Jan/10

A new year

1 Comment | Posted by Adam in Uncategorized

Uhhh… it’s been over a month-and-a-half since my last post? Holy cow.

Since the last update I’ve made, I’ve completed my first class in my career as a student of Law, and I’ve written five mid-terms for my other year-long classes. The exam period wasn’t too bad, though there were plenty of tensions running high. Exam period has always felt a little bit more relaxed to me, as, aside from the time that you actually need to spend writing the exam, you have freedom to spend your time however you like. Ideally that time should be spent reviewing, but I get to decide how and when I do that review.

I haven’t gotten any results back from exams yet, so I only have my own impressions to go on. However, accounting for that, I’m pretty happy with how everything panned out. I put enough work in during the term itself that my review process was pretty relaxed and didn’t feel like I needed more time or was under a great amount of pressure to review and process all of the information we had covered up to that point. I began the process of writing my outlines about two weeks before classes wrapped up, as I figured that would be a lengthy process, and wanted to get as much of a head start as possible. This also allowed me time to take more than a single iteration at some of my outlines; after getting to the end of the last one, I had a better feel for how I wanted to structure the ones I had already completed.

It’s highly likely that I’ll get my grades back and be disappointed with the results. I hold myself to a high standard, and this is the first time I’ve been tested in any capacity on brand new material. However, getting back those grades will simply present an opportunity to adapt the system and methods that I’ve currently got in place – not a failure, or a missed opportunity. The only missed opportunity would be the one where I neglect to take anything away from getting back grades that tell me I need to adapt.

The holidays were awesome, and deeply relaxing. I sat down multiple times to do some schoolwork and put myself ahead of schedule, but there was no part of me that actually wanted to do the work. Sure, doing it would have put me ahead of schedule, but in times like this, it’s important to listen to what our body and head are telling us, and allow ourselves breaks when we deserve them. The Fall term was a bit of a roller-coaster: meeting over a hundred new people, learning new material and a new approach to thinking, and re-adapting my priorities to suit the new demands on my time.

Adapting priorities is always tricky. School and my relationship need to remain at the very top of my list. I made a decision to return to invest in myself and return to school. To do anything but assign that a top priority would be a waste of my investment and time.

Although it’s mostly obvious that my relationship should be at the top of my list of priorities, it never hurts to remind myself of that fact. It’s also important to note that there’s not really any relationship that I know of that doesn’t require work. When the pressure gets on and things get stressful, it’s easy to get complacent, and let your relationship take a back seat to everything else. But this isn’t the coping mechanism that either of us want to turn to when things get tight.

Fortunately, I’ve managed to stay on top of most of the goals that I’ve set out for myself this year. I’ve managed to continue playing squash a couple times a week, and continue teaching one dance class a week and finding time to practice. The biggest sacrifice that I’ve had to make has been blogging. I really enjoy writing and the opportunity to articulate new areas of growth and learning. But after coming home from sitting in classes all day, and then reading for another couple of hours, I’m completely burned out, and don’t have any mental energy left to devote to writing out a decent entry. So that’s where the sacrifice has been made. I’m not happy to see that change, but if it means that I can maintain most of the rest of my life for the next three years, then that’s the choice I have to make.

Until another two months…

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Nov/09

Update, pure and simple

0 Comments | Posted by Adam in Dancing, Design, Habits, Lifehacking, Management, Minutiae, Productivity, Squash, Uncategorized, Updates on me

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in, and that is a tough thing to feel slipping. When the crunch periods are on, it’s hard to find the time or mental energy to think about subjects that I want to expand upon; when the crunch periods are off, it’s hard to motivate myself to do even more writing. As you can see, it can be a challenge trying to find a place to write creatively in there. When time is a scarce commodity, the best approach for me is usually to go back to the basics, so that’s how this post rolls. Just an update for you, and an opportunity to do some writing that isn’t schoolwork for me.

School..

has been going really well.

