How did you spend the last hour?

I want to talk about time, and how it’s spent. Almost every time I read about or listen to anyone talk about time management and personal development, they eventually get to TV. They say things like “Want to spend an hour a day learning a new skill? Just drop an hour of television.” or “Watch less television to improve your ability to pay attention.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this advice, I’m unable to apply it because I don’t watch TV.

Tonight, though, while mindlessly surfing the internet, I came across a wonderfully-titled article by Corbett Barr on Expert Enough: The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things. I wholeheartedly agreed with the content of this article as well, but one sentence jumped out and stabbed me in the self-identity. In discussing how people make excuses for not learning and achieving things by saying they’re too busy, Corbett makes the typical comment “Really? How many hours of TV did you watch this week?” but then he asks:

“Oh.” I said.

I believe that I’ve been excusing myself from learning and achieving things by saying, “Not only am I busy, but I already don’t watch TV!” …and yet… I definitely spend more time wandering the dregs of the internet than I would like.

Because good advice is a waste of your time if it doesn’t change your behaviour, I decided I would change my behaviour. I started using StayFocusd for Chrome several months ago, and it drastically cut the time I spend on sites like Facebook and YouTube. There are, however, more than 360 million sites on the internet, so I can’t block all of the time-wasting sites. Also, exploring is a good thing, so I don’t just want to have a whitelist (besides, I can waste plenty of time on very otherwise-productive sites).

My solution, instead, is just to be more mindful of my time. I’ve set up a script on my computer using Windows’ Scheduled Tasks feature that will bring up the following image fullscreen every hour:

I want to have reflection time.

I want to have reflection time. How am I going to do that?

I’ve been intending a while bunch, lately, to “take some time and reflect,” referring to a whole host of topics I’d like to reflect on, from romance to school to my blog to my habits to my goals (individually and as a whole) to setting up a system to easily track failures and improve on them. I have done brief goal reflections, but otherwise that’s pretty much it.

Ultimately I’d like to reflect on a very regular basis. If I could find a way to do it, twice daily would be optimal. It wouldn’t have to be for long. The morning could just consist of looking at my agenda for the day, planning the main things I want to accomplish, and reading an inspirational quotation or something. The night would consist of (ideally) an assessment of my day, reviewing how it met, exceeded, and fell short of my expectations, and then noting if there are any patterns of failure that I notice. Then, I’ll figure out what’s causing the failure and come up with potential ways to address it.

In a multilayered cake of irony, it was the lack of reflection that was causing itself. My not reflecting led me to not address my failure to reflect. (rinse, repeat). I have recognized for over a week (I distinctly recall wanting to reflect last sunday) that I wanted to do something about this, but haven’t done anything because it’s never felt like the right time to do anything about it. The idea with the reflections is that they’d give me regular chances to tune into those thoughts that have been hopping around anxiously on my back-burner, before they get burnt.

One fortunate thing is that this particular revelation comes to me at a moment when I have got myself into a reasonably regular (and early) sleep-waking situation. This is not habitual, but merely a necessity given 9am exams every other day. Even still, I think I’m going to start this with an MEA (term courtesy of Nir Eyal, though ZenHabits has written about the principle extensively as well). MEA = Minimum Enjoyable Action, and is basically the smallest form of the habit possible. It must be so small that: a) you can’t fail & b) you can’t complain.

I can’t possibly get up late enough that I don’t have time to write a sentence, and I can’t possibly be so tired that I can’t write a sentence. Long term, I’d potentially like to have a form I fill out with fields expressing certain things about my day, but I’ll get there eventually. This is a start.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll scale back the MEA to “pick up a pencil”. That I can definitely do every day.

(While selecting a category for this post, it occurs to me that despite years of reading ZenHabits, I still had not really been focusing my personal development around habits. That changes today.)

“I Don’t Watch” – The challenge to mean what I say.

“I don’t watch.”

This is a phrase I’ve said to people on many occasions, usually when they admonish me for not having seen something—typically a movie or TV show. I was blessed to grow up without a TV in my house and have (not surprisingly) never particularly been interested in following shows. It just takes so long! Years ago I watched all of Dead Like Me, because there are only two seasons and it’s hilarious. I was briefly caught up with The Big Bang Theory but not past season 2. I like watching movies but don’t do so often.

