I’ve been out of class (having finished first year) for about two months now.  With a little bit of distance, I can turn my sight back to the last year and reflect on what helped make things easier (or harder).  Some of these suggestions may prove helpful to those of you that are starting out on a new challenge, some may be a bit specific for your tastes.  Let’s do this.

Take time to prepare for the change

After talking with Bay and making sure we could work it out, I arranged my departure from work so that I had three weeks off between my last day and the start of school.  Three weeks may seem like a lot of time, but it only feels that way if you don’t fill it.  I had a number of small projects that I wanted to complete, and I knew that if I was capturing ideas and staying on top of things, that time would fill up.

When you consider the fact that I was undergoing a radical change to the daily routine that I had been building on for the past five years, three weeks really isn’t that long.  Taking this time off may sound obvious or easy to many of you reading this, but these types represent only a portion of the population.  There are as many people that find it almost impossible to let go and accept that even if it means less money, you have to put your mental health before anything else.

Even if it costs more money (as not working is necessarily more expensive than working), it gives you the time to set up the foundation and groundwork for the next year.  Some people prefer to dive headfirst into a new adventure.  I’m all for being adventurous, but I want to reap the maximum benefit from those adventures, and that means setting up at least some kind of framework before diving in.

Some of the things that I accomplished in these three weeks were: performing an experiment with biphasic sleep, spend some quality time hanging out and catching up with some friends, spending some quality time with my wife, hanging shelves and doing some handiwork around the house that has been bothering us for months, and yes, even spending some days doing nothing but playing video games and staying up far too late.

This last one is every bit as important as the others.  Let’s be honest with ourselves – we like to do some things that generally aren’t always for our best interest.  Staying up late and playing video games is hardly a productive activity, but I enjoy it, and it’s a nostalgic thing to do.  Just as much as I know that, these days, I can’t do this very often, I also know that I’m going to want to do that at some points throughout the coming year.  If I’m going to need to exercise willpower to stop doing that in the coming year, isn’t it better to give myself a bit of a mental break and get some of it out of my system now?  I think so.  Again, we’re building a framework here – setting ourselves up so that we’re really able to accomplish our goals in the coming year.

Not only set goals, but be willing and able to adapt them

As of late I’ve heard a bit from studies suggesting that goal-oriented behaviour may not be the best approach for everyone.  This isn’t necessarily that astonishing, because there’s no such thing as “a best approach” to anything that fits for everyone.  We’re all different, and require different approaches to accomplish what we want out of life.  However, setting goals is an important part of how I accomplish and achieve in my life.  It gives me a metric to look back and see how I’ve grown, and it gives me something to drive toward and keep me on course.

Heading into law school, I had set the following goals for myself:  Maintain an A  average in my classes (I achieved this in my undergrad, so it seemed reasonable), continue playing squash three times a week, continue teaching dance, practice dance once a week, and, most important of all, continue to spend time with my wife (yup, you better believe she’s on my list of goals – something would be wrong if she wasn’t).

Throughout the year, life happened, my growth continued, and I gathered more data.  Some of that data was in the form of what realistic expectations were for a law student, vis-a-vis their GPA.  Some of that data was more introspective, such as better understanding how much I can divide my time between various activities.

Some people get overwhelmed when life is changing around them, or they are undergoing their own growth.  The new data creates cognitive dissonance, as it contradicts the goals that they set for themselves, and, if they’re unwilling to adapt, they are forced to either mentally ignore the new data (an awful habit to get into, but a common one), or they discard their goals and forget about it.  The correct approach is neither of these; the correct approach is to accept the new data, appreciate it, and adapt based on what it tells you.

After our first midterm was over, and having our professors impress upon us the fact that the grades we had received in our undergrad were not representative of what we would be getting (I heard the phrase “A B is a good grade!” repeated many times throughout the year, usually more often closer to finals), it became obvious that my goal to maintain an A average may have been unrealistic.

A lot of people believe that adapting your goals means that you have failed.  Many project managers struggle greatly to simply come out and explain to the client that the original goal of meeting a certain deadline is no longer possible, and that they will need to adapt their timeline in order to accomplish what they had originally set out.  This is not a failure on anyone’s part, but our society generally has trouble accepting this fact.  It is simply adapting to new data.  It is the intelligent, and sustainable, way to handle new information.

Changing my goal from an A average to a B average may have seemed to some people like they were giving up on themselves, or lowering their expectations.  In Law, there are many many type A personalities.  These people typically struggle with adaption; they have a strong drive, and they are used to setting their sights on a goal and not relenting until they achieve it.  This generates a considerable amount of stress.  By contrast, when I adjusted my goal, I was not giving up on myself, nor was I lowering the expectations that I held myself to.  This is simply by virtue of the fact that the GPA I wanted to maintain in school was representative of many things.

