Digital Alterity

I want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you who contacted me after yesterday’s post. Every single person that contacted me was positive and affirming. Some of you said that I inspired you. Some of you said simply that you loved me just the way I am and that you’re with me every step of the way. I’m saving every response as a pick-me-up on days when it seems like I can’t possibly tank what’s in front of me.

Today was the first full day confronting my problems head-on. I started my day by playing WoW for a bit and then taking a nice relaxing pre-work bath. Having successfully woken up and relaxed a bit, I started two lists that were going to serve as the focus for my day:

• Shit I’m Nervous About. These are the things that make me start feeling the stirrings of nervousness, panic, and general ickiness. These are exactly the sort of things that I would be tempted to ignore until they turn into full-blown crises. These items are officially marked with a skull. They come first in the kill order. I have to face them, and I have to make some progress on getting them out of my way. I’m allowed to delegate these tasks to someone else if I think they can help, but I absolutely cannot ignore them until they become someone else’s problem by default. Some things on this list might not even be proper tasks that can be done or things that can go away in any tangible sense. In these cases, I look deeply at them, try to figure out why they make me so nervous, and think of one tiny thing I can do to make them less scary or life-breaking.
• Shit I’d Like To Do. These are things that are either fun or that genuinely sound like an unscary but productive task. This is the easy stuff. When I feel my resolve slipping, I hop over to one of these items to build my confidence back up. I’m not scared of these tasks, so I don’t feel an obligation to confront them. Some of them might even be safely ignored.

These lists are only for me. They’re not preserved for posterity. At the end of the day, I’m going to throw the damn things away. Tomorrow is going to be a completely new day with completely new lists. The quest doesn’t seem nearly as big that way.

The lists worked out great today. I had six items on my “Nervous” list, and I dealt with four them before lunch. On a less tangible but still important level, I felt far more in-control today. I was actually tanking my problems on my terms instead of letting them run around my head all willy-nilly. That feeling of control goes a long way toward keeping my calm and collected.

Today, I had a lot of victories. They’re small — hell, they’re even microscopic — but they’re the trash mobs that tell me that, yes, I can complete this instance if I perform to the best of my ability.

1. “Happy Birthday” by The Crüxshadows
2. “Big A, Little A” by Crass
3. “Shine” by Rollins Band

If you’re not sufficiently motivated after listening to all three of those songs in a row, check your effing pulse. You’re probably already dead.

Are you one of the few friends I have that actually still uses IM? Ever wonder why I’m almost always set to some kind of “away” status? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this article from Joe Kissell explains in excellent detail some of the challenges that IM presents to my way of dealing with the world.

From considerable reading and from personal experience, I’ve learned that introverts have a number of other tendencies. And taken together, these traits may shed some light on why I (and numerous other introverts I know) have a hard time with IM, Twitter, and the like. For example, introverts typically need to concentrate on just one thing at a time, and are often particularly sensitive to interruptions and distractions.

Another typical introvert trait is wanting to compose one’s thoughts carefully before sharing them (either verbally or in writing). Once again, while this doesn’t prevent me from carrying on verbal conversations at a normal speed, it makes rapid-fire online textual conversations rather unnerving. For me, interacting with other people in real time online is just as draining as interacting with other people in person. So my feelings about participating in, say, a lively multi-person chat are about the same whether we’re talking about iChat or a party. I can hold my own in the conversation and it’s generally fine, but because it takes a lot of energy I prefer not to do it very often.

The whole article is definitely worth a read.

Today, before work, I had one of my little emotional outbursts. These happen periodically because I try very hard to stay on even keel as long as possible. This, in turn, leads to a buildup that will eventually become too much to contain. This morning, when I realized that there’s no way to go to my friend’s wedding without pillaging the small amount that we’ve got saved up for a house, the anxiety just became too much to contain, and I spent the time before work trying not to cry in the middle of the Reitz Union while trying to explain to Allyson all the stuff that’s getting to me right now.

I should have known that there was a problem brewing of course. You see, my inbox is about three inboxes high. When you’re a GTD wonk, this is a clear sign that something is terribly wrong. My inbox has been this way for two months. I haven’t been doing my daily sketches or my weekly comics. I haven’t been running. All of these things interrelate, and I’m extremely resistant to talking about any of them.

I’m having real trouble fitting everything into one day. I’ve had to realize that the time before work has to be time for me. Going to work is a very stressful thing for me because it’s means social contact. I have to talk to my co-workers. I have to help my professors with their purchase orders. I have to interract with people, and that is extremely stressful for me. I don’t expect other people to understand this because I’ve come to accept that it’s an anomalous part of my psychological makeup. Most people will never understand how hard it is to pick up a phone and call someone — even if it’s someone I deeply care about — because it’s just not that hard for them to do. So, exercising or attempting to otherwise shoehorn other things in before work is a generally bad idea. When I first started my new job, I was doing my daily sketches at lunch. And maybe I ought to do that again. I’ve been using that time to read and recover from a morning of interacting with other people though. Essentially I’m not quite sure how to fit in all the parts and pieces to my day while still leaving myself enough downtime to feel human. When should I exercise? When should I draw? When should I figure out our accounts? When should I make dinner?

