These posts were originally published on the Tempo book blog between 2011-14, and imported here in 2019 when that blog was shut down and replaced with a single page.

Creative Desks versus Administration Desks

May 7, 2012 By

For many of us, desks are where a lot of life happens. I realized about a year ago that psychologically, there are two different types of desks, which most people combine into one physical desk.

The two types are creative desks and administration desks.

Even if you have multiple desks (at home and at the workplace for instance) chances are, you combine both psychological types in each.

Creative desks are where you do serious maker work. Writing, coding, design, pen-and-paper math, spreadsheet analysis and so forth.

Administration desks are where you do all the overhead stuff. Expense reports, invoicing, book-keeping, contract signing, faxing, filing, travel arrangements, GTDing, certain kinds of email and calendaring, and so forth.

The two don’t go well together because people who get a high off  creative work are generally depressed by administration work, and vice-versa.  Basic systems and processes are also different around the two desks. If you consider emotion/energy aspects and system-process aspects, you could say that the two types represent very different field-flow complexes, with different tempos. Mixing them up results in a cacophony.

So how can you cope with both kinds of work? The solution is to separate the psychological desks physically to the extent you can afford to.

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The 6-Hour Maker-Manager Work Day

April 30, 2012 By

There are some ideas that keep popping up. They’re like Rome. All roads lead there, and you end up finding different viewpoints for the idea depending on the path you take.

The Maker-Schedule/Manager Schedule idea from Paul Graham is one such. It may be his most fertile idea.

Once you get used to thinking of work-tempo management around the idea of two fundamental frequencies (4 hour maker upcycles and 1 hour manager upcycles) you have a  framework for analyzing many different types of creative class work. One conclusion I’ve reached is that if you do both kinds of work, you’ll end up working 6-hour days. Here’s why.

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Thinking in a Foreign Language

April 26, 2012 By

This is an idea that simply refuses to go away. Ever since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its debunking in the original naive form, the idea that language shapes thought keeps popping up. Now the behavioral economists weigh in to show that decision-making changes when you switch languages. The research is reported in a Wired article, Thinking in a Foreign Language. 

This looks like it is primarily about the mere fact of shifting gears to a different language causing greater deliberation. But I strongly suspect there are going to be patterns related to mental model construction and use in the to and from languages as well (i.e., specific ordered language pairs, (A, B), will likely have measurable and characteristic effects on the nature of decision-making).

You’d need more subtle tests for that though.

The researchers next tested how language affected decisions on matters of direct personal import. According to prospect theory, the possibility of small losses outweigh the promise of larger gains, a phenomenon called myopic risk aversion and rooted in emotional reactions to the idea of loss.

The same group of Korean students was presented with a series of hypothetical low-loss, high-gain bets. When offered bets in Korean, just 57 percent took them. When offered in English, that number rose to 67 percent, again suggesting heightened deliberation in a second language.

To see if the effect held up in real-world betting, Keysar’s team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they’d lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 — a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.

When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. “They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses,” wrote Keysar and colleagues.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

 

Hacking Grand Narratives

April 16, 2012 By

Grand narratives are probably the most frequently mentioned subject in reactions I get to Tempo, even though I carefully restricted myself to individual narratives in the book. Apparently the urge to apply narrative models to collectives is irresistible. Several readers have gone ahead and sort of hacked the narrative models I discuss in Tempo, and applied them to grand narratives. To be frank, I don’t completely understand most of these attempts. I know of applications to unconventional crisis response, the political process in Honduras, the history of Western art, and the history of debt/finance.

But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am treading carefully here.  I’ve learned something from each hacking attempt people have told me about (do share if you’ve tried this sort of thing), and I’ve made two experimental attempts myself: applying the model to 19th century American business/technology history and on a smaller scale, to software projects. I am starting a third experiment: applying narrative analysis to wannabe-Silicon-Valley tech hubs like Boulder and Las Vegas. But overall, I am not satisfied that my models (or anyone else’s) are good enough yet.

But let me try and lay out the problem here, and have you guys weigh in.

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Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option

April 10, 2012 By

We use the phrase nuclear option rather casually as an everyday metaphor for highly consequential, irreversible and consciously triggered decisions. But chances are, you’ve never actually considered how the actual nuclear option is managed. The turning of this one little key — the picture is of an an actual nuclear trigger —  is easily the most analyzed decision in history. The design of the decision process around it is one of the greatest feats of narrative engineering every accomplished. That the trigger has  (knock on wood) not been pulled since World War II is an engineering accomplishment comparable to the Moon landing.

The nuclear option is the most extreme example of a special kind of decision narrative that I call a trigger narrative: one built around a major decision requires an explicit triggering action after all the preparation is done: things like proposing marriage, submitting a manuscript to an editor or issuing a press release. Not all major decisions are framed by trigger narratives, but for those that are, the nuclear trigger narrative has much to teach.