The GPA I would end with did not simply represent how smart I was, or how much time I had, how much I cared about  my career, and especially not about how objectively good I was at the study of our legal system.  It represented these things in part, sure, but it also represented how much of my life, and my time, I was willing to sacrifice to this pursuit.  Was I willing to sacrifice my other goals, in order to accomplish this one goal?  The new data I received was telling me that if I wanted to continue with my goal of maintaining an A average, I would likely not be able to achieve my other goals, such as regular squash, dancing, and spending time with the most important person in my life.

Here to is a stumbling block for many people.  When setting our goals, we initially start with X amount of data, and then lay out a set of goals that we believe we can achieve (well, that’s what we should be doing.  Many of us shoot far too high in our initial goal-setting process).  Upon receiving new data that tells us one of our goals will require more time/effort/whatever, it necessarily means that out other goals will have to change in order to meet this one.  Just a simple example below (skip if you already get my point):

Let’s say that you figure you have five hours a week to devote to your pursuits.  You set out goal A and goal B, figuring that A will probably require two hours of your time every week, and goal B, three hours.  (Of course, you probably won’t be explicitly thinking this, but when coming up with goals for ourselves, we’re generally considering this in some capacity or another).  Now you receive some new data.  You’ve found out that achieving goal A will now require three hours, instead of two (in my own case, this is basically what I found out about my goal to keep an A average).

You will no longer be able to accomplish both goal A and B with the spare time you have available.  You have a these options:

• Fool yourself and keep the goals, pretending that you will be able to do six hours worth of goals in five hours of time.  (Note: This is the same situation as simply ignoring the new data)
• Get frustrated and discard one of your goals
• Adapt to the new data, and perhaps adjust goal A to something more reasonable.  Or, give up on goal A, and decide to pursue goal C

The hardest part about all of this is recognizing when you are a presented with a moment that a decision is required.  Many of us have these moments pass us by, and only realize when it’s too late that there was a actually a decision to be made.  For Law, it was fairly easy to see – we were told regularly what a reasonable expectation was.

If you’ve been reading this blog, or are a friend of mine, you’ll know that I came up against one of these moments with respect to dancing and squash, both during the school year, and again at the start of this co-op term.  If you read back through the blog entries I wrote in the past year, you can actually see me trying battling through the process of needing to adapt my goals.  Over time, I came to realize that I would either need to adapt my goals and choose one pursuit to prioritize, or, have that decision made for me (or, even worse, have both of my pursuits be given an inadequate amount of time and get dropped as a result).

Making the decision to change and adapt your goals can be a difficult one.  Sometimes you really want something, and we often have a difficult time accepting that achievements require sacrifice.  However, coming to terms with the nature of sacrifice is necessary, and no rewards will come without having to make some kind of sacrifice.  Learn to recognize these moments in your life, and embrace the change and adapation that is necessary – it helped me get through my first year.

Do something outside of school

I was lucky; I was accepted to UVic, the university right here where I live (and also a highly acclaimed law program).  As a result, I already had a social network, and many ongoing interests that kept me from existing solely at school.

Many students enter law school by way of moving to a new city and setting up shop there.  For these people it can be difficult to develop interests that don’t revolve around school in some way or another.  All of their friends are people they’ve met at school, they spend a ton of time on campus, they end up talking about school all of the time, etc. etc.

I continued teaching dance while going through first year, even though this added to my stress at times (it can be difficult to choreograph a class when you’ve got a memo looming shortly ahead).  However, it also maintained a continuous presence in my life that pulled me out of school.  It was impossible for me to allow my life to completely exist within the sphere of school,because there was something that recurred every week and demanded that I pay attention to it.

Maintaining a sense of identity that exists outside of school is essential to staying sane as you go through the process.  If you allow your identity to be defined solely by your experience at school, you’ll start to put too much emphasis on grades and exams; and buy too much into the pressure and stress that accompanies these things.

Worse than that, you can lose sight of the fact that life carries on while you are in school.  If you enclose your existence within the confines of school, life can pass you by, and you may find yourself graduating or coming up for air at the end of each year, only to realize that everything has changed.  By maintaining interests, friends, and activities that exist outside of school, you’ll help ensure that life doesn’t pass you by – it will continue to grow, progress, and move along, and you’ll continue to be a part of that movement.

Collaborate generously*

*where appropriate to do so

Not everyone will agree with this point, but I stand by my opinion, more so than ever before after completing first year.  In first year, there will be plenty of opportunities to collaborate.  Although collaborating on writing an exam or the written portion of an assignment may be considered cheating, most of our professors encouraged collaboration when studying, doing research, preparing outlines, and so on.  Outside of the situations where it would be considered cheating, I think that collaboration is a sure fire way to enhance your success.

The stress would get to some of our cohort, and more than once I would hear students declare that they didn’t want to assist someone any more because they felt like they were being used.  I understand this sentiment – when things are tough and stressful, it’s very difficult to keep our hearts and outlooks soft.  I framed my approach a little differently.  Being a project manager at heart, I already had a good understanding of the value that collaboration and synergy can bring about, and knew that any form of collaboration at all is generally a positive thing for me.  Here’s the real secret though – it’s almost impossible to collaborate with someone and not derive some kind of benefit.  Sure, my fellow students would benefit from anything that I provided or put out there (hopefully), but even if someone took my outline and provided me nothing in return, there’s always the possibility that they would come back to me and ask “Hey, Adam, I noticed you put this case in there – is that actually relevant?”.

