Matt Chung's Site

Category: Organization

  • Organizational skills – incremental improvement

    I’ve been told throughout my life that I have a tendency to rush. I struggle with boredom, which according to Brené Brown can be defined as “uncomfortable state of wanting to engage in a satisfying activity, but being unable to do it.”

    People throughout my life would often (with good intention) kindly suggest that I “slow down” … when speaking … when learning a new skill … slow down they said. But for much of my life, I’ve felt similar Charlie Sheen, having only one speed: “Go.”

    And this urge to want to move through life quickly — in a rush — I think partially stems from this belief (argument made by Oliver Burkeman) that it’s a mechanism for avoid the following: we’re all going to die someday and that our time on this earth is limited.

    According to Oliver Burkeman, the average human life spans 4,000 weeks. I find that completely wild, don’t you? Death feels distance and the thought of it is unsettling. But after sitting with this negative emotion for a few deep breathes, a certain calmness follows. By radically accepting that my life is finite, my attention shifts towards ruthlessly prioritizing my life and ironically, the desire to rush dissipates.

    It’s ironic and somewhat paradoxical.

    By increasing awareness of life’s finitude, time begins to slow down. And in contrast, when there’s a lack of this awareness, when traveling through life as if there’s an infinite amount of time, I tend to rush.

    By accepting that my time will soon come to end, I temporarily free myself from what Burkeman calls the “brace position”.I drop the desire to get everything done immediately. Instead, I transition to a state of mindfulness, revisiting projects that I want to tackle, breaking them down into tiny, manageable bite sized chunks and slowly, but surely, chip away at them.

    Adopting the mindset of incremental improvement

    So again, instead of my default tendency to try and make one-off titanic shifts in my life, I am practicing the art of incremental improvement. I’m applying this mindset towards sharpening my organizational skills. Looking back at all my previous attempts on becoming an organized person — the desire for identifying as an “organized person” may stem from a fixed mindset, which can be counter productive for development — I had approached learning organization skills with sort of a “get it done and over with” mindset.

    This attitude of wanting to rapidly get through things reminds of one piece of advice that Kit Laughlin passed on another forum member on Stretch Therapy, who was trying to rush the process of becoming flexible:

    “Just wanting to get it over and done with” is exactly why it’s not working for you. The attitude you bring creates the resistance you feel in your body. I guarantee zero progress with this approach. If you really don’t want to do it (for whatever reason) then don’t. Life is much simpler if you approach it directly like this.

    The above comment reminded me of another topic on the forum, a topic on failure and persistence; developing organizational skills for me has been (and continues to be) challenging. But despite the frustrations and setbacks, I persevere:

    No. That is what your mind tells you, no doubt, but when you try, and fail, and try again, you are developing persistence and determination; and you are signalling to the organism that you are serious about change. What you describe (the idea quoted above) is literally the reason so many people who desire change cannot bring it about. What you argue is a thought—that is all—and it is not true.

    Tiny little victory of pulling quotes

    And I want to hit pause for a second and share that I’m experiencing a proud moment: I was able to find the two above quotes within seconds, pulling them out from my digital organizational systems by:

    1. Launching my DevonThink app on my laptop
    2. Expanding the “quotes” directory
    3. Navigating to “L” (first letter of Laughlin)
    4. Linearly searching for the quote

    I consider my current approach fairly effective. And one way to evaluate effectiveness is by measuring the approach through the lens of the POET compass:

    • P – Presents well (on time and clear)
    • O – out of the way (invisible)
    • E – easy to use/get to (instant)
    • T – trusted (off mind)

    Based on the criteria above, I think that my quote management system works (for me, right now):

    1. Presents well – was able to relatively quickly (in the order of seconds) retrieve the quotes.
    2. Out of the way – Yes, up until the moment I wanted to fetch them, they were out of sight.
    3. Easy to use/get to – In terms of easiness, little effort (a few clicks) and a short linear search, which for me is acceptable since I’m not storing a huge volume of quotes.
    4. Trusted – I have not visited my DevonThink application for (probably) months and the application was certainly off my mind and yet, I could trust that I could return and retrieve the necessary quotes.

    Summary

    Here’s a reminder to self that I can slow down and walk the path of slow and steady.

