• 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.

• 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

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

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.

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.

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. 

This is the 3rd 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.

As of right now, I think this is the scale and the dimensions that I want to track of my emotional state as it relates to productivity, happiness, and living a life that I feel in some amount of control over.

Energy refers to my physical state. Feeling healthy, rested, strong, etc all contribute to a sense of having energy. I think it captures both the long term and short term benefits of daily living and such. Big fluctuations in energy could mean that I’m over-self-medicating. Long periods of low energy could pinpoint bad habits. And long periods of high energy can be appreciated for what they are.

Focus refers to my mental state. Being able to control my attention seems to be the best indicator (and an easy thing to introspect about myself) of having not let myself be taken on every whimsical distraction that the day produces. It allows me to know what I want, why I want it, and how I can go about getting it. It provides direction, while energy provides the motivation.

Enjoyment refers to my general state of happiness and ability to appreciate the moment. Knowing what I want and having the energy to get it is useless unless I also have the ability to appreciate and enjoy what I do have. But simply enjoying what I have would slowly become more difficult unless I stayed on track with focus and energy so that I could continue to pursue the rewards of life.

Stress is different from the other three.  Unlike the others, you aren’t necessarily trying to optimize it to be high.  On the other hand, you don’t want it to be low either.  I think stress is best when it’s got a good amount of up and down–it should be like a well-oiled lever that you can ratchet up when you are doing something important, and then pull back down when you’re done.  Stress isn’t all bad–there’s a term for good stress: eustress.  It’s what happens when you play a good game of poker, or watch a suspenseful movie, or have a big presentation coming up.  It means that there are things that matter in your life and you care about them, and you’re doing things that challenge you.  Stress is only bad when it stays high for too long, or when it is coming from sources that you can’t control, and therefore that you can’t make go away.  That said, I still think it’s a really important factor in our own pursuits of happiness, and so I want to be aware of it.

The next step

I am going to record my own emotional vitality signs for a while, and also make note of a couple things: whenever one of the signs fluctuates two points or more in a single day, I want to record what caused the sudden up or down movement (to the best of my knowledge).  Secondarily, I will give myself assignments that try to take on the weakest vital sign and improve it during the day… hoping that I’ll find the most effective ways of managing my energy, focus, enjoyment, and stress.

Only good things can come of this, right?

This is my continued brainstorm on the idea of building a set of standards to run your life with.  By designing, executing, reviewing and revising these standards, the goal would be to eventually end up with a very 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.

When it comes to moods, morale, motivation, etc, I’ve come to believe that there are three separate struggles that all need to be addressed in order to really be happy/fulfilled.

My primary struggle is with energy–getting enough of it to continue to follow-thru on decisions and goals that I’ve made in the past.  My secondary struggle is with replacing fogginess of mind with focus so that I can design those decisions and goals and edit them as they progress.  And my third struggle is between positive and negative moods so I can enjoy the fruits of labor, goal-achieving, and well-made decisions as they come in.  They’re all interlinked, and you need them all to both design and live a fulfilled life.

• Weak vs Strong Energy (motivation — how much you want something)
• Foggy vs Focused Mind (vision — knowing what you want)
• Unpleasant vs Pleasant Experience (appreciation — being able to value what you do have)

The struggles have priorities.  Assuming that all three struggles are occurring at once (ie. I’m feeling weak, foggy, and unpleasant–yikes!), my first responsibility is to move from weak to strong–to cover the basics of exercise, sleep, a good diet, etc.  Only once that struggle is completed is it necessary to take on my second responsibility of gaining focus–finding clarity of mind and a vision for what I want my life to be.  And likewise, once that’s complete, I take on the third responsibility, which is to move from unpleasant to pleasant overall moods and states of enjoyment–a capacity to enjoy what I do have while also knowing what I want and having the energy to go try to get it. It’s my simplified version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applied to my own very specific life.

The basic premise of what I’m trying to design is that depending on how pleasant, focused, and strong I feel, I will have different activities and responsibilities that address the current weakest aspect of my mood and morale (and, therefore, not all at once, since the weakened state of morale simply isn’t capable of taking on the whole burrito at once–for example, what point is knowing the right thing to do if you don’t have the energy or will to do it?).  The beauty of it is that I know that my priority is to move towards feeling pleasant, focused, and strong, and that there are different ways to get there (aka different forms of self-medication) that work better for particular situations than others.

When I start each day, I’ll attempt to select where I am along each of these three categories, and that will help shape the goals for the day:

1. Unpleasant or Pleasant
2. Foggy or Focused
3. Weak or Strong

Weak versus Strong

For the weak trait, my self-medication should focus on being physically healthy.  Getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising, not drinking too much, etc.  Once feeling healthy and strong, my responsibility is to be ambitious, to reach for something bigger and better than the current situation, and use the strength to think beyond what’s simply assumed.

Foggy versus Focused

For the foggy trait, my self-medication should focus on meditation, brainstorming, and walks.  Things that help me address the mental quality of the feeling directly, getting back to a grounded, clear, state and being able to make plans, decisions, and even bigger visions (assuming I’m also feeling strong).  Once focused, my responsibility is to be productive with that focus and figure out or re-affirm goals and an overall vision.

Unpleasant versus Pleasant

For the unpleasant trait, my self-medication should focus on quality time with myself, my wife, and my friends.  It may or may not involve a change of scenery, since that helps reacquaint me with the huge variety of the world.  The goal is to bring variety, the unexpected, the spontaneous back into my state, and mix it with the familiar, and share it with people I love.  I often feel that my unpleasant feelings are often related to a very small view of the world, one where I’m at the center… and the best way to get out of it is to change the scenery and experience something outside of my own head.  Once I am feeling capable of enjoyment again, I gain the responsibility of being self-expressive in some manner.  Creating, building confidence, being generous and giving with my time and resources.