Maybe someone would ask me why I had structured things a certain way, or note that I had incorrectly cited a specific case.  Sometimes I would exchange outlines with study partners, and then we’d both gain the benefit of third-party review.  Sometimes, helping out a friend that was having trouble just plain felt good.  Knowing that I was able to make the journey a little easier for some of my colleagues contributed greatly to my own sense of self-worth and self-esteem.  There’s no substitute for the positive feelings that being generous with your work and time can provide.

Being open and collaborative in this manner may really be counter-intuitive to some people.  I’m told that in some law schools, the competitiveness is so strong that people really don’t want to share anything with another student, for fear of it meaning that student will do better, affect the grading curve and result in the initial student’s grade being lower.  I think this is pretty short term thinking, and that if we are able to raise our grading curve collectively by improving each other, we all win in the long run.  Maybe my grade is relatively lowered because I helped another student get a higher grade, but I’m sure that in doing so, my knowledge of the actual material is deeper that it would have been had I not helped that person out.  And that’s what this is really all about – not getting the highest grade on some arbitrary metric, but actually deeply learning the material we are studying.

Sharing in this manner is a lot like the open source approach to developing and licensing software.  A lot of software companies have scoffed at the open source concept, where developers collaborate and work on projects for which there isn’t an obvious economic benefit or reward.  These companies are locked into the unfortunate perspective that the only thing that should really motivate your actions is the bottom line (financial).  This is akin to the law student that figures the only thing that should motivate their actions are their own grades (again, the bottom line, though in the academic context).

Both of these perspectives are short-sighted, and will ultimately cheapen your experience.  Collaborate with your peers, and embrace the opportunity to help educate them if you can.  The more times you explain a concept, the better you will be able to do exactly that when it’s time to write an exam.  If you find yourself explaining something to a colleague more than once, look at it simply as practice.  I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Be a project manager

Okay, this last tip may not be that helpful to those of you that don’t have five spare years of your life kicking around, or aren’t interested in management.  But, you can still take some of the tips that I write about in this blog, and learn to apply them in order to make yourself more efficient and more organized.  That’s what I’m talking about here.  An effective project manager needs to be able to multi-task, remain efficient, and handle many different threads at once.  These are all skills that are greatly benefitted by taking some time to increase your productivity.

My previous career working as a PM in software gave me ample opportunity to hone skills such as applying GTD methodology, effectively capturing ideas, avoiding procrastination, and appreciating the power of collaboration.  Before returning to school, make an attempt to develop some organizational skills, or to build upon those you already have.  Any time that you can put in now toward improving your habits will pay off exponentially as you apply it over the next three years.

Try to view the time you spend adapting these new habits before returning to school as another form of investment.  You’re investing time now into developing new, positive habits, so that later on you will be more efficient and better able to manage the demands that will be on your time once school starts.

Keep sight of the bigger picture

No matter how stressful it gets, always try to keep sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing.  You’re not writing an open memo assignment because you don’t want to fail, you’re writing it because you want to understand how to properly apply legal research and writing skills.  And why are you doing that?  Probably because you want to be able to seek out justice for those in our society that have been wronged.  Or maybe because you want to make a ton of money working a swanky job (a pretty poor reason to go to school for law, in my opinion, but to each their own).  Whatever it is that has motivated you to take on the next big step in your life, take time throughout the course of that journey to recognize that it truly is a journey.  If you cheat yourself out of the ability to recognize that, you really cheat yourself out of part of the experience, learning and benefits.  If things weren’t stressful, and didn’t require you to adapt or change, they wouldn’t be worth pursuing.

And, scene…

These tips are pretty general, and will hopefully serve you you well in whatever new portion of your life you are embarking on.  Change is generally going to be stressful, as we humans are creatures of habit, and changing our environment imposes new requirements and approaches to the habits we’ve developed leading up to this point.  However, if you take proactive steps and maintain a positive outlook, you can help ensure that the journey is rewarding, and that you maximize the benefit that you reap from it.  I always try to tell myself that when I’m feeling stressed out, it’s often because I’m learning something new, or in a situation that I’m not comfortable with.  Aim for this kind of distance and introspection, so that you can identify the situations where you may be able to learn something new.  The more often in life you are able to recognize an opportunity to learn, the greater heights you will be able to achieve.

Okay – I promised podcasts and audiobooks, and that will hopefully come up next time.  The ferry ride to and from the island is an awesome opportunity to write a post, and I really missed putting ideas on to paper (… screen, I guess).  I’m always looking for new ideas to write about, so please post a comment if there’s something that you would like to hear my thoughts on, or particular questions you may have.

