This Elastic Life
Think of elastic, it is responsive. It stretches, it flexes. The more it does so, the more comfortable your life will be. It’s not about having more, or less… it’s about balance and flexibility. I’d describe my current Elastic Life project in no less (and maybe many more) than 6 layers: Elastic Story, Elastic Foci, Elastic Schedule, Elastic Calendar, Elastic Time, and Elastic Money.
Please note: This document might change over time, as I reflect and refine some of the ideas presented.
Writing an Elastic Story.
Summary: Designing a Hero (Individual/Organization)
Method: Using The Hero’s Journey (Joseph Campbell) to align your self or organization with the story so far. Then project out into the future so that you may define and redefine your journey all while living it.
How might we write our organizational story as if it (the self, the organization) is a personification of a hero, a new kind of collective hero our best self. Could your existing org be in the middle of this hero’s journey? Could this help you market with where you’ve been and where you are going? Living in this way creates a sort of Elastic Story, a gravity towards living a complete self directed and rewarding life.
Zap’s Challenge
— How do you write the Hero’s story while (s)he’s still being heroic? What parts can be left out to write later? What part of the story are you in? What is your backstory?
The 12 Stages of The Hero’s Journey
Directing my Elastic Foci.
Summary: Designing for Focused Action (Individual/Organization)
Method: Imagine there are 5 different time lenses that you use to organize your life. They provide clarity into focus action from near term to long term perspective to help you find alignment in a particular focus. A person or group of people can manage these more intentionally when they are known. Let me help you imagine them from far away, to near term and with some concrete context.
Foci #1 / Product Designer
T5 — Impacts (Decade)
Imagine the impact you could have over the next five to ten years, where do you want to end up? Why do this at all?
Action: Revisit this impact statement 3–4 times per year or if something happens to cause a point of reflection. How might you know this is achieved?
Be regionally known as a valuable system designer and visionary thinker. I’d love to increase the quantity of opportunities to work on valuable, culturally relevant projects.
T4 — Outcomes (Yearly)
What concrete difference can you make in a year? How will you know you achieved this?
Action: Revisit this tangible outcome 3–4 times per year or if something happens to cause a point of reflection. How will you know this is achieved?
Complete several blog posts and public speaking opportunities that establishes my value as for my community as a design thinker. I would like to establish a professional/personal best of 2 Vogon Poetry talks and at least 6 DPL blog articles.
T3 — Milestones (Monthly or Quarterly)
For the next 3–6 months what do I have to get done to get closer to a positive yearly outcome?
Action: Revisit these specific milestones monthly or quarterly and if something happens to cause a point of reflection (like the plan no longer works). Try to stay 1–3 months ahead and revise as needed.
[X] Complete January Blog post on “Meeting stakeholders where they are”
[X] Complete Vogon Poetry presentation and talk on “Slow Design” (talk scheduled for February 12, 2020)
T2 — Stories (Weekly)
What do I need to get done next week to hit my monthly milestone?
Action: Set each week set the focus goals for the next week or so of work, based on the previous week. With monthly milestones and yearly outcomes in mind.
[X] Complete and publish blog post
[X] Create a complete Presentation outline for “Slow Design” (so I can begin timing myself and testing ideas)
T1 — Daily Actions
What could I do tomorrow to advance this valuable focused story, assuming I have the opportunity and desire?
Action: Ideally one would set tomorrows actions today, preferably first thing in the morning. The more stable a daily schedule feels, the more certainty you’ll have in your day. This will help control stress over change events. During the day track completion and time spent, modify tasks as needed or pull in a new task from your Daily Actions bucket.
[X] Revise blog post
[X] Create first draft of “Slow Design” text only outline
T0 — Archives / Completed Stories & Activities
What have I already achieved to move me forward in my life?
Action: This bucket lets you keep track of important change events and accomplished task. If you accomplish something, move it instead of deleting it. If you deviate from your plan, explain why here. This is your focus history.
You can have many Elastic Foci but the more you divide your attention the more slowly progress will proceed. With this in mind you can overlay foci over longer periods of times with phased effort.
Imagine an Elastic Schedule on an Elastic Calendar.
What other kinds of work schedules might we imagine if we detached from our arbitrary and customary cultural norms?
Most people work a set number of hours that contributes to a more complex organization being open increasingly all day, every day. Yet we most often we base our schedule around a 7 day week. Is this the best possibility for us?
What might we gain from being able to set our schedule around a different calendar week?