This past week, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve felt like the material has been starting to sink in, and the landscape is a little bit more clear to me. We also got our first midterm grades back, which was a welcome piece of feedback that I think we were all ready for. I did better than my expectations, and so that made the pill a lot easier to swallow, but I think that most of us were really just happy for the opportunity to be given a benchmark. Our professor sagely commented “for those of you who did well.. Don’t fall in love with it”, and so I will be making an effort to remain vigilant as we continue onward. I don’t know what other option I really have.

After the last couple of weeks, the remembrance day holiday was a welcome reprieve, and even though one I had a make-up class scheduled on Friday, the workload has been a little bit lighter this week. I think that I’m also starting to gain a better understanding of how I can best absorb the material, which is making me a little more efficient. That’s the hope, anyway – I won’t be able to tell anything for sure until I have the means to test that: time passing and more data. So, we’ll see. If nothing else, I have certainly been trying out a number of different means for approaching this material. On that note…

Habits and productivity..

are a mandatory topic in any blog post.

This wouldn’t feel like a blog entry if I didn’t include some notes about productivity or habits of mine, as of late. In the process of training myself better moderation, I’ve had some minor epiphanies, which has been exciting. The opportunities in life for growth are really a significant aspect of what makes me tick, and so it’s always exciting when I’m lucky enough to reflect on one of those opportunities as it’s occurring.

The first thing I’ve noticed about my own habits, and I suspect, many others, is that training moderation is easier when we give ourselves the opportunity for flexibility. When it isn’t absolutely necessary (it rarely should be) to abstain from something, a flexible system with clear boundaries will provide you with a habit that has a greater chance of sticking for the longterm. Abstinence does not provide you with any opportunity to adapt to new circumstances, and is not really a practice in moderation at all. Some people may tell you that abstinence is a virtue, but my own belief will always be that life and happiness are about balance, and part of that balance is the skill of moderation.

The most significant thing about that has come out of this process has been my growing understanding and ability to articulate the concept that moderation is a skill. The significance of this discovery is that I can now begin to approach this skill with the wisdom and hindsight that I’ve gained in the past, trying to train other skills. Never mind that – the fact that moderation is a skill at all means that it’s not just some innate ability that someone is born with, but rather something that you can make better, over time, if you wish.

Some of my own thoughts as I’ve begun to think more about this notion are that:

Moderation works best in a framework

A framework provides you with some kind of boundary. It gives you a benchmark from which to practice moderation. If you take away these boundaries or benchmarks, then you will fall into the trap of shifting baselines, a concept pioneered (I believe) by the thoughtful Randy Olsen (his movie Flock of Dodos is excellent). The longer you spend doing something a certain way, the more natural that way feels, and the more difficult it becomes to objectively assess where you sit. (Randy applied this concept to the Great Barrier Reef, I believe, noting that the baseline for what the reef looked like when it was healthy shifted dramatically between his time as a student, and when he took his own students to see it. The reef had shrunk and withered significantly, but to the class, this was the baseline that they would be acquainted with, and see as natural, dulling the sense of urgency to do something to maintain its health as an entity).

With a clear framework, you have an objective baseline to which you will always be able to look and ascertain if you’re moving in a positive direction toward your goals.

Moderation and Willpower hang out together

The more you practice moderation, the greater your willpower becomes. Moderation, over time, means becoming adept at following through with something when you desire, but doing so in a manner that looks ahead to the future. It requires exercising a degree of restraint and willpower, but in a manner that leaves you with reserves.

Willpower, then, can be thought of as our energy to moderate. For your muscles, you have a finite amount of energy that you can expend before you need to back off and give them a rest. For the practice of moderation, you have willpower.

Make no doubt about it, willpower is a finite commodity. We all have some measure of willpower that we are able to exercise when we need to. But once that willpower is expended, it is like any other muscle or mental quality that can be trained; we need to give it time to recharge. The more that you practice and exercise moderation, the greater your reserves of willpower will become. When you practice abstinence, you make decisions rarely. You are not exercising moderation or your willpower, because you are rarely exposing yourself to the situations that would allow for it.