Efficiency, GTD, Habits, Law, Managing Change, Productivity, Updates on me Hide

The title is a bit of a paradox.  Creative processes are typically those that fare and progress best when left to their own devices and are free of the encumbrances that attempting to manage them can impose.  However, as with everything in life, I believe that certain guidelines help, rather than hinder these types of processes.  A significant portion of my spare time living in Vancouver so far has been dedicated to improving my own abilities in the styles of dance that interest me most.  I have been spending a lot of time reflecting on this process, and have received some excellent advice from some newly made friends about this ongoing process of improvement.  This post represents the culmination of these thoughts and tidbits of advice after the first month of the Summer.

Let’s get it out of the way, because if I don’t, someone will mention it.  ”You shouldn’t spend time thinking about dancing, you should just do it”.  This is a blanket statement that I have heard more times that I care to think about.  There’s certainly some truth in it, because at the end of the day, the most fundamental thing you need to do when you’re dancing is listen to the music, shut off your brain, and do what your body tells you to do.  If you aren’t doing this, and your goal is to dance, you have failed at your goal.  Beyond that though, this super-general statement will lead you astray.

You do need to put some time and thought into your creative processes if you want to progress in them.  Simply doing whatever you feel like doing, without ever providing yourself with guidelines, goals, and benchmarks, will hinder, rather than aid, your own progress.  It’s important to pursue a direction.  If you want to be a great photographer (as some of my friends are), you take classes to learn how to do that.  If you want to be a great painter, you take classes to learn how to properly paint.  Dancing is no different, nor are other creative processes.  If nothing else, education and thought devoted to your pursuit will vest you with new ideas, inspirations, and an understanding of what has been done, and how you can either build on that, or avoid making the same mistakes.

Okay, it’s out of the way.  I feel like I should just create a boilerplate disclaimer that states that so that I can dump it at the bottom of every post tagged “dance” and save us all a bunch of time.  I’m not going to though because I’m waiting for the ferry and typing that out helps make the time go by a little faster.  Let’s get to the meat of this post.

The Theory

At the core of almost any creative process are two facets: theory and application.  These are just abstract terms that I’m using, and may not bear any actual relevance to the way they’re described in any particular pursuit.  Further, these concepts exist outside of merely creative processes, and apply in a lot of other settings.  In Math, you begin by learning the theory of numbers.  How operations work on constants and variables, how a derivative is performed (ugh), etc.  Once you know that, you need to actually apply these concepts to proper problems.  You can’t apply anything if you haven’t learned the theory beforehand, but if all you’ve done is learn the theory, you’ll be unable to apply it to anything other than the most contrived circumstances that generally exist in laboratory or classroom settings.

This is a common critique that is levelled from both sides of the fence in the ivory tower/real-world debate.  People working in the industry, in various professions, lob criticism at pure academics, claiming that they exist only in the world of theory, and never have their theories and ideas tempered with the versatility and complications of application to real-world problems.  The academics riposte that industry professionals are hopelessly mired in the here-and-now and the application of existing principles to the problems in the real world, and are never able to advance their ideas at any significant rate (thinking outside of the box, so to speak).

They’re actually both right.  It’s important to take time to step back from the real world and analyze and assess our knowledge as it currently stands, and reflect on how we are currently achieving our aims (and whether or not those aims are even still reasonable).  This can be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve if you are constantly confronted with the next emergency.  Equally important, if all you ever do is consider theory and never apply it, you’ll never really ground yourself in reality, nor learn the ability to apply your theory with the fluidity and flexibility that is important to any successful endeavour.

The application

The point of this long-winded metaphor is to state the realization that I’ve reached regarding myself and dance: I’ve been sitting in the ivory tower.

This realization has dawned slowly on me over the last couple of weeks.  Every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, many of the street dancers (so that includes poppers, lockers, house dancers, whackers, and b-boys) head out to Robson Square and get down.  On each of these nights, you can usually find at least 10-20 dancers practicing and getting down (which is super awesome).  This was a pretty intimidating scene for me to plug in to.  A week ago this past Wednesday was the first time I’d gone out purely to practice.  Before that, I had been to the square to take some classes that were being taught there (also awesome), but nothing else.  I arrived early and practiced technique for about an hour before someone I’d met recently, named Boris, showed up, and then we started practicing in front of the many windows that surround the now ice-free skating rink that is downstairs.

I asked Boris for some advice, mentioning the frustration I feel every time I try to dance outside of purely doing drills.  Boris’s advice was simple, but profound:

“I’ve been there.  You need to practice freestyling and cyphering* more.  Freestyling is a skill, just like any particular technique is.  If you don’t practice that skill, you won’t be able to improve in it”.

We spent the next thirty minutes taking turns locking in front of each other.  It felt supremely awkward.  The truth is that I’ve never really danced in front of someone else, while they stood their watching.  Sure, I’ve danced at the bar plenty of times, but that’s a different thing altogether.  People at the bar blend into an anonymous crowd.  There’s individual faces, but it’s easy to ignore them.  Plus, at the bar, there’s other people on the dance floor.  I’m sure that being a person that has devoted time to the pursuit of dancing, people notice me when I’m dancing next to people that have not, but it’s easy enough to ignore.

