I woke up in the middle of the night two nights ago and couldn’t get back to sleep.  But I was sort of stuck in this strange nostalgic mindset where I felt removed from my life, looking down on it, and in particular comparing the current moment to various moments in the past.  It was weird.  Does that ever happen to you?

I believe in the Hedonic treadmill concept (first introduced to me by Cameron Marlow way back when).  It’s basically that regardless of the current situation, good times, bad times, etc, that you’ll eventually return to the same baseline level of happiness that is your, for whatever reason, equilibrium.  That equilibrium varies person to person based on genetics, temperament, and whatever other factors factor in.

I also believe that people can make slow progress with moving their equilibrium up or down, either intentionally or accidentally.  Not with specific events, but with a gradual shift in mindset, lifestyle, health, and factors out of our control.  That’s why I’m so interested in the Track Your Happiness project, the big vision is to create tools that help you learn which shifts in lifestyle are the most effective and correlated contributors to your happiness.

That said, I was surprised at how much my life has changed in the last couple years, and how completely happier I feel now that a few things have changed.  For one, I’m in an amazing relationship.  For another, I’m getting my financial situation in order.  For another, I don’t have a ton of responsibility other than to myself, my wife, and our future.  It’s a much more stable place, and I think it has had a tremendous impact on my stress levels and my base happiness levels.

Which just sort of proves an obvious theory: that long-term intense stress has an impact on baseline happiness.  Or, actually, maybe it’s not that direct.  Maybe stress merely impacts your calmness.  And calmness is one element of happiness… not necessarily creating it, but, along with energy, focus, and enjoyment, allowing happiness to happen.

• Read last week’s review — check!
• Upload a screenshot of my mood tracker stats
  • This week’s score: 93, still going down.  I’m not entirely sure this is an accurate representation of my last week.  Though, I have been feeling low on focus and energy for some reason.  Could be seasonal.
• Review my guidelines for enjoyable living:
  1. Make your own meaning.
  2. Make your own advice, then take it.
     1. Struggling a little this week with taking my own advice.  I need more focus.
  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.
• Review my projects
  • TI: Making good progress updating the UI and also planning the next set of feature improvements.
  • Track Your Happiness: Checked stuff in, but other than that haven’t made much progress.
  • Standards: Not much to report.
  • Mirror, Mirror: neglected, but will be used this coming week at Daniel’s wedding.  Need to make sure it’s all up and ready to work flawlessly before then.
  • Adventure School: neglected
  • Locavore: Got some new illustrations, and integrated with Foodista.  Submitted it to the App Store today.
• Review my goals
  • Added “buy a bigger house”.  We started looking this week.
  • Also added “sell our condo” and started that process going.
  • Marked off “get out of credit card debt”.  That was a biggie.  We paid off our American Express and now all of our remaining debt is in our equity loan.
  • Marked off “build a better photo booth”.  I think I’ve done that.  Now it’s just a matter of installing it once I get back from NYC.  Plans to continue developing it will also have to be determined.
• Go through calendar and email to make sure I know about all my meetings and have responded to everyone I’m supposed to respond to — check

I do my best to avoid multi-tasking during work by closing email, Twitter, and social networking notifications for a 4 hour block each day, and trying to “do meaningful work” in two different chunks of time (around 2 hours each).  They can be for the same or different projects, but they have to be one at a time.

I have a wiki page open, titled with the date, that I jot in any thoughts that can’t resolve themselves.  This is my best defense against multi-tasking.  Rather than switching tasks, I simply unload the multi-thought into a text box and let it simmer in there while I return to the work at hand.

But now I’m learning that multi-tasking isn’t really the enemy.  It’s the multi-thinking that is almost impossible to avoid, and which multiplies exponentially as the number of projects increase.

Sometimes while writing in the daily pages dump that I do every day I try to write and wait for multi-thinking to try to distract me.  It could be checking my phone, or it could be checking email, or it could be thinking about a separate project than the one I’m working on.  It’s weird how itchy I get to switch projects or chase a distraction when that impulse comes.  It’s very physical, like a mini-shock of tingles that can only be defended against by chasing down the distraction.

It occurred to me that this mini-shock of tingles is our subconscious.  The whisper of our bottom-of-the-ocean brain sending up a command.  It sends the somewhat mindless command with an Inspector Gadget-like time bomb attached.  Obey this command or this message will self-destruct.