Moderation works best with flexibility

By providing yourself with a flexible framework, you give yourself a clear, objective boundary within which to work, but allow yourself some flexibility within that boundary. Setting yourself up in this manner gives you the opportunity to adapt to circumstances as needed, and allows you to exercise an element of control at multiple points. Part of the key to moderation is actually providing yourself with the ability to make decisions at multiple tiers of willpower. When you practice abstinence, you train only one level of willpower – never doing something ever. However, what about if/when that level of willpower fails you (and let’s be honest here: nothing is truly failsafe; especially our willpower)? You haven’t trained any other aspect of your willpower. That one level fails, and you cave with no more defences.

Flexibility gives you the power to exercise your willpower on multiple levels, and on a continual basis. Doing so allows you to check in with yourself more frequently, and see how you’re doing. It gives you many small victories, which encourage the growth of your self-esteem, and a few small losses, or failures. But failure is an essential part of life; it’s better to have a small failure, with small victories surrounding it to ground your perspective, than one big failure, with the last success far enough of back in time to be fading from your memory.

Flexibility lends itself to iterative change and continual feedback, two qualities that lead to greater success in many of the endeavours that we choose to pursue.

Moderation can be applied to anything (it is worth practicing)

Some people will think that talking about moderation means that I’m talking about either alcohol abuse or drug abuse. But moderation is a skill that we practice in everyday of our lives, though much of it is beneath our level of awareness. It isn’t until you start to think about moderation as an independent skill unto itself that you begin to see its presence constantly.

Injured yourself playing a sport, but want to keep playing? Want to stay up, but know that you should go to bed? Know that you should be working on an assignment, but procrastinating instead? All of these are examples of situations in which we are aware of what the correct decision is, but must exercise our willpower to overcome our short-term impulses. In most cases, we don’t even contemplate the reserves that we are or are not exercising, make a decision, and get on with our lives. Wouldn’t you like to have a little more willpower?

Moderation itself requires moderation (it is reflexive!)

Moderation really does apply to everything, including itself. It’s important to find times when you allow yourself a little bit of excess. Remember, the act of practicing moderation is one that uses up willpower. The difference to be aware of is that the moments of excess you allow should be ones of which you are cognisant, rather than simple lapses in judgment. By mentally allow yourselves these breaks, you will ensure that you keep an eye on your baseline and prevent it from becoming a habit. You keep your goals in sight and stay true to them in the longterm.

Okay, I’ve covered off the productivity update, if that’s all you’re here for, see ya!

Dancing..

is made better by having awesome students.

Our studio has been doing well, and the classes continue to be enjoyable. My own growth has come in the form of improving my ability to choreograph, and working on technique when I can find the time (not as often as I’d like). My class’s progression has been rapid and fun, which is great – I’m enjoying the process of learning along with everyone.

I finished off the last term with some more work on popping and a little bit of waving. In order to do some work on gliding, I decided that we would work on a little bit of gliding at the start of two or three of our classes. Partially to warm the class up, and partially because gliding can be a very disheartening skill to learn when you first tackle it: the balance required is slow to build, and it can be painful on your calf muscles. Additionally, it’s just not a way that we’re normally geared to move, so there’s a reasonable amount of muscle memory that needs to be trained. We also added in some new fundamental techniques, some of which I’d just been shown this summer, like the popcorn.

Two of my friends from school came and checked out my first class of the new term, which was a lot of fun. Because we hadn’t done it much last term, and because I love it so much, I started the first term off with some locking. I went through some fundamentals with the class, and then began putting some choreography toward the end. We went considerably far back, starting with the Watergate, a social dance that Sugarpop taught me this Summer, and that ties in directly with the lock from which the dance gets its name. The fundamental movements that we went over this class included:

The pace
Uncle Sam point
Giving yourself five
The lock
The pimp walk
The scoobot

I have never taught some of these before, so it was a lot of fun figuring out how best to convey this information to the class, and seeing how people handled learning some of the new movements (some of them much better than I did when I was learning!)

