Adam's House o' Fun

RSS Feed Changing - please update your readers

2009-10-15T20:19:06Z

Or, if you prefer, "So long, and thanks for all the blogs!"

No, the blog is not shutting down. PERISH THE THOUGHT!

After sticking by MovableType as my blog software for something like seven years, it's time to move on. Before I do, a very brief (and by that I mean long and boring) history.

I started this blog because I wanted to take on a project that would be a little bit fun, would give me an opportunity to get my hands dirty with some open source software, and because I wanted to see if I could set up and effectively manage and run my own UNix server. Additionally, I received some excellent encouragement from my friend Davin at the time, when he told me "you're definitely someone whose thoughts I would be interested in reading". He may not remember saying it, and he's probably said that to a number of people. No matter, it was enough of a catalyst to get things underway.

I was indeed able to do all of those things, and while working through a Computer Science degree at the same time too. I had an old computer sitting around, and setting up the FreeBSD box that I initially used to do my hosting was a challenging task, and a great opportunity to learn. My friend Myron had already spent a good deal of his own time working with FreeBSD, so I was fortunate enough to have access to his knowledge in getting things working, which was a good thing, because even though techies will tell you that "UNix and Linux have come a long way and almost any idiot can install and run them these days", THEY ARE LYING. Well, at least in my opinion they are. I have been working with open source OS's for over seven years (my final swan-song was just before making the switch to Apple's fantastic line of computers), and I have yet to find one that didn't have me trying to compile my own code and search through forums online for the four other people that are encountering the extremely specific problem that only we seem to have. Oh well. I got things up, got a free hostname from DynDNS.org, and http://fresh.ath.cx was born.

I was able to keep things running smoothly for a while, and even hosted Graham's blog for him for a while. My initial interest in blogging was mostly .. well I don't know really. I guess you would call it a diversion. I wrote entries that made me laugh, and hoped that they also made my friends laugh. I never bothered to fool myself into believing that I had an audience of more than seven close friends (and still don't), but if I made myself laugh while I was writing, that was sufficient for me. At the time, I was working a job that did not have very much for me to do, so an opportunity to fill that time up with something marginally constructive was better than sitting around doing nothing (I can assure you that this is not an indication of a poor work ethic on my part).

As time pressed on, I started to fall out of touch with the administration duties inherent to running a server and hosting a website. Things went down hard for a couple of months before I was able to muster up the endurance to go through the process of reinstalling and running Linux again. When my server went down a second time, I was in the midst of dating a new girl (now, I'm happy to say, my lovely wife), and had other interests keeping me occupied. Fiddling with a server just wasn't a priority.

And so my blog sat, idling in obscurity. It wasn't until I started playing squash, after graduating, that I realized that if nothing else, blogging could act as a way for me to record my thoughts and progress as I attempted to improve in a sport that I soon realized I had a long way to go in (and still do). So, I brushed the dust off the server, spent some time fiddling once again, and got things running once more.

Traffic to the blog picked up considerably about a year later, when a controversial set of events were set into motion when I reffed his match at a tournament in Comox. The end result was that the story I blogged upon getting back home was passed around to almost everyone in the squash community in Victoria, and the link got sent as far East as Ontario. this provided me with new impetus to keep writing, and I stuck at it up until the third and final time my server died on me.

This time, I was done playing the role of server admin. It took time that I didn't have, and required knowledge that I was no longer willing to maintain. Hosting your own server is cool if you can stay on top of it, and is certainly nerd bragging rights; but, beyond that, it's work, and it's troubling if you're not 100% sure that you've got everything secure and locked down, and have the potential for running a zombie computer that's been compromised by an evil hax0r. So, the blog disappeared for a third time.

The next resurrection came as a result of a significant event in my life - our wedding. As a way to keep people up to date and aware of what was going on, and to provide a reliable place for people to go and get information about the date. That site still exists here, for a little while longer anyway. At this point, I decided that hosting a server was no longer a practical option, so we sprung for webspace and a domain name. Fortunately, the last name Quiney is relatively rare in North America, so it was fairly easy to grab my name and set something up there. I migrated my blog software and archives over to the new server, and we were once again ready to go.

From here on up, the main changes were aesthetics. Trying to figure out a way to make a change to my design without overhauling everything, I upgraded MovableType and installed one of their pre-installed themes. Unfortunately, those sucked, but I didn't have any other options, and my time was fairly limited. So, rather than do anything about it, I posted entries complaining about how ugly my site was, and offering to trade some of my own time as a project manager, an efficiency and productivity coach, and a dance instructor, for someone else's time. Naturally no one responded. And so I complained...

The site's design changed one more time to the blue and green style that was around for a while, and that brings us to this summer, where, four days before I started law school, a new, exciting, challenging, and terrifying chapter in my life, I attempted to completely update the design of my site.

And the result of that is what you're currently looking at. For someone as keen on productivity, self-improvement, positive habits and realistic, intelligent planning, as I am, this decision really didn't reflect any of that.

Anyhow, that's all changed. Thanks to the advice of a new friend, married to another new friend, and fellow law student, I've set up WordPress on my server, and have updated the site. Going to http://adamquiney.com should now take you to the new site, and this will be the last entry that gets posted on this RSS feed. If you are still interested in hearing what I have to say, please update your feed reader to point to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/adamquiney/ewmx

Again, in large bold letters, that new RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/adamquiney/ewmx

If you're visiting the site manually, you won't need to do anything differently - http://adamquiney.com should resolve just fine to the new site. If you do encounter any problems - please let me know.

So long, and thanks for the blogs. See you guys at the new site.

Back once again, the incredible..

2009-10-03T22:14:31Z

Welcome back

I haven't been able to update for about four weeks. The reason for this is that I, rather uncharacteristically, decided to dive into the work of updating my blog with four days left before school started. I had been making excellent progressive during the past three weeks, and cleared off a ton of tasks. The remaining items that I had left seemed manageable, so I felt it prudent to start in on another project before school started.

What I didn't foresee was that Movable Type, the blog software I use, and the theming capabilities that it comes with, are iffy at best. Actually getting a particular layout to work with my blog, based on my own anecdotal evidence, is very fiddly work. On top of that, I have very little CSS experience to draw upon, and just don't really enjoy doing the work. Although the idea of using themes was to avoid having to do any of that, the themes that you are given are quite limited, and if you want to go even just a little bit outside of the box, you need to be willing to get your hands dirty. I was not fooling myself that this would be necessary, but didn't anticipate that school would get as busy as quickly as it did, and that installing a theme would bring down my whole blog.

If you are viewing this site directly, you can currently see that it's extraordinarily ugly (and I'm actually surprised you've read this far if that is the case, instead of just refusing to accept my imposing something like this on your sensibilities). If you're viewing it in an RSS reader, then that's all good, and really the main aim to which I publish anyhow.

Still, people are bound to be googling my name from time to time, and it sucks that this is the ultimate result that they end up at. Enough of that for now. Change will come, at some point down the road, and until then, we're all stuck with either using a feed reader (which you should be doing anyway - check out Google Reader if you haven't yet), or reading text on an ugly site.

Law School

I don't know what I can write about law school at this point that won't end up coming off as hopelessly optimistic or simply trite.

Suffice it to say that I'm really enjoying the faculty, the classes, my classmates, and the subject matter so far, and that although I'm sure the workload (and consequently, the stress) will increase as time wears on, I'm optimistic in my belief that I will continue to feel positive about both my decision and the new field of study that I have chosen to pursue.

Law bears a lot of overlap with a way of thinking that I have pursued and espoused for a while now: skepticism. Being in a degree program where we are not just encouraged but expected to make use of faculties that focus on seeing both sides of an issue and determining the most effective ways to argue for either of those is challenging and rewarding.

Dancing

The fall term has kicked off at Vibestreet Dance, and things are going great. I've finished giving my third class so far this term, and have also started giving some private lessons. The students seem to be enjoying what I'm putting down, and that's good, because I really am too.

So far I have taken the class through the basics of popping, waving, and tutting, and this Tuesday I will be giving an intro class to locking. Although I am nowhere near the locking instructor that some of the people I've been fortunate enough to train with are, I think that I am good at conveying information in a way that other people can understand, and I do spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to understand the fundamentals of these dances. I'm excited to teach something that is still very new to me, and especially a dance that I have so much respect for and that has so much history behind it.

Giving private lessons is also a new experience, and allows for a much more organic approach to teaching. Whereas class teaching requires that I keep things at a basic level, stay on track and can only address individual students for a brief period of time, teaching one-on-one with someone allows us to follow diversions that may come up, and to spend much more time on a specific piece of foundation if the student is having trouble with it.

I was fortunate enough to be awarded a small scholarship by Liz Vaesen, an instructor in Vancouver that brings hiphop workshops over to Victoria about six times a year. As a result, I'll be taking a dance workshop tomorrow in old school hiphop and locking from Keeley Kaukimoce. It's an honour to be chosen for something like this, and quite humbling. Homework allowing, I'll blog about my thoughts post-workshop.

Productivity

School is busy and requires a lot of time, but by staying on top of classes, reading, and managing my time effectively, I'm finding that I still have time to fit everything else that I want in. We are given classes only from Monday to Thursday, and Fridays are reserved for make up classes.

So far, I've spent my Friday's studying and fitting in a game of squash around lunch time. With a little bit of discipline, it's pretty easy to avoid falling into the trap of treating Friday like your weekend, and getting through a ton of your work. I get up at the same time I do on the rest of the weekdays (6:30), put in four hours of studying, give myself two hours off, and then come back for another four hours. By the time I'm heading out the door to meet up with friends in the evening, I've completed most of my reading for Monday and Tuesday.

One of the most valuable habits that I developed through my previous work in project management, and learning and applying the principles of GTD, has been minimizing and eventually quashing the tendency to procrastinate. Defeating this bad habit is one of the better ways to squeeze more time out of each day. You don't actually gain any more time, but you are now controlling 100% of how you want to spend that time. Whereas, when procrastinating, you are forced into undertaking activities that fit with the aims of procrastinating (typically short in duration, because you won't allow yourself, mentally, to start anything big, knowing that you've got something else you really should be working on; usually somewhat fun, and usually a bit of a distraction - Facebook anyone?).

If you're interested in more tips on eliminating procrastination, check out some of my archives related to Productivity and GTD. Ah, excellent.. clicking on those links currently appears to be broken. Bah. Well, look for those later then.

The rest

I'll end on a curio that Bay and I picked up this weekend at Future Shop, shown below:

This little piece of plastic acts as a power-free amplifier for my iPhone's speaker. If you look, you can see taht the plastic has a series of curves cut out of the interior. These curves operate on a similar principle (presumably) to that of many brass instruments, and you can see that at the end the cut-out spreads out into the shape of the bell of a trumpet. Simply by putting my iPhone into this device, I can amplify the signal considerably, without needing any power. Although you can see a wire coming out of this guy, it is simply cable that connects my iPhone to my laptop. This can be removed without affecting the way this device operates, and is simply there to allow me to use the amplifier as a dock as well as it's original purpose.

I've got my homework/study space set up at home on our dining room table (though it's pretty easy to move to the office), and I can use this dock to hold my iPhone when it's acting as a remote to our home stereo. That looks like this:

Kind of cute right? It's pretty functional too. When I want to listen to my voice memos, the amplifier serves quite well, as I just turn on my speaker and shoot them through it. Makes it quite handy to process those ideas at the end of the day or week (during my weekly review).

Anyhow, enough of that. More to come now that I'm back up, but until then, at least I'm publishing again.

Biphasic Sleep Journal - Week Three

2009-09-08T03:00:58Z

It's now Monday on the long weekend, and this marks the end of my experiment with biphasic sleeping. I've included the third week of journaling here, and then below that my final thoughts on the experiment.

Week 3

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Day 15 (Monday)

I felt a cold coming on last night, and elected to maintain a monophasic sleep pattern to ensure that my body got as much rest as possible. Nothing else to report today, though I am returning to biphasic tonight.

Day 16 (Tuesday)

Back on the wagon. It was again, fairly easy to get up at 4:00AM this morning, and I'm 100% convinced now that if you need to get up early for something, the way to do it is to ensure that you sleep for some multiple of 90 minutes: 90 minutes, 1.5 hours, 3 hours, etc. Whatever it is, if you stick to this rule, getting up is a snap. It's now the morning and I have not been particularly sleepy or yawny. However, the first day is usually easier, as there appears to be less sleep debt overall that I have accumulated, versus later on in the week.

Day 17 (Wednesday)

The pattern continues - easy to get up, though never a pleasure having the alarm ring at 4:00 in the morning. On especially busy days, I also find making time for the nap a bit of an inconvenience. The best way to work this is to schedule it in your calendar and honour that appointment. This way I am inclined to treat it as just another thing that I have to get done during my day, and like any other meeting. The only trouble is that napping feels like wasted time, rather than something that is actually productive. I sure wish I could find a way to make the ubersleep pattern actually work. However, this is far too much for any normal human to accomplish, and I am skeptical of the physical costs that sleeping a total of only 2 hours a day would have on your body, regardless of whether or not you were able to function fine mentally.

-Nap-

As is now the usually case, I feel groggy for about 30 minutes after waking up from my nap. This is very frustrating. Even if it's only a temporary thing, it's just annoying feeling this way a second time during the day. I can still function fine during this period, it's just like being uncomfortable for a scheduled 30 minutes every day. Is it worth suffering through this to gain an extra two hours every day? Yes, absolutely. But, I don't have to like it.

Day 18 (Thursday)

I've made another realization today: sleeping biphasically is not that difficult physically (aside from the annoyances I've mentioned previously), but it is definitely a little bit taxing psychologically. Even if my body is getting enough rest, it is very difficult to accept the fact that when I go to bed, exhausted, at 11:00 in the evening after a hard day of exercise and work, I will be getting up in 4.5 hours. I am used to looking forward to waking up feeling refreshed and shedding that exhaustion over the course of 8 hours of shut-eye. Even if this is purely a mental thing, it is difficult to adjust to. Just the fact that I wake up at 4:00 thinking, "Man, only 4.5 hours of sleep", takes a small toll on me.

