brain chaos

blogs/unfinished/chaos-of-the-brain.md

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+# Chaotic Flow
+
+I find I meander through tasks quite chaotically.
+I often have many tasks on the go at a time, and work through them slowly, flitting between them as and when my interest takes me.
+In the past I've considered this nature of being as a disruption of of [flow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)), surely a negative pressure on my productive and ability to focus, which is so crucial to complex undertakings requiring deep focus.
+However, now I think that the chaos is a good thing, actually, and that a chaotic flow might be the best flow of all, from a certain perspective.
+
+My thinking is this - deep flow is great, but most of the time, I am distracted.
+This is fine in itself, I might be distracted by work, by people, the weather, or anything.
+I might just be daydreaming, thinking about future plans, or listening to music.
+A wandering mind is curious, and ripe for inspiration and new ideas, in a way that a flowing mind is not.
+Though literally distracted, in a creative domain ideas and inspiration are a fundamental currency, so I hesitate to consider time spent distracted as "wasted".
+Instead, I frame it as still flowing, actually, but in a softer, looser sense than dedicated one's entire being to a singular focus.
+
+Of course, this can't apply to everything - in plenty of situations, failing to achieve a deep focus prevents the act from being performed at all.
+However, when I consider my hobbies and projects, they are mostly being text-based, almost entirely computer-based, and I expect the same is true for most of this blog's audience, so I'll press on regardless.
+
+Being a text-based kind of person, I can touch-type comfortably, and have generally text- and keyboard-based workflows.
+I also like shell scripting and optimising things, so 
+It's become easy to open a terminal (2 keypresses), a text editor (4 keypresses, 2 if a terminal is already focused) or a particular project (rarely more than 8 keypresses, even for an arbitrarily named project) before actually thinking about what it is I want to accomplish.
+This means it's exceptionally easy to get to the point of expression for an idea - a short key sequence in muscle memory takes less than a second to input, and might take at most five seconds if I need to navigate a little.
+On a system which reacts to these inputs as quickly as they are entered that means I could be starting to write about the 
+
+That said, the wandering mind is flighty, and difficult to wrangle into action.
+
+I want to start by clarifying that I have nothing against deep, focused flow - I actively encourage it!
+There's no substitute to spending good, quality time learning, practising, creating, playing, whatever your verb of choice might be.
+You will get better at doing the thing and you'll have a good time doing it.
+Go flow!
+
+What I want to be wary of is actually exactly the "productivity" of flow.
+Engaging in deep focus activities is productive in the short-term, but can be exhausting, especially without taking adequate rest.
+I also use my deep focus a lot professionally, and rarely have the energy to put in several hours more once I'm in a position to create for myself.
+
+So, I'm working on finding ways to make progress on the things I make outside of work, in a way that doesn't feel like working on them.
+I want to be able to meander through my personal time doing either nothing, or if I am doing something then meandering only very relaxedly towards some ulterior goal.
+To this end, this means that anything I want to develop in my personal time has to be really easy to start doing.