When you’re in a situation like this, you start to fall back on the same things pretty quickly.  I’d come out with a sequence that I had thought up, and then fall right back to the fundamentals and have trouble moving beyond them.  But that’s okay, because this was the first time I’d ever actually tried to move beyond the realm of pure theory into the realm of application.  David and Michael, two twins that I’ve seen dancing at Get Down last year, and at some of the classes I’ve been taking this Summer, showed up later, but I needed some time to reflect, eat dinner, and stretch.  The next night, I repeated this process for popping, forcing myself to get into the cypher and do something – anything.  Dancing first – once that was happening, the technique could flow from it.

The result

I’ve often drawn parallels between squash and dancing.  If you look hard enough, you can find meaningful parallels between almost any two pursuits.  After the second cypher I danced in, I wondered to myself why I hadn’t felt like this was as big of an issue with squash as it was with dancing.  I believe that this is because squash is already set up to impose these two types of learning on your process.  You don’t have to pursue both the laboratory work (drills and working on movement) and the application in the real world (games and tournaments), and many people are content to simply play games.  In fact, squash is probably more likely to lead to people that have the opposite kind of problem to that which I’ve experienced with dancing.  Rather than spending all of their time in the lab working on theory, they spend all of their time playing games, applying what they know (again, this isn’t a criticism – if you’re content doing that, then by all means, continue to do so).

As a late dancer, pursuing a style of dance that requires a good deal of technique, it’s been easy to neglect the importance of real world application, and to simply work on theory, theory, theory.  The more I thought about these changes to my own pursuit, the more I realized that I may very well be passing along the same habits to my students.  Not once have we cyphered in one of my classes.  Why not?  Probably because I’d never done it myself.  Maybe because I was a little bit afraid to dance in front of people when the focus was exclusively on me.

But if I really care about dancing, how is this a sustainable approach?  It isn’t, unless I’m willing to forever remain a laboratory dancer (I’m not).  This point was actually driven home during the first class I took in Vancouver – a locking class with an incredible dancer named Kim Sato.  At the start and end of the class, everyone got together in a circle, and rather than facing the front and the mirrors, where we could focus exclusively on ourselves, we faced in towards each other and danced that way.  At the end of the class, Kim announced that we would be following the leader, and each took turns doing something that everyone else had to repeat for a number of beats before moving on to the next person.  It was intimidating, and I loved it.

Truthfully, the hardest cypher you ever enter will be your first one, and, parallel to that, the hardest time to get into any particular cypher will be the first time.  Each time after that, it gets easier and easier.  I found myself walking to Robson square this past Thursday excited about the opportunity to get down with other dancers, and to work on my freestyle skills.  I knew that I would be intimidated all over again, and that I would find it hard to keep coming up with new things, but I didn’t let that bother me.  I just wanted to get better at the application of my technique.

You…

So what does this mean to you, the non-dancer that has stumbled across my blog because I keep publishing my notes to Facebook, or because you’re bored at work and I was the first thing that popped up on your RSS-reader?

It means that if your aim is continual, optimized improvement in a given pursuit, you too must be spend time reflecting on whether or not you’re spending enough time in the lab, and enough time in the real-world.  If you find yourself plateau’d and unable to break out and experience a new bout of improvement, assess whether or not you’ve been spending too much time, or too little time, working in the lab, honing your skills.

Bonus

Okay.  The theory for today is out of the way.  The other thing that I promised last time I posted was an update on what I’ve been learning.  That list is perpetually growing, and never-ending, and I feel like everytime I spend an hour in a class, it dovetails into me learning about seven other new things related (and sometimes unrelated) to what we were working on.  Maybe I learned a single boogaloo technique, but also picked up new ways to approach teaching, learned about a weakness that I need to work on, and learned that I don’t like dancing on a certain side.  Notwithstanding that, I will try to summarize some of the more salient points, because otherwise this blog amounts to nothing more than verbal masturbation, and that’s not really my steeze.

Up to this point, I’ve been taking three classes each week: One hiphop class, one locking class, and one popping class.  I started taking a hiphop class because it’s taught by someone that I have a great deal of respect for: Liz Vaesen (Please someone correct me if I spelled her name wrong).  Brooke and I first heard of Liz when we took a popping workshop that she was bringing over to Victoria (she brings about four classes over each year), and were both immediately inspired and identified with her approach and view on hiphop, and dancing in general.  An excellent teacher is a better predictor of my growth than anything else about a given class (which may sound trite, but that includes subject matter and many other factors;  I feel like I would learn taking a ballet class with a great teacher than I would a popping class with a bad teacher, all other things being considered equal).