I assume that as time wears on, this feeling will disappear, as sleeping biphasically will be the norm, rather than the exception, and so the concept of sleeping 8 hours will be the thing that feels weird. I have heard people that operate on a polyphasic sleeping pattern feel this way about everyone else sleeping a single, contiguous block of 8 hours, but I have never heard anyone write about what it's like when they've returned to monophasic sleep (which has happened plenty of times). I would be interested to know if it took a while for the psychology to right itself and accept once again that they were sleeping for 8 hours each night.

I've reached the conclusion that once the experimentation period is over, I will continue on with biphasic sleeping, though revert to monophasic on Saturday and Sunday. The aim here is to try and eliminate some of the debt that I felt I was accumulating during the second week of this experiment. Getting a full 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday may help in this capacity, or it may throw off my schedule completely. In truth, I don't know exactly what will happen, but that's okay. I suppose the experiment will continue, even after the official end-date has passed.

Day 19 (Friday)

This will mark the last day of my biphasic sleeping experiment, as I intend to revert to monophasic blocks of sleep on Friday and Saturday nights from here on in. I finished all of my working out for the week yesterday, and did not feel like practicing any dance. As a result, I didn't have any physical activity to stimulate me in the morning, and I've felt quite tired for the last four hours (it's now 8:45AM). Again, I'm drawn to wonder whether or not this approach to sleeping actually gives the body enough sleep, or if I'm just gradually building more sleep debt or getting used to the feeling of perpetually being a little more tired throughout the day. Part of my reasoning for getting two unbroken blocks of 8 hours on the weekends is so that I can see if that leads to feeling more refreshed during the rest of the week. Time will tell.

A funny thing happened last night: I went to bed at 11:00, as I normally do. At some point in the night, I woke up. It felt like I'd been asleep for quite some time, so I assumed that my alarm had gone off and I had "rested my eyes" for a few seconds. This is a dangerous trap to fall into, as you turn off your alarm, "rest your eyes" and then wake up four hours later. Anyhow, I've gotten myself into the habit of jumping out of bed as soon as I catch myself doing that, and so I did the same this time. I got up, put on my clothes, grabbed my iPhone and waterbottle, brushed my teeth, and then started checking my e-mail. It was at this point that I noticed that the time was 2:00AM. I must have finished a sleep cycle, had a brief moment of wakefulness, and then gone from there. I went back to sleep until my alarm actually DID go off, got up, and started the day. If this is indicative of anything, it's probably just that I've now trained myself to get up fairly easily whenever I like, provided I've finished the most recent sleep cycle. Getting up at 2:00AM didn't feel any different from 4:30AM.

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My thoughts

Although I've really enjoyed the extra time that this sleeping pattern has provided me with, I've consistently felt like I have not been getting enough sleep. There has always been a slight undercurrent of sleep debt throughout my days.

If I could get away with this sleeping pattern but feel well-rested throughout the day, I would do it in a second. Taking the naps is not the issue, and I would gladly put up with the inconvenience of having to schedule around a nap in order to gain an extra two hours of free time each day. What I am not willing to do, however, is sacrifice feeling good and optimally productive during my waking hours.

Even though it was weird and met with some resistance and odd looks, I'm really glad that I took the time to conduct this experiment. If I had not, I would forever be wondering if this was a viable option. Additionally, even if I was a little more tired than I normally would be, I got a tremendous amount of stuff done during these three weeks. Obviously three weeks is a lot of time off, and most of us would hopefully be able to get a lot accomplished in that amount of time. Nevertheless, I do think that I put those two hours to good use - spending time working out, practicing dance, and checking tasks off of my todo list.

Some people will have a lot of trouble adapting to a new sleeping pattern, but there are a few things that I felt I did that made things much easier. Most importantly was the fact that I was very disciplined in the times that I went to sleep, took naps, and got up. Many people asked me if I snoozed a lot, and my answer was always a resounding no. Snoozing is an excellent way to destroy any progress you make in establishing a new habit like biphasic sleeping, and is the worst thing you can do for your sleeping pattern. You gain no real benefit from snoozing, and you're much better off planning your sleep to end at the completion of a sleeping cycle.

On that note, one of the things I gained from this experiment was a better understanding into how sleep really works, and how the duration of our sleep cycles can effect how easily we wake up. Before this, I never would have believed that I could go to sleep for 4.5 hours and rise quickly and easily when my alarm goes off. Going into this, I figured the hardest part would be waking up and getting out of bed, but this was never an issue.

Further Updates

If you view this site directly, have tried to post comments, you've probably noticed that the layout is currently borked and commenting is not working. I am aware of this (but thank you Davin for pointing it out), and it will only be temporary. The reason for this is that I'm working on updating the design and layout of the site, as the old design didn't feel like it quite fit with the intent and direction that the blog has moved in over the past few years.

Additionally, the identity of the blog as Adam's House o' Fun, while it seemed fitting when I was doing my undergrad, no longer really feels like it reflects the content that I am publishing. Rather than bother coming up with a catchy name, I like the idea of simply using my name as my brand.

Although I imagine that I'll be busy for the next week, I intend to put in a decent amount of time next weekend to get things proper. Web design is definitely not my strong suit, so if anyone is interested in trading some of your time for some of mine, I would be happy to help you get organized or get on top of your own projects - if you've got the spare time, what do you have to lose?

Once that's finished, adamquiney.com will be up and live, and things will continue rolling as before.

Also, tomorrow is the first Fall class that I'm teaching at Vibestreet Dance this year. I'm very excited to start teaching again, as I've had a fantastic summer related to dance, learned a ton of stuff, made some really great friendships with keen dancers, and had a chance to let a lot of it soak in. If you're interested in taking classes, get in touch with me!

That's all for now, but expect to hear soon on how the first week of classes has gone.

Biphasic Sleep Journal - Week Two

2009-08-31T22:54:11Z

Alright, it is now Monday, and that means that I have completed two weeks of my experiment with biphasic sleeping. Although the first week's journal was very optimistic, I definitely felt a change of heart this time around. At the start of this week, I was feeling quite tired and pessimistic with the likelihood of continuing. Towards the end of the week, things were starting to turn around a little bit, but I am still unsure as to which of these approaches is really the best for me.

With a single block of sleep, I generally find that I feel better rested throughout the day. When I say better rested, I equate that to mean that I feel less of the signs that I associate with being tired: sandy feeling around my eyes, a little less focused, less energy than I would normally have.

On the positive note, I really enjoy having the extra time during my day to work on projects and chores, and being up early when there are minimal distractions is really quite nice. An alternative to giving up biphasic sleep is to switch to a habit where I sleep biphasically during the week, and then have two 8 hour blocks for both of the weekend days. This may be enough to provide me with just enough extra sleep to keep things running smoothly.

Without any more pre-amble, here is the journal for the past week:

Week 2

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Day 8 (Monday)

I'm now into the second week of biphasic sleeping, and woke up at 4:00AM this morning. One thing that I've noticed is that the amount of time it takes for me to mentally get started has reduced over the course of the last week. While a week ago, I was sitting on the couch and needed to do something like working out or video games to get my head started, I woke up this morning, walked into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and my head was already filled with ideas and thoughts about how I wanted to spend my day and what I would accomplish first.

I walked out to the living room and started working out and completing some tasks on my TODO list in between sets. One thing I've noticed is that there are really two different types of sleep inertia that we typically have to work our way through in the morning. The first comes from waking up in the middle of REM sleep, and I've touched on that briefly already. Put simply, waking up in the middle of your REM cycle is what gives you that extremely groggy feeling upon waking up, and typically leaves you feeling pretty out of it. The second type of inertia comes from not being very consistent with your sleeping schedule. If you get up at 6:00AM one morning, 8:00AM the next morning, and 11:00AM the third morning, your body is going to have a fairly difficult time adjusting to this. The upshot of this type of inertia is that it just takes longer for your metabolism to get into gear. This is due to the fact that after the first morning, your body is going to start training itself to kick things into gear around 6:00AM. The second morning, this causes you to have poor sleep (as your metabolism does not coincide with the time you're getting up). By the third morning, your body is going to be quite confused, and has probably started your metabolism and then put it back to rest by the time you get up at 10:00AM. These are the mornings that we typically get up and reach for the coffee, causing a caffeine and energy level spike, followed by a subsequent crash.

The previous week, I did not have to deal with the first type of inertia, as I was making sure that I was getting up at the end of a sleep cycle. I did, however, have to deal with the second form of inertia, as my body was not yet trained to get things going at 4 in the morning. Along those lines, if you plan to try something like this out (and I do recommend it - I am really liking it), I would strongly suggest planning some kind of physical activity, along with a light snack, first thing upon getting up. The snack and the activity will jolt your metabolism into gear, and help your body recognize that it needs to train itself to start the engine that much sooner.

On the topic of caffeine: I love coffee, and very much enjoy the rush that a couple of cups of java can give me. However, I also recognize that making it a habit is self-defeating; you lose the rush as your body becomes acclimated to the stuff, and you become dependent on it in order to stay awake and avoid headaches. I start my mornings by making a pot of Earl Grey tea (creamy Earl Grey from Specialty Teas on Fort Street actually - I love this stuff), and drinking that as I go through my morning routine. Tea provides a much more balanced and consistent caffeine intake to your system, and will help you ease your body awake as well as avoiding the crash an hour-and-a-half later. After the first week, you will enjoy the process of making tea (which I find a little more interactive than coffee), and appreciate that you are not reliant on coffee first thing in the morning to function.

-Nap-

I've been up from my nap for about three hours. I have cleared off most of my tasks for the day, so I spent the rest of my time re-sorting my Magic cards (this is a task that either has to be done frequently, or takes a long time), reading about GTD and polyphasic sleeping, and brainstorming ideas for a site redesign.

Although I've passed the one week mark, I definitely felt like I was carrying some sleep inertia with me this afternoon. The familiar sense of 'sandiness' that we get around our eyes when we're tired was present for a couple of hours. I had no intention of returning to bed, and didn't want to take in any caffeine to try and remedy that, so I just sat through it. Mind you, this was nothing severe - just something I noticed.

The other thing to correlate with this is the fact that this was the first time that I got up and out of bed as soon as I felt myself naturally wake up. In the past, I have woken up with about 20-30 minutes before my alarm is set to go off. In these cases I have put my head back down and after a few minutes fallen back to sleep. Today, I made the decision to simply get up at this time and start pulling myself together. It's possible that this decision affected the amount of rest that I received and is the reason for this sensation.

Day 9 (Tuesday)

It's getting easier and easier to get up in the morning (although this hasn't been difficult up to this point either). I've started setting aside my clothes to work out in beside the bed so that I don't have to risk waking Bay up when my alarm goes off. One thing that I've noticed is that it can be difficult to read early in the morning. Sitting in a dimly lit room, before the sun has risen, listening to relaxing music and reading a fairly dense paper about the loss of anonymity in our modern society really starts to have an effect. I don't know if I would mark this up as an issue specific to biphasic or not. I have certainly had moments at work in the past where I simply could not get myself to focus on something without an overwhelming urge to close my eyes and sleep.

One thing that is certain is that there is some degree of discipline required to maintain a schedule like the one I am practicing. It would be quite easy fro myself to close my eyes right now and drift back off to sleep. Again, this sort of thing is present with monophasic forms of sleep as well. However, in my case, doing so would probably throw off my body's ability to successfully adapt to a new sleeping habit. In an attempt to put an end to the yawning today, I've shifted from the comfy couch to our dining room table to do my reading, and am now sitting instead of lying down. The little things can make a big difference.

-Nap-

I had a great nap today, and woken up feeling like I'd slept for a while. However, I am still feeling like I have sleep debt hanging over my shoulders, and I am beginning to wonder if my body is in fact getting enough sleep under this new regime, or if I am simply gradually adding increments to the amount of sleep debt that I have accumulated, and will crash at some point in the future.

Today was the first day that I did not immediately get out of bed upon having my alarm go off, and I caught myself closing my eyes and nearly nodding back off. Clearly this is not a successful move to pull off if I want to continue this experiment to its completion.

Although I very much like rising early and having an extra two hours everyday, I am not willing to sacrifice feeling well rested for those things. This is obviously quite a contrast to how I felt on Sunday, but that's okay - that's precisely why I'm conducting this experiment.

Day 10 (Wednesday)

This marks the second day where I've gotten up and felt like I'm carrying around sleep debt with me. It's nothing that I can't work through or deal with, but I don't like it. Feeling sleepy sucks, feeling well rested rules. While I felt in pretty good shape after my initial bout of weight-lifting and dancing, it is now 11:00AM and I'm once again getting the now familiar sandy feeling around my eyes. I fear this may represent the beginning of the end of this experiment, if things don't begin to improve.

Day 11 (Thursday)

I feel pretty good today (at least at 6:00, after getting up at 4:00), so things are nothing if not inconsistent at this point. Tuesday and Wednesday mark the low point so far for this experiment, but we will have to see how I feel in 5 hours, as 11:00AM has been when I have hit the low point for each of the those days, as well as around 3:00PM.

One thing I do very much enjoy with this schedule is that I get the opportunity to get up and practice dancing for at least an hour every day. This is a non-trivial amount of time to be able to devote to something that I care about. Once school starts, it's entirely possible that studying will have to take that place. One thing that I am definitely wary of is how difficult it can be to study when you feel tired. If I cannot get my energy levels to the right place, I will not be able to use this time in the morning effectively, at least in this regard.

Day 12 (Friday)

Fairly uneventful today. Waking up from a nap is still annoying - damn greasy face. Otherwise the schedule seems to have taken. I felt myself fighting getting up at 3:30 today. I'm not sure if that's due to sleep debt, or simply feeling lazy. I'm going away to Hornby Island with Bay, Ben, and Ashley for the weekend, so this will be another good test to see how the schedule works in this context. The other option is that I simply sleep regularly, and then try to resume on Monday. I'll see how I feel.