  • Developing organizational skills

    The cycle of disorganization followed by organization

    Yesterday morning, I had a (often recurring) thought to improve my organization skills. I’m aware that this repeating desire comes in cycles, periods of deep disorganization, followed by frustration — frustration from being unable to find something I saved, frustration from dropping the ball on some project — ending with a crescendo of hyper-focus organization. This pattern, that I’m becoming more and more aware of, motivates me to approach this (not novel at all) situation in a more mindful way, especially after reading this hacker news quote from this pursuing the forums this morning:

    “[The Artist Way] is great for identifying underlying creative blockers and helping you discover if the current rut is the same rut repeated or something new“

    Sometimes, our problems tend to repeat themselves. And while nothing is wrong, per say, with a problem repeating itself, I do want to minimize the time I spend recycling the sames solution over and over. And instead of berating myself, and in spirit of a growth mindset, I ask myself: how can I learn more about organization and how can I develop more skill around organizing?

    Why get organized to begin with?

    There’s this baseline assumption I hold: that organization skills improve the quality one’s life. But is this rooted belief of organization helpful? Is it accurate? Is it true that acquiring additional skill may help me realize certain (personally, professional) projects?

    Breaking down organization into concrete buckets, into discrete skills

    Before jumping the gun (as I’ve done many times in the past, leaping to problem solving prematurely), I think it would be helpful in my situation to zoom out and break down organization into several skills. Upon creating these categories, it might be useful for me to then perform a self-assessment because by approaching this with honesty and compassion, I can then give myself what I need

    Different ways to bucket the skills

    Organizing Creativity

    Thoughts that pop up while writing this article

    • What role does knowledge of Reiss Motivation Profile (RMP) play as it relates to a fixed vs. growth mindset. How does my low desire for order impact my motivation to develop organizational skills
    • What are some resources (e.g. books, courses) have I tried in the past? What worked? What didn’t work? Where am I at now, in my journey?
    • What are the trade offs of developing organizational skills, of becoming more organized? Can I really have the “best of breed” approach, leveraging the (assume) creativity sparked from lack of organization?
    • Can I develop organizational skills that have less to do with how it looks — especially from the outside — and more of a growth internally? Similar to DBT, the behavior might look the same but the internal feeling is different

  • Forcing oneself & Procrastination – not a problem, but a signal

    My view and judgements on procrastination has shifted over the last year and I’m becoming more increasingly aware of my tendency to delay or postpone certain tasks until pressure builds up.

    My observation is that sometimes for certain projects or tasks I put it off until (more or less) the very last minute.

    One example might be: it’s Monday morning and I have some report I need to send out by end of week and I wait until Friday morning to even begin. Then all at once, I complete the task — mind you, the task itself requires about 15-20 minutes of concentrated effort — often feeling totally drained and exhausted afterwards and above all else, guilty. Whenever I find myself procrastinating, I still try to stay self-compassionate “who doesn’t sometimes procrastinate sometimes?”. And though I want to minimize the negative consequences of procrastination, procrastination in itself is not something I want to completely eliminate.

    Here’s why.

    I do not believe that procrastination is the problem. It’s not something that needs to be extinguished.

    In fact, I believe procrastination has utility and functional in certain circumstances. The act of procrastination allows me to avoid or delay some anticipatory, potential (often yet unaware of) negative emotions. In that way, procrastination serves as a protective mechanism.

    Yes — procrastination can become maladaptive. I get that.

    But what I’m leaning towards now is to increase my awareness around procrastination and treat the behavior as a signal. A clue. A reminder to check in myself, a moment to pause and breathe, and question: “What’s going on?”

    Am I procrastinating because of some perfectionism tendencies? Sometimes I fall into the trap that whatever is I do “needs” to be stellar so that I minimize perceived social rejection. Acceptance.

    Am I procrastinating because of the potential boredom accompanying the task? Is it because the task at hand doesn’t provide sufficient stimulus. Boredom is useful and I believe a necessary ingredient to creativity. And more often than not, certain tasks that I believe are boring end up providing stillness and calm.

    Am I procrastinating out of fear or anxiety? Sometimes I avoid a task because reality is that there is a negative consequence that follows the task. And at the same time, I realize now (as I’m typing this out) that if there’s going to be a consequence, how about facing it? I don’t always HAVE to front load the negative emotions and immediately pay the price. Because sometimes it is best to defer negative experiences, like if I am lacking sleep and tired and some undesirable behavior would follow as a result of experiencing negative emotions.

