Progressively building and breaking flow
“Some things are in our control and others not.” — Epictetus.
Last year, I made various attempts at time management and scheduling systems. I learned to be comfortable with Android’s calendar app and to use it as a reminder for “not urgent” stuff, as well as not forgetting major events. I also learned to adjust my work to be more cyclical, to allow it to have ups and downs. But I was still in a state of “fighting myself”, overall, and started thinking about a new system, which I am going to practice this year.
The goal of this system is to build on my natural tendencies and get more out of them each day. I have learned, or rather, relearned, that for my project work to really shine, what I need are brief periods where I’m not just in a “comfortable” state of flow, but “superflow” — I’m really struggling, I’m putting everything I have into it, and it’s good, I come out of it feeling energized. I make videogames, and that’s creative work. I need high mental intensity to make certain breakthroughs. Videogames themselves — when they are well made — achieve this kind of challenge-based flow by gradually ramping up the challenge, with occasional breaks. And when I watch skilled game players — great competitive players, great speedrunners — on streams, they do not remain content with their performance. They keep evaluating and hammering away at their own strategy. They set a pace for themselves and make decisions about what to practice. They don’t decide they won because they game said they won. In essence, they take the model a whole step farther, and dream a little bit bigger.
So, then, to do this for arbitrary skills and tasks, I thought, perhaps what I should do is tie it with something else I often struggle with: Doing ordinary chores. Over the holidays I spent an abnormally large amount of time uninstalling software and taking notes on my own computing habits and workflow. By the end, without any hardware changes or OS reinstallation, I had made the system substantially more responsive and learned a few new tools. And there is a really tangible benefit to that: Human “transient” attention span may only last a few seconds(some studies say eight is average, but the exact number isn’t the insight) — any slowdown in workflow longer than that may break it, and subsequently break flow. Cleaning is generally a good idea, and it has cumulative benefit.
At the same time, I realized, there is no real end to cleaning once you start. It’s something you have to do regularly, i.e. it’s guaranteed to be cyclical in nature. I’ll always have laundry and dishes to do. Instead of defining them as a “necessary evil” that I should abhor, it’s something I can ritualize, and turn into the basis of strength. And deliberate practice, similarly, is focused but in a narrower way than a lot of creative work: You spend time familiarizing yourself from within a particular field of study, and understand the existing knowledge, before you go and try to reinvent everything and connect the dots in different ways.
Therefore, I developed a “level progression” to follow, incorporating these ideas:
1. Cleaning, Errands, Warmups
2. Deliberate Practice and Research
3. Intense Project Work
0. Break
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” — Zen proverb.
The way this works is that I always start at 1. There’s always a thing to clean or a way to warm up to my task. Then I can evaluate my energy level and decide if I want to break, proceed with another warm-up, or advance to the next level. Each time I do something I reevaluate using the same model. There can be any number of levels, there is no time-based limitation on each step, and I can decide to skip up if I’m feeling particularly energetic. But my assumption is always that I have to start at a low level of intensity and build up to the hard thing. Sometimes the hard thing is hard because it’s technical, other times because it involves my emotions, or is physically taxing. I don’t try to get caught up in these particulars. If I feel that it’s hard, it’s hard — but with progressive intensity, I build up confidence for approaching it. Neither do I assume that once I hit level 3 it’s something where I’m going to be going all-out for the next 4 hours. It’s just as likely that I take 2 hours to build up to that point and 10 minutes doing the thing.
By the time I hit the project work stage I want to have a lot of energy, a lot of anticipation for my own ability to concentrate, such that I am carried over my usual barriers and can start to push very, very hard. The starting stages are what get me there: first by doing things that are mildly irritating and are difficult mostly because starting is difficult. But once I’ve started a few times, starting on the hard thing is only a little bit harder.
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain
Because this is a flexible pattern, I can make a lot of adjustments. I can do a lot of small tasks if my energy is low that day. I can layer in a “small ramp” on a big one. I can spend a lot of time stuck at one level. The point is not to focus on budgeting hours or assuming that a thing is small just because it is small in terms of the necessary physical actions, and that once “a thing” has been done, that I’m done for the day. It’s learning to live with challenge: Picking appropriate challenges, allowing small problems to feel like big problems and big ones to feel like small ones, listening to my body’s needs and balancing them against that assumption that I need to keep challenging myself. Sometimes sending an email is very, very hard. Sometimes lifting a heavy weight is very, very easy. Approaching it cyclically makes it possible to approach each of these things with a healthy attitude, and without squandering the day trying to build up necessary focus or bringing a bad attitude to tough work.
Does it actually work? I’ve been following it since the start of the year, and so far, yes. The structure is lightweight and not burdensome. It’s helped me not stress or feel “burned out” or that I’m “wasting time”. I keep a list of what I’ve done and clear it out each day. I’ve had slow days, already, but even on the slow days I end up doing things with tangible benefit. I believe it is adaptable to many situations. When I notice a thing and say, “oh, that might be useful” it finds a place somewhere on the queue. I can judge the amount of energy I need to bring to something accurately, even if I can’t judge the amount of actual effort it will take once I start.