Day 13 and 14 (Saturday and Sunday)

As mentioned before, we went to Hornby island for the weekend. However, contrary to what I had originally planned, I decided that I would switch back to a monophasic block of sleep for 8 hours each night once we got there. The reasoning behind this was that the cabin was small and it would be kind of weird getting up and working for five hours before anyone else was up, and I would be running the risk of waking our hosts, which I felt would be pretty obnoxious. I also knew that we would be partying while we were there, and potentially staying up late. Although I have managed both of these last two things on biphasic sleep schedule, it just felt like it would be a bit too much of an effort for a trip that was meant to be a break, both physically and mentally.

I had no problems falling asleep and waking up both nights and mornings. When I got home Sunday night, I felt that I was starting to come down with a cold, and so I opted to stick with a single block of sleep Sunday night as well. It is now Monday, and I feel fine. I also feel less tired than I have with biphasic sleeping as of late. I intend to revert to a biphasic schedule for the rest of this week and then determine how I feel about continuing the schedule or switching back to monophasic full-time.

What is this Twitter thing all about?

2009-08-31T20:07:10Z

Unless you've been living in a cave that is protected from wireless internet access, own a tin foil hat, wear that tin foil hat with the shiny side facing out, and haven't been talking to the hermit living in the cave two down from yours, you have probably heard mention of Twitter.

My friend Dave first mentioned Twitter about two years back. On the surface, Twitter seems like a remarkably useless service. "It's basically like having nothing but Facebook status updates, all the time, and you follow a whole bunch of people and stay updated with them via those".

This is the most common description that I've heard, and it's a reasonably accurate one. However, one of my projects before school was to start using Twitter myself, and see what it meant to me and my own set of use cases.

The main reason I had set this as a goal to accomplish was because the more I have heard about Twitter, the less it sounded like something that I could effectively evaluate from the outside. Sometimes you simply need to immerse yourself in something in order to get a feel for whether or not it presents a piece of technology that could benefit you. This is often the case for technology, as it often enables you to do something you had previously not even realized would be of value to you. Since, up until this point, I never had the capability to broadcast a message to a large number of friends instantaneously, it would be very difficult for me to objectively evaluate whether or not being able to do so would provide any tangible benefit. How could I know for sure if I'd never had that capability in the past?

One of the things that I took away from Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody (a recommended read) was that as people tend to age, we typically lose our ability to jump on board something new, oftentimes making the determination that it is a fad and a waste of time without ever giving ourself the time to really evaluate it. By the time it's caught on in a big way and we realize that we need to learn this thing to get by in the modern world, we are considerably far behind and have a significant amount of catching up to do.

Although it is inevitable that as we age, we lose our agility and ability to adapt as quickly as we once did, I believe that I can take steps to minimize the scale and speed at which this happens to myself. One of the ways for me to slow this inevitability is to do things like set aside time to evaluate new pieces of technology.

An important thing to mention is that I am not suggesting the choices are binary, and that you can either adapt and start using Twitter, or not adapat and become extinct. However, by taking the time to actually evaluate a new piece of technology like this, I can determine whether or not it is something that I will actually find use for in the future (in which case it is worth my time getting to know it now).

This project was a fairly small one. My goals were to create a Twitter account and use it over the course of the next week. I didn't have any stipulations as to how I used Twitter, just that I actually make use of it in some capacity - even if that meant updating about something as meaningless as eating dinner at Boston Pizza. While some people would deem this a waste of time, I think that part of immersing myself in something like Twitter means that I don't set boundaries for how I use it. The real point is just that I use it. Legitimate use cases may grow out of that usage organically and serendipitously over time. If they don't, then I'm no worse off than I began, except perhaps for the two hours of time that this project cost me (and investing two hours of time now, to determine if this is something that may have legs later on, seems like a pretty good deal to me).

So, how did things go? Well, they went about as you would expect. My tasks were:

Talk to Davin about Twitter
Search Lifehacker for any resources related to Twitter
Sign up for a Twitter account
Find some people to follow
Use Twitter (tweet) for a week

I wanted to talk to Davin about Twitter because he has been using the service for a while as part of his role as the main blogger for the GDC (The Graphic Designers of Canada, or something like that - Davin, please correct me if I got that wrong). As he is using the service in a semi-professional capacity, I was pretty sure that he would have some good insights.

In fact, his insights were much like everything else I've tried to track down on Twitter. He told me about how it affects him on a daily basis, but not really what it provides him in terms of real benefits or use cases. This wasn't his fault, but it did confirm to me that I really need to try this out to determine if it's something worth my time.

For things like Twitter, I often check in with Lifehacker to see if they have put together any tutorials or posts related to the application. Lifehacker's goals, direction and thrust align very closely with my own, and so they provide an excellent proxy through which I can glimpse hidden opportunities that may be relevant to my own process. Lifehacker had a few decent articles, but the main benefit I took away from them was a number of people to follow once I'd signed up.

Following someone on Twitter is basically like adding them to your friendfeed in Facebook - whenever they make an update, it shows up on your main screen and you can see what they have to say. The real point of using Twitter is to follow a number of people that will expose you to new ideas, links, etc., in line with the kind of content that you want to see. Once I'd signed up for my account, I searched for and added as many of my friends that I could find, and a large number of people that are involved in GTD.

So the last step was just to get out there and actually use Twitter. This isn't very complicated, and was certainly made easier by installing an application called Tweetdeck on my iPhone. This allows me to get a complete view of all of the tweets from people that I'm following, and allows me to tweet quickly from my phone. You can also use SMS to send and receive tweets, which operates in much the same manner.

Twitter is kind of a funny social space. Unlike Facebook where you maintain a tight rein on who you are friends with, and what those people can see, Twitter operates on a pretty open forum kind of mentality. Random people I had never heard of have started following me, usually because I've either re-tweeted something that someone else they follow has said (essentially just repeating what someone else has already tweeted), or because I happened to mention a topic that they are following or have a passing fancy in.

Initially I would get an e-mail letting me know that someone had started following me, and I would look them up trying to figure out who the heck these people were and why they were interested in what I had to say. But I quickly got over that and realized that:

They're not really that interested in what I have to say
It's just part of the Twitter experience

Once you see that most people are following upwards of a thousand people, you realize that it's just the way things are done in this social sphere.

Despite the way it sounds on the surface, Twitter obviously presents a number of valuable use cases, because it's user base is quite large, and it has been put to use in some very diverse, very powerful situations. The election protests in Iran, and the Olympic demonstrations/protests in China were both made possible in part due to Twitter's ability to enable people to communicate quickly and effectively to a large number of people in a very short amount of time.

I don't feel that a week has been long enough for me to effectively evaluate where Twitter sits in my existing set of use cases, nor whether or not it will fill a niche that exists somewhere between Google Reader and Facebook.

Some of my goals in using social media such as Facebook and Google Reader are to publish and increase the exposure that people have to skepticism, critical thinking, and scientific attitudes about the many junk claims that exist - this goal can really be summarized as an attempt to increase the education that people have, quixotic as the goal itself may be. I'm also obviously hoping to increase exposure and interest in the things that matter to me - I would love to see Popping and the other urban styles I'm into gain a greater foothold here on the island. In addition to those things, I want to provide content that people find interesting and engaging, and at the very top of the pyramid, I want to establish myself as an interesting person, and an expert in the things that I choose to pursue, be they professional (law, project management, productivity coaching), or leisure (squash, dancing, etc.).

For Twitter to have continual value to me, I would anticipate that there be specific items that I would publish or comment on in Twitter, but not Facebook or Google Reader, and likewise, I would anticipate there being items that I publish in those mediums, but not on Twitter. So far, most of what I have published on Twitter has been redundantly published on one of those other two sites, and so a distinct value exclusive to Twitter has not yet emerged. Time will tell if there is new value that arises from this service, or if it becomes a passing fad that I leave off to do its own thing.

Next up is my second week of journals related to my experiment with biphasic sleep. I will publish this tomorrow. Worth noting is that this past weekend I went away to Hornby with Bay, Ben, and Ashley. Although I had originally intended to maintain a biphasic sleeping habit, I quickly determined that this would be obnoxious to our hosts, potentially waking them up at ungodly hours, and disrupting our plans in order to allow myself 90 minute naps in the afternoon. Stay tuned for more details.

RTM and GTD - Acronyms to change your life

2009-08-28T11:20:21Z

One of the projects that I had decided I wanted to take on during my break was to review the web application called Remember the Milk (RTM), and see how it would integrate with my existing GTD (Gettings Things Done) workflow. I am being far from original by writing about GTD and RTM at this stage in the game, but what I can provide is a narrative that may help you in getting yourself more organized, and provide some insight into how you may be able to migrate your own tasks or current system into something similar to this.

My GTD system at home has evolved organically, and partially through my love of aesthetics. There, I said it - I like things that look pretty. That's fine, as long as it doesn't hinder any of the more important things. Although my system looked nice and was functional, it felt like it was limited in scope and what I could accomplish with it. If I wanted to quickly get a view of what tasks I needed to do based on some new arbitrary criteria that I hadn't thought of before, I would either need to manually search through all of my lists, or create a new list to redundantly store all of the items that fit this new criteria (and in doing so, manually search through all my lists in the process of creating this new one). Although I liked the way the system worked, I always had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I could do so much more with a system that was designed from the ground up with GTD in mind, rather than what I was currently using.

Since converting everything over to RTM and making a go of it for one week, I am sold. The application is very efficient, and integrates perfectly with my GTD workflow. In fact, it synergizes with it, providing me with many new ways to use my database of TODO items much more effectively than I ever did before.

Remember the Milk has a couple of things going for it. First of all, it is a web application, which means that my lists and tasks can go with me wherever I am. I don't need to check in before leaving the house and copy anything I may need onto paper in order to reference when I'm out. If I'm working on a computer other than my own and an idea pops into my head, I can put in all of the work up front, adding an item to one of my lists and filling out the relevant details.

In addition to this benefit, RTM is simply a much more comprehensive tool for the job than using an ad hoc system like the stickies. What I mean is that RTM has been built with the concept of creating lists of tasks and TODOs in mind, so it provides many options for capturing the pertinent details relevant to things you need to get done. As an example, instead of simply entering in the name of a task, I can enter the name, add any relevant tags (@errand, @home, etc.), provide an estimate for the amount of time required (more on this later), and assign an item a due date.

I can also add any number of notes for a given item, which are then displayed sequentially in a separate view. This is especially handy for capturing any ideas or stray thoughts related to a particular task, and allow for a very organic workflow that can include mini brainstorming sessions related to a given task. With my previous ad hoc system, I would simply add any notes underneath the main item's name by indenting and adding more text. That attempt would quickly grow out of hand for any item that had more than a few notes, as it would scroll the rest of my items off the screen.

Migration

Once I'd made the decision to try out RTM, the first step was to get an account and convert all of my existing stickies over to this new system. For now, I left everything in the sticky system as it was, simply copying across. This way, if things didn't work out, I could just shut down my RTM account and pick up where I left off, albeit with the necessity of migrating a few new items back. Still, not too much hassle.

RTM's system of employing lists that hold a set of items translated pretty nicely to my existing groups of tasks and lists, so it was especially simple to copy these notes across. For example, my previous sticky that held a list of gift ideas for Bay was moved across by:

Create a new list called Gift ideas for Bay
For each item in my previous list, create a new item in this new list

Okay, so that's a pretty trite example, but we're easing in here, so lay off.

Transferring most of my lists was the easiest task, as this had a one-to-one correlation with RTM's native state. Once I started working on converting my TODO and project lists, I ran into a few snags.

The biggest catch was related to contexts and the division of lists. As of late, I have started to capture contexts for all of the items on my TODO list. The concept behind a context is that it is a quick reference to determine who, what, and where you have to be in order to accomplish a task. If I have a task that is Blog about RTM and GTD, I will assign that task the context @web (GTD uses @ as a shorthand to indicate a context). The reason for this is that I need web access in order to fully public a blog entry. In truth, I could break this task up into two parts: Write Blog Entry (for which the context would possibly be @laptop, or really just @computer), and Publish Blog Entry (for which the context would be @web). In this example, I have them together, as I usually accomplish the two parts in the same sitting.

I will explain more on how contexts can enable you to be more effective within RTM shortly, but for now, the main point is that moving these over into RTM presented my first speed bump. The real hurdle was simply that I actually needed to sit down and think about what contexts and tags I needed to capture in my system. Nothing is worse for functionality and searching than having a bunch of similar but different tags or metadata in your system, as you then end up searching for something like "All tasks that have tag:@web", but end up missing the tasks that have the tag:@internet. Although it required a little extra time on my part, one of the steps of my migration process (in fact, one of the first tasks I entered into RTM) was sitting down and planning out what contexts and tags I would actually need.

The other item that I wanted to be able to move across was my status tags. With the sticky system, I created places on my TODO list to hold items for which I was waiting on something else (typically another person). Whenever a TODO item was no longer in my control, I would move it down into the Waiting For section, and go from there. But, how did I make sense of this concept in the new system? Did I move an existing item into a new list whenever it left my control and passed to someone else? This was certainly one option, but I decided that I wanted to interact with lists as minimally as possible (ideally only having to work with this part of RTM/GTD when initially entering a task) and instead mainly interact with my tasks by changing the tags and other types of metadata associated with them.

Lists

One of the first things I did was look online for some ideas as to how to effectively order all of my tasks into lists. As you can tell from above, I was having a hard time getting a feel for where the distinction between tasks and tags lay, and how I could make good on my goal to work minimally with lists, and maximally with tasks. The first blog entry I came across was this one here, featured on the RTM Blog. In this entry, the author recommends creating lists for every project you have, dividing them up into personal, work, and school by prefacing each list with the tags ps, wk, and sc, respectively.

This approach is nice because it allows you to maintain but keep separate multiple sets of lists for different pursuits. I don't have to look at ps lists when I'm under the gun at work or school, and can solely focus on items within those lists.

The author also recommends creating a na to assign to any task that is immediately actionable. This tag indicates that there is nothing that you need to accomplish before you can start work on this task - an important part of GTD, as we want to capture as many steps of a project as possible, but when it's time to work, we want to focus solely on the next steps. It is a pointless exercise to focus on something that is currently bottle-necked waiting for something else to finish - we should be focusing on the task that is bottle-necking things!

