it.
3. Daily novelty leads to daily review. The system is different every day.  I get assigned to a new spirit animal, my tasks are in a different order, and I get different amounts of points for things done previously.  It’s complicated enough that becomes entertaining to check in and see what I get for a given day… and yet I also know that it’s trying to be smart about it.  The motivation to look daily and see scan all the things I should be doing is a great way to make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks without being aware of them.  They may still slip through the cracks and get neglected, but at least you’ll know that they’re there.  And if it turns out that something doesn’t need as much attention as the moodoscope thinks it does, I can change the importance right there, or remove it entirely.

Okay, that’s all I have to say about it for this week.  Here’s last week’s moodoscope.

Does your life have meaning? Does your day have meaning? Where does it come from? Were you born with it, was it given to you, did you find it, or did you make it?

What is meaning anyway?

Is it a set of rules? A job? A mission? No.

It’s the juice from a story. Meaning is what comes from a series of images/words/sounds in a row that, together, produce a vivid story about your life, about your day. Impactful, memorable, intangible, meaningful.

Meaning is pure importance. It’s a story that you emotionally connect to, that you feel is so powerful as to have been permanently fused to your sense of self.

It’s a story that you may have found, but the meaning is something that you yourself made and fused to yourself.

Does your life have meaning? Does your day have meaning? How did you make it, which story did it come from, how fused are you to it?

You can share the story, but not the meaning.

What is fear? It’s basically one response to the suspicion that something that you want or have is not safe. That it’s threatened.

Fear is rational, in this way, because nothing is safe. Everything is always in danger of ending, being taken away, etc.

But is fear the right response to the natural order of things? Should we be afraid of everything simply because it will eventually be taken away or end?

Fear makes us want to protect. Hide it, bring it into a crowded area where it won’t get noticed, attack, distract, claim as yours, turn it into an absolute, forget that it’s in danger.

But in the end nothing can be protected, everything will end. Can we protect and enjoy at the same time?

Is enjoyment a possible replacement for fear? Isn’t enjoyment as much of a reaction to the suspicion that something will end as fear?

Isn’t the enjoyment of things that will end really the only true way to protect that thing, to justify its existence in the first place?

Then what threatens enjoyment? Is it safe?

A very interesting article that describes the difference between how our brain responds to wanting versus how it responds to liking.

In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge’s equivalent for Panksepp’s seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain’s reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

Make a lot of sense.  What’s even more interesting is that this desire to constantly seek isn’t attached to the reward center.  We never seek seek seek and then feel sated.  Seeking can easily turn into an endless loop if the rewards of seeking are small (as they are with dings from email, Twitter, etc) and random (as they are with dings from email, Twitter, etc).  Small random rewards, like being able to eat just one piece of popcorn every 3-5 minutes, will drive someone crazy, right?

Of course, this is nothing new, but I like the context of it.  I like the word “seeking” to describe the process.  I’m not so sure we have to wrap it all up in an ominous warning about the state of our never-ending searches for scraps of nothing.  I think it’s just as interesting to think about how much this desire to seek out new things gives us reason to live, to break out of ruts, to be open for variety and surprises.

Long live seeking.

This is the 5th post of my continued brainstorm on the idea of building a set of standards to run your life with (inspired by Jake Lodwick’s similar pursuit).  By designing, executing, reviewing and revising these standards, the goal would be to eventually end up with a workable and, importantly, custom plan for long-term happiness. Forgive me if it’s long-winded while I continue to figure out what I’m trying to say.

I have been drawing little pictures to represent my various physical and mental states for a couple weeks now, trying to see if the process would lead me to better understanding what makes me feel productive, and what makes me feel happy.

I’ve learned a few things along the way. I think “stress” was the oddball metric, even though I think it’s a really important one. I decided over the weekend that I should flip it around and focus on being calm instead. By flipping it to be a positive metric instead of a negative one, it helps remind me what I’m striving for, rather than simply what I’m trying to avoid.