The subconscious is also good friends with the Lizard Brain.  If I disobey, the Lizard Brain wakes up and starts asking why I’m wasting time.  Why I’m not getting things done.

I remember reading Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, which was all about the million different modules that exist in our brain just below the level of consciousness.  Processing, repeating, instigating, reacting, attacking, defending, etc. This is like that. If only I could articulate better this little dance that constantly goes on between the conscious and subconscious minds.  If only we knew just how controlled we are by the impulses and the punishments and the rewards that our subconscious minds give us.  Not only that but I don’t even hold a grudge towards my brain for doing this… I blame myself.  Of course, now I sound like a schizophrenic talking about my subconscious brain as separate from myself.

Does it really matter that we have so little control?  Is control over-rated?  Is it inevitable that we need to delegate so much of our mind’s activity to this underground current of mindless responses and reactions and repetitions?  Without that structure of immense complexity constantly churning away below consciousness, we’d never be able to get anything done, we’d never be able to find a pattern, or know how to respond to something that we’ve experienced before, or learn.  Do we have to choose between being in control and being productive?

• Read last week’s review — check!
  
• Upload a screenshot of my mood tracker stats
  • This week’s score: 119.  Score is still going down, but I actually didn’t have the most productive week in the world last week.  I’ve been feeling distracted a little.
  • This week’s animal: the lowly barnacle.  Low energy, low focus, and low enjoyment.  It wasn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds, I think it’s just part of my cycle of motivation, and the key is to use the knowledge to attend to being healthy, finding focus, and enjoying the moment.  I’ll be back in no time.
  • Added “Star day” to the list of things I want to track in the “Do the day right” section.  Sometimes going above and beyond the call of the day and doing something amazingly awesome is what needs to be done.  I also added “Post an entry to M2B” which is another blog I started and will be linking to in a bit.
• Review my guidelines for enjoyable living:
  1. Make your own meaning.
  2. Make your own advice, then take it.
     1. A strange shift is taking place in the kind of meaning I want to make in my life.  I want to build on existing foundations.
  3. Have good intentions.
     1. An action from last week that seemed risky at the time has paid off and I do believe that the intentions were good throughout.
  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.
     1. Thinking about maybe moving.  It definitely has a part in the vision that I am 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.
      1. A few conversations this week focused on the difference between having high expectations for people, expecting the best, and holding their actual behavior against them.  On some level, we have to learn to try to be our best while also accepting the reality of who we (and the people around us) actually are right now.
  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.
      1. Yes, very important.
  16. Study your mistakes.
  17. Retry things you don’t like or are afraid of every once in a while.
• Review my projects
  • TI: I made more meta-progress on this one than actual progress this week.  Forming a new company, finding the right environment for it to thrive in, talking to lawyers, etc.  But, as of yesterday continuing to make progress on the actual project as well.
  • Track Your Happiness: Getting some new reports set up with a better graphing library.  Converted all but one of the new charts and starting to think about what else I should cover.
  • Standards: Starting to think about how to open it up so that others can use it.  Things I need to do: make it easier to set-up, swap to jquery, figure out what should be public versus private, figure out how much customization I want to let people have.
  • Mirror, Mirror: neglected
  • Adventure School: neglected
  • Locavore: Waiting on some work, and also working with a friend to re-design the logo and launch screen.  It’s gonna look a lot nicer.
• Review my goals
  • Removed “do the eat local challenge for 30 days” — still interested in it but it’s just not high on my priorities right now.
  • I feel like I should think about adding some more goals, but right now none are coming to me.  So I’ll just focus on the goals that I have.
• Go through calendar and email to make sure I know about all my meetings and have responded to everyone I’m supposed to respond to — check

I quit the Robot Co-op in June, and have been working on this tiny new company since then.  I think I’ve finally reached some definition on what exactly this company will be about.

Here’s what I’m working on:

Locavore has continued to sell at a steady pace.  Nowhere near enough to be a living, but definitely a nice supplement to additional streams of income.  I have realized that in order to sell 200/day regularly, I’d have to be mentioned in the NYT or be featured in iTunes pretty regularly, and unfortunately my app doesn’t really have “news-worthy” things to report often enough.  That said, I have been working on a new release that integrates with the wonderful work of Foodista (so long, Epicurious!) to show related recipes.  I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to show you what we’ve built.