The next class I reviewed the choreography that we had learned so far and we then moved to tutting. The class all groaned when I announced that this was what we would be doing next class, so I was happy to see that most people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Tutting can be a frustrating art to learn; it requires moves that demand a good deal of flexibility in your fingers, wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Though lots of people work on flexibility in their lower body, it is less-often exercised from the forearms down.

I was disappointed to see that one of the students that had shown considerable promise last term didn’t return, but I saw some other new students in his place, so things balance out, as they usually do.

Squash..

still rules.

But I’m not getting to play it as much as I’d like. I have been biking to school, and teaching dance classes, so my fitness and flexibility have not suffered to a great extent, but my touch is starting to fade as time goes on and I don’t have the opportunity to hit the ball as often as I’d like. I have been playing on the squash ladder at school, which is a lot of fun and a good way to meet new friends, but the level of play isn’t equivalent to that which you would find at a club that is dedicated to squash. Still, it does give me an opportunity to work on my length, and it’s a lot of fun. I’ll take squash wherever and whenever I can get it!

And that..

is it.

That’s the end of the update for now. Although my updates will continue to be sparse while I’m in school, I absolutely intend to continue writing. If I stopped doing this, I think that I would have lost a significant aid to my own growth and potential. Thanks for continuing to read, and stay tuned! Please leave me a comment if you have any questions related to the content I post, or the subjects I write about. I’m always looking for more inspiration to fuel writing, and if it comes from without, it saves me some of the mental energy required to come up with new ideas.

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Oct/09

First mid-term of the degree

0 Comments | Posted by Adam in Uncategorized

And so here we are. The first mid-term of a law degree. Here are some of the things that I’ve done leading up to this point:

Stressed about the fact that law school is a whole new ball game, and it’s no longer reasonable for me to expect to get consistent A’s
Searched online for information relating to how important first year law school grades are
Done some deep reflection about grades, and what they mean to me
Come to terms with the fact that I may (and probably do) sit somewhere in the middle of the curve among my fellow students
Stressed about the fact that I have no idea how we’ll be tested on the material tomorrow
Studied and realized that I know a lot of these things better than I thought I did
Shaken my head and complained out loud: “We’ve got a midterm and a writing assignment coming up, AND we’re expected to read for four hours every day?”
Gotten and shared outlines from second- and third-year students
Gotten completely freaked out as a result of looking through the outlines I’ve received
Gone through the process of preparing my own outline, amazed at the length of some of the outlines I looked through
Tightened up and completed my outline, and noted that mine came out around 16 pages (after including the relevant cases)
Studied by myself
Studied collaboratively through Facebook
Studied collaboratively in person with some study groups
Established a stronger bond with those people I’ve studied with
Drunk a lot of Earl Grey tea
Choreographed most of my next dance class
Gone through two practice mid-terms
Gone from being pretty concerned about my ability to do anything beyond “winging it”, to feeling pretty confident in my ability to put together a semi-decent argument
Made an incredible stir-fry (it’s the only kind I know how to make)
Drunk the following Scotches: Aberlour (10 year), Aberlour (12 year), Bowmore, Smokehead

I have much more to write, but no time to put the thoughts into words. Stay patient…

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Oct/09

Study arena

3 Comments | Posted by Adam in Uncategorized

Quick post showing the study set up that I’m working with. We have an office in our condo, but Bay has about 6 weeks left before she finishes her M.B.A. and completes her thesis. As you might expect, that takes precedence over the more mundane studying that I’m currently doing.

That’s okay though. Although my study setup is fairly spartan, it has everything that I need to make sure that I can stay focused. Recreated here in glorious colours:

For some odd reason, my Flickr notes get scrunched up into a very small margin for this setup. Nevertheless, you can get the gist of what I’m operating with here. Being a broke-ass student sucks, but it doesn’t take a lot to come up with a system that allows you to be efficient.