I built a quick reporting tool to capture my 4 emotional state dimensions, and also built a new kind of game that helps articulate the processes that my brain uses in order to manage my day. Here’s the output from last week’s data to give you an idea of what it looks like:

A few notes:

• Each item in the list of daily activities is given:
  • A level of importance
  • A flag designated whether it’s required or not
  • Optional days of the week that it should be done
  • A weekly frequency for tasks that don’t need to be done every month
  • Self-medicative benefits… for example, if something is good at increasing energy, it will be given an extra point for days when my energy is low.  This helps me connect my current state with the activities that are best done to help that state.
• For a given day, the points for a given activity are generated by seeing:
  • Add a point if it’s supposed to be done that day (or if its frequency requires that it be done soon)
  • Add points for its level of importance
  • Add in points if it has been neglected.
• Neglected activities, rather than being punished, increase in importance until they are done.  So it’s perfectly fine to neglect something for a while and then to come back to it.  In reality, I realized that we are required to neglect things until they become important enough to do… otherwise we’d be doing everything a little bit every day.  Instead, I wanted my system to mirror that natural feeling of things becoming more important over time, and encouraging you to do things that have been neglected for a while.  While it might appear that this would encourage me to neglect things in order to get more points for them, I think that getting some points today will always seem more rewarding than planning to get more points in the future, thanks to our cognitive biases for reward.
• I should mention that my chores are being sorely neglected at the moment because our house is under construction while a new window is installed.  I still need to test if it makes sense to put chores in this… but my sense is yes.

I think that by mimicking the way my brain actually works, I may have found a system that could work.  I plan on adding and removing things from the list as I find them to be useful or not.

Notes on the spirit animals

I love things like astrology, personality tests, etc that help create a very general profile of you and give you a reason to think about certain aspects of your personality or life.  I have created an algorithm that places me in one of 8 profiles based on my high vs low numbers in energy, focus, enjoyment, and calm.  Calmness hasn’t been added in yet (as I’m still trying to figure out how it plays in), so when it is added in there will be 16 profiles instead of 8.

I want to create a mood horoscope of sorts that tells you as much about yourself as it can, knowing as much as it can know about yourself.  As I tweak the system and add a layer or two of complexity to it (factoring in calmness, factoring in previous states, average states, etc) it may become smarter about nudging me in the right direction here and there when I need it.  Or, it might not.  In any case, it’s a fun little dimension to the project that I’m excited about.

What do you think?

Am I going further into the woods or finding my way out of it?  I can’t really tell at the moment by myself.

The Interview Project is amazing.  It’s a road trip from the west coast to the east coast and back again, interviewing 121 people along the way with simple open-ended questions.  It’s really well done, from the questions, to the style, to the website.  A new interview is posted every three days, and it looks like they’re currently on 26 out of 121.

Start at the beginning.

Two of the things that people mention most when I mention that I’m working on my own:

1. It must get lonely
2. It must be difficult to stay on task

It’s true.  Though, personally, the feeling of loneliness (in geographic space, not in the strength of relationships) is one that I sort of like.  So, the main thing that I really have to worry about is how to work alone and stay on task.

This week I’m trying a new experiment.  No social networks, email, chat, etc before 3pm on my laptop.  I can periodically check email on my phone, mostly to make sure that nothing urgent is waiting for me, but because it’s not that easy to reply on the phone, I’ll just leave them there until 3pm or so when I can then think about all of the people I need to reply to.  I keep chat open, but “away”, so that I can still have work-related conversations with people.  And Tweetie is completely closed because I can’t help but be distracted by the amusing, witty, and constant updates from friends (and celebrities).

The other thing I’m doing is bringing back my practice of writing “daily pages”… ~750 words a day to myself, that sort of help me get everything out in the open in my head and so that I can find a bit of clarity in my typically scrambled thoughts.

Anyone else have tips for working alone?