So, when my friends cry out in horror and disbelief, “But you must have seen The Dark Knight!” or “You’ve never seen Doctor Who?” or “How could you not watch all of the episodes of Firefly?” I tend to answer “I don’t watch.” Recently, though, I’ve found myself clarifying that “well actually, I do watch a fair amount of YouTube videos”. I was talking with a friend about choosing my next 30-day challenge, and we ended up with:

“Online” is defined broadly as anything that got to me via the internet. This means anything streamed or downloaded. This includes something that was downloaded by someone else, even if it was transferred to me by digital cable or by a physical disk. Essentially, this will limit me to the following, none of which I expect to be substantial (I was last in a theatre about 5 months ago).

• Movies in theatres.
• DVDs rented.
• Videos I take myself, on my phone or camera.
• Videos others have taken, watched locally on their devices.

I have decided to make a singular exception: I may watch lectures online, provided it is part of actively studying for one of the 5 courses for which I’m writing an exam on in the next 2½ weeks. Actively studying will probably mean taking notes. If the video has no important visuals, I will just listen to the lecture, but this is unlikely since most off these subjects involve working through math.

Also, notably, since YouTube is a popular source of music online, I may use it for such purposes, but may not view the tab containing the video, even once it has stopped. That is, if I want to listen to a song on YouTube, I have to search for it on Google, Ctrl+click on the link to open it in a new tab, then close the tab with the X when it’s over. This is largely to avoid distraction by browsing through related videos etc.

This is a particularly suitable challenge for this month for several reasons:

1. I have a lot of exams to deal with, so this will free up extra time with which to study.
2. Also, unlike a challenge of the form “do ______ every day”, this challenge won’t add any responsibilities to my day.
3. I am going to be going home to see friends and family at the end of the month, so I have a lessened need to interact with them online.

(Although this was not designed to be within the scope of the challenge, it occurred to me just now that I won’t be able to Skype (video-call) friends or family this month either. Oh well, as mentioned, I have exams and I’ll be seeing most of them soon enough anyway.)

I’m not sure about GIFs and flash videos, but I’ll generally try to avoid them as well. My general rule for things like this is “if it feels like cheating, it is”. I’ve found this to be an easy and effective way to eliminate all loopholes.

40 Days Unsweetened

What the food am I doing?

To be more specific, I’m not going to consume any sweetened or naturally sweet foods for the next 40 days. I’ve arbitrarily set this limit at 5% sugar by mass, to eliminate things that seem okay. I set that limit when I realized that raw almonds have a few grams of sugar per 100g. Anything that I was already seriously doubting is probably out anyway. Fruit is out. Anything with “sugar” (or “glucose”, or “high-fructose corn syrup”, or even “stevia”) listed as an ingredient is out. “Diet” foods are out, because I already don’t consume artificial sweeteners.

The reason this is a 40 day challenge versus the typical 30 is that I was inspired to cut out sugar just before lent was due to start, and it seemed to go well with the theme of fasting. Also, while I started 30-day challenges last summer, I haven’t done one in awhile, so I thought I’d come back in strong. Then on April 1st I’ll also start a 30-day one (or will I?).

Why on eats would I do this?

• Purely as a challenge. I successfully gave up chocolate last lent, and I’m quite a chocoholic normally. This is the next logical step up.
• My health. Sugar is, well, not exactly the best food for one’s general health.
• I tend to eat sugar compulsively, and I like proving to myself that I can break from my compulsions with enough conscious effort
• It’s listed as the first step to adopting the Bulletproof Diet. I’m not a huge fan of diets, but what I like about the Bulletproof diet is that it’s a guideline rather than a rigid set of rules. All of us are following it, just some of us more than others. It also doesn’t involve calorie-counting or anything complicated. It’s essentially just “these foods are better for you than those foods. Eat more of these and less of those.”

Then what?

When I’m done, sugar will no longer be blacklisted, but I hope to avoid a sudden resurgence into stuffing my face full of sugar. I figure if I allow myself to eat lots of extra-dark chocolate, that will help with my desire to gorge on sweets.

For those of you who see me in real life, hold me to this!

Frontal lobe or midbrain? How to take control.

EDIT: I no longer endorse the content of this article, nor the veracity of any of Dispenza’s claims. His models, and those presented below, seem grossly oversimplified. I appreciate all of the commenters who have brought this to my attention, although my first warning sign was the ridiculous stuff he cites in another book I won’t even link to.

One of the popular pseudo-scientific questions people like to ask is “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or if they have a slightly better understanding of nuance, then maybe “Do you favour the left or right side of brain?”.

While this question can be seen as just a figurative way of asking someone if they consider themselves more analytical or creative, it perpetuates the myth that our brain is rigidly divided into two halves that only do certain things. This is not quite accurate. While the left-half of the brain is indeed more active while reasoning and the right-half while creating, both sides of the brain engage in most activities, just in different ways. This TED Talk explores how musical improvisation (which would probably be called right-brain) relates to communication (usually thought of as left-brain).

