38 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
# Chaotic Flow
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I find I meander through tasks quite chaotically.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My thinking is this - deep flow is great, but most of the time, I am distracted.
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This is fine in itself, I might be distracted by work, by people, the weather, or anything.
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I might just be daydreaming, thinking about future plans, or listening to music.
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A wandering mind is curious, and ripe for inspiration and new ideas, in a way that a flowing mind is not.
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Though literally distracted, in a creative domain ideas and inspiration are a fundamental currency, so I hesitate to consider time spent distracted as "wasted".
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Instead, I frame it as still flowing, actually, but in a softer, looser sense than dedicated one's entire being to a singular focus.
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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.
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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.
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Being a text-based kind of person, I can touch-type comfortably, and have generally text- and keyboard-based workflows.
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I also like shell scripting and optimising things, so
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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.
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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.
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On a system which reacts to these inputs as quickly as they are entered that means I could be starting to write about the
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That said, the wandering mind is flighty, and difficult to wrangle into action.
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I want to start by clarifying that I have nothing against deep, focused flow - I actively encourage it!
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There's no substitute to spending good, quality time learning, practising, creating, playing, whatever your verb of choice might be.
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You will get better at doing the thing and you'll have a good time doing it.
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Go flow!
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What I want to be wary of is actually exactly the "productivity" of flow.
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Engaging in deep focus activities is productive in the short-term, but can be exhausting, especially without taking adequate rest.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To this end, this means that anything I want to develop in my personal time has to be really easy to start doing.
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