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Oct/09

Study Better..

0 Comments | Posted by Adam in Uncategorized

Alright, I’m back, and with a shiny new blog layout and design to boot. It feels good to start writing again, after taking what, to me, feels like a long hiatus. School has required plenty of writing to keep me busy, but writing within the confines and requirements of an assignment is a lot different than writing purely for the benefit of my own sense of expression.

In the past, many of my posts have related to GTD, and how the skills of that philosophy can be applied to your job and your daily chores at home. Given my recent change in direction, I’m going to write today about how you can apply some of the concepts of GTD to improve your ability to study. Well, actually, I’m mostly going to talk about what I’m doing to stay on top of the work that we’re given on a weekly basis, and how some of that ties in with the habits that I’d established before leaving the professional world to return to school.

Before starting in, I’ll just grant you an idea of the amount of work that I see on a daily basis. We have about six different classes that we are taking, for a total of roughly 20-30 hours of our week. We don’t have any classes scheduled on Friday (yes, this is awesome, but probably not for the reason that you’re thinking), so we have at least three days a week that are wide open, as far as how we spend our time is concerned.

Supplementing those classes is the reading. Oh god the reading! On average, we have about 30 pages of reading, per individual class, to get done. On average, this means that each night we need to read about 60 pages. On top of that, it’s not enough to simply read the cases and material – we need to read, understand, and be prepared to discuss that material the next day. Reading case after case eventually starts to cause them all to blend together, so the erudite student also writes out case briefs for each of the cases so that you can reference these later on in class and discuss them intelligently (I’ve found that staring slack-jawed at the teacher is another option).

Lastly, the readings are dense. I’m not a slow reader. I’ve accomplished the usual geek tricks like reading a Harry Potter book in a couple of hours, just so that I could say I had done it (this is the first time I’ve actually revealed this fact, but I was glad to have that fact as an ace up my sleeve if I ever ran into some jerk boasting about that kind of thing at a party). I’ve been a voracious reader since a kid, so I’m no stranger to burying my head in the pages of books. However, this material makes you question your ability to comprehend the English language. ”Did I suddenly forget how to read?”, I find myself wondering out loud. Why has my reading comprehension gone from a Harry Potter book in a couple of hours to a ten pages over the span of an hour.

Anyhow, you get the idea – this is slow reading. I find that to actually complete my readings for one class, and finish the case briefs that I want to do to ensure that I retain and comprehend that material, I require roughly 2.5 to 3 hours of time. This allows me a little bit of time for distractions (e-mail, making tea, etc., though I try to minimize these), but is otherwise pretty tight. As you can see, this quickly adds up and makes for a lot of work to get through each week. If you want to stay on top of this, it really does require some dedication, motivation, and good habits. The dedication and motivation are things that come from within, and are related to your love and interest in the material at hand. The good habits are something that can be cultivated externally, and that’s the pith and substance (I’ve read that term about 50 times just this morning. Lawyers seem to love it) of this post today.

Enough rambling, let’s get to the point, yah?

Stop Procrastinating

Obvious right? It’s still relevant, and I’m still going to talk about it.

Procrastinating is simply the art of putting off until later, something that you could be doing today. We all do it, and most of us hate the fact that we do it. Working as a project manager, and taking steps to change my habits to allow me to be more productive required that I grapple with my own bad habit to procrastinate in a substantial manner. The most enlightening conclusion that I drew was that procrastination is ultimately about making a decision, and that most of us are unaware that we are making a decision.

How do you want to spend your time? Do you want to spend it doing a bunch of small, meaningless things, or do you want to spend it on a personal project, working out, or doing something larger and more meaningful? This is the essence of procrastinating. When you put off doing something, you are making the decision to fill your immediate time with small, trifling tasks until you finally get around to accomplishing what needs to be done.

