So you think you finally got it, you are on top of it, you can time manage like a pro and act on your priorities.
And it all works out well, you can see the big picture, you act on your goals, you do the important stuff, while other people seem stuck in gluey mess of unclarity. The same gluey mess that made you rethink your time strategy, destructure your habits, restructure your time use and basically take quite a bit of time and thought to put yourself in a better, more focused position.
You do very well, that is until you have to deal with one person (or more) that is still stuck. One person that somehow attaches themselves to one of your projects, and has no time-related cognitive hygiene whatsoever. A person that plays in work time (because they are unclear about their goals and they procrastinate on them) and works in play time (because they are guilty they haven't done real progress). A person that thinks you should use all the time until your project deadline to work, think, (read be insecure about, and generally mumble in the fog of) the same one project.
A person that postpones when you want to take action, but cries out you should act together when you want to work on another project. Or think together, or talk about it (read doubt all sensible strategy to just move the project forward, and instead waste hours just generally being stuck in doubt and this illusion that the project is harder than it first seemed to you). All this happens until this one project, which you could have settled yourself in a few focused hours or days of work in a flow state, ends up being this huge messy cloud, that hangs over your entire schedule for weeks or months. Until you don't know when to anticipate the next step (because you wait for that other person to make up their mind and act or just trust you can move forward). So you end up anticipating that work on the project might happen at all times, and feeling the project is unsolved for weeks, together with the helplessness and lack of ability to focus on other things that comes from that.
Congratulations, you got stuck on someone else's cognitive mess and bad habits. You will feel helpless, frustrated and be generally unproductive and waste good work time (and relaxing play time) for a looong time.
Why is this so frustrating? Well, if you are the type that I described above, that generally has a good work ethic and quite a grasp on their own time management procedures, this will frustrate you even more, because you put the work into clarifying some principles that make you productive, in creating those good habits of handling work and making space for r&r. That is you put in a lot of work of self reflection, change, and good judgement where you could have just bumbled your way around into work with a foggy mind (which is definitely the easier option). Quite possibly, to make time for upgrading your strategies, you had to juggle other things, to resist the pressure of urgent but not as important projects. So why do you have to deal with all this mess, all over again, when you've done your work? And why does it get harder, the more days the project takes, and it feels the clarity, balance and sense of sanity you have obtained is slipping away?
A good way to think about your time takes work, and generally saves you lots of trouble. It is a form of mental hygiene. When out of this zone, everything can feel overshadowed by one project, on which you feel like you are working all the time, but make little or no progress. This brings about feelings of helplessness and self-doubt on your ability to progress, lack of ability to work on other things and sometimes even lack of ability to enjoy your time off or make plans around this foggy mess. Is natural to want your cognitive hygiene back, it is the same, if not more important, as wanting to keep a clean house. They are people which are more sensitive to mess than others. I, for one, cannot focus when there is mess over a certain threshold in my environment, and definitely work best in very clean and well structured spaces.
It is the same for my mind though. I don't work well if my schedule or finances or state of relationships is unclear. I need clarity in the big picture of things. When things get messy (in real or metaphorical ways), I compulsively try to clean them up. At least that is proactive, because I know if I wouldn't clean them up I would get stuck in limbo-land. As I stumbled upon this bit of knowledge about myself quite early in life, I have accumulated a bunch of strategies to cope with mess (read clean it up), and generally use a journal to clarify things for myself when the mess is not at physical levels.
Bad time and organizational habits are not acknowledged enough as the very damaging things they can be. We make smokers consume their bad habit in the rain and cold, not to be affected by it, but there is no generally accepted code of action when confronted with someone else's bad time habits. Most of the time we even feel bad for getting frustrated, and god forbid we lose our cool and explode on one of our colleagues stumbling around moments - we feel bad and apologize for ages to come. We feel like somehow we've been impolite, but also like a transgression has been made against us. A transgression which we don't have the vocabulary to express or communicate about until we explode.
So I propose we create that vocabulary. It is very damaging to be stuck in someone else's foggy mind, and we should acknowledge the ways in which that mess affects us. We should develop boundaries, strategies to deal with and ways to communicate to these people that in their innocuous disorganized way, they are making our lives hell.