Given that general outline, by choosing one of each of the three paired traits, I will fall into one of 8 profiles:

1. Strong, focused, pleasant
2. Strong, focused, unpleasant
3. Strong, foggy, pleasant
4. Strong, foggy, unpleasant
5. Weak, focused, pleasant
6. Weak, foggy, pleasant
7. Weak, focused, unpleasant
8. Weak, foggy, unpleasant

The goal is to work my way up the profiles, ultimately finding a way to sustain myself in the profile of feeling pleasant, focused, and strong.  The bold word is the area that deserves immediate attention in the form of some kind of self-medication.  The italics word designate the areas of responsibility that I have for myself in terms of health and productivity.

All of this implies that given how I feel at my starting-point, I can begin to build a list of priorities, self-medications, and responsibilities for myself that are best suited for moving from that profile up to a higher one on the ladder to happiness.

My first draft of the 8 profiles looks something like this:

1. Strong, focused, pleasant: Producer and Enjoyer
   1. Responsibility: Produce and self-express in an ambitious manner, build amazing things, focus on big meaningful projects
2. Strong, focused, unpleasant: Maintainer
   1. Responsibility: Do things that need to be done that have been put off for a while, but don’t require creative thought
      
   2. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media
3. Strong, foggy, pleasant: Artist
   1. Responsibility: Do something big and self-expressive that involves discovery / free-association
   2. Find focus with meditation, walks, brainstorming
4. Strong, foggy, unpleasant: Sharer
   1. Responsibility: Go out and have fun, be social
   2. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (primary)
   3. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (secondary)
5. Weak, focused, pleasant: Tinkerer
   1. Responsibility: Produce and self express on a small scale, pay attention to meaningful details in existing projects
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep
6. Weak, foggy, pleasant: Explorer
   1. Responsibility: Write, doodle, take pictures
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (secondary)
7. Weak, focused, unpleasant: Organizer
   1. Responsibility: Clean, do errands, organize
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (secondary)
8. Weak, foggy, unpleasant: Consumer
   1. Responsibility: Call up a good friend and meet. Read, find a good movie, try to find an enjoyable diversion.
      
   2. Get stronger with exercise, diet, sleep (primary)
   3. Find focus with mediation, walks, brainstorming (secondary)
   4. Find enjoyment with quality time with friends, change of scenery, consuming media (thirdiary)

The point of the profiles…

The whole point of this is that when I’m feeling weak, I should remember to make exercise, sleep, and diet a priority over worrying about making progress on meaningful projects.  There’s a direct connection between my weakest trait and the self-medications that can be applied.  To give my emotional landscape a bit of respect (don’t try to brute force myself to be at 100% every single day) and in the end develop a system that is flexible enough to handle low-energy weeks and yet ambitious enough to ask a lot from myself when I’m feeling at the top of my game.

Putting it into practice

Since this is new, for now I’m just going to try to be aware of which state I’m in.  The funny thing is, that in order to fully flesh out this system, I need to already feel strong, focused, and pleasant.  I’ve come back to this several times over the last couple days and have not been able to make progress until I asked myself which profile I was currently in, and realized that I was unfocused, or feeling weak, etc.

After I test this out and see if it actually makes any sense, I’ll go from there.  No rush, right?

The all-caps STANDARDS project is an interesting new project from the constantly re-inventing Jake Lodwick. He describes it as a self-management project, a set of rules he designs, revises, and lives by.

“STANDARDS” is a system I both live in and control. Its entire purpose is sanctioned by me, for the purpose of allowing me to consciously guide my life into a state of long-term happiness. It is a gentle system; it knows that sudden, drastic change is counterproductive. Every week is slightly different than the last; it is evolving into a progressively complex mechanism for optimizing my behavior… in a sense, it is my behavior. I think about it constantly; I judge the merit of my own actions in reference to its directives; I do what it says. It’s not enough to say we exist symbiotically; it is part of me.

The post that introduced me to his thinking best is here.

Basically, he has a set of rules which he can edit and revise once a week that he strives to follow for the following week. Some of his current rules are:

1. Eat each meal within 1 hour of 9:30, 1:30, & 8:00.
2. One 3-hour creative block per day.
3. One hour reading print.
4. Begin bed routine by 11pm.

This caught my attention because I’m also obsessed with the idea of self-management. Creating meaning for your life out of your best ideas, beliefs, and goals, while also taking into account the fickle beasts of motivation, determination, and strength of will.

For me, however, the most problematic element of these rigid self-management plans is their lack of flexibility, variety, and spontaneity. Not everyone is like me, obviously, but over the years I’ve learned that I work better in environments that allow intense amounts of focus for certain projects until those projects are done and new ones can be invented or old ones can be revisited.

I get the strange feeling that a “perfect” day according to the STANDARDS would be fairly moderate or mediocre day to my gut.  They assume that you can make progress on all of your goals and principles every day.  That, if having a great living space is very important to you, you should then devote 10-30 minutes every day to improving your living space.  It doesn’t take into account that a single burst of uninterrupted improvement once a month might actually be more effective (to me).

Now, this is just my opinion.  What works for me probably wouldn’t work for anyone else, and what works for Jake probably won’t work for me, etc.  And if I’m reading this correctly, the whole point of the project is to NOT adopt someone else’s standards — the whole point is to create your own system of meaning and to fully face your plan for long-term health  and happiness with the amount of dedication and planning that any other serious project might.

So, given that goal, I’m going to hop in and try to come up with my own STANDARDS and see where that leads.  Thanks, Jake, for inspiring me to do that.