My first iteration ended up following a lot of this author's advice. I created the appropriate lists, and assigned the ns tag to all of my actionable items (I prefer ns for "next step", rather than na for "next action" - simply a matter of preference). For any project, you should have a minimum of one actionable item. If not, you should be asking yourself why you do not have an item you can act upon. If it's a lack of motivation, you should either delete this project, or move it into the Someday/Maybe list (see below).

I also really liked the author's recommendation that you assign a "goal task" for each of your project lists. Create your project, and make the first task you enter take the following format:

.. [Goal of Project]

This will, in theory, do two things: This task will sort to the top (when sorting by name) due to its preceding two periods, and will provide you with an immediate idea of the aim of this project when you are performing your weekly review. Having this information readily available will make your life easier when you are reviewing your lists, and thinking about the underlying goal of a given project is a great way to ensure that you are on track (and stay on it) when you initially start entering a project.

It will also get your brain engaged in the process of brainstorming tasks when you initially enter a project. Sometimes you may be surprised simply by the process of writing down the goal for a given project ("Okay, so I want to have the TV on the wall. ... Hmm, why do I want that? It won't actually look prettier.. Am I only doing this for the coolness factor?").

I also made it a point to assign a priority of "1" (the highest priority) to all of my Goal tasks so that these sort straight to the top of my list no matter what.

What are you waiting for?

We still haven't covered something I mentioned earlier: items we're waiting on. The author of the above blog recommended creating a list for all items that you are waiting on, and moving those items into the list. However, I didn't like this idea for a couple of reasons. First off, this approach would require interacting with lists more than I want to. More of an issue though, is that, currently, the lists are the way that I can identify the project for which a given task pertains to. If I move a task called Crop Photos from the list ps - Wedding Photos to Waiting For, I lose the information that that specific is a step in the Wedding Photos project. How do I know which list I move it back to when I am no longer waiting for something?

No, this wouldn't do. I made a mental note that I would need to find a better approach to accommodating these items, and moved on.

The last step of the process was creating a Someday/Maybe list for each of my personal, work, and school tasks. The Someday/Maybe lists contain items that may be cool to take on someday, but don't really fit in with your current objectives, goals, or time-commitments. This is the place for any task like Go Skydiving or Learn Spanish. If you intend to complete these projects now, then they should be in their own list. However, if these items are currently just passing fancies, then they go in the Someday/Maybe list, and you capture only the general idea (for these items, it is not yet valuable enough to brainstorm tasks and steps to achieve them).

Productive graffiti

After completing the initial set up based on the blog entry mentioned above, I was still not satisfied. The items I had that I was waiting for were still nagging at me, and I felt like I could put tags to a more effective use. I searched further and found this excellent blog entry at SheenOnline. This author's approach differed from the previous in that tags were used exclusively to denote that a given task belonged to a given project, as well as indicating that I was waiting on something.

This seemed a more practical approach to me, as I could have a task that was both part of a proejct, and marked as waiting for something. I went through all of my tasks and this time reclassified them using the system outlined in the blog entry. Specifically, you use the following special tags:

Tags preceded with a @ are for context: @Home, @Downtown, etc.
Tags preceded with a - are for status: -NS, -WF
Tags preceded with a . are for project names: .FixSink, .FrameWeddingPhotos, .RedesignBlogLayout, etc.

In addition to these special tags, you can apply any other tags that you like to your projects. Once you have completed this process, you will have a large number of tasks that have specific contexts, some that will have a status (those that don't will typically be tasks in a project that need something else to happen first), and lastly, a set of tasks without a project name tag (daily or ad hoc tasks) and those that do belong to a project.

The contexts that I am using are: @Web, @Laptop, @Home, @Downtown, @Phone, and @Errand. In RTM, you will want to assign any physical context (a specific location) as a location rather than a tag (these behave almost the same way, except that locations integrate with Google Maps, allowing you to quickly search for everything you can accomplish within 10km of your current location).

The statuses I use are: -NS, and -WF. A task is either an actionable item (-NS) or not (in which case it does not have an -NS tag. Additionally, a task can be waiting for someone or something before I can complete it (-WF). Avoid the temptation to assign -WF to every task that is not an actionable item. -WF should be reserved for those tasks that have been delegated out to someone else.

The projects I have.. are too numerous to bother mentioning, and will not coincide with your own anyhow, so we can leave that one as is.

Smartlists and Handy Searches

Now that you've got everything tagged, you can begin creating smartlists. Smartlists are simply saved searches. One of the strengths of RTM is its comprehensive searching functionality, allowing you to search for any number of criteria and combining them to create effective lists. For each project tag that I created in the step above, I also created a smartlist to display all tasks with that tag. This gives me a way to quickly determine what steps are left on a given project (important for the weekly review).

Whenever you add a new task within the context of a smartlist, RTM will automatically assign that task with the appropriate tags, provided that the search saved for the smartlist is unambiguous. What this means is that any task created within the context of a smartlist with a search like this: tag:.becomeNinja AND tag:@Home will have both the .becomeNinja tag and the @Home location assigned to it. However, a task created in the context of a smartlist with a search like this: tag:.becomeNinja OR tag:.becomePirate will have neither tag assigned to it, as it is ambiguous which tag should be assigned.

What about the more interesting searches though? Some of the searches I have saved as smartlists are:

Errands - "tag:@errand AND status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND NOT tag:-wf"

This list displays all errands that I'm currently able to run. I define an errand as any task that I need to accomplish when I'm out of the house. Groceries, picking up drycleaning, buying a new set of squash shoes, all qualify as errands.

Waiting - "tag:-wf AND status:incomplete"

Nothing complex here, but this is an important part of the weekly review. With this list, I can quickly assess who and what I am waiting on, and determine if I need to follow up with anything. This helps ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Quickies - "timeEstimate:"< 1 hour" AND tag:-ns AND NOT tag:wf"

This is a very handy list to have. If you've created time estimates for your tasks as you've entered them (and you should get in the habit of doing this, as you won't bother after you initially enter them), you can use a list like this to determine what you can accomplish quickly when you find yourself with a desire to get something done and only 30 minutes before you need to go and do something else. I often find myself referencing this list before I go play squash and before bedtime.

No Due Date - "status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND due:never"

This list allows me to assess all of the next steps for which I have not yet assigned a due date. These are items that are likely to slip through the cracks, as they will not show up in my main TODO list (see below). The items in this list may or may not be legitimate. Legitimate cases are the ones where I have planned out the tasks for a project and identified what the next steps are, but have not yet made the decision to actually commit to working on the project. If an item stays in this state for too long, I will eventually move the project into the Sometime/Maybe list (or just delete it if I no longer want to do it). This list is always checked as part of my weekly review in order to determine if I'm ready to commit to a new project, and to make sure I have no tasks that I have accidentally neglected to assign a due date.

Completed Today - "completed:today"

I created this list when Bay came home one day and asked me what I'd done. I couldn't tell her immediately, but quickly typed in this search and was able to show her everything that I'd accomplished (seriously, my marriage is more exciting than this makes it sound). Being able to quickly assess what you've accomplished in a given day is good for your psyche and will help you on those days when you feel like you haven't been able to get anything finished. Don't underestimate the value of this list.

Todo Next - "status:incomplete AND tag:-ns AND (dueWithin: "1 week of today" OR dueBefore:today)"

This is the main list that I work from on a daily basis. It contains all items that are not yet completed, are next steps (ie, actionable), and that are either due within 1 week of today, or are overdue. The list is ordered based on due date, so that I can work through from top to bottom, closing out tasks on my plate, and getting a feel for what the coming week looks like at any moment. This list currently contains items that I have tagged as waiting for something and I am not yet sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. As this list essentially acts as a daily tickler file, it isn't necessarily a bad thing being reminded that a given task is approaching a due date but that I am still waiting for something before it can be completed. If this becomes bothersome, I will simply update the search to remove all tasks that are waiting for something, and rely on my weekly review in order to ensure that they don't slip through the cracks.

Additional Lists

In addition to everything mentioned above, I use RTM to manage and maintain any lists that exist outside of my GTD system. By this I simply mean lists that are just.. lists. Gift ideas, ideas for dates, ideas to blog about, etc. None of the items in these lists are specific tasks that I need to act upon, and the beauty of the above set up is that nothing in these lists will show up.

Trick out my RTM

One thing I noticed is that RTM's interface is a little spartan, and at times, cluttered. It becomes especially cluttered when you are running a large number of lists, as you will have the tendency to do if you are using it for GTD in this manner (every project ends up being its own smartlist, adding to the smart and regular lists I've just mentioned above). I went searching for ways to alleviate and improve the look and feel of this interface within Firefox. I'm using Firefox because Safari is my main browser, and I needed a application to remain persistent on my machine and allow for as much customization as I wanted. Firefox is a bit of a memory hog, though I haven't noticed any real problems.

In order to make this a persistent part of my system, I ended up doing the following:

Set Firefox to open and sit in, by default, my first virtual desktop.

I use six virtual desktops - one contains my GTD system, one contains my browser, one my mail, one my music, etc. This simply provides an easy way to mentally and visually separate my windows, and is functionality that is supported by default on Mac and UNix/Linux machines. Windows users can download third-party applications to support this (though I don't know offhand what they are).

Set the home page of Firefox to be three tabs: My RTM home page, A page showing the list of keyboard shortcuts for RTM, and a page showing a list of search criteria that can be used in RTM.

This gives me a quick set of reference pages to jump to whenever I can't quite remember how to search for a specific thing, or if I am trying to learn a new keyboard shortcut

In order to improve the layout of RTM, I followed a number of the suggestions in this lifehacker article. The significant changes are:

Show keyboard shortcuts next to each item

This removes the guesswork for keyboard shortcuts, and will help you learn the appropriate shortcuts much faster. Using keyboard shortcuts is a must if you want to get the most out of your system, as I find mousing around horribly inefficient when you can click on key and jump straight to the appropriate spot on screen, ready to enter your text.

Longer search box

Nothing is more annoying than trying to review the search you just created to ensure that it's correct, and having to arrow-key through 15 characters of text. This improvement simply makes the search input box larger so you can see most (if not all) of what you've entered.

Widescreen layout

This simply optimizes the RTM interface for a wider screen, allowing you to view more at once.

RTM Greasemonkey Script

Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox allowing you to add custom user-scripts to the application. These scripts can be applied globally, or specifically for a given site (in this case, for RTM). This tweak is the most important one, as it moves all of your lists from tabs to a much cleaner look on the left side of the screen. It also creates some much needed shortcuts (Control-Shift-J and -K to move up and down the lists on the left side, Control-G to jump to a given list, and Control-M to move the currently selected task(s) to a given list).

Quicksilver

I also installed the Quicksilver plug-in for RTM, which allows you to rapidly add a task to your set of lists from anywhere using the familiar Quicksilver interface. As much as I love Quicksilver, I haven't actually found the need to use this plugin, as my process for adding a task is typically: Control-1 (switch to virtual desktop #1, which contains RTM, and only RTM), hit T to create a new task, fill out pertinent details). I also like to have the context of the RTM system when I'm entering new tasks, which you lose when you enter a task right from the Quicksilver interface.

So that's about it. This project has been a significant success, and I'm excited for the opportunity to put the next evolution of my system to the test in two weeks when school starts.

Lastly, most of my purpose in blogging is as a way of tracking and documenting my own personal growth. However, it is also my own manner of publishing and establishing my credibility as an expert in certain fields, such as productivity, and project management. I won't ask this often, but from time to time will mention that if you find any of these articles helpful, please do me a small favour and share them in Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter, pass them along to people you know that may derive benefit from them, or whatever else you deem appropriate.

That's all for now - if you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment and I will address.

Lifehacking

2009-08-24T12:46:04Z

Lifehacking is an odd term, but the benefits that the activity bring are well worth getting past that initial connotation. To me, lifehacking is the process of making changes in your life, your routine, and the way you think, in order to make you more efficient, accomplish more, and generally getting yourself out of your way so that you can do the things you want.

Although the lay-person's idea of hacking is some 35 year-old sitting in their parent's basement breaking into the military's computers, the reality is that hackers are generally just people that tinker with their computers in order to optimize them as much as possible. In order to determine the best ways that you can modify a system, you need to undergo a process of analysis to figure out how things fit together, and where you can make changes that will have the most benefit. Lifehacking is analogous to this process, but applied to our life, our bodies, and our minds, rather than to a computer.

Although some people refer to each of these pursuits individually (mindhacking, bodyhacking, and lifehacking), I lump them all together into one term, because I find it hard enough to accept that I go around using the word lifehacking, let alone two other equally awkward sounding terms.

My three week retreat since leaving my job is mostly devoted to this pursuit, in preparation for the start of school, but also simply because I would like to establish a number of new and positive habits before I am under the familiar, crushing burden of school work, at which point I will not be given an opportunity to affect new change in my life until the first term is complete.

Today I'm just going to review some of the items I have recently introduced into my daily routines and life, and how they have allowed me to become more efficient.

Biphasic Sleep

I have recently posted the first of three weeks worth of journals related to my experiment with biphasic sleep. The notion of biphasic sleep is that by sleeping in two intervals, rather than the more typical single interval, our sleep becomes more efficient, and thus we require less.

By introducing this routine into my life, I have been able to squeeze an extra two hours out of every day. It is pretty rare that you will be able to introduce a lifehack that makes you efficient enough to gain an extra two hours out of every day, no questions asked.

The counterpoint to this method of sleeping is that having an extra two hours of wakefulness may be a waste of time if you spend a lot of time sitting around bored. Personally I think boredom is the worst way to spend time imaginable, and so I diligently keep track of all my projects, ideas, and activities that I'm working on, and manage my tasks using the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology (more on this further down). Whenever I'm bored, I review my TODO list, my projects, and see what I can work on and go from there. If nothing jumps out at me, or I feel like I just need to relax and take a break, I'll read or play video games, and this is fine too.

The real key here is that if you are considering making this change in your life, be sure that you've got things with which to fill your time.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is an application that is available for Macs.