Mirror, Mirror is my little photobooth side project that I’m working on with a good friend.  I am building one for Vain (to be installed any day now!) and another to be rented out to local weddings and events.  It’s a fun project, but also not a business idea so much as a cool gadget to play around with.

The other thing I’m working on is actually a full-blown company with a good friend and a local business.  I’ve commited to working 40 hours a week for the next 9 months on it, so it’s gonna be a big chunk of my weekly work.  I’m super excited about it because it’s something that’s practical, has a good business plan, and caters to both my interests and my skill set.  I always scoff at people who withhold details about their projects for fear of being copied… I am withholding details because there’s a bit of an issue of protecting the company we’re working with.  Otherwise, I’d tell you all about it.

A thousand little projects also keep me pretty occupied.  I am helping the guys at Track Your Happiness to build better reporting and such for their data (I also just recently launched Twitter integration for getting your random notifications through the day… try it out!).  I’m helping a friend in California build a website for her new business.  I’m thinking constantly about moods, standards for meaningful work, and event planning, to mention a few of the bigger ones.

Keeping busy, and loving it.

If you’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard, there’s something new in Automator that I sort of like.  It’s called an iCal Alarm.  You can create any Automator flow (an alarm clock that plays a certain playlist, something that clears all the items on your desktop and files them, etc) and save it to iCal so that it gets run at a certain time every day, week, or on whatever schedule you want.  Here’s how:

1. Upgrade to Snow Leopard
2. Open Automator
3. Choose “iCal Alarm” from the templates
4. Build your workflow… you could, for example:
   1. Start playing a playlist
      1. Find iTunes Playlist (specify by name)
      2. Play iTunes Playlist
   2. Archive your desktop files
      1. Get Specified Finder Items (select Desktop)
      2. Get Folder Contents
      3. Filter Finder Items (maybe, for example, any with a label so that if you want something to stay on your desktop you just need to give it a label)
      4. Move Finder Items (I have a “Junk” folder in “Documents” that has all of the random stuff I collect but never delete)
5. Save it
6. Open iCal, schedule the event to repeat on whatever schedule you want.
7. Edit the “alarm”. I did notice that if you schedule it to repeat the alarm defaults to scheduling on a certain date (the current date).  Change that to be “0 minutes before” the event so that it’ll happen on the same time and date every time.

A couple other interesting things you can make it do:

1. Open your email at a certain time (so that you can close it and not have to think about it until it opens itself each day).
2. Have it read your iCal events to you in a robot voice every morning.
3. Take a screenshot of whatever you’re doing (for people who like to randomly record things).

Browse additional Automator plugins and come up with something else.

Kurt Vonnegut explains, by way of Derek Sivers, why some of us are addicted to drama:

[...] life is really like this…

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it’ll be told for a thousand years.

via Kurt Vonnegut explains drama | Derek Sivers.

And fairy tales are all about huge swings up and down.  So we either pretend that the small ups and downs of our lives are actually much bigger, or we try to bend the curves to fit more dramatic storylines.