    In sum, procrastination and I are becoming friends and ultimately I want to increase my awareness of when I’m delaying or deferring something and then, try to leverage one of the skills or toolboxes I’ve either come up on my own or ones that I’ve picked up from others (like from The Waves of Focus online course)

  • Created my first YouTube playlist for House Dance Class Recap videos

    Created my first YouTube playlist for House Dance Class Recap videos

    Creating YouTube Playlist on my channel serves multiple purposes. First, doing so in a way for me to practice my organization skills. Second, a playlist enables me to chronologically view my dance journey. Third, playlists help viewers (subscribers and non-subscribers) paint a better picture of what dance classes in studios look and feel like.

    Now, I do have a backlog of edited house dance recap videos that live on my iPhone and Instagram (stories), not yet uploaded to YouTube. How many? If I had to guess, probably in the range of 50 videos or so. Will I upload all of them? Although I’d like to, probably not. Perhaps a select few.

    What other playlists will I want to create? Off the cuff, here are a few ideas

    • Stretching and flexibility journey – I started stretching on May 16, 2024 (162 days ago) and similar to my dance, I’ve been documenting my flexibility journey
    • Daughter and dad recap videos – Whenever I watch videos of Elliott and me, I feel joy and love. It’s yet another way to remind myself that I am living a life that’s both worth living and living a live that’s aligned with my long term values
  • I ran out of iPhone storage … or so I thought

    I ran out of iPhone storage … or so I thought

    In the middle of recording a video during yesterday evening’s dance class, my iPhone popped up an alert, a message notifying me that I ran out of disk space and that the current video recording was halted. After seeing the notification, I had mentally prepared myself to visit the Apple store to trade in my phone, upgrading the iPhone to one with larger disk capacity — perhaps doubling the capacity, from 2TB to 4 TB — but fortunately discovered that I can reclaim about 1/2 a TB of space by performing some clean up, pushing out the need to upgrade my phone.

    What’s taking up all that space?

    I attend dance classes ritually on Tuesdays and Thursdays and almost every class, I capture footage of the entire class, recording myself in order to both 1) create recap videos and 2) reflect on my dance, what I liked, what I dislike. These dance classes in London tend to run 90 minutes and recording at 30 frames per second (FPS), 1080P, HEVC encoding (I had assumed video was being encoded with H.264 and today learned about HEVC, a more efficient format), that’s about 3.6 GB of disk space per hour of video, taking up about 5.4 GB of space per class.

    iPhone Video File Sizes

    But why the hell is CapCut program itself eating up almost 1TB of space, almost half of the capacity on my iPhone?

    What the hell is going on!?

    It appears that CapCut duplicates each imported video file in a project. That’s my guess and it would make sense because the application should not affect the original file. This would explain why a project file consisting of a 30 second video clip extracted from 2 hour clip take up 10GB?

    So now, I am currently performing some maintenance on my iPhone, carefully deleting project files. What’s odd is that there seems to be some sort of misreporting of disk space because when I delete what I think is 10 GB of project files, I only see a few hundred (about 400 MB) reclaimed. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reason, like perhaps some background process or thread has not kicked in to update the disk utilization?

    Either way, I am going to hold off on upgrading my iPhone that contains a larger capacity and try and reclaim 500GB of space.

  • A simple solution to “Damn, I forgot to buy XYZ at the grocery store”

    A simple solution to “Damn, I forgot to buy XYZ at the grocery store”

    Ever find yourself frustrated that you forgot to pick up something from the grocery store? I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve experienced frustration when I returned home, after forgetting to pick up some item (e.g. ketchup), despite writing down the item on a sheet of paper that I ultimately forget is neatly tucked away in a jean pocket.

    But lately, I’ve been experimenting with a solution I came up with that seems to be working pretty consistently without fail over the last month.

    It’s simple: I write down the item on a sticky note and then attach the sticky note to my credit card that lives in my wallet.