This week, things are amplified even further for a couple of reasons. One, I’m reducing my calorie intake again because I’ve been slowly adding kilos to my mass. When I make changes to my diet, managing my depression becomes harder than normal until my body adjusts to the new calorie intake. Two, I’m not paying proper attention to the stuff that’s actually important to me. Even worse, I know it. I have a mission statement. I have a creative goal. I know that the single most important things I should be doing on a given day are:

• Drawing something from life daily.
• Writing something daily.
• Working on a comic.
• Exercising.
• Taking care of myself mentally/emotionally to ensure that I stay out of funks like this.

When I’m not doing any of these things on a given day, that is a failed day. And I’m not even filling that time with mindless video games on the Xbox or reading things on the Internet. In the past week, I have spent large portions of my time either doing something else “productive” or just mindlessly staring off into space. No outflow. No intake. Pure zombie.

I need to manage all of this better. I need to pick up the pieces, ignore how long said pieces have been sitting on the unvacuumed floor of my life, and work on making things better in the present. In essence, I need to:

• Be more open with Allyson about my feelings, fears, anxieties, and stresses — even if I can’t do that without crying or just plain sounding stupid.
• Go through my inbox, and get my GTD lists firmly in place again. I can’t let all this nonsense sit in my head.
• Call Leah, apologize profusely, explain that money is tight, find out where she’s registered, and send a nice present along with a letter expressing my gratitude for her friendship.
• Email Jen back. Jen is one of my best friends, and I need to take care of that friendship because it is precious to me.
• Set aside non-negotiable time to draw and write.
• Sort out my free membership to the gym right outside my office so that I can exercise whenever I decide without regard for the Florida rainy season.

And, most importantly, I need to let go of anything that doesn’t fit with those things. If the dishes don’t get done, they will smell. And that will be okay. If Allyson and I have to take money out of savings to order a pizza or just eat random pre-packaged garbage out of the freezer, we will do so. And that will be okay. If I don’t have a chance to update the money every day, we won’t know exactly up-to-the-minute how much is left in checking/savings. And that will be okay. If I can’t get all of the things delegated to me at work done while maintaining my cool, people will begin delegating to someone else. And that will be okay.

We all have our individual quirks and psychoses. I need to go back to actively managing mine instead of just hoping for the best while imagining the worst.

Technorati Tags: Depression, Anxiety, GTD, Productivity

Like most Americans, I had today off due to the Independence Day holiday. Usually, in my lethargic world, days off mean laying around the house reading comics, drinking coffee, and playing video games. Today, however, I implemented a plan that has been in the works for some time now. I started the 2007 Purge.

You see, back when we had the bedbugs, we began the first purge out of necessity. If we didn’t feel like cleaning, isolating, or otherwise packing up something, we obviously didn’t care enough to keep it. Old furniture, random school papers, and tons of kitsch all met a gory end in the apartment trash dumpsters. The next and most prolific purge happened when we moved out of French Quarter and into Covered Bridge. I donated countless boxes to charity and threw out pounds and pounds of junk in an effort to fully unpack in my home for the first time since I left for college. The current purge is out of a desire to just let go of things and better use my space.

This morning, before noon, I filled up thirteen boxes of excellent stuff and took it down to Goodwill. I donated all of my old video game systems—including a very well kept Xbox and an original NES. I culled more than three-quarters of my video games. I got rid of stuffed animals that I’ve had since I was a child. When I drove to Goodwill, I couldn’t actually see out of the back of my hatchback. My house feels oddly empty and—though it seems a strange way to describe it—free. I still want to donate/eliminate about another car load.

In a semi-related note, I alphabetized all of my comics after bagging and boarding them over the weekend. I also put aside a whole bunch of recent comics that I’m donating to a fellow over at the CGS Forums. I’ll try to get those out in the mail tomorrow night when I go pick up my comics for the week. Now I just need to get a proper box for my comics so that it will be easier to sort through them. I would love to get some Drawer Boxes, but I’m having a hard time justifying the expense for how few comics I actually own.

Technorati Tags: Donations, Simplifying, Decluttering, Clutter, Cleaning, Comics, Storage

I am not good at doing things halfway. I am absurdly devoted to whatever my current obsession happens to be. As a result, I can often do amazing things in a very short amount of time. I can lose a hundred pounds in a year. I can learned how to draw in just a few months. I can go from a couch potato to someone who runs 30 km/week in just a matter of months.