Liz’s class is everything I love about hiphop.  It focuses purely on social grooves, is done in Robson Square (urban!), and it’s not about flashy moves or fancy choreography.  I never really grew up “plugged in” to hiphop.  I knew that I wanted to dance from a fairly young age (though was never able to find teachers for it when I was a kid, and was probably also too intimidated), but never really identified with rap music when I heard it on Much (it turns out I’m just a snob and, like all forms of music that is broadcast, like only a few of the songs that are put out at any given time).  It wasn’t until I met Brooke and started to talk with her about dancing and hiphop that I realized that many of the elements and feelings that exist in HipHop are elements that I identify strongly with.  Individualism, creativity, honest self-expression, and self-awareness (both individual and cultural) are all key aspects of my identity.

Although I struggle to reflect these virtues at times (as do we all), they are all aims that I pursue throughout my day.

Bay’s cousin, Michael (who I like and enjoy chatting with), said something to me the last time that I saw him that really put me off.  He was playing me some music from a group called Bass Nectar (who are pretty good, though not really my top choice), and as we were listening, he commented that “If not for these guys and this kind of music, rap would be dead”.  I smiled and let him know that I couldn’t disagree with him more.  To the outsider, rap, and by association, hiphop, is nothing more than the superficial parts of it that we see co-opted and projected to us through a TV screen, endorsement deals, and product placement.  To most of the public, hiphop is artists like Puff Daddy wearing flashy suits, or Soulja Boy making a catchy hook and posting videos of himself displaying his vast ignorance and the unfortunate arrogance that comes with youth (nothing wrong with that arrogance, as we all have to move through it – it’s just too bad that he’s chosen to have a camera focused on him as he completes that journey).

But hiphop is so much more than these superficial elements.  In truth, these elements are probably so distorted as to have become the antithesis of hiphop.  Michael’s statement that rap would be dead if not for artists like Bass Nectar displays the ignorance that most people have of what hiphop is.  Hiphop is a cultural movement.  A way of feeling, thinking, obeserving, reflecting, and creating.  Hiphop wouldn’t die simply because the mainstream lost interest in the superficial and  overly-refined products that the music and fashion industry have distilled from the movement.  By the same token, a movement that is about culture wouldn’t simply be rejuvenated because a new set of artists have adopted a new interpretation of that culture.  Cultural movements don’t die, or get reborn.  Cultural movements like hiphop are reflections of our society, and they morph and evolve, just like our societies do.

Sorry about that, I didn’t even notice that soapbox I was standing on.  Anyhow, let’s get back on track.  The things we learn in Liz’s class are social dances.  Grooves and dances that have evolved as new music has come out and people have interpreted that into simple movements.  The Humpty dance, the Roger Rabbit, the Bart Simpson, the Steve Martin, the Cabbage Patch, and yes, even the Running Man, are all social dances that have evolved and become a part of hiphop.  These grooves and the music provide a simple pallette for the dancer to paint with.  Their interpretation and creativity in how they use those grooves, and add their own flare, are what leads to a creative process.

I’ve already mentioned the locking class that I take with Kim, and that’s also an excellent class.  Kim’s one of those ridiculously talented dancers, accomplished in ballet, tap, hiphop, locking, and several billion other styles (from what I’ve been told).  I always finish her class exhausted, drenched in sweat, humbled, and with a greater awareness of what it means to dance, rather than simply to lock.

Lastly, I take a popping class with Jamieson, one of the member’s of the Groovy G’s – a very talented popping crew in Vancouver.  Jamieson, like the other two teachers I’ve mentioned, does an excellent job of focusing on the dancing aspect of popping, and is excellent at teaching you without you realizing that you’re being taught.  We usually start out with very basic dance movements, and by the end of the class that has evolved into several popping techniques.  The only thing that I find frustrating about the class is that I am having trouble figuring out how to take his manner of teaching and adapt it into something that I could share with my own students.

Before I left, Brooke and I had discussed teaching two popping classes – one beginner, and one advanced. However, in Vancouver, there’s only one open class for popping, and one for locking.  Furthermore, Jamieson isn’t teaching “advanced” techniques.  He’s just teaching movement, and layering that with technique.  Likewise, Kim isn’t teaching complicated choreography – she’s teaching dancing, and layering that with locking techniques.  I’ve had students come up to me and ask if I was going to teach a more advanced popping class, but I was never able to really understand what that class would look like, nor what I would be teaching them.  I’m more convinced than ever that this isn’t the right approach – I think that what would be better is to have a class once a week, and a cypher once a week.  If the advanced dancers aren’t happy reviewing fundamentals, focusing on dancing, and spending some of that time learning new techniques, they can come to the cyphers and practice applying the techniques they’ve learned.

I’m happy with the length of this post, so I’ll cut it off here.  I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to audiobooks and podcasts on my commute to work, so I’ll aim to focus on reviewing some of the ones that I think are most worthwhile next blog post.  Until then…

* Cyphers are a little bit like a battle.  You have a bunch of dancers in a circle, and take turns going into the centre of the circle and getting down, one after another.  The aim isn’t to out-do one another (though playful one-ups-manship is fun), but simply to come together and create something, with the music, as a group.  The feeling is one of encouragement and creativity, rather than aggression and competition.