    Before elaborating on this particularly unique solution, here are some other attempts:

    • Location based reminder with Siri – “Hey Siri, remind me when I get to Sainsbury grocery store to buy ketchup”. While the notification works well (that is, a notification will pop up on my phone when I am in close proximity to the grocery store), sometimes my phone sits tucked away in my backpack and I end up not even hearing or feeling (i.e. vibrate) the notification. Or sometimes my phone suppresses notifications due to be set on sleep mode.
    • Writing down items on a sheet of paper and putting the piece of paper in my pocket – As mentioned above, I (with good intention) write down items on a sheet of paper and then stuff the paper in my pocket and though this sometimes work, I often forget about the paper all together.

    In a nutshell, with all the solutions presented above, the problem really boils down to forgetting about the solution itself.

    Instead of relying on good intentions, like my memory, having some sort of trigger to prompt me. So me paying for my credit card (at the moment) always happen so I piggy packed on that.

    Ultimately, this solution of mine is a fail safe. Because although I do write down a longer list of items on a single sheet of paper, the item(s) on the post-it fail to make their way to the single sheet of paper, for many reasons.

    Again, this solution works … for me given my assumptions (e.g. paying with physical credit card) and circumstances. Even so, as a practice of improving my organization skills, I evaluated my solution using the POET compass in terms of how well my solution presents, how well it stays off my mind, how accessible the solution is, and how much I trust it. More on this below.

    Evaluating the solution using the POET compass

    As mentioned in more recent blog posts, I am currently enrolled in an online course called “Waves of Focus” (see this blog post for more details). And one tool I been incorporating into my daily life is the POET compass, a way to evaluate your “organization” solution.

    Does it present well?

    Yes, the solution in itself uses a label and works well as a visual trigger. As soon as I whip out my wallet and see a sticky note attached, I’m reminded that there’s at least one item I’d like to buy while at the grocery story.

    Is it out of mind?

    Invisible? Yes! The label itself is slapped onto my credit card, which is tucked away and out of sight and out of mind, sitting in my back pocket.

    Is the solution easy to use/easy to get to?

    Is it Instant? Yes, in the context of grocery shopping, I pay with my card (not apple pay or any other mechanism). So retrieving the sticky is as easy as retrieving my card from the wallet.

    Trusted?

    Off of mind. I would say for this particular scenario (of going to the grocery store and trying to remember to purchase something) that being trusted is probably the most important criteria (within the POET compass). After jotting down the items and attaching the sticky note to my card, I simply can forget.

    Summary

    I’ve been using this solution for a little over 4 weeks and appears to be working well. This solution (like many others) was born out of frustration. And while I still practice self-compassion and take it on myself, frustration is a normal and common feeling that I’m learning to listen to more, allowing myself to detach and and step back and brain storm (unique or not) solutions for my problems.

  • Ask yourself questions when coming up with a (digital, physical, mental) organization solution

    Generally speaking, I struggle with keeping things organized: files on my computer (digital), items in my house (e.g. physical), and my thoughts (i.e. mental). To help combat my organization challenges, I signed up for an online course (i.e. Waves of Focus). In that course, I learned about a tool called the poet compass , which helps individuals evaluate the quality of their organization solutions through a set of criteria.

    Since learning the technique about a week ago, I’ve been practicing using the tool especially since I’m aware that when it comes to organizing, I tend to prematurely jump to “problem solving”, often quickly creating solutions that are born out of in the moment frustration. In other words, these solutions are often driven out of impulse. Because of this, rarely do my organization solutions seldom stick around. Now, before I come up with organization solutions, I leverage POET (i.e. Presents Well, Out of the Way, Easy to get to, Trusted) compass along with the corresponding questions (below) associated with each individual criteria.

    Questions

    Start with the central question of “does it even matter”

    Before evaluating your organization solution against each dimension (e.g. presents well, trusted), it’s worth considering taking a step back and asking a more central question: “does it even matter”?

    In other words, is the item that you are considering organizing worthy of organization Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes no. Whenever unworthy, consider simply discarding the item.

    Questions for P – Presents Well (on time and clear)

    It’s not usually worthwhile to try and organize EVERYTHING. More practically, we choose what to (and what not to) organize. For any given object that’s you trying to organize, its often surrounded by other items. The problem with this is how do you separate the signal (i.e. the item you want to organize) from the noise (i.e. the other surrounding items). With “Presents well” criteria, you can increase the signal to noise ratio by asking the following questions:

    • Can I use an alert/reminder?
    • Can I use a label?
    • Will it appear clearly?
    • Do I like the way it looks/sounds?
    • Can I weave it into an existing rhythm? (Paths/Lists)
    • Would grouping or sorting improve things?