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The Tempo of Code

March 26, 2012 By

At ALM Chicago last month, I did a talk titled Breathing Data, Competing on Code. It was a lot of fun, and a big part was applying ideas from Tempo to software development. I did this once before at the SoCAL Lean/Kanban meetup, but this time, I took the ideas in a significantly different direction. It’s an hour-long talk, so you’ve been warned.  The talk was pretty well-received, so looks like I am gradually improving at this talking-head game.

There are also quite a few bits that are somewhat interactive, so you may lose the thread during those parts.

The Fundamentals of Calendar Hacking

March 19, 2012 By

I am always amused by time-management amateurs who have found a system that works for them and a few of their friends, and start imagining that they’ve created a perfect system.  “Universal time management system” is the perpetual motion machine of the self-improvement industry.

The zeroth thing you need to know about personal time management is that in a certain theoretical sense, there are no universal  systems. Only calendar hacks. What’s more, you cannot pick some compendium of calendar hacks and easily sort out the ones that will work for you. You need to learn the art of calendar hacking.

That’s what this post is about: the fundamentals of calendar hacking. I’ll be straight with you: the ideas in this post are going to be somewhat tough to grasp if you haven’t already encountered them, but I’ll keep it non-technical and provide several hopefully illuminating examples along the way.

The key is diagrams like the one below.

 

Diagrams like this are known as empirical computational complexity phase transition diagrams in computer science. I’ll show you how to read and draw informal, non-technical versions in a minute, but the key idea behind them is that an impossibly hard scheduling problem is not impossibly hard everywhere and at all times.

The key to calendar hacking is separating out the hard and easy regimes and dealing with them differently. This is one of my favorite technical ideas, and my excuse for playing fast and loose with it, as I am about to, is that my heart is in the right place. I mentioned this idea in a footnote somewhere in Tempo, but I figured I ought to do a proper post on the idea.

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Routine, but Cannot be Automated

March 9, 2012 By

The hardest kind of activity to get organized is stuff that is routine, but cannot be automated. This is stuff that has trivial meta-content, but non-trivial work content. Even GTD struggles in this department.

Trivial meta-content means it is not hard to plan or schedule this stuff, or figure out and create the necessary enabling pre-conditions. Non-trivial content means the actual work is hard and cannot be automated.

Blogging is an example for me, so I’ll use that. If I had to put it in my organization system, it would simply be write blog post as a weekly calendar reminder.  No biggie. But I cannot put the work itself on autopilot.

Small business book-keeping is another. It seems simple enough to just put your receipts in a shoebox, and update your books based on your invoices, credit card statements, receipts and bank balances every month. All you need is an Internet connection and your shoebox. But the work itself cannot be automated.

Why is this stuff hard to get organized? Is it fundamentally hard? What are the consequences if you don’t keep up?

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The Second Most Important Archetype in your Life

March 1, 2012 By

In Tempo,  I distinguished between two broad classes of archetypes: generic ones that have names and explicit descriptions, which apply loosely to many people, and specific ones that apply to just one person, and may be only implicitly recognized based on characteristic behaviors.

The more intimately and personally you know somebody, the more you need a specific and implicit archetype. This means that your self-archetype is the one that has to be the most specific. At least if you agree that self-awareness is generally a good thing to seek.

This does not mean that a specific archetype needs to be detailed. It can still be an impressionistic thumbnail sketch that is no more than a characteristic shrug or turn of phrase. It merely needs to be one-of-a-kind; sui generis. 

Your self-archetype is arguably the most important archetype in your life. It can be either specific or general, and a thumbnail or very detailed. But most often it is specific and detailed.  It is sometimes useful to compute with a very generic, thumbnail self-archetype, to break out of toxic self-absorption.

What do you think is the second most important archetype? Hint: it is not necessarily the one that maps to your significant other.

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Live Life, Not Projects

February 20, 2012 By

I first encountered the concept of arrival fallacies in Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project. Which goes to show that you should occasionally attempt to learn from people who are very unlike yourself (Greg Rader has a nice post about this from a few months ago). If you’ve been following my writing for any length of time, you probably know by now that I am deeply suspicious of the very idea of happiness, and its pursuit. The Rubins of the world rarely get on my radar.

An arrival fallacy in the sense of Rubin is any pattern of thinking that fits the template, I’ll be happy when ______ (Rubin credits Tal Ben-Shahar’s book Happier, which I haven’t read, for the concept).

The idea generalizes beyond happiness to any sort of goal-driven behavior. You could use templates like I’ll be ready ____ once _____. Or I’ll really understand life when ________.  Call the first template Type A (happiness fallacies), and the other two Type B (readiness fallacies) and Type C (enlightenment fallacies) respectively. There are probably other common types, but we’ll stick to three.

Let’s make up a list of examples of each type, for reference, before trying to understand arrival fallacies more deeply.

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