Dancing, Random Thoughts, Updates on me Hide

I’ve lived in Vancouver for about a month now.  I’m working here for the Summer on a co-op placement with WorkSafeBC, and living with my brother and his girlfriend Willough.

My brother and his girlfriend are being amazing hosts, and it’s making everything a lot easier than it might otherwise have been.  I haven’t had to worry about finding a place to rent during the Summer and I’ve been living ridiculously close to downtown for rent that is affordable.  Me paying rent helps out Brendan and Willough, so all in all, I think things are working out pretty good.

This is the first weekend that I haven’t travelled back home to Victoria (to spend time with Bay, friends, and family), or had someone coming here, so it’s really the first decent duration of time that I’ve had to sit down and reflect.  The first couple of weeks have been a process of acclimatizing for me.  Learning the ropes at a new job, figuring out where things are in the city, getting over the initial inertia that I experience when I want to start something new (in this case, taking dance classes).  Today I’m planning solely to reflect on that experience, and what it’s telling me about myself.

Dancing

The dance culture in Vancouver is incredible.  There isn’t a single night that goes by where I don’t find myself wishing that we had anything comparable to what I see here.  Every single night I can walk down to Robson square and find someone to practice with.  All of the dancer’s I’ve met have been really friendly, and the quantity of talent is leaps and bounds ahead of what we have in Victoria.  Note that the quality is about the same – in Victoria we have some excellent dancers (I don’t include myself in that category), it’s just that Vancouver has more excellent dancers.

As far as classes are concerned, the options that are available are almost overwhelming.  I’m taking three classes a week, and if I had more time, there are certainly more classes available that I could be taking.  More popping classes, more locking classes, more hiphop classes, and more house classes.

I’ve had to make some adjustments.  One of those adjustments has just been pushing myself out of my bubble.  I generally avoid social situations until I’m tight with people.  Even though I can do it pretty well, I hate small talk.  I spend too much time in my head, thinking about how awkward it will be going up to some random people dancing and saying “Hey, I’m new in town, what’s up?”.  Getting over that hasn’t been super difficult, but it has been something I’ve had to push myself to overcome.

As with many anxieties, once I just made the decision to do it, it was easy.  Things have been helped by the fact that I’ve met a few of the dancers here before, either from classes, or from mutual friends, or workshops that I’ve taken.  I recognize a lot of them from Get Down, which I came over to Vancouver for last Summer.  Even better, doing exactly what I stated above turned out to not be awkward at all.  Everyone has been super friendly, and the culture here is really welcoming and inviting.  Big kudos to the street dancers in Vancouver.  If I can help bring back even 10% of that with me to Victoria, I’ll consider it a success.

The other big adjustment has been accepting that I really do have a long way to go.  I’ve always known that I’m not a phenomenal dancer – just someone that loves doing it.  When I’m in Victoria, it’s easy to forget this sometimes.  Since there are very few people that pop or lock in Victoria, the opportunities to see direct evidence of that reality are rare.  I’m a big fish in a small pond, but do everything I can to stay humble and continue driving myself to improve.

However, in Vancouver, every single day I see someone that is able to prove that point, quite effectively.  Because of the effort I make to remain humble, I can accept how great these dancers are without it affecting my own identity to too great an extent.  However, I do face an ongoing challenge to avoid falling into the “pit of despair”, or even to just become overly intimidated by the calibre of talent that surrounds me.  It’s easy to see someone wrecking shop and think to yourself “Man, these people are so good… what’s the point of even trying?”.

One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed in my popping classes is that I just am not feeling funky.  I feel like I’ve got good technique, because that’s what I’ve been able to watch on TV and replicate.  But as soon as the music starts and it’s time to cypher, I feel like I’ve got about seven techniques I can rely on and nothing else.  I feel dead on the dance floor, or like I’m hiding behind the technique.  This is one of my biggest goals this Summer: to understand how I can get funkier, and try and become more creative.  That might be an impossible goal to accomplish – how do you become more creative?  I don’t know if it’s something that can actually be done, but nevertheless, every time I step on the dance floor, I will be doing it with that thought in the back of my head.

Squash

When in school this past year, I had to come to a difficult conclusion.  That conclusion was that I wouldn’t have time for both dancing and squash.  I needed to make a decision between the two.  I love squash; but I double-plus-love dancing.  The decision between the two wasn’t difficult, but letting go of something that I loved was.  However, I knew that if I didn’t make the decision myself, it would end up happening anyhow, and I would simply become more and more frustrated as I felt the skill I had built slipping away.  Sometimes in life, it is better to accept that we need to change in order to grow, than to try to divide ourselves between too many things to the detriment of all of them.

