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.)

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:

What Steve Jobs means to me

I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Steve Jobs is dead. I found out while at work. I work at Kik•, on the cross-platform messaging app that is Kik Messenger. The entire company would be wholly impossible without Jobs and the iPhone. This, however, is an understatement. Computers themselves, and thus the internet, and thus much of today’s culture, have all been massively influenced by this man.

If the me that I was a few years ago could see me blogging about how Steve Jobs is an inspiration, he’d be very confused. For years, I’ve been a Windows/Linux guy, and ragged on Apple as much as I possibly can. I just bought a smartphone this summer; it’s an Android. The only piece of Apple I own is a 2gen iPod Shuffle, which I proudly sync using Windows Explorer and python script. I don’t have iTunes installed. While my personal preference for computing has not changed over the past few years, I have grown an appreciation and respect for Apple and Steve Jobs.

I still like having two+ mouse buttons, and I still like having both a Backspace and a Delete key, and I really don’t know how well I’d be able to handle having my main modifier key (Ctrl/Apple) not in the corner of the keyboard. I also can’t stand the colourlessness that pervades the typical Apple interface. Yet, I can’t deny the vast influence that the mouse as introduced by Apple and the window manager have improved my life. I am not an ungrateful person.

I’d rather focus on Jobs though. Tonight, I read his speech at Stanford and then later watched/listened to it. This speech is 6 years old, and yet fits the occasion of his death very well, as his final point is about death. While Steve Jobs may only have had 56 years, most would agree that he made more of them than most people make of their 80. This was not an accident.

In his speech, Jobs describes how for all of his adult life, he has looked in the mirror every morning and asked himself:

I’ve recently been developing several new daily habits. I’ve been meaning to blog about them for awhile, and tonight seem like as good of an occasion as any. I recently listened to Jim Rohn’s The Art of Exceptional Living Audiobook, and it inspired me to make a number of changes in my life. So far I’ve integrated three daily habits:

• I go for a walk.
• I read for at least half an hour.
• I journal.

Most books on the subject advise against making significant changes all at once, as they can be harder to keep. I wanted to dive right in. Besides, I think these habits are consistent and mutually reinforcing. The walking makes the other two easier, because by the time I get to the end of the day, I’ve already done one of my three new habits, so I’m already part-way toward my goal. Also, since my journalling is about personal development, it makes sense to read something inspiring first. I like reading anyway. I also like walking. I’ve been enjoying journalling as well. I’ve logged nearly 20000 words in 22 days.

Where does Steve Jobs fit into this? Well, I’m nailing my nights, but my mornings have been less than fantastic. My main excuse for this is that it’s really cold in my apartment (my room anyway) and so I’ve been lazing in bed because my newly-awoken-brain thinks that that will keep my feet warmest. Come on Malcolm: you can do better than that. Steve Jobs describes how he makes each day meaningful from the beginning, and I’m going to find ways to do the same.

I haven’t decided yet what this is going to consist of, but I now have a clear vision that my mornings need much more clarity and purpose than they have at present. Will I ask myself a question? Several? Recite a mission statement? Chant a mantra? Plan my day in my head? Do something specific?

…I don’t know yet. But I’m excited to find out.

Priorities: It’s not what you do, but what you don’t do. (Music and Thoughts)

I mentioned that one song was missing from my 30-Day Poem/Song Challenge. Well, here it is:

While you watch & listen, here are some of my thoughts from the past few days. I’ve had some interesting conversations and listened to more of Steve Pavlina’s podcasts (such as this one on achieving goals) and I’ve started thinking about my goals. I’m notorious for not setting any, so this list is not very long, but if you’ve been following my blog you’ll have seen that I have at least one:

I will develop awesome time-management skills and habits. -Me, several weeks ago.

Well, I started thinking about ways in which I could try to accomplish that goal. One of Steve’s strategies is to become the person who has already achieved it. As I thought more about what sort of person has amazing time-management skills, I realized that the person I was imagining was not very spontaneous or adventuresome, two traits I hold in high esteem. With that realization came questions: Then who do I want to be? What skills and habits do I want to have?

I began to redefine the problem, from “not managing my time well enough” to “not managing my activities well enough”. What I realized is that my main problem isn’t with missing deadlines but with wasting time. It’s not that I feel like I need to procrastinate less. On the contrary, Parkinson’s Law (Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.) makes a fairly strong argument for procrastination. If I do things earlier than they need to be done, I’ll likely spend more time doing them then they really need.

A New Approach

Today I decided I would try a different tactic: I made a list of all of the things that I wanted to potentially spend my time doing today, and tried to do only things on that list. I added some things as the day progressed, but the point of the exercise was to be doing only things that I consciously wanted to do. I have a strong tendency to get sidetracked by activities that in retrospect I judge to be wasteful. These include reading shallow blog articles, wandering around on Facebook, and having long circular arguments with my friends. These activities are entrancing but not engaging — tempting but not really worthwhile. Instead, I want to do more reading, writing, exercising, and having deep and meaningful conversations with people.

The today-plan worked out alright. I had two items on my list that I had marked as high priority (see below) and I got both of them done. The flexible schedule I gave myself worked particularly well today because the two high-priority tasks were ones I wanted to do anyway and knew I would enjoy (recording the video above was one). I’m not sure how well this would work in a circumstance where I have a large unpleasant task with a faraway deadline. We’ll see, though. I’ve managed to get those things done before though.

In working through this new strategy, I’ve come to realize:

That is, as long as I’m not doing anything wasteful, then I’m either doing something valuable or doing nothing. If I define the latter to be meditation, then it’s still worthwhile. Exactly what I do isn’t really that important – as deadlines approach, enough pressure will build that the things that need to get done will get done.

I’ve yet to determine exactly how this will affect my spontaneity, but for now my rules will be as follows:

Rules

1. I will keep a daily list of activities I may engage in.
2. I may modify the list at any time during the day.
3. There is no limit to how long the list can be.
4. I will not spend a significant amount of time engaging in other activities.

Rule 2 lets me be spontaneous, because if I discover an interesting activity I feel is worthwhile, I can take part in it… as soon as I add it to the list. This forces me to make a conscious decision “Yes, this activity/event will add value to my life” before I undertake it. Otherwise, it’s all to easy to just do it without truly considering if I really want to.

For rule 4, I haven’t decided exactly what the threshold for significance is, but I think probably about 10 minutes on any one activity per 3 hours, and 30 minutes total on any extra activities within the 3 hours. I should probably use some sort of timer that I set every time I start one of these activities, that will sound after 5-10 minutes to force me to either decide that what I’m doing is meaningful or stop. The former case would apply to finding a really captivating article or something on the internet.

I’ve created a new page titled “My Life“, that will keep a current record of exactly what rules I’m following as I live my life. The link ought to stay at the top, so if you find myself on my blog in the future you can see what challenges and so on I’m currently engaged in.

One final remark: I’m observing with some interest that while I seemed to be taking a blacklist approach, what I’ll actually be creating daily is a whitelist. I suppose because otherwise, if I wanted to permit myself to have half an hour of Facebooking, I’d have to take it off a list, which seems strange. Would I then put it back on the list when I decided I’d had enough? I’m going to try it like this for now, and see how it goes!