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Minimal effective dose

I’ve been a fan of a personal productivity tactic referred to by Robert Boice as brief regular session, or BRS for short. His research on work patterns of university professors from different disciplines shows that those who wait for large, uninterrupted chunks of time to do their academic work (mostly, writing) tend to be less successful according to various more-or-less objective metrics (ability to obtain tenure, publish highly-cited papers, etc.) Instead, a more effective strategy is to make regular, even if microscopic, progress by working in BRSs. This approach fits nicely with the idea of starting and stopping the work sessions before you are subjectively ready, but it flies in the face of another compelling tactic that calls for long, uninterrupted periods of time for doing deep work, which was popularized by Cal Newport. Newport defines deep work as a challenging activity, for which you are uniquely qualified.

I really like Newport’s uninterrupted deep work idea, but find the BRS approach more practical in terms of making consistent progress and avoiding procrastination. I think that there is a caveat to it, though: depending on the type of work, there is a lower limit for how brief a BRS can be. In other words, there is a minimum amount of time that I need to spend on task in order to make any progress. For example, when I am editing videos, either for classes that I teach or simply for fun, documenting the games that we play with my daughter (like the one below), I need to spend a finite chunk of time of watching raw footage, defining the cut-in and -out points and placing at least several clips together in the timeline. If I don’t do at least that much in a given editing session, I would effectively need to start from scratch the next time.

Finding this minimal effective dose for different types of work is generally not easy. In some cases, you might enjoy the activity so much, that you would enter the state of flow, where you literally lose the sense of time and blow through the time limit you might have set for yourself. A flow state, or more specifically, maximizing the time spent in a flow state, of course, is the goal, so if it happens regularly, there is certainly nothing to complain about.

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Getting started

A productivity hack that I’ve been rediscovering: it makes sense to start an activity early, that is before you are ready. Even more specifically, start before you want to. Once you get going, it would be relatively easy to continue. The reminder for this came in the form of a memo from my daughter’s strings teacher. She wrote to the parents of her students that kids are typically reluctant to pick up an instrument for their daily practice sessions, but are happy to continue playing once they start.

This technique has to do with the theory that we, humans, have a certain amount of inertia that makes us reluctant to stop wha we are doing at the moment and switch to another task. Incidentally, it also means that we should try stopping an activity before we are ready to do so. If the next step of the project is absolutely clear, it would make it so much easier to pick it up again the next day, or whenever it is time for the next session.

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“Hokusai says”: philosophy of the artist

I came across a poem by Roger S. Keys called “Hokusai says” a couple of weeks ago. Among other things, it’s an illustration of the principle that I keep telling my students, who work on their papers and theses – even though, objectively, most of the writing out there is actually re-writing of someone else’s thoughts or findings, there is value in re-wording and summarizing those thoughts again. The very act of re-processing and condensing the “old” information adds something new to it and makes it more accessible to others.

The poem is about Katsushika Hokusai – a monumental figure in the history of art. To me personally, it is fascinating how he was both influenced by and had a strong influence on the Western art. Somehow, he seems similar to Leonardo da Vinci in his incredible skills of observation and distilling the essence of phenomena simply by looking and thinking.

Hokusai’s writing is less known than his art, but he left some incredible bits of wisdom over the course of his long life. And this is what Roger Keys talking about in his poem. It’s a fantastic portrait of Hokusai, the philosopher. Curiously, I couldn’t find much info about Roger Keys himself after some casual poking around online, besides the fact that he is a scholar of Japanese art and has some association with Brown University.

Here is the poem. Enjoy.

Hokusai says

Hokusai says look carefully.
He says pay attention, notice.
He says keep looking, stay curious.
He says there is no end to seeing.

He says look forward to getting old.
He says keep changing,
you just get more who you really are.
He says get stuck, accept it, repeat
yourself as long as it is interesting.

He says keep doing what you love.

He says keep praying.

He says every one of us is a child,
every one of us is ancient
every one of us has a body.
He says every one of us is frightened.
He says every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

He says everything is alive —
shells, buildings, people, fish,
mountains, trees, wood is alive.
Water is alive.

Everything has its own life.

Everything lives inside us.

He says live with the world inside you.

He says it doesn’t matter if you draw,
or write books. It doesn’t matter
if you saw wood, or catch fish.
It doesn’t matter if you sit at home
and stare at the ants on your veranda
or the shadows of the trees
and grasses in your garden.
It matters that you care.

