there's a mode I can get in that is very beautiful and I want it in more of my life where I'm present and taking care of something, such as cleaning a space, and in each moment I'm just doing whatever cares for it best, with full couldness at several scales
Cleaning mode, to-do list indirection, and splayed-out context
29 tweets · February 2023 · 149 likes · 7 retweets · read on Twitter
there's a feeling when I am cleaning where my motivation is very simple I simply: - perceive the scene - envision how I'd like it to be - do whatever I feel like to close that gap there's no to-do list, there's just a world and my desires
to-do lists introduce a level of indirection where it becomes easy to feel like the gap (aka "error") is "I have unchecked checkboxes" when this is kind of a meaningless proxy even if you did a great job of enumerating the right things, the checkboxes don't contain matteringness
there's a sense in which the easiest way to make the "unchecked checkboxes" error go away would be to delete the list or check them off without doing them but we know that of course we can't just do that 😂 I suspect… many of us have friction that is *literally* this conflict
that friction is irrelevant to whatever it is we're aiming to do!
just now, I was about to put something in the trash by my desk only to realize I hadn't put a new bag in so I went mid-writing to go get a bag the nature of this thread meant that (like the cleaning) I can leave the draft open and it affords finishing
like, simply by looking at the state of the thread, I can figure out what to do with it next well, that's not totally true; if I waited long enough I might get out of touch with what I'm saying here and I'd at minimum need to re-read it in order for further words to flow
but there's no disruption caused by getting a trashbag or going pee or something those only risk disruption if while on such a mission I get waylaid into something deeper or longer
sometimes though we work in ways that have a lot of context sort of splayed out and it's a bit more delicate @fortelabs wrote about state of mind as a key resource to knowledge work ribbonfarm.com/2016/01/28/pro…
there are maybe two different kinds of splayed-out-ness one is when the splayed out stuff is in the world, eg - you have your car taken apart - a dozen books & papers arranged on your desk - a half-refactored codebase onto which other changes can't be made
the other is when your mind is what's splayed out, eg: - writing a long essay, paper or book, where all the parts are in the world but the WHOLE is in your head - doing strategy, where you're considering lots of agents, causes, trajectories - this ofc:
there's also something like arc momentum I was recently organizing expenses for taxes, and each action locally took only 1 min and was very obvious in next steps so I was locally quite interruptible but when a short walk turned into a (lovely!) long walk, something was lost
I suppose that part of what was lost was actually mental context—my spreadsheet was tracking a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't remembering every place I'd looked or sorting decision I'd made so finishing the task a later day risked some duplication of effort
there's also something about the satisfaction of completing something in one day / arc I suspect this is partially about open loops, like I wanted to finish it because I didn't want it to remain open and I didn't know how to close it without finishing it
most people are not very good at feeling the simple moment of satisfaction & vast micro-rest when completing something (even a tiny fraction of some larger something)
this tweet by @RomeoStevens76 has been a really useful set of simple instructions for getting into this mode of being for me
all of this feels related to the Complice "Now Page" which is a page that shows you just your current intention (or some dropdowns/inputs for choosing an intention) and to which I recently added an animation
another lil case study: I wanted to show you the animation, not to just talk about it, but this required a multi-step task that was sort of "outside" of writing this thread: - ship the code (took 20s; it was ready in test mode) - screen capture - make gif - tweet
if I'd gotten interrupted in the middle of that task, it could have felt quite stressful; this is in part because the twitter thread composer doesn't save drafts so it's scary to leave something open for awhile to return to but also in part because it's sort of just a tall stack
this might be a good reminder that sometimes I tweet better when I'm sending one tweet at a time rather than composing the whole thread at once on which note, gonna hit send now even tho more to say
okay where was I? I was sort of orienting towards today as a writing day, and part of what was on my mind when I started writing this thread (a couple hours ago now given the little things that have made their way into the cracks) …how do I access this fluid mode while writing?
I suppose in some sense writing one tweet at a time has a bit of this fluid small-deliverable couldness quality (editing is a whole nother workflow mystery) paradoxically, I got distracted after writing the first half of that tweet, and found this:
there's definitely something about the unshippedness of things that motivates me to finish writing them though, and I don't think that's a confusion when I was working on my 20k word "How We Get There" last year, wanting to share it w friends was the main driver of finishing it
like I was saying at the top—it had no checkbox it had a desired world state which was "my friends are reading it" and I wanted it to be done before they did, so every time I wanted them to read it, I WANTED to finish writing it
I'm recognizing that despite my overall goal-orientedness and understanding of PCT (which has this perception-desire-gap model of motivation) ...I still do a lot of stuff with push energy rather than pull energy.
it's harder to focus when I have a lot of open tabs. often those tabs are representing nebulous unconscious half-intentions, but then they turn into stale clutter that I'm pulled towards clearing away—but clearing isn't WHY to read this article!!
everything is so backwards it's maddening! okay and just now I though of a kind of interesting metaphor, and wanted to tweet it 👇 this move wasn't exactly generated by starting with an end-state...
as far as I can tell I got weirdly lost in this thread and lost touch with the feeling I was talking about, that I actually had a lot of at the start ...the dao that can be talked about, *sigh*
anyway, in my experiences this morning of cleaning I was struck by a connection with this article by @Meaningness where he talks about how even very formal procedural activities are done in a way that involves improv & situated cognition metarationality.com/rational-pcr