A better dichotomy

Instead of thinking about left-vs-right, a more pertinent question that we should ask of ourselves on a regular basis, is “Am I thinking more with my frontal lobe or midbrain?”. I’ve been working my way through a book called Evolve your Brain by Joe Dispenza and some of the later chapters are so cool I just had to talk about them.

A quick refresher on parts of the brain: the midbrain, located of course roughly in the center of the brain, is in charge of processes like sensory perception and motor coordination; the frontal lobe, just behind our forehead, is what processes higher thought and engages in complex reasoning. The relative size of our frontal lobe is also one of the clearest distinctions between us and other creatures, representing 30-40% of our brain mass versus 11-17% in primates and about 7% in dogs^{[Dispenza, p346-347]}.

Chapters 10 and 11 talk about the frontal lobe and how to use it to take control of our lives and become who we want to be. Essentially, the frontal lobe is the seat of our consciousness. When we live life habitually, going through the same motions, we are not taking full advantage of our frontal lobe and instead are being controlled by the midbrain and the other more primitive parts of our mind. Evolve your Brain proposes that in order to achieve our goals we must focus on using our frontal cortex. How do we do this? By focusing. Just as athletes or musicians can improve their performance by mentally rehearsing exactly what they want to do and how to respond to certain stimuli, we can do that with our day-to-day activities and interactions as well.

Focusing on Focus

I’m going to work on practising the techniques outlined in the book over the next few months, and I’ll report back with my progress and suggestions on how to use it in your own life. My primary focus is actually going to be focus itself. I’m going to mentally rehearse being focused on the work I do and single-tasking, and my hope is that while the rehearsing may take time, my increased level of discipline will give me more time. It seems like a worthy investment. A very introspective friend of mine once said “Discipline is actually the path to freedom. Otherwise, you’re a slave to your urges and impulses.” He spoke the first part of that, and I paused, internalized it, and figured out the second part. Nobody wants to be a slave, hence the argument for discipline. It’s really empowering, ultimately, to put it like that, because it separates the person from the urges. It is easy to justify acting out the impulses by saying “they’re part of me that I have to honour.” While the first half is true, the second is most certainly not. For more on intercepting urges, see this post on The Pause at ZenHabits.

The unfortunate victims of frontal lobotomies (destruction/removal of the frontal lobe) in mid-20th-century became lazy and obsessively driven to experience sameness constantly. To a lesser degree, this is what anyone can experience when we constantly reenact the same behaviours. Since the brain is plastic, neural networks that are unused will gradually wither and die, replaced by the features that are active. I’m going to make a point of asking myself on a day to day basis:

The Emotional Intelligence of a Smartphone

My phone

I’ve been the owner of an Android phone (HTC Incredible S) for 9 months now, but today I sent it off to get serviced because the touchscreen has been acting up. I first noticed the touchscreen behaving strangely this fall, when horizontal bands of the screen would sometimes be unresponsive. On the right, in a mockup of a drawing app, you can see how poking the screen produced no dots on the band, and so on. This was even more annoying when trying to type, because the bottom band passed right through the home-row (if you can still call it that on a touchscreen) of the keyboard.

Anyway, at first it would just do this for a few minutes every day, but then it started to act up like this consistently. The problems got progressively worse until by mid-January I could never be certain at any given moment that I’d be able to use my phone at all. Furthermore, touch events started happening in the wrong places—I would try to select “Yes” and the screen would select “No”, or taps would become long presses. Sometimes the phone would seem to think I had touched somewhere on the screen when it was sitting a foot away on my desk, and would navigate interfaces on its own.

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (hereafter EI, though often called EQ like IQ) is a term that is used to describe one’s ability to perceive others’ emotions and response appropriately in social situations. As the image here from Psychology Today illustrates, EQ is ascribed a fair amount of importance. The same concept is also embodied in maxims like “It’s not what you know, but who you know”.

What makes a smartphone smart?

So if we were to map the concept of IQ to technology, it could refer to a number of things, but at the forefront is processing power and efficiency/effectiveness of algorithms. Of additional consideration is the ability to learn new things, which is likely where the concept of a smartphone comes from: in addition to built-in phone features like SMS and alarms, smartphones can play games, interact with social networks, and let us draw, to mention just some of the hundreds of thousands of apps out there.

How, then, would we map EI, or EQ? Emotional intelligence, for a computer or smartphone, or any piece of software, is its interface. A piece of software has good EI if it responds the way you expect it to, and even better EI if it anticipates your needs and makes it easy to accomplish your goals. When our technology does this, we adore it, and when it fails to do so, we abhor it.

