I just finished the first week as the Senior Web Developer for our team at Critical Mass. Wow. Hard Work. My running joke for the week has been "Whos bright idea was it to take on this job?" This has been an especially difficult week to begin this kind of role: a major project was going live (more on this later) and there was a new employee to take care of. It was very much an out-of-the-pot-and-fat-into-the-fire situation! Luckily for me, the "new" employee has worked there before, and is already quite skilled and knowledgeable, so I didn't really need to hold his hand. On top of that, the already established team leads are nothing but top-freaking-notch, so they were able to help this greenhorn along.

I've already identified the various skill sets I am lacking, and need to improve on. I don't want to fall into the world of management, turning into that balding guy with glasses on the C-Train, reading "Improve your personal power" on his blackberry, whilst listening to Tony Robbins on his MP3 player. Yeuch.

One of the things that has really opened my eyes with this promotion is how I view management culture in general, and all the implicit assumptions I have about workplace culture. It's all very turgid and confused, but the fundamental crux of this introspection is that I need to be enough of a leader to actually lead, but I also need to step back and let the team members shine through as well. It's a whole different level of chainsaw juggling. I plan on taking a very Taoist lead-from-behind style of leadership.

This is such an awesomely amazing opportunity for me to grow as a person—both personally and professionally. I am ready.

I was just tuning into DnB Podcast.com, specifically this awesome mix by Transient, which (if you follow the link) has an interesting album cover. This got me thinking, the mix itself does tell something of a story, and a story is implied by the cover itself.

So what if every piece of media has a backstory, or even better, given a back story? It wouldn't necessarily have to be public, but it would be an interesting way to get the creative juices flowing. Something to do on the ever-repeating public transit commute that I perform 6 times a week.

Pick a piece of media, and give it a backstory, or (if it is a spoken word podcast for instance) give it a front (i.e. a sketch or something similar).

What a great way to limber up ones creative muscles!

I've been reading Mind Hacks, and Mind Performance Hacks lately. Awesome books. They have given me the chance to look, and change my brainstate—becoming my own metaprogrammer as it were. Just recently, I ran across a great blog entry titled: 10 Reasons people make bad decisions. I'll post the basics here, but you should really head over there for the full skinny.

If you have some understanding in the ways in which your brain makes flawed decisions, you can stop to think about your decisions, and potentially avoid making them in the future. The first step is to know what these flaws are.

1. Sunk cost bias
   This one is simple. People tend to put in more value into thing that they put a lot of time, energy and resources into. Think of that project where thousands upon thousands of dollars were invested upon something that ended up not working anyway. If someone would have killed the project at the $10,000 dollar mark, then $90,000 would have been spared, but how many of us can really be the ones to say "We're throwing in good money after bad here!"
2. Egocentricism
   Egocentricism is something that everyone else has except you, right? The thing about egocentricism is that it is in our nature. There is really only one ego in our brains (usually) and ultimately, according to our brain, it is the only ego that counts. This can cause problems however, because we tend to see things happening to us as being more severe then they actually are. This is exemplified by an experiment described in the linked-to article:

   In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were connected to a device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer�s fingers. The researcher began by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer�s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer�s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer�s finger, and so on. Although volunteers tried to respond with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder.

3. Confirmation Bias
   This happens when our rational brains are short-circuted and we take an event and show it to be linked to our already established notions and opinions. This may be related to memes, and the tendency for memes to self-reinforce.
4. Overconfidence
   Even if you are suffering from the deepest of self-esteem problems, chances are you are overconfident about some aspect of your life. For a good example, talk to any given driver out there "All the over drivers are idiots, but I know how to drive!" Programmers are similar in this regard.
5. Dysfunctional Competition
   This is essentially the fact that our happiness tends to be measured relative to the other peoples happiness around us. We like to think that this is not true, but as this experiment shows:

   Max Bazerman from Harvard [who performed the experiment, said:] "When I ask people whether they would prefer a) $7 for themselves and for another person or b) $8 for themselves and $10 for the other person, people choose 'b.' However, when people are simply given 'a' or 'b,' 'a' makes them happier."