Along with this devotion comes a parallel obsession with measurement and statistics. It’s not enough to just go exercise, I have to measure my speed/distance with a GPS watch and log the data in a spreadsheet full of complicated formulas. I can’t just eat healthier. I have to painstaking track every calorie I consume. I can’t just be more productive. I have to track all of my completed projects in a wiki. In fact, sometimes I wonder if the reward for me isn’t actually the task itself but rather the appeal of benchmarks and descriptive statistics. Are my obsessions just data sets for geek analysis? It’s certainly hard for me to do much of anything without some means of tracking or describing success through some kind of number. I tend to quantify a set of benchmarks before I can even motivate myself to start.

Herein lies the difficulty. I’m constantly competing against myself. Rather than just opting for a navy shower over a bath when convenient, I’ll outline that I’m only allowed one luxurious bath per week—an absurdly extreme benchmark for me. I’ll outline that I have to lose at least 0.5 kg/week. I’ll outline that I have to draw something every single day. I’ll outline that I must increase running distance every three weeks. Measurement, quantification, and benchmarking inevitably lead me into the dangerous waters of over-performance. In turn, this leads to exhaustion and burnout.

I want to work on getting on track with a lot of things, but I need to do so in a way that won’t encourage me to start speeding down the exhaustion turnpike. I need to focus on making changes with small, painless deltas that move me in the direction I want to me moving toward without suddenly making extreme changes in course.

The lighting in our apartment is terrible. Now, given my cave troll nature, it’s actually rather impressive that I would notice this and somehow also consider it worthy of declaration. Our old apartment at the former Covered Bridge Apartments was a dream of light. This place, however, has almost no outside light and only a handful of overhead lights. We’ve supplemented with an army of lamps, and while just fine for most purposes, it’s just painful for drawing and (I’m told by Allyson) painting.

Now the result of this is that I don’t draw every day on the weekend. I know it isn’t a true motivation problem because I draw for hours when we visit Starbucks. I also spend my whole lunch break drawing outside during the week. Here in the dungeon, drawing is just harder to accomplish.

Now admittedly I’m overemphasizing the lighting problem for narrative effect. I also only have one drawing surface in the house—the kitchen table. This problem, however, requires $150-300 for a decent drafting table. The light problem, it turns out, was an easy and cheap fix.

I bought a twelve-dollar adjustable clamp-on light for the kitchen table. Right now, I just have a regular CFL bulb in it, but I’ve already ordered a full-spectrum CFL to really nail the lighting. Even with the regular bulb, it’s already a tenfold improvement. I just did some blind contour sketches at the kitchen table and then sat reading a book there just because of the wonderful task lighting.

So, yes, there are probably things that will require much effort or cash to fix, but there’s usually a quick and dirty hack to keep you moving for now. Don’t mortgage your present artistic productivity for a future that you might procrastinate right out of existence.

Technorati Tags: Art, Productivity, Lifehacks, Light

The notion of giving myself permission to suck has been something of a mantra with regard to my art for the past couple of months. A life of constantly chasing safe subjects and safe methods left me with pencil skills that constantly weren’t as good as my dreams for projects happen to be. A sincere evaluation on my part revealed that, in order to improve areas I needed the most help with, I needed to work on some real fundamentals I had ignored. My initial forays were pretty much guaranteed to suck in comparison to even the lacking work I’ve previously produced. Recent results, however, please me greatly. Even when I’m not pleased with the results, I’m nonetheless pleased with my rate of progress.

Thinking more broadly, giving myself permission to suck has been at the core of a lot of my personality development over the years. As a firebrand of a teenager, I was never unclear about what exactly sucked. The Super Nintendo sucked. DC comics sucked. This proto-hipster extremism extended directly into more recent times when Starbucks, Microsoft, and anything popular sucked. By allowing myself to try things that suck, I’ve often been pleasantly surprised. The Xbox 360 is my evening and weekend friend. I hit Starbucks as often as my budget and schedule allow, and I’ve recently found that DC produces some quite decent comics. None of this knowledge came without some element of (at least perceived) personal risk. While these things seem small and consumer, they nonetheless prepare you for the big choices. Choosing to leave IT in order to become a secretary was a big decision. Admitting proudly that I want to produce my own comic books took a lot of courage. The small decisions prepare us for the life-changing ones.

Question the structures that you imprison yourself with. Ask yourself in each moment what you want to do. It doesn’t matter what Jesus, Henry Rollins, or Spider-Man would do. The choice and the responsibility for your future lies with yourself.

