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.