6. The Endowment Effect
   This is related to egocentricism. We tend to put more value on objects we already own, rather then their absolute value. In another experiment with mugs performed by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler, a random set of people were given mugs, and another random set of people asked to buy those mugs. The people who had mugs were only willing to part with them for $7, while the buyers were only willing to purchase them for $3. Now that's a seven dollar mug!
7. Availability Bias
   This is the effect where we tend to see probability in terms of memorable events, rather then in terms of their absolute probability. Look at the amount of fear around, and energy spent on the War on Terrorism. It is more likely that you will die from a car crash, or even an STD then a terrorist attack. This also has an effect on the micro-scale of your personal relationships. Sometimes the most negative aspects of a relationship are the ones you remember the most. When this gets combined with confirmation bias, it can make for an insidious combination.
8. Conformity
   This is an obvious one. Now I know that a lot of my frequent readers pride themselves as being non-conformist, but the kind of conformity being referred to here goes a little deeper. Buskers have known for years that if you seed your hat/guitar-case with some money, especially bills and higher denominational coins, people will generally give you more money. This is also called the "Restaurant effect", if you have 2 restaurants with one across the street from another, and one of them is seeded with people on its patio, and the other is not; the seeded restaurant will get more patrons. The effect of conformity is so subtle because most of us believe that we are somehow different, and immune from it, when we truly aren't. That means you Mr. or Miss non-conformist.
9. Illusion of Control
   This is the effect that causes gamblers to bet more on crap shots that they role verus shots that other players role, even though the probabilities are exactly the same. We seem to think that we have more control over a situation then we actually do.
10. Attribution Error
    We tend to think that people act and do things exclusively for our benefit, despite evidence to the contrary. That guy who cut you off in traffic quite likely didn't do it because he was an asshole, he was probably confused, a new driver, or even just distracted. In fact, maybe he is generally an asshole, but we tend to take his actions personally, as if he was cutting you off to be a prick at you, rather then because he is generally a thoughtless prick. The main effect here is that people tend to favor personality based explanations. It is similar to the old saw "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." except, again it focuses on a character trait of the individual (stupidity) rather then what might be a more realistic explanation, such as a mistake, circumstances out of their control, or even other motivations.

In a future entry, I'll explore how to work with this list of mistakes in your daily decision making and interactions.

I've been meaning to write about this for a long time. With the help of my wife and some deep thinking about my goals (sparked by "Getting Things Done" of course) I came to the realization that I have a hard time with my wants and desires. In fact, I have for a long time. The difficulty is that I have a hard time articulating my desires to myself, let alone to my wife—or anyone else for that matter. In fact, it is a frequent occurence that I will walk into a Chapters or Indigo, spend an hour browsing books, and come up with nothing I want to read.

So when I came to this realization, I sat down for awhile and I thought about what my wants and needs were. I still had a hard time articulating them, even to myself. I made a list of my wants and needs. My list? Pretty short, and not at all focused on objects. The list itself is 6 months old, so it is a little out of date, but includes things like "Improve my self dicipline" and "Finish my Meditation Project".In fact, when Shell asked me what I wanted for my Birthday, I came up with a list of maybe 10 items (most of them being of parivate nature). I wracked my brain for 3 days on that list.

Things are just not that important to me. What I have suffices. My wife, my child, and my friends are way more important. And when I see my wife take sexy good pictures with her sexy good camera and flash, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel good knowing that I help provide for her creative expressions. I love "spoiling" my wife.

Why am I blogging this? Because this brings me to my second point about "want confusion" and its effect on relationships. One of the fundimental issues is that this in-equality can cause strains on a relationship, especially if either, or especially both parties are unaware of what is going on. Once "want confusion" is named however, this issue is diminished; especially if you have a wife who truely cares about you. The other fundimental issue is in how others, especially friends and family, view the relationship. They see the inequality, but do not see what is going on behind it. This puts strain on the whole relationship, both between the two people involved, and the observers because the assumption is that one individual in the relationship is taking advantage of the other.