Technorati Tags: Lifehacks

Ramit over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich really nailed the whole issue of actual productivity vs. non-productive guilt about productivity in this post that, yes, I only discovered this week:

This is why you’d never see me “studying” in the lounge while really talking to 589368943 people around me. Or why you’d never see me in the library sleeping. But you’d also RARELY hear me turn down something fun to do work. In fact, lots of people comment how they never see me working at all. It’s not that I’m especially smart. It’s that I don’t engage in unproductive behaviors to assuage my guilt.

Folks, I can’t explain exactly how strongly this resonates with my life experiences. Back in college, everyone who hung out with me for any length of time inevitably wondered how I earned decent grades while staying up all night playing spades in the lounge or watching dubbed re-runs of Sailor Moon on USA today. Frankly, I waste almost no time feeling guilty for things I’m not doing right now. Every moment is a conscious choice for me. If I’m not doing the laundry or updating Quicken with my latest receipts, I’m making a proactive choice not to do so. Part of why GTD has worked out so well for me is that it’s a formalization of the system of renegotiating agreements with myself that I’ve been making since I first headed out to elementary school.

I do precisely what I want to do when I want to do it, and I don’t give a damn about how anyone else thinks I should organize my time. My time, you see, is not theirs to organize. My failures are my failures. My successes are my successes. I don’t blame others for my results, and this allows me to disregard other people’s notions of how my working processes should be managed. I make no apologies for deciding to major in English. I loved my degree program, and it fit my interests well. I make no apologies for deciding to get a job rather than coasting right into a graduate program that no longer interested me. Similarly, I make no apologies for deciding to leave a promising career in IT and application development to give myself more time to write and to create the life I want. It easy to feel guilt when you choose to view your life through someone else’s framework.

The hard truth that you can either face now or be crippled by later is that you’ll never be happy living someone else’s life using someone else’s methods to achieve someone else’s goals. Take the time right now to figure out where you personally want to be and what makes you uniquely happy. From there, it becomes an absolute walk in the park to fill in the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be—all without guilt as a false motivator.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Lifehacks, Guilt

At five o’clock this morning, I heard Zelda music. My Palm m130 had gone off, loudly, in the office. This was my PDA’s final hurled insult before I removed its batteries.

The paper calendars aren’t working for me. First of all, they’re heavy. My messenger bag needs to be light because I carry it all the time. When I took the calendars (2006 and 2007) out of my bag, it felt quite literally like a significant weight off my shoulders. Secondly, the calendar isn’t searchable. I wrote this off at first and just a geeky form of hunger pangs, but the fact is that there really isn’t a good way to find an appointment when you don’t know when that appointment actually is. What weekend is it that we’re going to Brandon? When am I heading down to visit Jason? You’re reduced to the physical equivalent of a table scan, looking at each record row by row. Finally, because I spend 10-14 hours of my day in front of my computer, it really helps when my computer is the primary entry point for all appointments.There was always a certain amount of inertia that kept me from pulling my calendar out of my bag to check something. As a result, certain things were getting delayed or ignored. The supplemental dilemma here of course and the reason why I need a portable calendar solution in the first place is that people rarely have the decency to email me about possible calendar appointments, so I need an easy way to review my calendar while away from my desk. It doesn’t have to input anything, though, because your appointment is just going to go on an index card for processing when I’m back to my inbox and GTD lists.

Yesterday, I decided to attempt replacement of my paper calendars with my old Palm m130 PDA. I had used it for over a year as an attached-to-the-hip nagging device, and I thought I would give it another go. After all, my application should be simple here, right? I don’t even want it to capture events. I just want them easily displayed for me on the go. And thus began the epic struggle between my PDA, iSync, iCal, and my continued sanity. The Palm wanted to delete appointments in iCal. iCal started respawning appointments—and even calendars—that I had deleted months ago. iSync would just suddenly stop working because of all the freakouts that iCal was having. This in turn caused me to kill off system lockups to do anything on my laptop. Finally after an hour of struggle, I got a complete initial sync on my PDA…only to remember that multiple day appointments weren’t handled appropriately by Datebook, the default calendar program on my Palm. I asked myself a hard question at this point that no geek even wants to ponder. Is this worth my time? Yes, I could tinker for a few days and get everything all set up. I could “fix” records in iCal into a format that Datebook likes better. I could buy software like The Missing Sync and a Datebook replacement. But—and I know that Apple has done this to me—the damn thing should just work with no tinkering required. I’m not trying to force a PDA to do something wacky here. Displaying appointments from a computer calendar is part of the core purpose fo the PDA.

My current intent is to setup my iPod to keep track of my calendar and then just make a permanent spot in my messenger bag for it. It’s an Apple product, you see, so it just works quietly and without complaint. Although, with my current quiet return to Unix command-line utilities, it’s only a matter of time until I hack some connection between remind and my iPod.

Technorati Tags: Palm Devices, PDA, Productivity, OS X, Calendar, iCal