Before I go any further, I would like to preface this section by talking briefly about Macs (the computers). I firmly believe that Apple makes products with one of their goals being that the user experience should be paramount above all else. What this means is that using a Mac is almost always a pleasing experience. Not only have Apple designed their products this way, but they have built their operating system in a manner that allows and encourages third-party developers to design programs that adhere to these same principles. The end result is that you get a product that is very polished (not just superficially, but all the way up and down the user experience), and stays out of your way when you are using it.

I am not speaking as someone that has existed inside a Mac-only bubble his entire life - I grew up using Windows machines and went through my entire Computer Science undergrad using Windows machines. I lovingly purchased and cobbled together powerful PCs, managed and upgraded the machines, networked and tinkered with them, and hacked with them to make my experience with them as efficient as possible. Then I got a Mac and within a week realized that I would never again own another Windows machine unless absolutely necessary. Everything is that much easier, that much more efficient, and that much more pleasing (this last point is where most techies typically get hung up, making the assumption that is the only thing that Macs have going for them. That's fine with me, but it's inaccurate).

The Mac community is one that has developed around a shared appreciation for good design and efficiency, and as a result, Macs generally have a large amount of applications available that allow for these kinds of practices. Chief among those products is Quicksilver.

Quicksilver can be summarized as a keyboard launcher, but this understates how much it can do for you. In reality, Quicksilver allows you to do anything and everything rapidly and with just a few keystrokes. If I have a file on my desktop that I want to move to a folder on my computer called Adam/Cool_Stuff/Ninjas/Robot_Parrots_vs_Ninjas/, I can do this in two ways.

The standard way that many of us are used to doing is to click on the file on my desktop, hit cmd-x (ctrl-x for Windows users), then open a Finder or Explorer window, then click through our directory structure until we get to the appropriate folder, then hit cmd-v (ctrl-v for Windows users), pasting the file into the folder.

The Quicksilver way that I would accomplish this is to click the file on my desktop, hit cmd-escape (which brings up the Quicksilver window with my file selected), hit tab, type "move", hit tab again, and type "Robot_", and then enter. I don't need to type the whole folder name because Quicksilver narrows down the list of places I can send the file as I continue typing until I'm left with just one result. This is significantly faster, does not require using the mouse for a lot of the work (which is inefficient compared to the keyboard), and does not leave me with extra windows open that I then need to close.

This is a pretty mundane example. How about a cooler one? Let's say I'm reading an article online and I see a word I don't know. Typically you would open a new tab, head over to http://dictionary.com, type in the word, read the definition, close the tab, and resume reading. With Quicksilver, I highlight the word, type cmd-escape (which this time brings up my Quicksilver window with the highlighted word selected), tab, and then start typing "define". As soon as the results are narrowed down to "Define word", I hit enter and a small window pops open showing me the definition for my word. I can close this window quickly once finished by typing cmd-w.

For both of these examples, it is very easy to counter by saying "Yah, well, I have my own way of doing that, and it's plenty efficient, so there's no need for me to bother with Quicksilver". This is a fair counter-point, when you are looking at specific cases. However, the thing that makes Quicksilver not just handy, but essential, is that it provides an efficient way for you to do virtually everything you can possibly imagine, and always in a fairly intuitive manner. Additionally, Quicksilver provides plugins for virtually everything you can imagine. There's an iTunes plugin, so that you can change your volume, change to the next track, request a new song in iTunes DJ, and rate the current song, all with a minimal number of keystrokes and without having to leave the task you're currently working on. There's a websearch plugin so that you can use Quicksilver to instantly search whatever site you like with the search string of your choice, without having to go through the process of opening up a new tab, typing the website you want to search, finding the search box, entering the search string, and hitting enter.

Again, don't look at the specific examples and tell yourself that you can do that in a different way. The reason that Quicksilver shines is that it allows you to do almost everything this quickly and effectively. Once you start tinkering with it and adding new plugins, you'll be amazed that you were able to function without it.

Windows users - your best choice is something called Launchy (which I used at work). Launchy is better than nothing, but it doesn't have the modular design that Quicksilver does, meaning that it doesn't have anywhere near the comprehensiveness or number of plugins that Quicksilver does. Still, just adding a keyboard launcher can make you more efficient. Hitting alt-enter, and typing "excel" is generally going to be faster than using the mouse to click through a number times to get to Excel from the Start menu.

Getting Things Done (GTD)

Being organized and having effective time-management skills will both create more time for you. By having a clear head and an awareness of what tasks you have on your plate at any given time, you will be able to spend more time present in the moment, and waste less time trying to remember what that thing was that you had to do, and figure out what your next step is.

While many people will throw up their arms and claim "I'm just not good at being organized", this is a cop-out. Organization and time-management are both skills that can be practiced and cultivated. Although some people will naturally be more intuitive at applying these skills, there is no reason that you cannot learn new skills to organize yourself, and new methods for coping with everything that life demands of us.

Getting Things Done is a methodology conceived of by David Allen. This method provides a workflow and a system for dealing with every new piece of information that comes at you, tracking your projects and tasks, and completing things in a timely manner. My mentor at Refractions, Krista Stellar, had been practicing GTD for a while before I started working with her, and it was something that I learned largely through osmosis. In spite of the many excellent things she taught me, I think that the introduction to GTD was the most significant thing that I took away from my time spent working with her.

The reason for this is simply that the GTD methodology can be applied to almost everything that comes at you in life, and staying organized and on top of things will give you a relaxed sense of control. Stress robs us of our ability to think clearly, our ability to enjoy ourselves, and our ability to remain present. By eliminating stress related to poor organization, you will remove this time-sink from your life, and gain more time to focus on the things that are important.

If you are interested in reading more about GTD, you can click the appropriate tag on the cloud to the right, or check out Merlin Mann's 43Folders blog post here.

If taking on an entire new system seems like too much overhead right now, you can start by making two changes in your daily routine:

Start maintaining a TODO list. Write down whatever you have to do, along with any information related to each item that is needed to accomplish it. When you finish an item, cross it off your TODO list. At the start of each day, create a new TODO list, and review your old TODO list. If there are items that you no longer care about, cross them off, and move over all of the remainingitems that did not get finished from the previous day's TODO list.
Apply the two minute rule. Whenever a new piece of information or task comes at you, deal with it immediately in two minutes. If you can finish it right away in two minutes or less, get it done. If you cannot finish it in two minutes, but it is something you will do soon, add it to your TODO list. If it is something that you need to file away, do so. Whatever it is, deal with it in two minutes.

Just by implementing these two rules, you will remove a lot of the overhead that is caused by letting new pieces of information come at you and simply sit in your inbox (physical or e-mail), or worse yet, in your head.

Remember the Milk (RTM)

Remember the milk is a web-application that integrates perfectly with the GTD methodology. Instead of needing to maintain a physical, or paper-based system, RTM allows you to maintain all of your tasks, projects, and todo lists online. Not only is all of this information available to you wherever you have access to the web, but it is also supported by an iPhone app and syncing software for other smartphones.

Although I won't go into detail about RTM today (that is a topic for another time), I think that this is the most significant evolution I have made to my personal system since I began blogging about it.

Multi-tasking

Everyone likes to talk about multi-tasking at work, but typically what they really mean is that they're browsing the web when they should be working on a spreadsheet. This kind of multi-tasking is inefficient, and should really be labelled "working with distractions". Although I completely appreciate the need for healthy distraction and allow myself that same luxury, this is not the type of multi-tasking that I'm referring to.

The type of multi-tasking I'm talking about doesn't even need to take place in front of a computer screen. When I'm referring to multi-tasking, I simply mean accomplishing more than one thing at once. If you take a few minutes to think about your daily routine, there are likely certain activities that you will do that include periods of time where you're not doing anything. Some excellent examples from my own life are:

Walking to and from work
Working out
Biking
Waiting for someone to meet me
Getting ready in the morning

Walking to and from work and biking are essentially periods of down time for my mind. Sometimes it is important to have time to just let yourself zone out, and I encourage you to grant yourself this from time to time. However, the rest of the time, you could be putting your mind to work. One excellent way to accomplish this is using audiobooks and podcasts. Audiobooks are a great way to learn while you're doing something physical, allowing you to focus your mind on something constructive while your body works physically. There are podcasts available on virtually every subject these days, and these present great opportunities to increase the breadth of your knowledge. Have you got a recurring TODO item like "learn Spanish"? Download an audio book or podcast related to this topic and get started.

Working out represents a decent amount of downtime, as your mind is not really working throughout, and you also need to rest your muscles in between each set. I find that with a set of free-weights at home, I can usually complete emptying the dishwasher and folding my laundry by the time I am done my workout, simply by getting up and working on these chores in between each set.

By making sure that you have a notebook and pencil with you whenever you go out, and your iPod, you can ensure that you never have to sit around doing nothing while you wait for someone to meet you. You can work on brainstorming or planning out a project you have in mind with the notebook (and throw on music while you're doing this), or just spend the time listening to an audiobook or podcast.

You can make your morning routine more efficient by pouring yourself a bowl of cereal and bringing it with you into the bedroom while you pick out what you're going to wear for the day and do your hair. Some people have weird hang-ups about eating food anywhere but the kitchen and the dining room, but I don't think there's much validity to this (especially given that the bathroom is generally one of the cleanest places in your house. Let's not talk about your keyboard; you're not eating around that are you?). If your response to this is that you don't eat breakfast in the morning and you save time that way, then you should re-evaluate your priorities. Saving time in the morning at the expense of your health is the wrong way to go - eat your breakfast, and make time for it by multi-tasking.

Be Efficient

So those are some of the important lifehacks that I've taken on board, both recently and in the not-too-distant past. I recommend giving any of these a shot if you ever find yourself wishing that you had more time. Choose one of these that compels you, and commit yourself to trying it out for two weeks to see if it works for you. Whatever you do, make sure you keep one thing in mind: if you find yourself complaining about being bored, you are not allowed to complain about not having enough time.

Biphasic Sleep Journal - Week One

2009-08-23T16:30:50Z

I finished work last week, and had three weeks ahead of me. Prior to the end of work, I had been collecting a large number of projects that I wanted to tackle before school started. I will be writing later on about some of those, but today's topic is related to what is probably the weirdest project on my list.

This project is to move from sleeping in one single unbroken phase (usually 8 hours), to a biphasic sleeping pattern, consisting of a core sleep at night, and a nap during the day.

There are many reasons for doing this, but the most significant is that by changing to this sleeping pattern, I am able to go from requiring about 8 hours of sleep to 6 hours (in theory). If you are reading this blog, you likely have some kind of passing interest in productivity, as I write about the subject fairly often. Can you think of a lifehack or productivity trick that you have implemented recently that has netted you an extra two hours of spare time everyday? Most of us cannot answer "yes" to that question. I, however, can, and that is what this entry is about.

Two hours may not seem like a very big number to you when you first read it, but let me put that into perspective. We spend about 8 hours of our day sleeping (typically), which leaves us with 16 hours of wakefulness during which we can actually do stuff. Adding an extra two hours onto that is an increase of 1/8th to the amount of time you have available to you. At the end of the week, that is an extra 14 hours within which to do things. If you prefer the longterm picture, let's say I live to the age of 75. I have started this experiment at the age of 30, which means I can sleep biphasically for the next 45 years. That roughly translates to gaining an extra 5.5 years of life.

These claims probably sound grandiose, and that's fine. Hacking your sleeping habits is certainly not for everyone. Bay's initial reaction upon me mentioning this to her was "I don't like this at all". After discussing with her, we concluded that she didn't like it for the following reasons:

It's weird
We won't get to go to bed together anymore
She likes sleeping next to me

The first point is technically correct, but irrelevant. Something being weird is usually just an indication that something is different from the status quo. The virtue of simply being different from the status quo should never be a reason not to try something out. One of the more disappointing conversations I had recently was related to a friend telling me that he was a fan of the status quo, but without being able to provide any real validation to support this stance. The status quo is nothing other than what we are currently comfortable with due to familiarity.

The second point is totally valid. It's important to both of us to spend time chatting in bed, cuddling, reading, being close to each other, and well... yah. Fortunately, this point was easy to mitigate. I could simply plan my core sleep so that I would go to bed when Bay would, and get up earlier. My original plan was to stay up later and wake up with Bay, but it would not be a problem to switch this up so that we could have time in the evening together.

The last point is kind of romantic, but not really relevant beyond that. The time we spend sleeping is time during which we are almost entirely oblivious to the world. Our body is resting and recovering from the day, and in order to do this effectively, it switches off our receptiveness to external stimuli. Although spending more time sleeping together is a romantic notion, I would rather have extra time that I could spend with Bay during my waking hours due to the fact that I'd accomplished more of my chores during the early morning when she was asleep.

After talking this through, and letting Bay know that I was simply conducting an experiment for three weeks to see how things went, she acquiesced (though she continued to shake her head at her weird husband), and I figured out what I would do. The plan was this:

Core sleep of 4.5 hours from 11:00PM to 3:30AM
Nap of 1.5 from 4:00PM to 5:30PM

The nap time would hopefully be adaptable (as would the core sleep, depending on when Bay was ready), but I have no guarantee of this, so I just chose what might feel like a reasonable time to get some shut eye once school starts.

The other thing I planned was to journal about the experience, so that I could become part of the many polyphasic sleepers on the internet that are logging their own experiences, and so that I could maintain some objective distance and look back and review how things are going. This is, after all, an experiment.

So, without further ado, here is the first week of my journal based on the experience:

Bi-phasic Sleep Journal - Week One

Started: August 17

Day 1 (Monday)

Discussed options with Bay, and agreed that going to sleep together was something we wanted to maintain. Went to bed at 11:00 with Bay, and set my alarm for 3:30, aiming for 4.5 hours of sleep (three intervals of ninety minutes each). Woke up around 1:30ish, went to bathroom. Checked clock to make sure I'm on track, and fell back asleep. Woke up again at 3:20, checked alarm, went to bathroom and got up.

Took me a little bit of time to get into gear. Worked out, reviewed e-mail, completed a task off my TODO list and started on another, this time reviewing and learning about AppleScript.

8:00

Starting to get a little bit sleepy. Going to head out of the house to attempt to snap out of it. Yawning.

-Nap-

Fell asleep quite easily, and napped for the full time. Woke up at one point and realized I had been dreaming. This had occurred within less than 30 minutes, as my iPod was still playing and I'd set it to shut off in 30 minutes. This is the first time in my experiment that I've actually felt compelled to fall back asleep after getting up.