It matters that you feel.

It matters that you notice.

It matters that life lives through you.
Contentment is life living through you.
Joy is life living through you.
Satisfaction and strength
is life living through you.
He says don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid.
Love, feel, let life take you by the hand.
Let life live through you.

— Roger S. Keyes

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Cafe sounds

I miss pre-COVID cafe environments, where I would often spend half-an-hour or so before coming to the office to catch up on deep work – stuff that is important, but not urgent, which makes it vulnerable to being pushed out of the agenda by shallow, but urgent, things on a daily to-do list. It seems counter-intuitive, because a cafe would be full of people and relatively noisy, compared to my university office, where I could be alone and in a relative sound isolation, if I wanted to. Yet, the amount of ambient noise in a cafe is “just right” for me personally to facilitate focussing on the work at hand. I think the background music and half-discernible conversations prompt my brain to go into the focus mode.

Nowadays, after a year of the global pandemic, many cafes operate as take-out or outdoor-seating establishments. I’ve mostly stopped going there, though, because for all the virus-related risks, the main benefit of providing a focus-conducive environment is missing. Since work had shifted to the home office, I’ve come to rely on home-based substitutes for all things related, including espresso and music. On the latter front, my daughter introduced me to the Cafe Music BGM channel, and I have been enjoying it quite a bit. Just as it should be for proper cafe music, it has a “just right” combination of novelty (in the sense that I am not listening to the same songs in a loop while I work) and monotony (in that there are no vocals – just instrumental tracks.)

So even if the home office cannot provide all the benefits of an academic campus or a hip cafe environments, the ambiance problem has been largely resolved, and my espresso is getting better too.

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Flashback to Milano

While flipping through my sketchbook yesterday, I came across this picture, which I sketched exactly four years ago to the day. My wife and I were on sabbatical in Milan, and our daughter and I were drawing plants on a sunny day in the Brera Botanical Garden – a quiet green nook in the middle of the city. There, we met a local artist, who came over and mentioned that he used to have the same kind of sketchbook. We chatted and looked through each other’s sketches – mine on paper and his on his phone. It was one of those fascinating “one chance – one meeting” moments, which I often go back to in my memory. Actually, it turned out to be not just one meeting, because we later had a chance to visit the artist’s home studio, being somewhat overwhelmed by his and his wife’s hospitality.

I took thousands of photographs and video clips during our six-months stay in Italy, but the sketches, which I got into a habit of doing fairly regularly, definitely carry more emotional content for me personally. On reflection, this makes me want to pick up the sketching habit again.

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Things that went well

Exactly a year ago, as the first COVID wave swept through Canada, our university switched to an online teaching mode, which is still in affect. Our daughter’s school also went to remote teaching after coming back from the spring break. Summer travel plans went up in smoke and regular activities like camps were canceled. So we scrambled to find other things to do to keep active and sane during the lockdown: paddle boarding, biking, painting, playing music and taking the dog on long walks. We also decided to vlog about the things we did, as a way of keeping a diary that we might enjoy re-visiting in the future.

As it is the case with most activities, it is far from trivial to maintain the motivation and discipline to vlog regularly. But even if we failed to bring many video projects to completion, the mere exercise of looking at what we did trough the camera lens gave us a better perspective and appreciation for the things we were still capable of doing, despite the pandemic.

One thing that went well is that because of staying at home last summer, I had an opportunity to resurrect my old hobby of building plastic models. A few days ago, I looked through the video footage my daughter and I shot last July, when we started building our first Gunpla kit (she’s grown up so much since then!). Here is the glimpse into those days (better late than never!)

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Traditional house-elf roles

A gadget I’ve been enjoying over the past week is a robotic vacuum Roomba. In fact our entire family has been having fun with it. My daughter aptly named it Dobby, after the house-elf from “Harry Potter”. I find it particularly ironic in the context of the recent International Women’s Day. I was looking online at some old Soviet postcards celebrating the 8th of March and came across this one (see below). A rough translation of the verse is that giving this kind of robot as a present for your spouse (it says “wife” specifically – in case there were any doubts that this is from pre-PC days) would stop nagging in the household, making life easier for everyone.

In the “Harry Potter”, incidentally, Hermione Granger advocated for liberation of house-elves from oppression by the wizarding society by founding S.P.E.W. – Society for the Promotion of Elfish Wellfare. She originally wanted to call the organization “Stop the Outrageous Abuse of Our Fellow Magical Creatures and Campaign for a Change in Their Legal Status,” but the name would not fit on a badge.