This segues well into the next thing I’ve been working on, which is…

Maintain Your Focus

A friend at school told me that experiments in psychology have shown on average that our attention rises, peaks, and falls over the course of about 40 minutes. After 40 minutes have passed, we have about 10-20 minutes of downtime before the cycle repeats itself. You can spend that downtime taking a break, or trying to push through it and continuing to read. In both cases, you will find a fresh wind coming upon you after about 10-20 minutes.

I have absolutely no way of independently verifying this, but it strikes me as reasonable. More important though, is that I think we all have some kind of threshold whereby we can concentrate for X amount of time, after which we really are better off taking a break before getting back down to it.

My own experience has been that it takes me about 10 minutes to settle into a zone where I am able to efficiently process the information I’m trying to read. After about an hour, I start to phase out again and lose focus.

During that first 10 minutes, it’s very tempting to let my mind wander and chase after any distracting thought that comes into my head. ”Oh right, I wanted to show Bay my new desktop”, “Hmm, I wonder how our Visa’s doing”, “I haven’t annoyed my cat in over five minutes!”, are all thoughts that frequently pass across my head when I’m trying to find that zone. The same kind of distractions pop up when I’m actually into the efficient zone, but it’s easier to let them slide and stay focused.

To counter this, my own method is to start my studying with a pencil and a pad of paper beside me. Whenever a legitimate distracting thought pops up, I write it down on my pad of paper, and release it. The idea is captured, and I can pursue it later if it’s worthwhile. Most importantly, I can immediately get back to the task at hand, rather than having it sit in the back of my head, buzzing around and tugging at my attention.

Turn Off Distractions

I’m really breaking the mould here.. Ignore that though – the best tips are the ones that should be the most obvious, but that we rarely follow.

Do you sit down to study, but leave your e-mail connected? What about MSN? Facebook? If any of these things represent legitimate distractions to you (and I can assert that they do to over 33% of my fellow students, given what I can see when I look across the room at people’s laptops), and you legitimately plan on getting something done, do yourself a favour and shut it down. Turn off your wireless access, take yourself somewhere that you don’t have access to a computer, etc. Do whatever you need to at the outset so that you don’t have to battle with yourself later on when looking for reasons to do anything other than studying.

Some people (not me) are able to get their work done in an efficient manner while jumping back and forth to e-mail, MSN, and a myriad of other distractions. I am not one of these people. Knowing which category you fit into requires honest reflection and introspection. If you’re unsure, perform an experiment and see if your studying is any more efficient when you remove yourself from these distractions.

I find that I can generally function alright when I leave my e-mail on (perhaps this harks back to my previous work as a project manager, where the order of the day was about 50 e-mails when trying to write up project plans and budgets); MSN and Facebook are both off limits, and have to wait until I take my next break.

Figure Out What Works For You

What works for you may be different from what works for anyone else. One of the things that I have been grappling with lately is how I can efficiently read all of the material we’re assigned, and meaningfully write out briefs and notes so that I can retain some of it.

The things I’ve tried so far, have been:

Read all material linearly, start to finish
Approach all material with the intent of briefing cases. Before even starting to read a case, set up a template within which to brief it, and scan the case for relevant facts to brief
Set up different templates for different types of cases (constitutional, criminal, policy, etc.), but maintain the same approach above
Read everything linearly initially, highlighting anything relevant. Then return and brief cases.

It’s taken me four attempts to get to this point, and I’m still unsure as to whether or not I’ve got a method sorted out that will work for me. But, I am evolving something, and I am learning as a result of going through this process. So far, school has not just been about reading and learning the material itself, but also learning about the best way to actually process and retain that material.