Day 2 (Tuesday)

Went to sleep with Bay at 11, and stayed up until around 11:20 talking. Set my alarm for 4 to give myself 10 minutes to fall asleep and then 4.5 hours from then until I needed to wake up. Alarm went off at 4 (I didn't wake up naturally before it this time), but it was quite easy to get up. I had obviously just finished a sleep cycle, as I was able to rise out of bed fairly quickly and didn't feel groggy. Brushed my teeth, worked out, and started on a few projects. It's now 6:00 and I still feel pretty on the ball.

Have not been yawning today, though it is now 12:30, and I can tell that my body is starting to prepare itself for a nap. My eyelids feel just slightly sandy.

-Nap-

Again fell asleep easily. I noted that I was partially aware of myself falling asleep, much like yesterday. Perhaps this is the doorway toward lucid dreaming.

I woke up briefly at 4:00 to check my alarm, out of fear that I was sleeping through it but this turned out to be baseless. Went back to sleep and woke up again at 4:23, and then got back to my routine. The most annoying part about sleeping is how greasy my face feels when I wake up - easily remedied by washing my face, still, annoying.

Otherwise I feel fully awake and refreshed. So far I'm enjoying biphasic.

Day 3 (Wednesday)

Again went to sleep at 11, aiming for consistency. This was probably the hardest time waking up yet. It wasn't really hard per se, it was just difficult to drag myself out of bed. I think I may have been in the final stages of REM sleep, as I was in the middle of some kind of imagery when my alarm went off. The biggest thing I miss is that feeling of waking up from 8 hours of sleep. However, I suspect that that may just be a mental thing, rather than an actual physiological thing. Based on my performance (physical and mental) I don't think I'm actually accumulating sleep debt, though that will remain to be seen toward the end of this week when I will feel most inclined to sleep in.

-Nap-

Falling into bed for the scheduled nap felt relaxing as always. I slept fairly soundly, waking up briefly before falling back asleep again, and woke up 10 minutes before my alarm went off - usually the indication of the end of my sleep cycle it seems.

Interestingly, when napping, I am usually much more aware of the process of me falling asleep, this time remaining conscious throughout the process of my limbs twitching a little bit prior to actually falling asleep. Again no trouble waking up, but I sure do hate the greasy feeling I have on my face whenever I take a nap. I've established the following routine upon waking up from a nap: brush mouthguard, brush teeth, wash face with cold water. This process is a familiar routine and helps get my mind back into the state of wakefulness. The cold water on my face feels great and refreshing.

Day 4 (Thursday)

I got up easily, but am finding it fairly difficult to stay focused and awake an hour later (5:00AM). This is the first morning where I have started things off by working out. I've made tea and starting off with some cognitive tasks - we'll see how things go.

After the rough start for the first hour, I'm back on track. The tea may have helped, or it could have been sitting down and doing something that demanded interaction and attention (today that was playing Super Street Fighter 2 - the previous three days it was working out). One thing that I find really nice about sleeping biphasically is that I no longer need to stress out about getting to bed too late.

Typically the amount of sleep that I get would be tied to when I get to bed, as I would not be able to sleep in past my alarm, which I would set to go off to give me enough time to wake up, get ready, and head out the door for work or school. With biphasic sleeping, since I'm typically getting up four hours before I would need to leave for work or anything, I have tons of leeway to stay up a little later than I would normally, without it impacting my ability to get the 4.5 hours that I need for my core sleep.

Being up early has dramatically improved my ability to devote some time to things that I've wanted to accomplish previously, such as dancing - it's pretty easy to book an hour of practice when I don't have any other demands on my time, so that's what I've been doing from 6:00 - 7:00 in the morning.

Day 5 (Friday)

It's getting easier to wake up in the morning, but getting up from the nap can still be a little bit frustrating, as I'm not used to the usual feeling of 'restarting the engine' in the afternoon that comes from waking from a nap. This weekend will be a good test of the biphasic sleeping pattern, and seeing how it fits in with the rest of my life. I have a bit of a dualistic nature when it comes to activity. During the week, I'm very focused on tasks, exercise, and a well-timed schedule. On the weekends, I love hanging out with friends, socializing, partying, and letting things flow in a manner that is much less regimented. Probably most significantly, while I still aim to get the right amount of sleep (I truly believe that getting good rest, drinking lots of water, exercising, and stretching are the closest you can get to a fountain of youth), the times I go to sleep are completely contingent on whatever I end up doing on Friday and Saturday. If I'm going out to the bar (rare), or heading to a friend's place for drinks, it's quite likely that I may not actually get into bed until 2:00AM the next morning. In the past, as long as I made sure I woke up around 9 or 10, I would get enough rest, and not lose my entire day (is there anything worse than sleeping in to noon? I hate doing this).

I'm heading out to a hiphop show with Brooke, Jo, Piper, and Jesse tonight at Plan B (WTF), and suspect that this will lead to a late evening. My intention is to act no differently than I normally would. If biphasic sleeping does not allow me to do the things that I normally would, it isn't going to be a useful thing for me.

-Nap-

Nothing specific to report about my nap today, other than to state that the worst part of biphasic so far is definitely having to go through the waking process a second time every day. When I say waking process, I mean, opening my eyes, shutting off my alarm, getting out of bed, brushing my teeth, cleaning my mouthguard, washing my face, and having something to eat to get things rolling.

The good news is that this is really the only bad thing I can say about it, and I absolutely love the way I feel the rest of the time. My energy levels are more consistent, and I feel motivated and energized throughout the day, rather than experiencing surges of energy at specific points during the day, followed by periods completely lacking in energy. Getting up at 3:30, which sounds utterly disgusting without any context, is awesome when you consider that I wake up easily and feeling fully rested, and then have three hours within which I can work on whatever I like before I even need to start thinking about getting ready for work, school, etc.

Day 6 (Saturday)

So, I had a good night last night, and after Plan B, we went to The Mint to hang out for a bit and chat before finding our separate ways home. I would elaborate more on the night, but this is a journal related to biphasic sleeping, and not a blog or a Facebook status update, so I'll stay focused.

I got in at 2:00 AM this morning, and I usually need about a half hour to wind down prior to being ready for bed. Additionally, I had been drinking at the club, so I was a still a little tipsy when my head hit the pillow at 2:30 (I did, however, make a point of drinking two large bottles of water, as I always do, to ensure that I didn't wake up feeling de-hydrated). I set my alarm for 4.5 hours later, and at 7:00, got up out of bed, once again, feeling refreshed and ready for the day. Honestly, I was pretty amazed. I figured that being out and getting to sleep later would have a detrimental effect on the whole system and play havoc with my new sleeping pattern, but it integrated perfectly.

The thing that I find fascinating is that the only real requirement here is that I get 4.5 hours of core sleep at some point before the next day. With a monophasic sleeping pattern, the main requirement is that you get 7.5 hours of sleep before you get back up. If you go to bed later, that's acceptable, provided that you stay in bed long enough to meet this requirement. You can then reset your sleeping pattern by going to sleep at a reasonable hour the following night and getting 7.5 hours again. Biphasically, it's the same thing. I just need to make sure that I get 4.5 hours of sleep during my core sleep, and can then reset again by taking my nap at the usual time, and going from there.

So, remarkably, I was able to go out to the club, have some drinks with some friends, come home, go to sleep at 2:30, sleep for 4.5 hours, and then wake up ready to go about my day as normal at 7:30 the next day. Pretty incredible isn't it? There is one drawback to combining inebriation with biphasic sleeping, and this is that instead of having eight hours within which my liver can process and extract the alcohol from my blood, it only has 4.5 hours. If you're in the habit of large and frequent drinking binges, you'll be able to wake up fine, but you're probably going to get out of bed and walk straight in to a wall. Then again, if you're in the habit of frequent drinking binges, you're probably not the sort of person that is particularly keen on being productive and hacking your life and your sleeping patterns like I am.

-Nap-

I met up with Davin and Jay this morning for breakfast (after being up for 2.5 hours), and then hung out and played Magic with them. After they left, I took my nap at 5:00PM, and then woke up, got ready, and headed out with Dan and Kellie for some drinks and conversation (great day!). Fall asleep for my nap has consistently been easy so far, and once again I woke up just before my alarm went off. After finishing up at the Bent Mast, I came home, tidied things up, and then went to bed at 1:45AM.

Day 7 (Sunday)

The end of the first week of my experiment! My alarm woke me at 6:30, and I got straight up out of bed and started the day. One of the things that I absolutely love about this sleeping habit is that I no longer feel like a slave to my sleeping tendencies. I recognize how cheesy that sounds, so let me try to explain. Normally on the weekends, I would go to sleep whenever I was ready to, and then set some time that I wanted to get up. I would try to ensure that I was getting 7.5 hours of sleep, but if I went to bed at 2:30 (I really enjoy getting stuff done late at night on the weekends), I would usually aim to arise at 9:00 in the morning, which meant I would only get 6.5 hours. In these cases, one of two things would happen: I would hit the snooze button 6 or 7 times before I was finally able to tear myself out of bed, OR, I would groggily pull myself out of bed and spend most of the day with low energy levels and require caffeine to rev myself up (which would then lead to further spikes in my energy levels).

Now that I'm sleeping biphasically, this cycle is shattered. The first key is that I am always aware of what time I go to bed, and what time I need to get up in order to ensure that I get three full cycles of sleep (at 90 minutes a cycle, that is 4.5 hours). By doing this, I'm ensuring that I never have my alarm go off and wake me up in the middle of REM sleep, and this is the situation that leads to you feeling completely blindsided when that alarm goes off. Getting woken in your REM sleep is the worst thing that you can do, as it robs you of the most important part of your sleep, and precludes your body from going through it's natural process of gradually coming out of that deep, deep slumber. Even if I stay up late, I don't need to worry about sleeping in through my day; even if I don't get into bed until 4:00AM, the latest I'm going to get up is 9:00 the next morning (allowing myself 30 minutes to fall asleep, and then 4.5 hours of actual sleep). I know this sounds ridiculous, but I actually feel like I've leveled up. Being in control of my sleep, and not the other way around, is amazing.

This is a significant discovery for me, and I think coming to this conclusion is enough reason for me to adopt and maintain this habit beyond the end of the experiment (which will be over in two more weeks).

Although initially I was concerned that having to nap would play havoc with my scheduling, it has not been an issue so far. So far I have been able to shift my nap as needed within about a four-hour window, which is quite a lot of leeway. I would not want to leave my nap much later than this, as I would start to feel a dip in energy (though probably less so than the middle of the day on a monophasic sleep schedule), and I would be pushing my nap and the next phase of my core sleep pretty close together. To really remain consistent, it is ideal to have your nap half-way between your previous and next core phases of sleep. I currently am not working (taking the time off to prepare for the Fall, when school will start), so I have the luxury of a fairly open schedule. I will have to see how and when I can fit napping into my schedule come the start of school, but unless there is something drastic preventing me from doing so, I will be aiming to maintain this new habit.

This marks the end of my first week of experimentation with biphasic sleeping, and the end of the first set of journaling. Although I had originally planned to publish the entire journal at the end of three weeks, this starting to reach a good length, and I think it makes more sense to publish on a weekly basis. I will continue to keep journals for the remaining two weeks, so keep it locked if you find this subject matter interesting.

Saiyonara

2009-08-14T16:23:14Z

Well, I've finished my last day at work. As a result of the fact that I've cleaned up all of my loose ends, I'm left with very little to do today - that will no doubt be a completely different story from my life a month from now.

The timeline for my last day was:

Last day of work:

8:00 Last day arriving at work

8:10 Pour last cup of coffee

8:30 Login and go through morning routine last time

9:30 Fill out timesheets for the last time ever

9:45 Last scrum at Refractions

10:00 Last coffee with Graham at work

1:15 Last JV lunch (while working at Refractions) downtown with Bay

3:30 Sent out goodbye e-mails to co-workers

3:45 Deleted archived e-mails from my computer

4:00 So long Refractions

While cleaning up my desk this week, I came across two of my logbooks that I had maintained when I first started.

I originally started maintaining a logbook when, during my first review, Paul Ramsey (the former president of Refractions, and someone for who I have a great deal of respect) mentioned that he noticed I worked better under pressure and when there was a lot on my plate. He recognized that that he too operated in this manner as well, but that something to work on would be to track what I was working on and to try and maintain a more consistent pace.

The logbook was my first attempt to do this, and really, my first attempt to begin any kind of system. About three years back, I realized that although I was now twenty-seven years old (thirty now!), with both a high-school and a university education, no one had ever taught me any kind of system for managing my tasks (really, for managing my life, both at work and at home). Before I even made this realization though, I knew that I wanted to pursue Paul's advice.

The logbook was the first attempt to accomplish this. Looking through the book is a bit nostalgic: projects that I've long since forgotten, and that have long since died. Attempts at organization that I now recognize as convoluted and problematic. Lists of TODO items that remain unchecked to this day (did these ever actually get done?). Even with all of these flaws, I still recognize the value that these first attempts brought me. They provided me with a starting point. They set me down a path, and gave me a base from which I could start evolving my own system. You can never go for a run if you don't take that first step, and that's exactly what this book was.

I scanned in some representative pages from each month, along with an appendix that I had created at the back, so that you can see how I started progressing along the path towards a full-fledged system like GTD, and get a feel for the missteps that it's okay to make as you attempt to get yourself organized (if you choose to). Let's repeat that one more time - it's okay to make mistakes. Take that first step!

The first two images are simply scans from the month of January and February. Although the domain and context of what I was working on isn't relevant, you can see from the way I was taking notes that there was still much to be desired.

The first scan shows an action item at the bottom, but with nothing to differentiate it from the rest of my notes. How would I know at a glance that this is something that I have to act upon, versus something that I can just use as reference for later on? What about the state of this action item? Did I ever actually complete this task? Did I just neglect to complete this? Did it simply stop being necessary? There's no way to tell what happened here. While I'm sure that I did in fact complete this item, you can see that it is important to create ways in your system that allow you to determine the answer to these questions quickly and at a glance. Otherwise we're just taking up valuable mental cycles that could be devote to more valuable tasks.