So happy house-robot day, everybody! Oh, and don’t forget to join S.P.E.W.!

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On puzzles

I’ve been solving chess puzzles as an exercise to improve my tactical intuition (read: stop blundering away pieces). The method comes from a highly influential book by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, aptly named “The Woodpecker Method” (“tikkanen” means “little woodpecker” in Finnish, and the repetitiveness of the approach also fits the name very well.)

I find it somewhat difficult to work on the puzzles, though. Not because of their complexity, but because of my default result-oriented mindset. I see puzzles purely as training, rather like lifting weights to build muscles, without any potential for creative content. I feel similarly about solving the Rubik’s cube – it is a nice way to spend time and practice concentration but ultimately, the solution is already known, and it has been done many time before.

But it is the process itself that is valuable in puzzles, not so much the final result. Somewhat unexpectedly this fundamental insight comes from the same chess tactics book. I’ll let he quote speak for itself:

“‘Life puzzle’ is a Swedish expression which originates from a political campaign and points out the difficulty of organizing work, social media, household work, ‘quality time’ with family, and ‘time-when-you-do-things-for-yourself’ – another common expression which is shorter in Swedish (just seven letters). The essence is the core of the Swedish mentality: life is a puzzle to be solved, rather than chaos to be endured.”

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The soft animal loves what he loves

This photo shows what my dog, Bruno, does while I do a workout in the living room (which became a part-time home gym during the COVID times). He never fails to join me for a workout – to offer emotional support, I suppose. But his posture shows such complete relaxation that it makes me chuckle about how much it contrasts with the “no pain, no gain” attitude that is stereotypically associated with physical exercise. It actually reminded me of the first few lines of the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver that I’ve incidentally come across:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.“

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Practice strategies for adults

One particularly neat thing about being a parent to a nine-year-old is that it gives me an excuse opportunity to try various activities alongside her without an expectation of accomplishment. Theoretically, it’s a license to be a beginner without any pressure to improve performance. Still, having this mindset is easier in theory than in practice. Realistically, one still needs to make some progress to maintain motivation. This raises the question: should adult beginners practice differently from children? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is a ‘yes, but only after they’ve acquired the basic skills’.

Take kendo as an example (which my daughter never practiced, by the way, although I had observed other kids’ training). Physical training aimed at improving speed and endurance is a huge aspect of children’s keiko (practice sessions). It is unavoidable for adults  too, but beyond a certain level of  physical ability, the adults are typically directed to shift their focus to other elements of practice, e.g., technique, strategy, psychology, philosophy. It seems that even though there is no hope for an adult beginner to reach a level of mastery that is hypothetically available to children (provided that the kids don’t quit their practice), a better use of an adult’s time would be to concentrate on other, arguably more advance elements of the art, that are beyond pure physical skills.

If we consider violin-playing (which I started studying together with my daughter), an analogue to suburi (empty strike) practice in kendo would be playing scales. The physical skill, i.e. a combination of manual dexterity and sensory perception, which is required for extracting other-than-horrendous sounds from a violin is considerable, and it makes the learning curve very steep. As expected, my daughter leaves me in the dust in terms of the progress. As much as I would like to play the ‘adult beginner’ card and shift my focus to some of the more exciting practice elements, like dynamics of the phrases, etc., the required threshold of the physical skill remains elusive.

Ready for battle. Stll life with chess pieces.

Chess is another example, where adults often strive to improve, but find it difficult. It is a bit different from both kendo and music in that all these activities are difficult to master, but chess is relatively easy to learn. This accessibility is deceptive. It makes people believe that there is no limit to how much they’d be able to improve. While this “everything is possible if you try” attitude is generally admirable, chess is perhaps the most striking example where innate ability (i.e. talent) is dominant over hard work, perseverance and training methodology. Still, there is an analogy to the practice of musical scales and suburi sword swings in chess. The limiting skill there appears to be visualization – the ability to literally see the position of pieces in your mind, without physically setting them up on the board. This ability not only enable the accomplished players do party tricks like playing simultaneous blindfold games, but more fundamentally, to calculate the possible variations several moves ahead.

So it appears that working on the basics, in other words, practicing like a children, is a good strategy for adult beginners too, even if they they are not aiming to achieve great heights in a particular activity. And if they are aiming high, then it is even more critical, because without mastery of the fundamental skills, their progress will always be limited.