Let’s imagine we had a 73 week / 5 day per week schedule (365 days/yr). In this work world your schedule alternates every other week, 5 days working 40 hours then 5 days off work to spend how you like. How would this compare to a standard work week now?
Standard 40 hour work week
— 2K HR/YR (40HR/WK 50WK)
Standard 32 hour work week
— 1.6K HR/YR (32HR/WK 50WK)
Proposed 5 day week, with every other work week off
— 1.4K HR/YR (40HR/WK 35WK)
What other potentials can you imagine? How might a modern workplace be able to support more variable scheduling rules using new calendar systems?
What other types of elastic thinking might we apply to our daily schedules?
Hypothesis: Many of our life’s rough edges (emotional inefficiencies, pain, frustration, anger) begin with the interruption of our intention, focus or experience of life.
Most of a persons experience is made of segments of the past, rolled up into a story of one’s self. If we think of the experience of a single day as the time between sleep cycles (instead of an actual 24 hour day), then we can never effect the events outside of this single day… UNLESS we plan and direct our focus for tomorrow (and maybe further ahead than that). Managing our focus is a way of providing situational gravity… to steer our ship outside of the confines of a single day and interruptions of a single day.
Question: What do our rigid schedules and personal understanding of reality play in these interruptions? Can I design a schedule that uses natural life patterns to shift focus to align my efforts over a longer period of time?
Initial Solution for Testing: Use 3 meals as dividing lines. Use a two part week to boost the focus blocks to 12. Begin and end each day with personal time, give a focus company or project to each block. These can change and be mixed as needed. See the image for a sample. Allow for scheduled interruptions and emergencies. Provide 2 earned days off each week which can be taken whenever. If you ever earn a full 100 days you are forced to take a 100 day sabbatical.
Download / view the initial schedule outline
Why and other possibles: Most commonly 5 day work week 2 day weekend and I have to interact with people who have regular schedules. So I only shifted the schedule slightly by represented as more equitable blocks 4 days and 3 days. Eventually I’d like to test a two or 3 day repeating cycle that breaks outside of the normal weekly schedules. Like 4 x 2 day blocks repeating or something.
At this stage the idea is pretty rough… so here are some related thoughts.
The natural continuation of our kinetic motivational energy
It seems to me that once we get rolling in the morning, it’s easier for most of us to continue along. Most of the time, I’ll keep rolling through the day until something interrupts me. Sometimes these interruptions are scheduled (lunch, doctors appointment) and sometimes they are not (phone call, urgent request).
We also have curiosities. These curiosities sometimes become intense and these interests boost our focus — this phenomenon is sometimes called flow.
If we wanted to increase the flow of everyone on the planet, how would we make schedules, work hours, etc. How would we rebuild the world for flow?
Transitions of focus
When we have a conversation, idea, or other interruption break our current cycle we transition to a new focus. These transitions are hard to keep track of. Sometimes we borrow time from other places to get things done and put off our most important goals.
The idea with meals is that you are tying a mental goal to a physical (potentially predictable) urge that is (somewhat) flexible. You can push your meal times off, but you’ll notice after a while. If you can internalize this as time to stop, each and refocus. Then you’ve got a flexible trigger.
Living Life in Elastic Time.
I’m going to talk with you about a problem that doesn’t seem like a problem. I’m going to talk with you about your relationship with time. Here’s a question you probably don’t ask yourself.
Does time work for you?
We generally think of time as a fixed, established system. We look at our very accurate phones and the time is given to us. But it wasn’t always this way.
Brief History of time. Sundials, clocks and watches.
The water clocks, which were probably first used in the Ancient Greeks, who called them clepsydrae. The candle clock, used in ancient Japan, England and Mesopotamia; the timestick, widely used in India and Tibet, as well as some parts of Europe; and the hourglass, which functioned similarly to a water clock. The sundial, another early clock, relies on shadows to provide a good estimate of the hour on a sunny day. It is not so useful in cloudy weather or at night and requires recalibration as the seasons change (if the gnomon was not aligned with the rotational energy into intermittent motions,[1] dates back to 3rd century bc in Chinese engineers later invented clocks incorporating Iranian engineers inventing water clocks driven by gears and mechanical clocks, employing the foliot or pendulum clock was invented in 1656. The invention of the mainspring in the early 15th century allowed portable clocks to be built, evolving into the first pocketwatches by the 17th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices
Railroads and the internet.
Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied.
Modern day anomalies.
Ethiopia and the 12 hour clock.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-30/if-you-have-meeting-ethiopia-you-better-double-check-time
So time doesn’t have to be measured the way we measure it. But how could we change time and why would we want to?
