Tomasz Skutnik gets his copy going in Warsaw.
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Quandary: Seattle WA
November 7, 2011 By
Geordie Keitt's copy of Tempo is called Quandary and began its journey in August.
A Pilgrimage through Stagnation and Acceleration
November 2, 2011 By
Gregory Rader at onthespiral.com just posted an interesting synthesis of the some of the ideas we’ve been discussing here lately. He’s taken elements of a couple of my recent posts, thrown in other ideas, and come up with a deeper explanation of why mindful learning curves, thrust, drag and 10x effects behave the way they do. He zeroes in on the idea of latent drag/lurking drag (drag that’s waiting to kick in) as the central meta-problem, and gets to several interesting insights.
But, suppose you have perfected the art of schedule management…have you permanently defeated the scourge that is drag?
Of course not. Ultimately drag is anything that distracts you from thrust work. Biological needs are sources of drag. You surely know at least a few people who periodically engage in near-manic bouts of creative effort, largely by ignoring their needs to eat, sleep, or maintain decent hygiene.
Venkat focuses on schedule management because it is an obvious limiting factor. Schedule management, for many people is the low hanging fruit. However, alleviating one source of drag will only enable a temporary period of productive acceleration before another, previously latent source of drag emerges as a limiting factor.
For some relevant context, Greg is big on CrossFit training, and I suspect a lot of his thinking is informed by analogies to that transformation process. Read the whole post: A Pilgrimage through Stagnation and Acceleration (and the comment I’ve posted on stuff like moving bottlenecks and weakest-link dynamics).
Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect
October 25, 2011 By
If you are only used to driving cars, it is hard to appreciate just how huge a force drag can be. The reason is that drag increases as the square of speed, so an object will experience 100 times the drag at 300 mph as it does at 30 mph. Not 10 times.
In Physics Can Be Fun, Soviet popular science writer Ya Perelman provided a dramatic example of the consequences of drag. With drag, a typical long-range artillery shell travels 4 km. Without drag, the same shell would travel 40 km.
Or 10x further. Which brings me to the famous 10x effect in software engineering.
If you haven’t heard of it, the 10x effect is the anecdotal observation that great programmers aren’t just a little more productive than average ones (like 15-20%). They tend to be 10 times more productive. A similar effect can be found in other kinds of creative information work.
Can you transform yourself into a 10x person? If you meet certain qualifying conditions (by my estimate, maybe 1 in 4 people do), I think you can.
Tempo Review on BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow
October 13, 2011 By
Cory Doctorow has a thoughtful review of the book up at BoingBoing.
But I’ve just picked it up again, and finished it. Why? Because I kept on referring to it in discussions — all sorts of discussions. A critical analysis of a friend’s manuscript for a new book on security; a talk with my agent about the plot of an upcoming novel; a discussion of economics and bubbles; a practical political planning session for an upcoming debate at a party conference. Tempo had stimulated a lot of thinking for me, and I thought it deserved finishing.
So I’ve finished it, and while I very rarely bother to post about books that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend (see “life’s too short,” above), I find myself driven to post a rare mixed review. Tempo may be the most fascinating book whose thesis I couldn’t entirely grasp and whose author I couldn’t wholly follow that I’ve ever read.
Like many other readers, Cory appears to have found the book rather dense, but worth finishing.
Mental Models and Archetypes Explained
October 3, 2011 By
I spent several thousand words in the book talking about mental models and archetypes, but this awesome satirical graphic conveys the essence of the idea in just one picture. From the Global Nerdy blog, though it apparently has a longer history and originally appeared in French first. Thanks to Jean-Luc Delatre for pointing this out.
Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management
September 22, 2011 By
I didn’t write a whole lot about time management in the book. This is because I believe it is a pretty mature field and I don’t like reinventing the wheel. But I do have ideas about how to make your time management behaviors more robust, so you can allow for a certain amount of forgivable sloppiness in how you operate. David Allen of GTD fame once remarked, only partly in jest, that the fastest way to increase your productivity is to lower your standards. Forgivable sloppiness is my term for what it means to safely lower your standards.
The core idea is what I call epoch-driven time management: varying your behaviors based on the tempo of a project. The idea can be generalized to your whole life, but let’s start with a single project, a thread in your life. This diagram, the Double Freytag triangle, which I discussed at length in the book, is one systematic way to carve up the time-line of your project into epochs with consistent tempos.
For the purposes of this post, all you need is your intuitive reading of the diagram. Think of the cheap trick and separation event as the psychological starting and ending points of a project (if you haven’t read the book, the choice of terms will remain somewhat cryptic, I am afraid). The height of the graph at any given point is, roughly speaking, a measure of how crazy your life is at that point. Each phase of the diagram is an epoch: it has a consistent rhythm, energy level and emotional feel.
Now that we have our terms defined (I am still working on an online glossary so I don’t have to do this for every post), let’s talk about forgivably sloppy time management.
Tempo goes to Burning Man
September 7, 2011 By
Andrew Boardman named his copy “Burning Book.” His rule: the copy must be passed on to someone who has been to Burning Man.
Bandwagon Timing verus Biding Your Time
August 31, 2011 By
There are two basic types of timing: bandwagon timing and biding your time. They are the extremes of a spectrum. Most people focus on the first extreme. A minority focus on the second extreme. Successful timing requires a synthesis. Only a tiny fraction of people achieve synthesis.
We use different kinds of language to talk about each type.
Bandwagon timing is associated with the following types of language:
- This is the right time to sell
- Computer science is a hot major right now, and you should focus on Web technology
- He was in the right place at the right time
- It’s the perfect time to move to China
Biding your time, on the other hand, is associated with very different types of language
- This is your moment
- “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, lead on to success” (Shakespeare in Julius Caeser)
- This is an idea whose time has come
- This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life
- He was a visionary ahead of his own time
To synthesize the two, you have to understand how they relate.
New Research on Decision Fatigue
August 24, 2011 By
There is a very interesting article in the New York Times on the phenomenon of “decision fatigue.”
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.
These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
Commentary: I haven’t yet thought this through since it is recent research, but in Tempo-terms, it seems to fit in with the general notion of the momentum and entropy of mental models. If you forcibly steer the momentum through an effort of will, you increase entropy and make the narrative less controllable further downstream.
This goes into the hopper for some serious future examination.