I am interested on this from two perspectives. The first is the obvious one, that I am an embodied person which lives within the limits of time and having to deal and work together with other people. The second is that time perception is quite a fascinating thing, and a cognitive process. The way we perceive our time strongly influences the ways in which we are able to act, and everything we manage to achieve, live, experience. It influences not just what we manage to put in our life, but the very process of how we feel about our life in general - rushed and anxious, or time-rich, productive and accomplished. Mastering time is mastering life (as much as a human can do), and mastering time can only come from understanding how we think about it.
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Power of thought, speed of thought
There are various discussions around what the speed of thought is. I won't join the debate, as for this discussion an approximate number is enough. Therefore:
Some people think the speed of thought is somewhere around 250 km per second. Others call it at 300 milliseconds. It all depends on what you are actually measuring.
The speed of the electrical impulse in the human neural wiring depends on the thickness of the "wire".
Other people measure how long it takes to begin to understand objects that are visually represented.
Yet far in the past people used to think that the speed of thought is infinite, that thought is the fastest thing in the universe, as in your mind you can travel wherever instantly. To all the places you have been to, to all the places you can imagine, to all the places you can have as points of reference, or the places you have a symbol, an image or a totem of - like the moon.
For years, that thought, of the ultimate escape through thought has comforted generations. Although it did had in some cases some Jumper intrigue into it - like you can't go to a place you have never seen or visited before.
Of course this kind of brain speed doesn't visit the actual locations, doesn't see the real objects of its imagery. It just activates the symbols, the references, the representations that we hold of those objects.
But even so, it's fun and useful, it enables us to visit the world in our head, hold in the same image objects, ideas and people that we never put in the same room, manipulate reality, find meaning and solutions, and just play.
Yet here's the funny thing. The pleasure we take in our speed of thought seems to be influencing the way we interact with the world. We try to automatize things in our life, and processes, we try to create new circumstances that wouldn't naturally occur from things we put together before in our heads, we try to have the same power over reality, over the source, as we feel having over our minds and symbols.
Some people think the speed of thought is somewhere around 250 km per second. Others call it at 300 milliseconds. It all depends on what you are actually measuring.
The speed of the electrical impulse in the human neural wiring depends on the thickness of the "wire".
Other people measure how long it takes to begin to understand objects that are visually represented.
Yet far in the past people used to think that the speed of thought is infinite, that thought is the fastest thing in the universe, as in your mind you can travel wherever instantly. To all the places you have been to, to all the places you can imagine, to all the places you can have as points of reference, or the places you have a symbol, an image or a totem of - like the moon.
For years, that thought, of the ultimate escape through thought has comforted generations. Although it did had in some cases some Jumper intrigue into it - like you can't go to a place you have never seen or visited before.
Of course this kind of brain speed doesn't visit the actual locations, doesn't see the real objects of its imagery. It just activates the symbols, the references, the representations that we hold of those objects.
But even so, it's fun and useful, it enables us to visit the world in our head, hold in the same image objects, ideas and people that we never put in the same room, manipulate reality, find meaning and solutions, and just play.
Yet here's the funny thing. The pleasure we take in our speed of thought seems to be influencing the way we interact with the world. We try to automatize things in our life, and processes, we try to create new circumstances that wouldn't naturally occur from things we put together before in our heads, we try to have the same power over reality, over the source, as we feel having over our minds and symbols.
Friday, 7 September 2012
Pure perception and the extra layers of meaning
There is no such thing as pure perception.
All we perceive has an added layer of interpretation and prediction.
In fact this layer goes so deep that we can only be aware of the fact that we are actually predicting things when these predictions are violated - like in the case of visual illusions, or impossible objects.
In this case our "perceptual" system extrapolates an object that is not truly there, but it might be (in a normal world when someone has not created a perceptual trick) - a triangle. As soon as we run our gaze over the edges we realize this couldn't possibly be, as it defies what we know about space.
This extra layer of perception is actually interpretation, and comes from our need of being able to predict the world and categorize it in things that we already know. It is a much harder to notice this layer when we deal with abstract interpretation of events, situations and people. As these rarely can provide exactly the circumstances that would violate those expectations, and even then we can reinterpret that violation under our own system's rules, or simply discard it.*
*Remember it is very hard for people to hold on to contradictory facts; we like things and facts that are coherent, and our brain will do lots to get that coherence, including brushing over very important details that don't fit the big picture, or - well - lying to us to keep our coherence and perception of our normal image of the world going.