Introducing ElasticTime.me
As an example, I made a few prototypes.
ElasticTime is an experimental web app that is extremely simple. In ElasticTime it’s about using technology to create our own experience of time based upon our exact location. It uses the Sunrise and Sunset time where you are to calculate 50 moments (or x moments) of day and night. You can think of a Moment like an extended period of time between 10 minutes and an hour depending on rules. An action is 1/10 of a moment and ranges from 1 minute to 6 minutes, enough time to take action.
Give it a try (you’ll need to allow location services, but they aren’t stored):
Elastic Time / V1 — 50 Moments of Day and Night
(100 available Moments each day, approximately equivalent to a quarter hour)
Elastic Time / V2 — 12 Moments of Day and Night
(24 total Moments, like Hours in our current clocks)
Elastic Time / V3 — 25 Moments of Day and Night
(50 available Moments each day, approximately equivalent to a half hour)
Why should we care?
When we are working and living from home, there is this feeling that someone else owns our time. It’s because they do. All companies run on logistical time. As our days fill more and more to the brim, we are losing our sense of self and nature, our connection to the cycles and rhythms of the world. And that’s because our logical time maps that all away. What if there were personal systems of time that you could subscribe to that would consider things like sun cycles (sunrise/sunset) based upon your exact location? What other variables could we harness to tie ourselves back to the natural world we live in?
I’d like to experiment with the rules of time so I can experience time in different ways to find the time that’s right for me. To extend its functionality I’d like to connect with my calendar and translate my appointments and reminders.
Conceiving of Elastic Money
How might we change the nature of currency to stimulate changes in our workforce?
Money or currency is maybe the most difficult for me to imagine elastically. Thinking about elastic money brings me to questions like:
How might we allow for basic, interest free credit for all citizens?
How might we automatically collect taxes with electronic currency?
How might we use money differently to create jobs?
How might currency be more equitable?
I was thinking about subsidizing a peer-to-peer economy with a special Peer-to-Peer Currency — it has to do with running multiple digital currencies on with a status that changes after it’s been spent with a peer. It would need to be handled digitally, likely using blockchain type ledger for the parallel currencies of the Peer Dollar and a Digital Dollar (which equals 1 paper dollar).
A Virtual, Peer Currency
Starting question: What if we had a parallel digital currency you could only spend directly with a person? Could we balance the economy more or less towards a peer-to-peer service economy instead of a production economy?
Let’s call the working example The Peer Dollar
The peer dollar is exactly like a regular dollar except that you can’t spend it with a business. You can only trade it directly with a person. Once spent, this peer dollar is transformed into a regular dollar. This is a peer-to-peer micro-business subsidy so that those who want to help others, can help them directly.
Each citizen gets X number of Peer Dollar per month.
What might happen to the economy?
How would this change the types of jobs people do?
For scale let’s imagine starting the experimenting at $3K/mo/person in Peer Dollars. Oh and one more thing, peer dollars can expire (since they aren’t physical currency) if you don’t spend them in a 90 day period.
Technical and social aside. This should be able to be achieved with a state run / owned and independently verified block chain currency and identity system. The allure of $3k/mo should be enough to get most people to register for their identification card.
Sources: Radiolab on alternative currency (fuzzy memory)?
Elastic Currency
Starting question: What if money could be calculated as a direct % of an individual value to the whole with some sort of value reserve for protecting everyone?
Maybe money isn’t really yours, it’s a % of what we’ve individually provided or borrowed against the whole. Maybe it’s tied to a % of all finite resources available (minimize resource extraction). Maybe it’s tied to a % of renewable resources and their efficiency in providing human value with low finite resource waste.
Could you issue a blockchain style currency based on this principle?
For example what if we calculated the value produced by all businesses, subtracted cost of the government and created a median value for earnings as a person. Healthcare and education are included before wages are calculated and we direct restrictions as a proportion of our money that goes to each thing in essence taxes are formalized as inflation and we try to make that inflation visible at an individual level.
Government doesn’t earn money, it only spends money… this in turn affects the value of money. If we want money to purchase more, we need to cut domestic government spending, if we want more money, government needs to increase domestic government spending. Direct international monetary exchanges must be put to a vote of the people. These votes could be facilitated and verified, just like monetary transactions.
These thoughts are always evolving, I think it’s our responsibility to strive for a more comfortable experience of life to all that we may extend this privileged olive branch.
How can we all live better together?
(Maybe with more elasticity & flexibility.)