An interesting chart relating how we feel when confronted with difficult work in relation to how much skill and ability we have to meet it. Not sure exactly how it relates to what I’m thinking about, but it probably does somehow.

Now I’m back at the very top.  I started by thinking about emotions, then backed up to self-medications, then backed up to routines and habits and good behavior, then backed up to responsibilities and roles, and now I’m at the top thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues that he tracked and thought about from age 20 til at least 79 when he wrote about them.

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

While these virtues are “good”, they don’t really resonate with me very much.  They’re too bound in moderation and a mild temperament.

I’ve been working on my own list of “virtues” or general beliefs of self-conduct for a few years now.  I’ve tried expanding on them a few times, but always return to the simple sentences and limited number in the end.

Here’s what I have:

1. Make your own meaning.
2. Make your own advice, then take it.
3. Have good intentions.
4. Be your word.
5. Do not dilly-dally.
6. Do not feel sorry for yourself.
7. Take time to make a vision worth striving for.
8. Rally others with your vision.
9. Tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
10. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
11. Stake your reputation on your better self.
12. Take responsibility for the consequences of being who you are.
13. Manage your stress, health, and clarity of mind.
14. Enjoy things.
15. Share.
16. Study your mistakes.
17. Retry things you don’t like or are afraid of every once in a while.

Slightly different category of things than BF’s, and I don’t really see how I could create a journal that required me to make note of when I failed to follow these virtues.  So maybe I have some more work to do to simplify them, or rephrase them to be a bit more actionable.  I don’t know.

I’m concocting this crazy system of ideas in my head, and before I get too carried away with it I have to let you know that I’m doing this and it’ll most likely collapse under its own weight soon and disappear forever. Until then, it’s this big knot in my head.  In some ways this is just an attempt to say that it existed at one point, even if it never ever sees light of day.

Okay, so.

Each of us has a bunch of roles that we play in life. Me, I’m a citizen, an worker, a friend, a husband, a son, a brother, and a private self to myself.

Each of these roles that I play have an ever-changing list of goals and responsibilities of varying importance.  Take my worker role.  I have a responsibility to commit a certain amount of time to that work.  In my case, I’ve found that committing myself to being in a state of “work” by 10am (that doesn’t necessarily mean that I need to be at my desk typing code, it just means that I have to be engaged in my work at that time).  On the other hand, simply being at a desk and “working” doesn’t necessarily fulfill the responsibility of the role.  My work needs to be meaningful, creative, and sustaining.  This means, in my case, that I should take a few minutes to ground myself by thinking about my energy, focus, enjoyment, and stress levels, my plan for the day, etc.

And then there’s the shifting importance of roles depending on the day.

In each of my roles, I live a day at a time, and every day those roles have different weights. For example, today is Friday, and it could be said that because I am working and because it is also Friday (where social pressure to go out is higher), I am 25% husband, 33% worker, 17% friend, and 8% citizen, son/brother, and private self. These percentages represent my dedication to fulfilling those roles, and while a work day might have a standard breakdown of commitment to roles, they could also shift slightly or drastically at times.

Some activities are responsibilities that have to be done, while others are goals that you would like to get done, and yet others still are things that might help improve the emotional, mental or physical state that you’re currently in.

Every day, then, there is my physical, mental, and emotional states to take into account.  Even though I come in to work and want to work, unless a few core vital signs are stable, a few of my loftier goals should necessarily give way to the more core responsibilities.  “Be in a state of work by 10am” is a responsibility I have to myself (I have to do it) while “writing down an aphorism” is a goal that, should my level of focus be too low, might move aside so that something more useful like “go on a walk” can take precedence.

Some activities are things that need to happen daily, others weekly or monthly.

Et cetera.