It is fascinating to think about the fact that we deal with synthesis, inference and abstraction from the moment we open our eyes (or sensory gates), and that what we think of as being "abstract thought" has in fact roots and examples in our very mundane, anchored-in-the-concrete interactions with material objects of the world.
I call this interaction because even if we don't act on the object we are observing, we already have a predesigned cognitive system that deals with it in such a way as to make it available for our interaction. We can't have pure observation, our level of observation already involves some level of preparation for interaction.
There is no point in seeing the three lines that we perceive as a table, if there is no possible interaction with it. The layer of meaning of the object seems to be added for our possible interaction. What does that say about the ones fascinated with meaning? What is their stance on interaction?
The fact that we seem unable to have "pure" perception also makes me wonder what do those awesome people that are mainly observers actually see (yup, I mean you)? Are they the mirrors of the world, a special mirror, with the properties of their vision and interpretation, in which one can see the world reflected in their personality?
That is why we have such ambiguity with terms like vision - to see but also to have a vision of something. Having a vision is quite similar to having some higher degree of interpretation and meaning over the facts that you know, is being able to put them together in a way that makes them easy to navigate and inspires people to action and interaction.
We can only decide to interact with what we see in our vision.
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Image : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_art_-_Impossible_Triangle,_Claisebrook.jpg
--------------
All we perceive has an added layer of interpretation and prediction.
In fact this layer goes so deep that we can only be aware of the fact that we are actually predicting things when these predictions are violated - like in the case of visual illusions, or impossible objects.
In this case our "perceptual" system extrapolates an object that is not truly there, but it might be (in a normal world when someone has not created a perceptual trick) - a triangle. As soon as we run our gaze over the edges we realize this couldn't possibly be, as it defies what we know about space.
This extra layer of perception is actually interpretation, and comes from our need of being able to predict the world and categorize it in things that we already know. It is a much harder to notice this layer when we deal with abstract interpretation of events, situations and people. As these rarely can provide exactly the circumstances that would violate those expectations, and even then we can reinterpret that violation under our own system's rules, or simply discard it.*
*Remember it is very hard for people to hold on to contradictory facts; we like things and facts that are coherent, and our brain will do lots to get that coherence, including brushing over very important details that don't fit the big picture, or - well - lying to us to keep our coherence and perception of our normal image of the world going.
It is fascinating to think about the fact that we deal with synthesis, inference and abstraction from the moment we open our eyes (or sensory gates), and that what we think of as being "abstract thought" has in fact roots and examples in our very mundane, anchored-in-the-concrete interactions with material objects of the world.
I call this interaction because even if we don't act on the object we are observing, we already have a predesigned cognitive system that deals with it in such a way as to make it available for our interaction. We can't have pure observation, our level of observation already involves some level of preparation for interaction.
There is no point in seeing the three lines that we perceive as a table, if there is no possible interaction with it. The layer of meaning of the object seems to be added for our possible interaction. What does that say about the ones fascinated with meaning? What is their stance on interaction?
The fact that we seem unable to have "pure" perception also makes me wonder what do those awesome people that are mainly observers actually see (yup, I mean you)? Are they the mirrors of the world, a special mirror, with the properties of their vision and interpretation, in which one can see the world reflected in their personality?
That is why we have such ambiguity with terms like vision - to see but also to have a vision of something. Having a vision is quite similar to having some higher degree of interpretation and meaning over the facts that you know, is being able to put them together in a way that makes them easy to navigate and inspires people to action and interaction.
We can only decide to interact with what we see in our vision.
--------------
Image : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_art_-_Impossible_Triangle,_Claisebrook.jpg
--------------
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
Preference for Escape
We have a cognitive preference for some patterns that have dominated our entire thought for years, or synthesize very intense experiences. We enjoy the taste of these concepts, they are old friends, they dilate our pupils and yield the ideas that can save us.
Me, I like escape. I like the taste of it - it feels like a breeze that lifts my arms into a flying posture, like the joy of freshness and continuous reinvention.