Throughout the year, I knew in the back of my head that I would return to squash again once the year was finished.  What I didn’t realize was that that wasn’t true.  I hadn’t really sat down and planned out my weeknights, and I hadn’t thought about what it would mean to pursue dancing to the extent that I wanted to.  Without sitting down and thinking about the amount of time that would need to be devoted, it was easy to believe that I would be able to fit both squash and dancing in, and devote myself fully to both pursuits.  After my first dance class in Vancouver, I overheard Boris and Ed (two obnoxiously good lockers) talking to each other, and Boris stating that he had been at Robson square practicing every night that week.  It wasn’t until I was back in Victoria that weekend that it dawned on me that if I really wanted to make the most of the Summer, I too needed to be putting an equivalent amount of time in.  The sacrifice that I would need to make didn’t fully dawn on me until I found myself talking about it with Bay and my friends, but it makes sense.  When I first started playing squash, I was at the courts about four to five times a week.  Improvement doesn’t come without dedication.

And so it is – I have a regular drill session and match with my buddy Bevan, who I first started training with, but aside from that, my time is devoted to dancing.  It’s a decision that was hard to confront, but ultimately for the best.  I’d feel worse if I didn’t feel like I was trading something I like a lot for something that I love.  If I were to take a fatalistic approach, I would still be able to look back proudly on the time that I spent honing a skill and achieving the level that I did.  If I take a more positive approach, I know that squash will never truly leave me, and will always be there in some capacity or another.

Zooming out

This whole process has really gotten me thinking about growth.  In the last year, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of growth in all aspects of my life.  Not just in myself, but in my wife, my friends, and my family.  Growth can sometimes be hard.  It’s not always easy to let things go that we care about, but sometimes you have to be willing to do that if you want to progress as a person.  Some people never fully embrace change in this manner, and forever restrict their own progression.  If that is the decision that they choose to make, then I salute that decision and hope for them the best.  If it’s something that they are unaware of, I hope that they’re happy.  For myself, I know that this will never be acceptable.

As an agnostic, I don’t generally believe in a god.  This doesn’t mean that I believe that there is not a god, nor that I believe there is not a higher power, intelligence, or order in our universe.  It simply means that I have not yet been given convincing evidence to support me changing my view in this manner.  I try to approach life with as open a mind as possible, while maintaining a critical outlook in order to protect myself from being taken advantage of.  As a Bertrand Russell once said, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”.

Why am I telling you this?  Well, one of the things that I often hear many religious scholars stating is that without a belief in god and an afterlife, our lives are meaningless (just because I’m not religious doesn’t mean that I don’t find Theology fascinating).  Perhaps to some people they are, but to me, it grants me the freedom to dictate my own terms with which I ascribe value to my life.  My own personal growth and progression, and contributing to the same in other people’s lives, are two things which create incredible meaning and purpose in my life.

How high can I reach?  If perfection, as an ultimate ideal, is theoretically impossible, how close to perfection (again, on my own terms), can I come?  The only way I will ever find out the answer to this is to push myself to achieve as much as I can.  To some, the fact that this motivation is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic (comes from within, rather than from something outside of me) makes it less meaningful.  To me, it makes it more meaningful.  If uncovering the deep inner workings of sociology and psychology, through my study of our legal system, is fulfilling and meaningful to me, then that is a victory in terms of my life.  Now, that goal, or end result, may very well be meaningless to someone else; but that’s okay – they need to set their own goals and pursuits that are specific to themselves.  These are part of what make life meaningful to me.  They’re part of the core of what makes me who I am.

Part of pushing forward for that growth means that life is always going to be about embracing change.  Sometimes that change will lead to short-term loss in order to make long-term gains.  Actually, it’s most likely that most of that change will lead to short-term loss.  Any change in your life is generally going to cause you some stress (most change is stressful, be it physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual stress), and require that you adjust in order to accommodate and figure it out.  Not only that, but not every change will necessarily be for the best.  Sometimes I make changes, only to realize that it’s not the change that I wanted.  These changes aren’t a failure – they’re simply more data points from which to evaluate where I am.

Learn to embrace change in your life, and to recognize that change in and of itself is a rewarding and positive part of life.

I think that’s it for now – the next post will be about some of the techniques and choreography that I’ve been learning in the classes I’m taking, so fairly dance heavy.  As always, I’ll attempt to analogize those things to the more abstract challenges and things happening in my life.  Until then.

Dancing, Updates on me Hide

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

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.

Dancing, Design, Habits, Lifehacking, Management, Minutiae, Productivity, Squash, Uncategorized, Updates on me Hide

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.

Minutiae, Updates on me Hide

Biphasic sleep, Habits, Lifehacking, Lifestyle Changes, Minutiae, Sleep, Updates on me Hide

Biphasic sleep, Habits, Lifehacking, Lifestyle Changes, Productivity, Updates on me Hide

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.

Habits, Lifehacking, Minutiae, Productivity, Projects, Social Media, Tech, Twitter, Updates on me Hide

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, a
nd 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:

1. 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.
2. 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, Efficiency, Getting Things Done, GTD, Habits, Lifehacking, Multi-tasking, Productivity, Quicksilver, Remember the Milk, RTM, Updates on me Hide

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 th
at 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.&
nbsp; 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.

Biphasic sleep, Habits, Lifehacking, Lifestyle Changes, Productivity, Updates on me Hide