without an e

attention surplus disorder [02/07/2008 15:24:32]

I used to think that I might have attention deficit disorder, because I have trouble getting things done and doing what I set out to do. But now I think my problem is exactly the opposite. It's not that I have trouble focusing, but that I waste time focusing intently on the wrong things for hours on end.

Obvious examples include television and link sites. I hardly ever watch broadcast TV and I don't have cable, but I've been known to buy an entire season of a show and watch every episode back to back. I lost a solid week to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and probably more than that to San Andreas. Even back in 1996, when I spent the summer writing a short novel, I had to forcibly stop myself from playing Starflight II because I knew if I didn't I would never finish my book.

When I started playing poker a few months ago, I wasn't worried about losing my shirt, but I did worry tremendously about getting obsessed and throwing my life of balance. That's exactly what happened.

But before that, I was obsessed with personal test cases, and that obsession seemed to work quite well. I'm trying my best to get back there.

But while I get obsessed with games and entertainment, I also get these little micro-obsessions with whatever happens to be in front of me. The most recent example happened about three minutes ago, when I linked to my old novel. I spent a good fifteen minutes just cleaning up old HTML, fixing URLs and writing a new introductory paragraph.

The problem with these little tangents is that they spawn tangents of their own, and pretty soon I've forward chained myself into oblivion.

The problem isn't forward chaining per se because jumping from one topic to the next can uncover some pretty interesting new ideas. The problem is stopping.

This is especially hard for me because I tend to keep myself rather isolated. When I had a girlfriend who got up at set hours and came home at set hours, there was sort of a natural structure to my day. But on my own, I tend to just work on whatever interests me, until I fall asleep or get interrupted. Often I run out of groceries and then after getting hooked on something for hours and not eating I wind up buying fast food just because it's fast.

One of the big changes I made along with the test cases last time around was to adopt a daily schedule with set times for everything. I even made a little GUI schedule program that showed a color-coded daily plan with a cursor bar showing the current time and what I should be doing.

It worked really well when I managed to stick to the schedule. I've got it up and running right now. It says I should be practicing piano, and that I should have already worked out, answered my email, and worked on my marketing system.

Uhhh.... Nope.

Ever since reading Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity, I've been thinking about Marshall McLuhan's statement that the medium is the message. (I bought McLuhan's Understanding Media but it's pretty dense and it rambles more than I do so I didn't get very far yet.)

Postman's thesis is that the structure of school is designed to produce people who deal well with boredom, memorize and regurgitate answers, and basically do what they're told, and that by changing the format, teachers can create a system that actually encourages kids to think for themselves. He's not arguing against education, but the actual structure of school: one person in front of a room presenting canned information in a canned order, all regulated by standardized tests, and so on. Even the best teachers are constrained by that system (or medium) and have to work within it if they want to keep their jobs. (The book came out in 1971, but it's still a great read today.)

We use the word media today to mean video, audio, or the various news networks, but that's not how McLuhan, who popularized the term, defined it. McLuhan's idea of media includes movies and books and print, but also speech, numbers, roads, houses, money, clocks, telephones, clothing, bicycles, cars, airplanes, weapons, typewriters, and automation. He devoted a chapter to each one of these in Understanding Media. Is original concept of the word is much more like the idea of technology. The subtitle of that book is "The Extensions of Man."

I've been thinking a lot about media for productivity. I don't see any reason why there can't be a technology that makes it natural to be productive the way a television set makes it natural to be unproductive. And I've thought a lot about what that technology might look like.

For me, it really comes down to four areas:

The first two items are straight out of Seven Habits, and number three, of course comes from Getting Things Done. But both of these systems still require a certain kind of person to implement them. You have to be motivated, disciplined, and vigilant - at least long enough for the habits to become ingrained.

The last item is my contribution. I want something external to my brain that will actively gather, sort, and refine my ideas, then feed them back to me one by one to implement, and that will also remind me of my goal whenever I get off track.

I suppose the particular wheel I'm reinventing is called a boss, but why be your own boss when you can build one?

I've said many times that I write to figure out what I'm thinking about. That's why this isn't a structured essay but a long ramble. I'd like to clean it up and refine these ideas, and turn this into an essay and make a real content site about productivity... But really my main goal right now is just to figure out what's missing.

See, I've already built the thing. I've got an outliner with tabs and the daily schedule. And I feel very organized. But that last piece is still missing.

Right now, what I have is no better than a traditional organizer or to-do list... Well, it's got a cute multi-tab interface so it's a little better... But it's still a thing that sits there passively and waits for me to act upon it.

What I want instead is a thing that actively influences me.

Hey! It's time to work on support. Here is your first unanswered ticket. Is it clear what they're asking for? Yes? Do you have a canned answer? No? Okay, do you know how to do it? Great! Let's solve their problem and record the procedure for next time.

Or later: Time's up for support. It's time to practice piano. I'll just fog your the screen up and keep you from doing anything else until you're done with practice. Can't do it right now? Okay, we'll override, but let's record what happened here as an incident report...

Basically, what I'm missing is the feedback loop. I actually wrote a little natural language "goal coach" chatbot that can help me break a goal down into subgoals. And I have a timer that can fog up the screen. And I have a scheduling system, and an outliner for defining queues of next actions. It's all clunky, alpha-quality code, but it works. I guess all I'm really missing is the master loop.

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