Unfortunately, I only realized now that I scanned in the wrong pages from my appendix, so I no longer retain the code I used to mark up the pages. The main colour used were blue and green. Blue items indicated discussions I had with co-workers, while green items indicated useful information or knowledge to reference back to later. Orange indicated important TODO items. Whenever I had a page where I had created one of these items, I would colour the top or bottom corner (or both if I had multiple items on a page), allowing me to quickly determine if I had something that needed to be referenced on a given page.

This system quickly got out of hand, as it is impractical to flip through pages of a book trying to find the correct coloured corner that corresponds to a piece of information I need. There is no ability to categorize a given piece of reference information, as it sits forever on a page in the book. I have no folder that I can put the information in, and no ability to search through the book, other than sequentially flipping through each page. Obviously this system left a lot to be desired, but it was a starting point.

Once I started PMing projects, I moved away from a static book and to a system that was more focused on the GTD approach to managing tasks, using looseleaf paper, and folders to organize it.

That's the end of my time spent PMing. Onwards to new challenges!

A conversation on GTD

2009-08-12T21:11:21Z

A friend and I were talking recently about GTD, and some of the difficulties he was having with his own implementation. The conversation we ended up having turned out to be a good primer on some additional GTD tips, so I thought I'd reproduce the conversation here (after anonymizing my friend's input).

The initial discussion was about the difficulty of actually starting a project, even after you've come up with the next step for it. My first e-mail was a sample of what my own PROJECT folder looked like:

Adam Quiney wrote:
-----------------

If you're interested, here's what my Project folder looks like

--Adam

PROJECTS
----------------

* Finish re-grouting bathtub
    * NS: Get out grout and finish job

* Consolidate office supplies (don't need second plastic tray device)
    * Next step: Talk to Bay about this, and look through the two to see what we have

* Set up RTM
    * NS: Read Lifehacker's guide to RTM

* Change tagTrack script for iTunes, to allow replacing existing tags
    * NS: Review code and determine where this is set

My friend wrote:
---------------------------

Nice set up. Here's mine, and I encourage your criticism of the way I have it set up.

TODO

Now:
Start business - set up web site, talk to friend about his start-up
Return saw to dad - clean saw
Return clothes to friend - put them in squash bag

Soon:
Clean and organize garage - clear out garbage
Closet doors - install hardware attachments
Finish flooring - measure and cut bathroom boarding
Baseboards - caulk trim

Later:
Learn to speak French fluently - any courses available through work?

Adam Quiney wrote:
-----------------

It's pretty well organized, and I notice that you use lists proper to GTD - Now, Soon, Later. I tried this originally, but it didn't quite fit with me. Now, I just have a TODO list (included below) and a PROJECT list. The project list mostly has stuff that you've got under Now and Soon.

Your side-consulting business is a good project, but I would break that down further. The major project is "Start side business". There's another project under that which is "Set up website". The next step for setting up the website is "Meet with Adam and talk about what is involved", and the _true_ next step for that item is "Get in touch with Adam, arrange meeting". I would track the projects under their own heading, and just move over the next steps when you think you are ready to work on them. That way your TODO list is much less daunting, and this will eliminate one of the passive barriers to getting stuff done - seeing _massive_ projects on your list just makes you not want to do them. Seeing "Get in touch with Adam and set up meeting" is an easy two-minute task involving an e-mail.

You can see that my TODO items don't have next steps for them, because I usually only move a "next step" type item over to the TODO list. That way my TODO list only ever has small, easily digestable chunks of work on it.

You'll notice I also have a "WAITING FOR" category on my list - that's where I put anything that /was/ on my TODO list, that I've acted on, and am now waiting for something before I can pick it back up. Eg, your list would have under WAITING FOR: "Arrange meeting with Adam. WF: (Waiting for) Adam to get back to me".

Whenever I notice that something has sat on my list for a while and hasn't gotten done, I re-examine it and ask "Why aren't I doing this?". Sometimes the answer is "Because I don't care about it" in which case I can just delete it and forget about it. Sometimes the answer is "Because it's way too big", then I break it down further and replace thenext step on my todo list.

Thoughts?

--Adam

TODO
----------

* Transfer music from External Drive to Mini and MacBook

* Blog

* Prune Minibonsai

* Clear out voice memos

* Upgrade Quicksilver (on desktop)

Waiting For
-----------------

Chores
----------

* Recycling
* Vacuum

Download
--------------

* Update for Firefox

My friend wrote:
--------------------

That's great input.

I agree with you - the TODO of setting up a business isn't sufficiently broken down by merely listing the two rather vague next steps I have beside it.

The notion of "setting up a web site" in itself isn't sufficient, since that isn't a task I can just sit down and complete without employing several other kinds of next steps you talked about. In addition, talking to my friend about how his business start up went also isn't a great 'next step.' The appropriate one would really be 'email him to meet for coffee.' 'Email Adam to set up meeting', and 'Email friend
to meet for coffee' are both simple stress-less tasks that I could accomplish in minutes, but both would put me well on my way to accomplishing necessary steps in achieving important input required to
achieve my goal.

I like the notion of breaking things up into both a project list, and a todo list. I could throw 'next steps' onto my todo, with a more elaborate project by project break down in a separate list.

----------

So that's that. Talking this over, got me thinking about implementing contexts within my system, and so I sat down and set up exactly that in my TODO list. If anyone's interested in hearing more about this, let me know. Otherwise it'll be a post for another day.

GET DOWN!

2009-08-07T03:51:58Z

Man oh man, what a week!

I gave my notice three weeks ago. I had a week of vacation time left over, so I worked two weeks, had a week of vacation, and then will work one more week starting Monday. We had some money that I had been given for contract work that I'd done, and Bay got to go to Brazil this year, so we agreed that it would be cool for me to attend a dance camp being offered in Vancouver (for the first time ever).

The dance camp was called Get Down. Get Down represents a unique and rare opportunity: a chance to learn and train with the founders of some of the styles I'm into, such as popping and locking. Let me repeat that: the founders of those styles. It's a little surreal being in class and having the teacher tell you "Now, this move is called the Romeo-twist, because my brother was wearing these shoes called Romeos, and we used to say 'Yo, twist those Romeos!'".

The instructors teaching are:

Greg Campbellock Jr

Greg did most of the choreography for the original lockers (back in the day when they were on Soul Train). You can see some of that original footage below. Cheesy? Yah, a little. But it's also way funky.

Popping Pete

Popping Pete (who's actually named Timothy) is Boogaloo Sam's brother. Boogaloo Sam, created popping and boogaloo. Popping Pete has been heavily influential in the creation and evolution of those styles. You can see some of his dancing here:

Sugar Pop

Sugar Pop is one of the members of the Electric Boogaloos, and someone who has come from the start of locking and popping to its current state. You can see Sugar Pop getting down here:

Caleaf

One of the founders of House dancing. You can watch Caleaf dancing (he really starts to get going around 1:30) here:

So, now you've got an idea of the caliber of talent that we've been fortunate enough to train with. The best part is that all of these guys are really cool, and really good teachers. On the first day, I was a little worried. Sugar Pop went right into teaching us choreography, and I find that I really prefer to learn technique myself, so that I can then take that and use it in my own freestyle dancing. However, as the days have passed, I've gained a real appreciation for the fact that all of these guys are really working to teach us that while technique is important, it's the fact that each of these styles is ultimately about dancing. If you're not dancing, you're not doing the style, and it's that simple. You can sit there and hit the hardest pops anyone has ever seen in their life, but if you aren't dancing, it doesn't matter - you're holding the music hostage, and that's not what dancing is about. Dancing is a visual representation (and interpretation) of a given piece of music.

I've been reflecting on the experience over the course of the weekend, whenever I find myself with a few spare cycles for thought. I realized that I went into the camp with a set of expectations and thoughts about what it was that I needed to learn. I left the camp having learned something quite different from my initial expectations, and far more valuable. When the first couple of classes didn't meet my initial expectations, I was a little bit disappointed.

"Why aren't they teaching us technique?", I thought to myself. The fact is that they were teaching us technique, but they were doing it within the framework of teaching us to dance. You can't have just technique and no dance - that's not.... dancing.

One of the things that Sugarpop (incidentally, although I really liked Popping Pete, by the end of the week, I had gained tremendous respect for Sugarpop, both for his teaching ability, and his attitude in general) stressed a number of times was that popping is a style of dance that it is very easy to hide behind. What he meant by this was that it is very easy to use good technique in popping and simply do that without having any groove or dance behind it. People watching will be dazzled by the technique, and the person can get away without actually doing any real dancing under that technique.

The more we worked throughout the week, the more I felt like I've been focusing on technique to the detriment of my ability to progress as a dancer. Only time will tell where the correct balance lies, but it's certainly something for me to keep in mind.

Know your history

This week was a lot of history. I've always known a good amount of the history surrounding popping and locking, but none of that knowledge contained an understanding of the social dances that went into creating these styles. Every time we'd learn a new dance from hiphop's roots (and often dances that I've seen people at weddings do (poorly) just for fun), sure enough, there'd be some element or technique in popping or locking that had integrated that original dance in some capacity.

Learning these original dances really helped provide a greater understanding of the context surrounding the styles that I love, and also provided a really solid foundation to grab onto whenever unsure of what to do next. Unsure of what your next move is? No problem, just drop down into the original dance and get back into the groove.

Find. Your. Groove. This was really one of the biggest things we had hammered into us this week. Don't go out there and dive into moves. Even though moves and tricks are cool, they can never be allowed to supercede just getting down.

Unfortunately, I'm finding it hard to articulate exactly what it was that I learned. Possibly because it was fairly orthogonal to the way in which I'm used to being taught. I suspect that the next couple of weeks will lead to a number of revelations on my part. The trickiest part about this experience has simply been that there was so much knowledge to absorb. You do your best to pick up on everything, but it's just impossible to fully retain everything that was passed my way, and even more so to parse and figure out what that information actually means to me as a dancer and a teacher.

Regardless of what I end up pulling away from the experience, I can absolutely attest to the fact that it has been one of the most significant periods of growth to date in my journey as a dancer, and there's not really much more I can say to top that.

Another year, another festival

2009-08-03T03:59:13Z

Another August long weekend has come to pass, and in doing so, another iteration of the Victoria Electronic Music Festival has come and gone. Two years ago, I volunteered for the first time at the festival. The last year, I was a member of the management team that ensured that the festival was a success (I'm happy to say that it was).

This year, I made the difficult decision to step back from my previous responsibilities of the festival. Although I really care about the electronic music scene in Victoria and really want to give back to it in any way that I can, I also care about the quality of the work that I feel I am able to deliver. Last year, I felt like I spent a lot of time trying to deal with (and ultimately remove) the bottlenecks that I saw (pretty reasonable, given that my day job is to alleviate bottlenecks). Unfortunately, I felt like those bottlenecks either remained, or had been replaced by new ones, this year, and so I had to make the difficult decision to bow out of my responsibilities.

Nevertheless, I wanted to participate in some capacity, and opted to volunteer again, as I had the two years ago. Given my previous experience, Chelsie and Bruce put me in charge of managing the volunteers that had signed up for roles in audience services. In the previous years, this had been a role that had met with a high degree of attrition. That is to say, a large number of volunteers had simply left part way through their shifts. Part of the blame for this can fall on the volunteers, but when people aren't being paid for their time, it is important to provide them with a sense of purpose and some direction. Without either of those two things, they really don't have any reason to stick around. My role this year was to provide them with a point of contact (Chelsie, the volunteer coordinator, really has her hands full as it is managing all of the volunteers for everything else, and manning the volunteer booth) and to attempt to alleviate the problems related to volunteer attrition.

The role itself was pretty adaptive, which is really the position I like to be in the most. It means that there's plenty of room for creativity, and hey, if things start to go sideways, we can throw out the playbook and take a new direction. For my part, I really enjoyed being in a role where I got to check in with people and say:

"Hey, are you having fun?"

"Yah!"

"Awesome! Keep doing that! Is there anything I need to be aware of?"

"Umm, I don't think so..am I doing a good job?"

"You're doing an awesome job, check in with me in 30 minutes!"

Given that I've been a project manager for almost five years, it's rare that I'm giving the opportunity to check in with someone and provide them with the single ultimatum that I want them to be having fun.

The volunteers that showed up were all awesome, and I would like to extend a thank you to Kim, Garrett, Chris, Stuart, and Chris. You guys were awesome. A special thanks to Erin, who stuck around for the entirety of my shift and was a trooper right up until the end. If you were around on Saturday, you would have seen Erin alternating between dancing hard behind the DJ booth and cleaning up garbage and handing out flyers when I asked him too. Overall, I was given a really awesome set of volunteers and it really made my job easier.

Volunteers are given a free pass out to both clubs on one of the two nights that VEMF runs - either Saturday or Sunday. Since I'm currently on the ferry and on my way to Vancouver tonight (Sunday), I had wisely chosen to take my pass for Saturday's night. However, by the end of my shift, I was completely exhausted. Although I really wanted to head over to Tammy's and hang out with Tammy, Emmy, Lexi, Justin, and my friend from way back in the day, Amanda, I was played around with the idea for only five minutes before I realized it simply wasn't going to happen. I guess being thirty eventually catches up with you, but don't worry kids, it's all worth it and I don't regret missing the night out at the club one bit.

I gave it some thought, trying to rationalize enough to be able to convince myself that I actually wanted to go out. However, after playing with the idea for a few minutes, I realized that it wasn't a question of whether I could convince myself to go out (I could); It came down to whether I really wanted to. In this case, I realized that I really just wanted to go home and sleep, and it was okay to do that. So, home I went, and home I slept.

In terms of the festival, this year suffered from many of the same problems that I found last year did. The music was a major issue, featuring far too much from one or two genres that really didn't make me want to get up and dance. Now, everyone has their own preference when it comes to music, and their own styles and genres that they are going to prefer. However, dancing is one of the things that I do, and I do it as often as I can. When it comes to a music festival, I figured that if you're able to run ten hours of music and only make me feel the music enough to really dance for one of those hours, it's a bit of a miss in terms of audience connection.