Can a phone be rude? What about mean?

However, this feeling of dislike can actually go further than just general annoyance or frustration at an inability to properly perform a task using some interface. I realized this rather profoundly with my defective smartphone when I had been trying in vain for probably five minutes to do something really simple like call someone. I was completely unable to navigate the interface because the screen would constantly press other places or simply refuse to push where I wanted. How do you think I felt? I’m actually going to give you space to guess. Think of an adjective that you would expect to most accurately describe my feelings at that point.

Did you say frustrated? Angry? Disgusted? Resentful? Those are all true, but that’s not exactly right. When I couldn’t use the interface, I felt hurt. It sounds odd, but I had an emotional response in my chest that I’ve recognized as the one I feel when someone is being cruel to me (I was bullied a bit when I was younger). It was probably the second time I had this response that I realized how strange that was. After all, at no point in this process had anyone set out to hurt me. Why did I feel like my phone was being mean to me?

After some reflection, I concluded that how I really felt was misunderstood. I was trying to communicate with my phone, via its touchscreen interface (which was designed for human fingers) and it seemed to be completely misunderstanding my instructions and ignoring them or vehemently disobeying them. I had unwittingly personified my phone to a huge extent, so it really hurt when I felt like it was ignoring me while I was going out of my way to communicate with it (eg. turning the phone to put UI elements in different places so I could access them). This would be like asking someone close to you (smartphones are companions) for help and having them plug their ears, sing, and then do something random that might be slightly related to what you were asking. They’d be taunting you.

Moving forward as a designer

I’m a designer, a hacker, and an engineering student, so I make things with interfaces. In fact, I’m quite passionate about user experience (UX) and interface design. While my phone’s flaky touchscreen was obviously not intentional, I believe that what I’ve learned here apply into conscious interface design as well. This kind of revelation is less of a “how” than a “why”. That is, prior to these experiences, I had had no idea that interfaces could cause such an emotional impact.

When my smartphone became stupid, it didn’t lose processing power. It simply lost the ability to communicate with me, and that felt far worse than I could have possibly expected. I’m going to remember this every time I design an interface.

A Real Man

The following is not a list of traits required for manhood. There are enough of those already.

This post is a response to a comment posted on this article by Jeff Perera which is itself a response to the article Toronto, City of Sissies by Christie Blatchford. The following will make more sense if you read at least Jeff Perera’s article, but it’s not entirely necessary.

Here’s the comment I’m responding to:

Very well written.
Ms. Blatchord seems to forget that there is more to being a whole person than outward appearances.
To me, a man is someone who is aware and in touch with his emotions, all of them.
A man hugs his children and kisses his wife (or partner.)
A man defends those who can’t defend themselves.
A man cries at sad, sappy movies, laughs at funny ones, and cheers at UFC.
A man hugs his friends because that’s what friends do.
Lastly, a real man isn’t concerned with the opinions of those who would confine them to little boxes. They just aren’t worth the time.

Here is the response I wrote as a comment:

Thank you for this. While reading it, it occurred to me to wonder about what we say about women or “real women”.

I first considered the phrase “A man defends those who can’t defend themselves” and mentally constructed “A woman defends those who can’t defend themselves”. I promptly concluded that while a woman would probably be praised for standing up for someone weaker, society doesn’t explicitly expect her to do so, in the same way.

I then looked at all of the other phrases, and concluded that (in general) we don’t state expectations like this about women. We may have them (eg. we expect women to hug their kids and kiss their partners) but we never state them in lists like this.

I have read countless lists of things men must do or not do, and feel or not feel. I recognize that your list is personal, and it is certainly more reasonable than most, yet it is still such a list. Your list does not confine men to a “little box”, but it does confine us to a big box, and that’s still a problem.

If we’re going to work towards achieving gender equality and freedom of personal expression, we have to take away all of the boxes and all of the lists, and accept that manhood isn’t defined by any characteristics at all. I realize that it’s scary to do this, but I feel it has to be done.

---

While writing this, I made some interesting discoveries via Google searches that I wanted to share here.

1

The first is the results of searching a real man versus searching a real woman. Nine of the top ten results for men are sites describing traits men must have to be “real men”. The results for women are mostly unrelated to this idea, except for this article that declares “A Real Woman Wants A Real Man” and proceeds to tell us (again) what a real man is like. Two of the real woman results are lists like the man ones, but both are from fundamentalist Christian groups, and the lists include such remarks as “A Real Woman… Wants to do God’s will.” and “A Real Woman… Knows her body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”. These definitely do not follow any widely accepted definition of what a “Real Woman” is, and according to traffic ranks Alexa.com, the first manliness site (askmen.com, which has several articles on the subject) has 22,000 times the number of pageviews as the fundamentalist site (chastitycall.org). At any rate, it’s clear that the cultural pressure of character is much higher for men than for women.