This ultimately focuses in on the crux of viewing any relationship from the outside. We as a society seem to value an outsiders perspective. At times, the perspective of an outsider can yeild a viewpoint that one has not considered. In the context of an outsider viewpoint of a relationship however, the outsider is working from a flawed perspective. What they don't see is the in-depth, mano-a-womano conversations, the periods of deep joint-introspection, and the conclusions that come from it.

Now that I have actually read GTD (twice) and reviewed it, I am finally ready to explain my own implementation of its process. This topic has been expounded upon at great lengths by various bloggers, so even if my voice isn't lost in the choir—or perhaps "din"—I may not end up saying saying anything new; the chief reason however, is to firm up and think about my own process of applying Getting Things done.

I am surprisingly low-tech in my implementation, my computers and PDA are secondary to my GTD process. I don't have 43 folders, and I don't own, or even want, a label maker. This is probably like heresy in some circles, but I have done the folder thing before, and it just didn't work. I also don't generate much in the way of paper reference. Some people seem to generate 6 folders-full in a work week. That is about as much as I generate over the course of a few years.

My central station of stuff collection and lists are 2 bound notebooks: one for home, and one for work. I may end up getting a smaller pocket style notebook for when I am in transit as well, but for now, my PDA suffices (sometimes I feel that my PDA is a bit of a wrench in my freshly created GTD machine). I split these notebooks into 3 major sections: daily tasks, projects, and project notes.

I date each section of daily tasks so that I can have a peek at what I did when, which is especially important when I need to look at what day I did something for client work, or whatever. I write each task down, and a little check box beside it, when it is complete I check it off. If I have decided to not do it, I X it out. When I delegate the task to someone else, I draw a left-ward arrow across the checkbox. Of course, some tasks don't get finished on that day, so I just carry it forward to the next day, and then I fill in the bottom left corner (kind of like filling in a spare on your bowling sheet). I only do this when I have finished writing in the task for the next day, lest I get interrupted in mid-carry-over and suddenly a task goes by the wayside. Horray for atomic commits! Finally, this system is great, because I can look back over a week, or a month, and see just how much I have accomplished. It feels good having this kind of permanent tactile record. I paper clip old daily pages together, so with just a flip of the notebook, I can access the tasks for the day.

The projects section is full of lists-with-checkboxes, that are basically a list of all the projects I am involved in. In the GTD vernacular, they are a combination of the 20,000 ft. view, the 10,000 ft. view and the projects view. At work, this is a list for each project, but for home, I maintain separate lists for my PHP projects, website projects, commitments to friends and family, music, and all the other insane shit I am involved in. Frequently the project lists will have sub-projects such as a list for my Meditation project, or a list for the S9y plugins I am working on. The list also serves as a someday-maybe list.

Finally, the project notes are more free-form: mind maps, outlines, scrawled notes, images and all project support materials all go in there. I try to reserve at least one page for each set of notes.

Frequently I will need to transfer things between work and home, or write down notes and ideas, or even process incoming stuff as it occurs to me. I do all of this on my PDA, to be transfered to either my Work Book or Home Book as the situation demands. It also serves as my "tickler file" for any of my time sensitive personal or contractual obligations. At work, Outlook performs the same tickley function.

I have tried a few different methods that just don't work at all for me. The first of which was a pure PDA solution. You'd think that it would; they're small, portable, and fun to play with. The problem however, is that graffiti as an input mechanism just sucks; it is too slow for me to generate the volume of text that a daily task list entails. If the lag between thinking thoughts and writing them down is too great, I am liable to forget a few tasks before I can get them down. That is no good.

I've also tried a wiki implementation—also no good. The latency between updates was too large (more a fault of my server/connection then the wiki itself I am sure) and it lacked portability or flexibility. Sure a wiki is available everywhere, that is, assuming you have a computer. You can't really add drawings or mindmaps effectively in a wiki either. Outlook wasn't even in the running. It isn't that portable unless you are a Microsoft junkie, and while it has a lot of beef, it all seems to be in the wrong places.