Having said that, most of the crowd appeared to be loving what was being played, so perhaps my tastes have just matured beyond that which is mainstream for our electronic scene. Davin was playing after hours at the Ambrosia event centre, and I know that that would certainly have struck a chord with me. Maybe it was just the music that they chose to feature on the main stage. In any case, it would be nice to get a little more variety on the mainstage, beyond drum and bass and driving house. Perhaps some deeper house, or some more breaks, or maybe even some progressive. I would really like to see the line-up for future festivals emphasize two things: diversity, and dancing.

One thing I noticed in particular this year was that volunteering definitely precludes me from enjoying the festival to the full extent. When there's a beer garden, great weather, friends, and good music, I really want to spend most of my time enjoying those things. Volunteering, and even more so, managing volunteers, precludes me from indulging in any of those things beyond a cursory experience. Is it worth it? Yes. Definitely. But, next year, I think I will try to make sure that I am able to get the evening of Saturday to spend with friends and to party. Sometimes you just want to cut loose.

Frustration

2009-07-24T19:05:58Z

Argh.

You ever have those periods of time when you feel like there are things you should be doing, and you're not doing them? Or where you can tell there's something intangible pulling at the back of your head, but you just can't place your finger on it? Or maybe you come home from work and feel like you should actually be doing something, but instead you just sit in front of the TV?

I'm sure you have, because we're all human, and this is just a natural part of the cycle we go through on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis (the frequency is different for everybody).

The more I learn to practice GTD effectively, the less often I feel this way, as I can allow my brain to embrace the mind like water ideal, and return to old ideas when I see fit. Still, it is impossible to feel and act productively one hundred percent of our time, and so the goal must be to maximize the amount of time we can exist in this state, and learn to accept (and yes, minimize, though this is less important than acceptance) the times when we do need to feel the way I currently do.

As an exercise to break out of this mental state, I write. As of late, two things have been on my mind more anything else: squash and dancing.

I hav been dancing a lot lately, as we are running two jam sessions a week at Vibestreet Dance, and that requires that I come up with something to teach twice a week. I can't even rely on teaching the same thing twice, as the same students may show up, and I end up feeling guilty about not being able to provide something new to them. Maybe this is just something that I need to get over, as part of this whole exercise should be of benefit to myself, not just my students. A teacher that is not gaining something from each lesson that they teach is not missing out on part of the teaching experience, as are their students.

I have taken a couple of workshops lately, and they have been very helpful in showing me new ways of teaching something, as well as many new techniques that I would like to work on and incorporate into my own styles of movement. Recently, I've been given lessons in breaking, locking, popping, and house dancing. That's a lot of stuff! Getting lessons in these new styles of dance is awesome, and is opening up my awareness and broadening my own inspiration to a great extent. However, this only results in frustration if I can't find the time to actually practice what I'm learning. House, locking, and breaking are all very new styles to me, and really require that I take the time to sit down by myself and practice the basics. This is hard to do at home because of the way I have been feeling.

Even though I'm a reasonably experienced popper, I will never be fully satisfied with my level of skill (this is kind of a general theme for my approach to things I'm truly passionate about). I often hesitate to teach something in class that I haven't had the time to sit down with and internalize. Part of the solution here, I suppose, is just accept that nobody's perfect, and that even if I'm still learning something, I can help the class with it. One of the things that I really want to avoid is attempting to show my students something that I'm still learning myself, and in doing so, teach them bad habits, or end up getting them frustrated as I cannot break it down very well.

If you've read through the paragraph above, you've just seen me provide myself with some therapy, as I think I've come up with the solution to my first problem - just do it, and don't worry about whether or not the class is disappointed that I'm not perfect at a move. We all need to learn, and there's nothing wrong with learning along with the rest of the class. Even better if I can provide a tiny bit of direction to help them along the right path.

The other thing that I think I probably need is a couple of sessions in the park with my ipod to just go over the techniques that I've been taught lately and internalize those. In GTD we have the concept of an open loop - something that requires action and is tugging at our mind. Everything that I've learned lately is sitting in that same space. It's occupying space in my head, saying "You should put some time into working on me, otherwise you'll lose this knowledge".

The other thing tugging at my mind has been squash. Although my opportunity to increase the amount of time and effort I'm putting into dancing has been incredible, and something that I've wanted to do for a looooong time, it's taken away from my ability to play squash. Although I've certainly been keeping myself fit (dancing requires a lot of energy, and I'm riding my bike as often as possible), I can feel the rust starting to creep up on my squash game, and this drives me nuts. Part of the reason for that is because I trained so hard this past season, and was really feeling good about where my efforts had led me.

Although all of our hobbies should be things that we do for fun, and don't become a burden on our mind, it's difficult for someone like me to make that leap and just let something be. That's the nature of life though - if you want to do more of one thing, you are going to have to sacrifice something else.

In an effort to have my cake and eat it to, one of the projects I have set aside for myself to take on once I end my tenure at work, is biphasic sleep. The notion of biphasic sleep sounds extremely silly when you initially hear about it: go to sleep more frequently in order to sleep less overall. With one single phase of sleep during a twenty-four hour period, our body generally requires eight hours of sleep. However, by breaking our sleep up, we are able to train our body to fall into REM sleep more quickly (which is the part of sleep that is evidently important), and thus require less sleep overall.

Although some people are absolutely insane and have managed to function quite effectively (arguably more effectively, if some of the blogs out there are to be believed) on as little as six twenty-minute naps a day (that's a mere two hours of sleep in a twenty-four hour period!), the goal I'm setting for myself is quite a bit more modest, and is based on the Hispanic tradition of siesta. The aim is to reduce my core sleep period to about five or six hours, and supplement that with a twenty-minute nap in the evening. In doing so, I will be able to create (as though by magic) an extra two hours of spare time, everyday.

This almost sounds too good to be true, and it very well may be. However, I enjoy an experiment as much as the next guy, so we'll see how things go. I could end up with an extra two hours of spare time every night (which may also be essential, if the workload required for Law is what I'm told it is), or I could fail spectacularly, in which case I will have spent a couple of weeks deprived of sleep, and return to my normal monophasic sleeping schedule. The worse-case scenario doesn't strike me as that bad, so why not try it right?

Anyhow, I think that's a sufficient ramble. Our drop-in sessions at Vibestreet have been growing steadily, and last Monday we had about twelve people in attendance to learn some popping from myself, and some breaking from Steve (good strength training!). If you're interested in learning more about any of this, drop a comment and I can blog and elaborate further.

The end of one story, the beginning of another

2009-07-19T01:00:32Z

On Friday of last week, I handed in my notice to let my employers know that I would be leaving the company in one month's time. This action is a milestone indicative of plans that have been underway for over a year.

I try to be a fairly risk-verse person, and as a result, I do my best to avoid counting my chickens before they have hatched. Going to school to pursue law is not a decision to be taken lightly, and they system helps ensure that by putting into place a number of hoops that the potential candidate needs to jump through.

About 18 months ago, Bay and I took a trip island for brunch in Nanaimo. Brunch was nice, but the real value was the opportunity to talk to each other about where we both currently felt in our respective jobs. The end result of this trip was that we came back with a concrete set of next steps to act upon in order to making something that had previously only been fanciful into a reality. Bay made the decision to return to school to get an MBA, and so, came home, registered to write the GMAT, studied for the GMAT, and began stressing out about the GMAT.

I began the process of looking into what it would take to start writing the LSAT, what entry requirements existed, and figuring out how to break the news to my parents (further education is no doubt exciting, but it does come with a hefty price-tag, of which we would no doubt be hoping to borrow some money from Mum and Dad to make ends meet).

Writing the LSAT was no peach, and I guess they make it fairly excruciating to weed people out. Although I've got plenty of experience writing tests under a time limit, I was not used to this format. I found myself writing as fast as I could and scrambling to get every question completed in time (and correctly), only to put my pencil down, take a breath, and be told that our time was up and we needed to move on to the next section. By the end of that day, I was exhausted and didn't want to consider what it would mean if I didn't get a reasonable grade and had to rewrite.

Fortunately my score was pretty good, and my undergraduate GPA was also good. I wrote the admissions officer at UVic to ask if she felt my chances were reasonable that I would be offered a position. It was with a big sigh of relief that I checked my e-mail last Summer while we were in Nova Scotia and read that if I had correctly calculated my GPA, I would most likely be receiving an offer.

That is a massive if, so I probably spent the next three months recalculating it over and over to make sure that I wasn't mistaken. When you hear things like that, your mind starts to play games with you. Bay and I were willing to move to Vancouver or out East to pursue school if that was necessary, but it would be nice to stay in Victoria for at least a few more years. I didn't have any choice but to wait to hear from UVic, and to begin preparing applications for other universities in the meantime.

In time, I did receive an e-mail from UVic letting me know that they were in fact offering me a position to start Law in the Fall, and that I could stop shaking and sweating. Huzzah!

After that, it was simply a matter of hurry up and wait. It is never easy to sit still when you have a new pursuit and direction, and this is especially true for individuals like myself, that thrive on growth and overcoming challenges. The remaining months of work have been difficult. Not because the work itself has been challenging or hard to accomplish, but because I know that I have reached the end point for my interest in this path, and that I have a new path to pursue.

That brings us full circle back to the beginning of this post, as I have now provided my notice of departure, and am tying off all remaining loose ends. Five years is a very long time to be at one company, and I'm not certain whether or not I will find myself in a similar position again. It is almost impossible to accurately ascertain that until you actually come face-to-face with the same situation.

During my tenure here, I have learned a great number of things. Many of them related to the various aspects that make a software project come to fruition, but also many related simply to the act of effectively managing both projects and people (and believe me, the majority of project management is about managing people, not the project itself). I've also learned a good deal about HR, both good and bad.

I've met some good friends through work, and have learned a large number of skills that I'm confident I will be able to apply in whatever field I eventually end up working in (GTD anyone?).

It is difficult to say whether or not I will return to the role of managing projects in the future. I know that I have a knack for the role, and possess many of the innate skills that are needed to effectively manage a project, but, my biggest concern would be that I be able to find new aspects of this kind of work that continue to challenge me. Regardless, I'm not the sort of person to mentally shut doors on anything, and if an opportunity presents itself that I think will be rewarding, I will be willing to go for it. I don't really know of any other way to live life.

Revealing the fact that I'm returning to school to pursue Law has been met with an interesting range of reactions. Many of my closer friends usually say "Ah yeah, that makes sense" (with the implication that I argue too much and am generally a heartless prick - maybe I'm inferring that). People that are not particularly close with me, or with which I have a strictly working relationship, generally react with "Really? That's a big shift!". I suppose that in some ways it is, but the ability to discern what rules we are currently constrained by, and how we can operate and find a solution within those rules is really the crux of both the project manager and the lawyer. The rules just happen to be defined differently (one by competing business and political interests, the other by codified laws and our bill of rights).

For those curious, I am initially drawn to intellectual property law, and for a number of reasons. First of all, I think that my background will serve me well in this field, as I have a good deal of experience not only with managing and directing efforts in this realm, I also have a very strong understanding of the entire procedure, from start to finish (requirements, all the way up to implementation and delivery). This field of law is also particularly interesting these days, as our technologies are opening up more and more doors every day, and challenging existing copyright laws that have previously been bound and determined by some fundamental principles (such as "reproducing something like a book is difficult to do, and thus not an offence that will be committed frequently").

I think that's a sufficient update into my professional life. Next up is an update on dancing. Keep it locked.

Still here...

2009-07-06T03:57:46Z

I'm still here, there just hasn't been much recently inspiring me to write. In the meantime, here are some excellent dance videos to entertain yourself with:

Crazy Scandinavian's

These guys may look goofy, but they've definitely put some work into their isolations. Although I think there's room for them to work on their technique, this video's giving me a few ideas for what I'll go over next drop-in class.

Hilty and Bosch, Featuring Co-Thkoo

This is an excellent video to see the difference between popping and locking. Most people that don't have any experience with the different styles think that they are the same thing. Locking is actually the older dance (and was created before hiphop, breaking, and popping), and is based more on funkiness and a limited move set. The guys wearing black shirts are two of my favorite lockers from Japan (a country with a lot of incredible lockers).

The guys in the white vests are performing popping. You can tell the difference if you look closely. The poppers movements are punctuated with sharp hits, and are generally more angular in appearance. The lockers movements are defined by faster movements with more flair and funk. Wrist rolls, arm rolls, knee drops, and and points are all some of the locking techniques to look out for.

One very cool thing that my friend Jesse pointed out in this video is the symmetry of the choreography. Although the two dance styles are often quite disimilar, the choreography that these guys are doing has been put together such that one group of dancers will perform a movement, and then the next group will perform similar movements and angles, but using the techniques associated with their respective styles.

JRock and Pandora, Tutting

This is a very cool routine showing the technique of tutting. You can tell just from the YouTube preview what the general idea is: assume geometric shapes with your body and arms that are reminiscent of egyptian hieroglyphics, and the way Bugs Bunny used to move when he would mimic egyptians in those corny cartoons.

This routine is especially cool because they've choreographed it to use two people. However, this isn't a necessary aspect of tutting, and it works just as well (well, maybe not quite as striking, but still cool) with one person.

Tutting is a technique that I have only been working on for about two months, as I was always averse to trying to learn it because of the problem I had getting my wrist to make some of the angles. While you can train your wrist by stretching it out each day, you can also eliminate the need to hit certain angles through creativity.

Poppin' John

An excellent video submitted by Poppin' John for Mr. Wiggles internet video contest (correct me if I'm wrong). Poppin' John does awesome things with waves, and is always frustrating for me to watch and try to fathom how the hell he's come up with his vocabulary.

I especially like his technique of putting one hand over the back of his head, and then using that hand to push waves down and out his other arm. Very cool.

Anyhow, that's all I've got for today. If any of these videos or techniques interest you and you'd like to learn more, come check out one of my classes at Vibestreet Dance. The techniques look complicated, but with practice, you can master them and trip out your friends too! Seriously though, popping is an awesome style of dance to learn, and a ton of fun to play around with. It's never too late to learn..