2

The second discovery I made is more surprising and less relevant: Google treats “man” and “person” as synonyms. This is not true for “woman” and “person”, which is a relief—then man and woman would be synonyms, and we’d have to retire the gender binary forever! What a shame…

I presume this has something to do with conversions such as chairman and chairperson, or mailman and mailperson, but the fact remains that it’s an inaccurate synonym.

I’d like to conclude by returning to the idea of better rules: at least one of the top “Real Man” articles espouses “modern manhood” rather than the “rugged” ideals of the past, these are still lists of expectations and rules. I’m willing to acknowledge that the better rules might be a necessary step on the way to full openness to all possibilities of unique manhood. Personally, I don’t think so. I think we need to stop putting such demands on people altogether. On that note, “man” and “person” can’t be synonyms, because you couldn’t possibly make such a list of traits necessary for personhood: “To be a real person, you have to acknowledge all of your emotions.” That just sounds silly.

FileKicker 2: Return of the File!

EDIT: As of September 2014, the Kik Messenger app no longer supports the old API, which means it no longer supports FileKicker. Thanks for using it—I wish it were still working but there’s not really anything I can do at this point! You can check out my current project at complice.co.

I wrote a post a few months ago about FileKicker, my first published Android app. I’ve since published another, ContactKicker [no longer available]. In the few months since then, I’ve launched several updates to each app, making the experience much better.

FileKicker, as I originally built it, was a bridge. The purpose of the app is to allow filesharing via Kik for any kinds of files, not just pictures. All I really did at first was connect the OpenIntents File Manager PICK_FILE intent with the Kik Messenger API, and on the other end I would simply launch the browser to open the file. While it was conceptually cool to build an app that didn’t actually have a visual interface, I realized that it wasn’t the best solution. For the first version of FileKicker, I implemented my own file-picker interface so that users do not have to also download OI File Manager. This also made things visually simpler, and improve user experience.

However, user experience was still weak on the receiving end; all FileKicker would do is launch the browser. This was fine for images and text, but it made it really hard to send some other kinds of files. APKs (Android application package files) for example, can normally be downloaded onto an Android phone and then installed, but the installer won’t launch if the file extension isn’t APK. This means users would need another app to browse to the file and rename it, which was altogether a poor experience.

To fix it for FileKicker 2.0, I implemented a download feature as well, using Android’s ASyncTask class. Now, the file is downloaded from within FileKicker, saved with its original name, and then opened with the appropriate app by checking the file extension. Since I did this, usage of the app has grown much faster, and I’m proud to say I have over 500 users and that each day about 50 files are sent using my app.

So, if you’ve got an Android phone, check it out and let me know what you think! If you have any complaints, compliments, feature suggestions, or other comments, comment below.

First hackings with Arduino: Text on LEDs

Last week, I ordered the ARDX Arduino Experimenter’s Kit from Solarbotics. I finally got a chance to play with it today, and it is so awesome. I’ve done a lot of software programming, but my only experience with hardware programming was the Digital Design course I took this summer. It involved using a language called Verilog, which is unreservedly my least favourite of all of the languages I’ve ever coded in (about a dozen).

This kit is awesome. It comes with a plethora of fun parts to use with the Arduino, including a servo, a DC motor, and something that relates to sound but I haven’t quite figured out what it does yet. It also includes a series of paper overlays for the breadboard that make it really easy to try their samples. It took me quite awhile to hook up a row of LEDs, so I decided I didn’t want to rip it apart immediately after, and instead I wrote some code that animated first a circle, then a word (“Arduino”). The latter is shown in the image above. Essentially, this is done with a massive array of ones and zeros, that is read by the main loop of the program onto the column of LEDs.

Go to the source!

I’m potentially going to take a little time and make code that will turn any string into the 1s and 0s needed for this, but come to think of it, I’m not sure why. I have a tendency to generalize and abstract things, my projects being no exceptions. It wouldn’t really help me learn more about my Arduino, and I don’t plan on keeping the circuit laid out like this. Well, if someone else wants to, I think Fixedsys is the perfect font.

Multitrack song!

I bought the AVS Video Editor for $50 this summer, in order to edit the 480p videos taken by my phone (Android; HTC Incredible S).

I recently discovered with some delight that I can actually use this program to edit a bunch of videos together.

Harmony ensued.

Peace Remains

See the lyrics