    Questions for O – Out of the way (invisible)

    Like many other people with ADHD, in order to prevent forgetting about items that I’d like to rediscover in the future, I’ll deliberately place them in plain sight. Unfortunately, overtime, the more I apply this strategy, the more clutter I create.

    • Can this go in a container/box?
    • Can this go in a cabinet?
    • Can this go in a folder?
    • Can this go in a behind/under something else?

    Now, you might be sharing some similar worry thoughts as me. Often, when items are tucked away — invisible — future me struggles with refinding the item. That happens. So before you simply place an item in a container or box or cabinet or folder, consider counter-balancing “Out of the way” with “Presents Well”, maybe by including a label.

    Questions for E – Easy to use/get to (instant)

    Your body’s resistance to an activity isn’t an obstacle to be overcome … The right solution isn’t to start punching the wall harder, it’s to look around for a tool to help you do the job.

    – The late Aaron Swartz

    Over the years and even now, I’m continuing to increase awareness around the thoughts that swirl around in my head. And anytime the thought of “JUST TRY HARDER” pops up, I try and hit pause, take a deep breath … because this thought serves as a clue. Though that mantra can sometimes translate to “try again” (i.e. perseverance), it’s not always the case and often, JUST TRY HARDER equates to applying brute force. Nowadays, I’m more keen on changing the surrounding conditions so both reduce frustration and increase ease.

    • Can I bring this closer to its place of use?
    • Can I link to this from a place I’d use?
    • How can I practice this?
    • How can I lean into mastery?

    Of the above questions, I find “Can I link to this from a place I’d use” one that I’ve been asking myself consistently throughout the day. By consciously creating links, I am reducing the probability of (as mentioned in the previous section above) losing lingering items and I am increasing the probability of rediscovering them. To elaborate, here’s an example. I recently created an excel sheet to track topics I want to write about: basically content creation tracking. Now, I’ve tried this approach of tracking items in a central location and almost always that central trackers end up decaying, becoming a stale artifact that I fail to maintain. My central writing trackers end up getting abandoned because

    1. I would either forget that I created them in the first place or
    2. I’d feel resigned when being unable to rediscover the original file.

    But through the concept of linking, I create more than one way to lead me back to the file.

    And, as for the question “How can I lean into mastery, it’s helpful to define the steps of practicing mastery:

    1. Pause with frustration – identify the stumble or opportunity for improvement
    2. Tune to level of ease – shrink down the scope
    3. Return to challenge of ease

    In short, practicing mastery (in this context) boils down to: how can I make my solution more accessible.

    We can lean into it. Sometimes its hard to recognize that things are not going well and it is tempting to just continue doing what I am doing

    – Waves of Focus’s Koroush

    Questions for T – Trusted (off the mind)

    Finally, to increase the level of trust in our organization solutions, we can ask ourselves the following questions:

    • What rhythm/habit could this connect to?
    • What space/”home” can I create for this?
    • How can I practice this?
    • How can I take a Step of Mastery?

    Put plainly, the level of trust increases through developing habits and repetition.

    Summary

    If you struggle with “organization” or “productivity” due to a wandering mind (e.g. ADHD), I highly recommend you check out The Waves of Focus online course. And of course, feel free to message me if you have any questions.

  • Waves of Focus – POET compass

    POET compass is a mnemonic that I learned about from the Waves of Focus online course and its a tool that’s designed for qualitatively assessing how well something (e.g. physical, digital) is organized.

    Note: I’m currently enrolled in Kourosh’s Waves of Focus program. It’s an online course focused on individuals with the wandering mind, helping us build tools and skills to organize our personal and professional work and help us with, for lack of a better word, “productivity”. In reality, I believe this course has just as much to do with gaining skills to deal with difficult, often negative, emotions like anxiety and frustration. I’ll probably post a series of entries about this program in more depth however in the meantime, I wanted to write to just share a little about one of the tools: POET compass.

    What is POET?