Also there is something in the idea of being able to escape at all times that makes you feel free and safe.
Many people associate freedom with risk, and safety with living a stable, yet sometimes boring routine. But in our thoughts of escape, in the possibility of it, some of us find the safety of not being trapped in a box that is not our size.
This taste for certain notions is reflected in our aesthetic preferences.
This is also reflected in my preference in movies. At least one stream/one taste of the movies I like shows a preference that can be traced back to the concept of escape - The Cube(s), the Saw(s), Fermat's Room, etc. Escapes from rooms, from labyrinths, from situations, survival instinct, traps, problem-solving, cues to salvation.
Being trapped in a box, in a situation, finding your way out by using your brains and your guts has intense meaning for me. And it can take various shapes.
It can be about saving yourself from a box which is not who you are, but just a situation in which others or life has put you in.
It can be escaping the box of routine into the excitement of a brand new box of things to do and people to meet and things to be good at and act upon.
What can be out there, beyond the box, if not freedom?
But freedom and pure chaos, complete indetermination are not something pleasant for the human mind. No matter how chaotic life might seem, nobody can truly live into chaos.
So we just into a different box, an unexplored one, or one in which we can be something we like more.
They are boxes which are too tight for us, and boxes which might take us an entire lifetime to explore.
And although they are boxes, they contain you, limit you, and they are limited themselves, we might not so much mind the box, as we can at times mind the fact that we don't like it's style, it's architecture, or it's tightness on our chest.
As long as there are things to explore, and the box matches our preference, we feel free.
Yet some of the ones ultimately obsessed with freedom, might intensely get focused on getting out of the box. There is escape for escape's sake. There is detachment, refusal to participate into something that feels like a box, and the intense fear that by participating you limit yourself to the size of the box, and you might forget you are in one until it is way too late.
That I understand, I can relate to. I hold the same instinct, and it took lots of learning to accept that some boxes might be "positive", and that I can escape so much as to escape everything I really want as well.
Also, if the things we do, the people we are with, the situations in which we find ourselves are boxes, it is interesting to remember we are boxes ourselves.
We can change ourselves in time by tasting other boxes, or throwing a way the things that are too tight for our liking, yet we are limited. We have the possibility of freedom, the possibility of becoming, yet we are not free to pursue everything at the same time, we naturally want the things that fit ourselves, the box that we are, and other things don't bring us much joy, no matter how heroic of an act of freedom we might be manifesting while escaping the "prison" of our previous identity.
On our road of manifesting our freedom, we want to be open, we want to embrace change, we want to discover and explore new things, new attitudes, new preferences, but something has to remain stable. Not the same thing all the time. We can't change everything at once, no matter how fluid our identities.
The thing we might not change, when we think we are changing everything, might very well be the idea of change, the internal observer, our very detachment.
Yet detachment is a box in itself. An attitude. It might feel like the secret weapon that has help you not fall, but it is also the drive that keeps you away from the things you want to stay in, because they are you, they represent what you need and like. Detachment lures you further, it whispers seductively into your ear that you can't possibly stay here, that there might be more to see, while not letting you feel the boxes you are passing through.
But there is no depth in an escape that is detached, that comes from fear. Those escapes just make you keep on running.
Where do you escape when you have escaped everything? You end up with this box of continuous escapes, which might look very much like a labyrinth. You might be the labyrinth.
Yet you can go back, grab the piece of string, trace your way, and find those exact rooms which where more than boxes to you. The rooms in which you can build, the rooms which you can enlarge, the rooms in which you are at home, and others might want to visit.
There is no point in escaping from the places that make you feel like yourself. And if you have obsessed about escape as much as I did, that comes as a revelation.
Escape was not the point to start with, but I will always have the special relationship with it. The point was being able to move, to see, and to be authentic, without constraints. Yet that is much harder of an essence to convey into one single taste, so escape has taken its place as a symbol.
The total paradox of someone focused on escape might be escape in ourselves. You never know what you have already become in the mean time, while focusing on the previous escapes. But the forever growing, adapting, changing, yet stable box of ourselves is the only box that hold us in forever, the box with that special taste - of not just having found, but feeling at home.