All of these factors can be handled in a couple different ways.  The default way is to handle them intuitively. I have a mechanism in my brain that keeps track of how long it has been since I showered.  I have to shower, pretty much daily, and when I don’t the importance of that activity goes up.  Same with doing the bills, or getting meaningful work done.  Then, there are the things we like to do when we’ve got extra time: catch up on a tv show, download a new iPhone game, get a drink.  Then, there are the things we do to help us control our mental states like exercising, eating a snack, taking a walk.

The default way of handling all of this, intuitively, is a pretty great system.  It works.  It’s a little rough around the edges, things fall through the cracks, etc.

Why would I try to replace this system with a complex algorithm?  One that was like:

All activities/goals/responsibilties in the system * day of week default role weights * optional changes to default role weights * current emotional/mental/physical state weights * any supplementary weights due to neglected responsibilities = ordered list of activities, goals, and responsibilities for the day with invisible point values that turn living life into an incredibly complex game.

Why indeed.  It’s difficult to write software that works better than intuition.  It’s why we all sometimes want to make a list of goals or to-dos for the day but most of the time we are perfectly fine simply remembering them.

I have to admit that I love the over-complicated nature of this system.  It reminds me of Leonardo da Vince’s drawing of the first helicopter.  Way wrong, totally impractical, but also sort of beautiful in its crudeness.

And, to be honest, I’m more interested in this system as a stunt than this system as a true improvement of the complexity of human motivation, emotions, and productivity.  I guess I like feeling like I can sort of take the system apart, see the pieces, etc, rather than worrying about trying to put it all back together.  But when I do put it back together, the Frankenstein’s monster-esque feel of it has a place in my aesthetic.

That felt good to get out. 

Merlin Mann’s whole post (loosely summarized to being about getting started by tackling the difficult thing no matter what it takes) is the best thing I’ve read on the internet in a while.  I especially liked the list of fears (fear of apathy, fear of ambiguity, fear of disconnection, fear of imperfection, fear of incompletion, fear of isolation, fear of sucking, fear of fear itself), and also the voice of the Lizard Brain (aka that voice that criticizes everything you do, including any attempt to quiet it down):

To make matters worse, when it comes to strictly creative endeavors like making art, your regular, old, garden-variety fears find an enthusiastic ally in the entirely rational, if philistine, voice of your Lizard Brain.

Listen for it, because that voice speaks so often and with such consistency and unquestioned authority that it can begin to sound like common sense—even intuition. It’s the voice that sees you thinking about making something, then calmly, firmly reminds you where you’re going wrong, wrong, wrong:

1. Grow up. “You already have plenty of things to do with your Real-Life Obligations without wasting time dicking around with some doofy ‘art’ project. That’s for kids and people with sandals in California. So, stop being childish.”
2. Eat your vegetables. “Even if you cannot be talked out of making something, remember that those Real-Life Obligations all need to be completely taken care of before you even consider trotting off to pretend you’re David Foster Wallace. So, stop having fun.”
3. No one notices and no one cares. “Why bother? Even if you were talented and interesting (which you’re not), you know no one will notice if you never make anything at all. Because no one really cares. Including you. So, stop trying.”
4. Your time’s passed, Li’l DaVinci. “Seriously, look at yourself. If you were ever going to be anything other than what you are or make anything other than what you’ve already made, you would have done it years ago. It’s too late now. So, stop evolving.”

See? What’d I say? The lizard’s a dick, too.

via Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start | 43 Folders.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, self-criticism, etc.  I know enough about myself to know that I don’t really have trouble starting things.  I’m not afraid of starting.  My Lizard Brain is more concerned about opportunity cost… what am I missing out on?  Is the direction I’m going in going to work?  Should I course-correct, hop to another boat, or maybe try to merge boats somehow?

July increased about 11% over June, though was still 36% down from May. My goal of making my expenses drop by 50% is still significantly far off. This month, however, had a 14-year old staying with us for two weeks, as well as Kellianne’s mother, so we did try to go out and entertain a bit more than usual. I guess it’s one month at a time with this, so we’ll try harder this month to keep spending down.