So why does my method work for me? Well first of all I am a real hard core stationary geek. I love stationary. So an excuse to have 2 notebooks (as well as a journal and sketchbook) is a-ok with me. Raw paper and pen is easy to work with, adding tasks and notes are easy. Everything is immediate and available. It is also easy to get very free form, sometimes a task can be a quick sketch—a picture is worth a thousand words. The stacking and permanence of the tasks are also a visual reminder of just how much I am getting accomplished which feels great, and being a stationary geek, I love filling notebooks up with useful stuff.

As I work with the system, I see some of the problem areas that need fixing. The more savvy amongst you will notice that I completely skip the whole concept of the context based lists. I haven't yet had the workload at work to warrant that kind of list, but that day is fast approaching. At home it is another story entirely . Instead of doing a weekly review, and making context lists, I do a daily review instead. I prefer this method for now, as I have a few scant hours in which I can get the stuff I need done at home, so there isn't much in the way of context shifts happening. I have enough time to get a few important things done, a few smaller things done, and then its bedtime.

Also, in my notebook, I have intermixed my someday-maybe projects with my current projects. This is mostly just how I work, jumping from project to project on a series of whims, based on what my current interests are. This intermixing may make some of the more organized of you cringe, but so far it seems to be working for me, allowing me to get a lot of my smaller "maybe at another day" tasks completed, or that much closer to completion.

Keeping track of my time sensitive tasks is a hard one. Mostly I just need to get more into the habit of using my PDA and Outlook calendar. Really it is just a case of paying attention to them.

Finally, one final nitpick I have is that i haven't gotten into the habit of dating my notes. This isn't fatal, but it could be potentially useful.

In the future I am going to start playing with some more, and better, contextualizing. Contexts like @home or @work are just far to wide and far-reaching for my needs. I will quite likely drill down to things like inCode, inPhotoshop, etc. Most of my context shifts happen on the computer, rather then in the world around it. Instead of keeping separate context lists, I will probably maintain the daily lists, as it gives me a set of goals to reach, and just use "icons" instead.

I hope this little foray into how I get things done inspires you, or at the very least interests you. Now, do any of you other stationary geeks wanna hit up an office depot? Lets go!

Just so that we are all on the same page here, I've quit smoking a grand total of 3 times. The first time I quit for around 2-3 months, but I eventually broke down and smoked one cig, then two cigs, and eventually gave up quitting. The second time I quit. I mean really quit. 2 1/2 years or something similar. Now I am quitting for a 3rd time.

I am getting pretty good at quitting smoking. I just need to learn to stay quit, thats all. Here are a couple of interesting coping strategies that I have picked up over the years.

First the basics:

• Quit. Just quit. Don't try and ease yourself off cigs, don't try the patch, or gum, or any of that shit. You are addicted, physically, and quite likely psychologically to the nicotine. If you keep exposing yourself to it, then you aren't doing yourself any favours.
• Limit your exposure to the temptation. It is much easier to resist the temptation to smoke when there isn't anyone smoking right in front of you. after a month or two you should be at the point where the idea of a cigarette makes you sick, or just doesn't interest you.
• Remember that the benefits to quitting smoking happen an hour after you quit, and keep on happening up to 15 years after you quit.
• If you smoke due to an oral fixation, use other things to help deal with the oral aspect. Gum, pencils, etc.
• Your last cig should be the last cigarette of the night. That means you sleep through the first 6-12 hours of non-smoking.
• Allow yourself some over-indulgence of your other vices. Within reason of course. If you drink coffee, don't be afraid to drink a little more coffee then normal. Whatever helps take the edge off. Be careful about this; if you end up becoming a raging alcoholic because you quit smoking, you've slid backwards, not forwards.

