Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

Relatedly, I think the worst thing about work is that it's the same shit day after day, week after week, month after month. Left to my own devices I would still write code—but, like, hyper-focused, a few scattered weeks per year, and in between I'd probably hardly touch a keyboard. It becomes a draining grind when that's all you do, with only infrequent and never-long-enough breaks. Keyboard and screen. Again. And again tomorrow. Indefinitely. Ugh.

So, like the day of rest, like Sabbath?

The only way to fix it... is to make myself bored. To FORCE myself to be bored. I sit on the ground with my legs crossed, close my eyes, and slowly count down from 60, 120, 180.. while shoving all the other thoughts out of my brain. It's like meditation, but meditation apps are a bit too interesting. I get distracted over how utterly weird they are.

Eventually, interspersed with all the intrusive thoughts and stressful shit ricocheting around, I start feeling a few brief twinges of boredom. If I'm really worked up it might take 10-15 minutes for these to take hold, finalling boring myself into calmness - at which point my shitty brain has stopped spazzing out and I can go back to getting shit done.

If you're neurotypical you can probably just put the phone away and go for a fucking walk. It will let your default mode network do its usual thing for a while, like it's designed to.

Strength training, for example, is now known to need periodization to stop the overtrain-and-crash cycle, but periodizing well means letting go of days where you feel great and could do a million reps because you need to accommodate longer term fatigue.

Renowned artists often engage in regular periods of "automatic drawing" (scribbling on the page without imagining or observing a specific image) as a way of giving their minds a break from structured practice, allowing raw imagination and muscle memory to present itself.

Something astonishingly common in the diaries of creative people is lengthy days-to-weeks periods of total inactivity, bookended by maniac phases of high output. Often the inactivity phase consists of hyperfocus on something a bit trivial like playing billiards or visiting the movie theater five nights in a row.

Ah yes, the great mental health clinic of TikTok.

Does 'them' in the end mean 'life goals'?

I highly recommend checking out his works to get through these fluffy blog posts into what the actual research says.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W94FE6/

You discovered one the benefits of meditation.

Many programming tasks, refactorings, and documentation writings are shallow work. Much of planning and preparing for deep work is shallow work in programming. Learning how to optimize the deep focus time is really helpful. Grease the gears, prime the pump, etc. etc.

There is wisdom in acknowledging a particular mental state and understanding it, but it is also wise to know how to guide your mind to the state you want when you can best use it based on your schedule and other factors. There is a lot of push and pull here, but discipline in habits will let you control the monkey mind, as the author calls it, in my experience. Though I think of my "me" as a monkey and the rest of it as an elephant to properly put it in scale (thanks Joscha Bach + Lex Fridman). The monkey tries its best to guide the elephant to the right place :)

Had something similar during my biweekly management and product meetings today; updates to not-quite-every syslog call where there was a tiny bit of judgement in deciding whether to make the update and a tiny bit of judgement in the making itself (a few vim macros could have sped that last part up a little, but that would almost have been too effortful).

Perfect drudge work I could do with 1/2 to 3/4 of an ear tuned in to what others were saying, not so difficult/deep that I couldn't rouse myself and comment when necessary.

How about some brainless exercise dosed so it's not very straining? Couple of pushups, base technique that you know well if you do a martial art etc.

But the essay(s) don't mention ADHD at all. Is that intentional ?

May be some dopomine deprived people don't even have a choice other than to embrace the monkey :-(

Different kinds of systems like habit-building, reminders or GTD can help; as can cutting yourself some slack and making room for inspiration to find you without obsessing over productivity. But ultimately you either do things you are proud of or not, and any system or reflection you put on top of amounts to rationalization. If that helps then more power to you, but don't lose sight of the actual work.

How? This is the whole problem; for many folks, this isn't helpful advice because the whole problem is that it's hard to do things if you're not "feeling" it.

Forcing yourself to do something can be considered discipline, but for many that's just stubbornly using the wrong tool (mental state) for the job. Which usually takes longer, gives poor results, and leads to fatigue and burnout.

However that approach does work well for some. (Seems to work much better for morning people than night people in my experience.)

For others, discipline consists of using the right tool for the right job to maximize both productivity and health. Which means given the tools available, pick one of the many tasks that need doing and can be done with that tool. Resulting in more productivity, better results, and an uplifting energizing feeling that makes other tools available.

Although for some people, that second approach might just result in procrastinating, in which case they should consider trying the forced discipline approach.

So finding out which path fits your temperament and taking advantage of it is the way to go.

I came to think of it in terms of attention. In a model where your awareness of time, or of change is conditional on shifting your spotlight of attention it can be defined usefully, I think.

So, in such a model your concentration is conditional on your paying attention to where your awareness is not pointed. To the interplay of things outside your spotlight of awareness.

The processes that are you but outside of the seat of your awareness already have workable models for all of that. They have good guesses. Your sensory will enrich those guesses and flow them into your reality as givens.

If you think of it like that there is a clear difference between paying attention to something, and expanding your perception of the present moment by concentration.

Sometimes I hear people use the c-word to describe uninterrupted time dedicated to a task. That is to say focus. Exclusionary attention.

How do you think about it?

I went around and logged the things I happen to be doing in a spreadsheet for three weeks.

Assuming those are mostly the things I'll be doing going forward I've categorized them into action-cards. Those have groupings by space (home, out, job) and time (night, noon, morning).

One card is titled BURN. If you play that card you can do whatever for 25 minutes, but you can't play two in a row. I set a timer.

Then I have to choose a card to play, from the things I actually do.

Set a timer. When that's up choose a card again.

There is a card called SLEEP, it has a checklist. Similarly EAT/COOK has both instructions and time limits.

I ended up with more than 15 but less than 30 cards. And the single point of failure is in set-timer to choose card loop. This goes away after about 20 days where it becomes a habit.

There was another point of failure, but now there is a CALLS card that is limited to two times a day, and the phone is otherwise offline. Battery life is 5x.

Contentness is 1.0

Try it.