• Upload a screenshot of my mood tracker stats
  • This week’s score: 129. Down from 143.  I had a couple unproductive days where I didn’t get much done.  Decided that I should force myself to exercise, take a walk, not drink too much on those days to best ensure that the following day is more productive.
  • This week’s animal: monkey. That’s the best animal (high energy, high focus, high enjoyment).  Despite a few unproductive days, the other days were amazing, and there’s a lot of good stuff happening in our lives… becoming more financially stable, making plans for future, enjoying life, etc.
  • Removed a few things from my list of tasks: dressing well, keeping my word.  I found them to be too vague and didn’t know if I was actually doing them or not.
  • Modified “finish a book” to be “read a book for at least an hour”, lowered the importance and increased the frequency.  I think that’s a better way to motivate myself on this particular task, especially while reading Infinite Jest.
• Review my guidelines for enjoyable living
  1. Make your own meaning.
     • This thought has led me to some interesting realizations this week about how I plan on handling a certain personal situation involving doing what I think is right while not using it as a way to get back at someone.
  2. Make your own advice, then take it.
  3. Have good intentions.
     • Ditto for #1
  4. Be your word.
  5. Do not dilly-dally.
  6. Do not feel sorry for yourself.
     • Part of this is about not having resentment for people who I think did me wrong in the past.  I read a cool transcript between Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama about how to be angry and forgive at the same time.
  7. Take time to make a vision worth striving for.
  8. Rally others with your vision.
     • Admittedly, I’ve been slacking on this one.
  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.
      • This week this took the form of me tackling some financial stuff that has been eating at me for a while.  I gotta face it down and get through it.
  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.
• Review my projects
  • TI: This week all I did was work on this new project.  It’s a biggie, and will be taking most of my time for the next 10 months.  It’s gonna be awesome though.  And I’ll find time this week to attend to my other neglected projects hopefully.
  • Standards: neglected
  • Mirror Mirror: neglected
  • Track Your Happiness: neglected
  • Adventure School: neglected
  • Locavore: neglected
• Review my goals
  • Made good progress on “start my own company”.  Meeting with a lawyer this Wednesday to start drafting up papers and such.
  • Started reading Infinite Jest again after a month-long hiatus.  It’s getting good again.
• Go through email and make sure I’m up to date on all my correspondence
  • Check
• Review calendar for the next week
  • Check

There’s an interesting section in Infinite Jest from pages 424-430 that talk about the difference between a society motivated purely by self-interest versus a society motivated by the interest of the greatest-good.  All wrapped in a highly entertaining analogy about a single serving can of soup that two people acquired from a man who spontaneously died.  What stops them from trying to bonk each other on the head with the soup and run away with it all for themselves?

We each are raised to believe that there is some self-interest in kindness, in treating others with respect.  Maybe because in order for us to expect others to treat us kindly, we must treat others kindly.  Or else word will get around and people will feel motivated to treat us with the same disrespect that we treat others.  So, we clump together in groups of agreed upon mutual respect in order to get the respect that we want in return, and outcast those who don’t play by those same rules.

And so self-interest becomes indistinguishable from interest of the group.  This is what happened with single-cell organisms to become multi-cellular.  And the topic of self-interest versus group-interest sort of becomes moot.

It’s in our self-interest to sometimes even put the group’s interest above our own immediate interest.  We become dependent on the group to exist, because the benefits of belonging in a community and society outweigh the benefits of being on our own.  David Foster Wallace coins it as “enlightened self-interest“.

Then it becomes a game of how long can you stretch the period of delayed gratification (the pay-it-forward karma-like hope that by assisting the group that the group will in turn assist you).  A day?  A year?  A lifetime?  Could you also expect some returns to come past your lifetime (yes, if you consider your reputation or legacy as part of your own self-interest).

And also, who is in the group whose interest you’re assisting?  Is the group your family?  Your company?  Your country?  Your gender?  Or is is  the entire world?  The bigger the group, the longer the return.

The bigger the group, the more self-interest is eventually asssisted, and therefore the more “enlightened” your self-interest.

The enemy of self-interest is getting burned.  Allowing people in the group who have more myopic self-interest in mind creates self-interest sinks that break the return cycle from self to group and back to self.

And so people have this battle, a fear of letting the group get too big.  It can only get as big as your own trust that the cycle of self-interest is actually a stable system of self-interest return.  But, our imaginations sometimes can’t hold such a complicated system in memory, and therefore we find our limit and our self-interest enlightenment eventually finds a smaller-than-the-world but bigger-than-the-self group to be self-interested in.

To the extent that we have that limited-sized group, we become self-interest sinks to people outside the group who include us in their group.  If that makes sense.  So there’s this constant tension that, as a society, we participate in by expanding our enlightened self-interest and contracting it when we get burned, and then burning others, and then maybe eventually expanding again.

August Spending, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

Spent $20 less in August than July. Which is better than I was expecting due to the fact that we had to eat out every night for 2 weeks during the time that our windows were being replaced and our kitchen was out of commission.

Other interesting facts:

• $300 less on home stuff
• $550 more on restaurants
• $260 less on groceries
• $200 more on bars
• $140 less on yoga
• $260 less on ATM cash

Weird to watch how life events play out in categories of spending.

Still trying to hit that magical 50% reduction in spending from May.  About 13% to go.