Matt Chung's Site

Tag: waves of focus

  • 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.

  • 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.