Find Tools That Work For You

There are a ton of tools out there can assist or distract you in your aims. Prior to starting to school, I completely migrated my GTD system into Remember the Milk (get it here). While RTM is a fantastic tool for deeper projects, I have not found it particularly useful for keeping track of my readings. Assigned readings are fast and frequent. I need to be able to jot them down quickly, and with minimal overhead. Although I initially started trying to do this in RTM, when I started to feel my diligence slipping, I noticed a friend in class using stickies on their dashboard to keep track. I made the switch and have been going with this since.

This doesn’t mean that RTM is not a fantastic tool – it just means that, for my purposes, for this specific thing I’m trying to track, stickies are the better option. Don’t confine yourself to using something that you think should be useful, but is actually a hindrance. If you find yourself resisting the use of some tool, ask yourself why that is. Is it because you simply haven’t gotten used to it, or is it because it’s just in line with the way you typically operate?

Collaborate

Not to the point of cheating. But within the realms of what is acceptable, collaboration is the way to go. The first couple months of our program are almost entirely absent of feedback. Because of the entry-level requirements for UVic’s law program, it’s all people that are in the high-functioning category, and when you put these kinds of personalities into a small building, give them something challenging to work on, and don’t tell them how you’re doing, it makes for a lot of built up neuroses. Collaboration is an excellent means to ground yourself, get a feel for how everyone else is feeling, and get some honest feedback about the work that you actually are producing. While it will never align you with the prof quite the same way as getting back an assignment that they themselves have marked, it will certainly give you a feel for how other people are viewing the material, and for things that you may be missing.

At this point, I can’t think of anything that has helped me as much as collaborating with my fellow students has.

Briefs

That about covers most of what I have on my mind today. This gives a very quick overview of the sort of things that have been occupying my thoughts lately: focusing not only on the new material that I’m learning, but also the way that I’m learning it. The more efficient I can get the latter, the greater the benefit I’ll be able to derive from my education as I go forward.

I’ll finish off by posting the case briefing templates that I’ve been using. If anyone has feedback or there own suggestions, please provide them – these are what I’ve been working from so far, but I would love to know of any inefficiencies or improvements that I could be making.

Regular Case Brief Template

Plaintiff:
Defendant:
Jurisdiction/Year:
Finding:
Finding of lower court (if applicable):
Legal Issue/Question:
Legal Principle:
Ratio:
Facts:
Reasoning:
Notes:

Law, Legislation, and Policy Case Brief Template

Style of cause:
Statute being interpreted:Jurisdiction:
Year:
Wording leading to confusion/interpretation issues
Principle/Ratio:
Reasoning:
Notes:

Reference Case Brief Template

Reference Re:
Jurisdiction:
Year:
Finding:
Finding of lower court (if applicable):
Legal Issue/Reference Question:
Facts:
Reasoning:
Notes:

Constitutional Case Brief Template

Style of cause:
Statute being interpreted: Jurisdiction:
Year:
Finding:
Dispute over:
Issue over which dispute arose:
Reasoning:
Notes:

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Oct/09

RSS Feed changing, please update your feed reader

1 Comment | Posted by Adam in Minutiae, Updates on me

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.

No tags Hide

Oct/09

Back once again, the incredible..

0 Comments | Posted by adam in Uncategorized

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, g
ive 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.

Dance, Law, Minutiae, Productivity, School, Updates Hide

Sep/09

Biphasic Sleep Journal – Week Three

0 Comments | Posted by adam in Habits, Lifehacking, Minutiae, Updates on me

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

——

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.

—–

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. &nb
sp;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, Habits, Lifehacking, Lifestyle Changes, Sleep Hide

Aug/09

Biphasic Sleep Journal – Week Two

0 Comments | Posted by adam in Habits, Lifehacking, Productivity, Updates on me

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

——

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.

Biphasic sleep, Habits, Lifehacking, Lifestyle Changes, Productivity Hide

Aug/09

What is this Twitter thing all about?

0 Comments | Posted by adam in Lifehacking, Minutiae, Productivity, Tech, Updates on me

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 demonst
rations/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.

Habits, Lifehacking, Productivity, Projects, Social Media, Tech, Twitter Hide

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