Me, I like escape. I like the taste of it - it feels like a breeze that lifts my arms into a flying posture, like the joy of freshness and continuous reinvention.
Also there is something in the idea of being able to escape at all times that makes you feel free and safe.
Many people associate freedom with risk, and safety with living a stable, yet sometimes boring routine. But in our thoughts of escape, in the possibility of it, some of us find the safety of not being trapped in a box that is not our size.
This taste for certain notions is reflected in our aesthetic preferences.
This is also reflected in my preference in movies. At least one stream/one taste of the movies I like shows a preference that can be traced back to the concept of escape - The Cube(s), the Saw(s), Fermat's Room, etc. Escapes from rooms, from labyrinths, from situations, survival instinct, traps, problem-solving, cues to salvation.
Being trapped in a box, in a situation, finding your way out by using your brains and your guts has intense meaning for me. And it can take various shapes.
It can be about saving yourself from a box which is not who you are, but just a situation in which others or life has put you in.
It can be escaping the box of routine into the excitement of a brand new box of things to do and people to meet and things to be good at and act upon.
What can be out there, beyond the box, if not freedom?
But freedom and pure chaos, complete indetermination are not something pleasant for the human mind. No matter how chaotic life might seem, nobody can truly live into chaos.
So we just into a different box, an unexplored one, or one in which we can be something we like more.
They are boxes which are too tight for us, and boxes which might take us an entire lifetime to explore.
And although they are boxes, they contain you, limit you, and they are limited themselves, we might not so much mind the box, as we can at times mind the fact that we don't like it's style, it's architecture, or it's tightness on our chest.
As long as there are things to explore, and the box matches our preference, we feel free.
Yet some of the ones ultimately obsessed with freedom, might intensely get focused on getting out of the box. There is escape for escape's sake. There is detachment, refusal to participate into something that feels like a box, and the intense fear that by participating you limit yourself to the size of the box, and you might forget you are in one until it is way too late.
That I understand, I can relate to. I hold the same instinct, and it took lots of learning to accept that some boxes might be "positive", and that I can escape so much as to escape everything I really want as well.
Also, if the things we do, the people we are with, the situations in which we find ourselves are boxes, it is interesting to remember we are boxes ourselves.
We can change ourselves in time by tasting other boxes, or throwing a way the things that are too tight for our liking, yet we are limited. We have the possibility of freedom, the possibility of becoming, yet we are not free to pursue everything at the same time, we naturally want the things that fit ourselves, the box that we are, and other things don't bring us much joy, no matter how heroic of an act of freedom we might be manifesting while escaping the "prison" of our previous identity.
On our road of manifesting our freedom, we want to be open, we want to embrace change, we want to discover and explore new things, new attitudes, new preferences, but something has to remain stable. Not the same thing all the time. We can't change everything at once, no matter how fluid our identities.
The thing we might not change, when we think we are changing everything, might very well be the idea of change, the internal observer, our very detachment.
Yet detachment is a box in itself. An attitude. It might feel like the secret weapon that has help you not fall, but it is also the drive that keeps you away from the things you want to stay in, because they are you, they represent what you need and like. Detachment lures you further, it whispers seductively into your ear that you can't possibly stay here, that there might be more to see, while not letting you feel the boxes you are passing through.
But there is no depth in an escape that is detached, that comes from fear. Those escapes just make you keep on running.
Where do you escape when you have escaped everything? You end up with this box of continuous escapes, which might look very much like a labyrinth. You might be the labyrinth.
Yet you can go back, grab the piece of string, trace your way, and find those exact rooms which where more than boxes to you. The rooms in which you can build, the rooms which you can enlarge, the rooms in which you are at home, and others might want to visit.
There is no point in escaping from the places that make you feel like yourself. And if you have obsessed about escape as much as I did, that comes as a revelation.
Escape was not the point to start with, but I will always have the special relationship with it. The point was being able to move, to see, and to be authentic, without constraints. Yet that is much harder of an essence to convey into one single taste, so escape has taken its place as a symbol.
The total paradox of someone focused on escape might be escape in ourselves. You never know what you have already become in the mean time, while focusing on the previous escapes. But the forever growing, adapting, changing, yet stable box of ourselves is the only box that hold us in forever, the box with that special taste - of not just having found, but feeling at home.
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