    • P – presents well (on time and clear)
    • O – out of the way (invisible)
    • E – easy to use/get to (instant)
    • T – trusted (off of mind)

    Although POET is used to measure how well something is organized, you can equally and similarly evaluate if something is disorganized. We can ask ourselves, “Is it hard to use (or get to), is something in the way, does it not come to mind (when we need it), am I worried about it (too much on the mind”. These questions stem from frustration and out of frustration, we seek organization.

    In another post, I’ll elaborate more on each of the measurements above and what sort of questions we may want to further ask ourselves when we are working on organizing. Finally, what I really love about this entire module (on beginnings of organization) is that the notion of organization is not defined as a black or white, a binary. It’s not “yes, it is organized” or “no, it is not organized.” In fact, organization is not even consider a spectrum and instead, it is defined as something with an infinite number of possibilities. It’s a much more functional and compassionate approach to organization.

  • A short review on Zettlr (open source Zettelkasten app)

    A short review on Zettlr (open source Zettelkasten app)

    I serendipitously stumbled on another Zettelkasten desktop application called Zettlr. Perusing the online forum over at Zettelkasten.de, I had noticed that at least three of four members repping the app in their signatures. Naturally, I was curious so I followed the scent on the trail and loaded up the Zettlr website in my browser.

    After skimming through the description, I decided to test drive the application.

    And so far, I am really loving the application. It’s beautiful. It’s use friendly. It sparks joy.

    Sure, the application is still in an infancy and has a few rough edges: the application fails to open up external third party application links (e.g. DevonThink) and the support for markdown tables is clunky at best and sometimes the cursor lags behind when I’m typing at my top speed. However, none of these issues are deal breakers. And I’m certain that, overtime, the application’s performance will be improved.

    Top features

    Keyboard shortcuts. Want to generate a unique identifier for your note card? Type in “CTRL + L” and the app will spit out a timestamp that serves as a unique ID for other cards to reference. Just plain awesome. How about inserting a markdown hyperlink? Well, just select some text and then press “CTRL + K”, the text converted to a markdown based hyperlink. And these two shortcuts are just the tip of the iceberg.

    Built-in statistics. Check out at a glance how many words you are writing daily.

    Writing is on fire!

     

    Built in emojiis. I didn’t anticipate that I would enjoy inserting emojiis into my documents. Of course, I don’t over do it and only sprinkle them sparingly. Regardless, they add a nice little touch, a spark of joy in the creative writing process.

    Auto-generated table of contents. By marking down your content with appropriate headings, you get a beautiful table of contents located in the side bar (which renders the emojiis nicely too).

    Zettlr: Emojii support and auto-generated table of contents

    Wrapping up

    Overall, I love the application so far (again: it’s only been about 3 days). I’m certain I’ll discover other blesmishes as I continue to use the application. Regardless, Zettlr allows me to enjoy creating content: I’m able to achieve a sense of flow, often losing myself in the process, thanks to both the aesthetically pleasing interface as well as the low cost of context switching between reading, editing, writing and searching.

  • Tagging my personal information management (PIM) with key/value pairs as key words

    Tagging my personal information management (PIM) with key/value pairs as key words

    Generally speaking, there two ways people store their digital assets. Some file their digital assets— PDF documents, images, videos, bookmarks and so on — into neat, hierarchical structures. In the other camp are people who leverage tagging, assigning one or more key words to their files. When retrieving assets, these people tend to leverage their software’s search capabilities.

    I’m somewhere in between.

    And my digital organization is far from my perfect. I cannot begin to count the number of times when I think of some article that I read, go search (for hours) in my personal database, and come up empty handed. So frustrating.

    Key Value Pairs as tags

    To reduce the time it takes to retrieve my digital assets, I now tag them using key/value pairs. In practice, here’s what it looks like. I’ll stumble on some article — maybe from Hacker News — that I want to save. Instead of just mindlessly clicking the bookmark button, I’ll hit the brakes and pause for a moment, pondering about the appropriate key/value pair I should assign. I ask myself: under what context will I search for this (this question is different than how should I store the information).

    Here’s a concrete example. Say I finished reading an article around C (the programming language) and want to save the web page. Instead of tagging the article with “C”, I’ll now do something like: programming_languages. Programming languages is the key, and the value is C.

    Key/Value pair tags. My DevonThink setup

     

    References