It's all mental baby

Quitting smoking is all mental. I mean, sure your body craves nicotine for a little while, but the bodily cravings are tolerable. With this in mind, you can approach quitting smoking with the proper frame of mind that hopefully means less stress for you, your friends and your family. One thing to consider is that smoking is ritualized. Taking the cigarette out of the pack, lighting it, and smoking it all constitute an elaborate ritual. As human beings, we live and thrive on ritual and routine. Consider replacing the ritual of smoking with some other tiny ritual. Another thing about smoking is that it gives you a break when you normally wouldn't. Don't be afraid to give yourself little breaks to run off and hide from the code, the dishes, or even the child. Just because you quit the smoking, doesn't mean you quit the break.

One thing that helped for me has been to listen to entirely too much Alan Watts. In fact, I usually have 2 audio-player instances running, one doing Alan Watts, and the other doing some kinda combined play list of Downtempo and Atmospheric Drum 'n Bass. Good stuff.

The best help comes frim my wife, and my friends. If they weren't there to help support my non-smoking, then it wouldn't be nearly as easy. Hearing "I'm so proud of you" from your wife makes it so much easier to stay positive about not smoking.

Another idea to help you quit is meditation. It may not be your cup o tea, but believe it or not, it can help. My friend Jen suggested the Tibetan Tong Len (sending and taking) form of meditation:

Normally, we are not very concerned about others. Because of this, we have developed this very strong belief in the "I." From this arises all our emotional negativity. To eliminate all our emotional negativity and thoughts of "I," we have to learn how to train our mind which can be done by sending and taking meditation. Sending and Taking (Tib. tong len) meditation is meant to help us develop a pure attitude by diminishing our involvement with ourselves and increasing our thoughts of others. Sending and taking meditation will help us develop bodhicitta[sic], (fn 12) the aspiration to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. In this practise[sic] we exchange our happiness for the unhappiness and suffering of other beings. This meditation is also connected with breathing. When we exhale, we imagine that we send a very bright light which goes out to reach all beings. This white light represents all our happiness, everything that is good in our life. We also think that it contains the seeds of happiness, which are all our virtues. So this white light reaches all beings and as it reaches them, it brings them great happiness and joy. In return, when we inhale we imagine that we are taking in a very dark, black light which carries with it all the suffering, problems, difficulties and all the causes of those problems. We do this meditation just following the natural rhythm of breathing. We know we want happiness and with sending and taking practise[sic] we realize that others want this happiness also. So whatever we have, we offer it to them. Whatever unhappiness and suffering they do not want, we imagine taking it. So sending and taking meditation is an excellent tool to further the growth of bodhicitta, the motivation of enlightenment.

From the Venerable Thrangu Rinpoche

The biggest thing is to revel in your non-smoking. Don't wallow in it. If you can enjoy the fact that you aren't smoking, then how likely are you to begin? If you can even learn to enjoy the nic-fits, how can you even think about starting smoking? This is definitely one of those things that is deeply personal, and takes a lot of thought, time and introspection to do. I personally tie my nic-fitting into my submissive nature and it seems to work out okay for me. But there are other ways to look at it and deal with it, such as: competitively "Damn Big Tobacco! They won't get the best of me!", as a personal challenge "Quitting smoking is like climbing this mountain!", spiritually "Quitting smoking takes me closer to god." or whatever turns and/or floats your crank and/or boat.

Quitting smoking is one of those things that can turn your life around. Because it is such a big change it allows you the opportunity to change other aspects of your life in tandem. It becomes a springboard for other life changes. Quitting smoking is difficult, really difficult, and when you do it, it serves as proof that you can do other things that are more difficult, and take greater strength.

Starting up again isn't as big a downfall as one might think either. If you have one drag of a cigarette and stop there, then it isn't like the quitting was all for null. Hell, even if you smoke for 8 months—uhh... for example— and then quit, it still doesn't mean that the first, second, or fifth time you quit was for nothing. Especially if you can look at the reasons why you started up again, and try to get around those next time.

Good Luck.

Browsing the site of My Wedding Makes me cry. Especially the Ceremony and Speeches.

I'm so soft.