Stream of consciousness blogging, Take 1

I am going to write this blog as much as possible without stopping.  I’m trying to unclog my brain, and let things flow a little bit easier, and sometimes the easiest way to do that is to create only one restriction, the lack of restrictions and the requirement to continue without going back and editing.

11 years after September 11

I remember all the bloody fucking numerology experts that appeared after that day.  I wonder what they’re writing about now… actually no I don’t, I don’t give a fuck.

Relax Mark…

Lately I’ve been telling myself to take it easy.  I get worked up over things far to easily sometimes.  I don’t know how evident that is to those around me, but I’m less worried about that than I am my own mental health.

Airport Limbo

I dunno if anyone else feels this way, but whenever I do a long series of connecting flights, I feel like I enter time-culture limbo the moment I step into the airport.

Motivational Slump

I’ve been in a motivational slump lately.  Uninterested in most of the things I would like to be interested in.  Apathetic about housekeeping.  Narrowed focus to only a few activities, with the space between them filled by hollow internet browsing.  Blogging, as I’m doing now, would be better than what I’ve been doing these past few weeks.

Paypal ticks me off

Searching for Paypal sucks on google results in over 9 million hits.

Searching for paypal rocks on google results in about a million fewer hits.

I’m done with Paypal.  Hate that service.

Tried to pay for the Legend RPG which donates its proceeds to Childs Play but Paypal refused my credit card.  Why?  No explanation.  I won’t be using Paypal again, ever.

Google payments? Sure.  Amazon payments? My favorite.

Paypal? No thank you.

Damnit!

I’m sick. Hopefully this will be gone by tomorrow. I have class on friday.  I really wanted to hike Ishizuchi-san tomorrow.

No internets just yet….

Waiting on both Windows and enough free time to call customer service and find a username/password that I seem to be missing.

Summer before Life

Well, this is it.  Last period of free time I will have in the forseeable future until retirement.  How am I spending it?  Mostly doing nothing. Some hiking, some weight lifting, a little studying Japanese, little bit of reading, but mostly spending a lot of time doing nothing worthwhile.

How do I feel about that?  Not really that great, but the problem is: I have no money.  Until my salary starts coming in, I can’t really do that much anyway.  I guess that’s the point of retirement is that you’re supposed to have free time and extra cash.  Dad seems to be enjoying it so far, for the week he’s been retired.

Attention, Decision making, and leading an efficient life

So as I write this I recognize that in the short run it is negatively impacting my efficiency because I have other priorities that should come first, however in the long run writing this, and concretely formulating my thoughts may be beneficial to my ability to maintain and increase work efficiency.

Efficiency is very important to me in my life right now because I frequently have quite a variety of things to accomplish and I need to squeeze some of those accomplishments into small time-frames.  I’m not particularly skilled in segmenting my work into multiple sessions, instead I prefer to totally complete it in one or two sittings.  If possible I like those to be a draft and revision sequence.

I’m reading about a cognitive science approach right now which led me down a tangential boulevard of consideration: How do I make sure what my mind is attending to is most beneficial towards accomplishing my current goal? The concept of continuously thinking about your goal is detrimental in that it absorbs attentive resources that you could use in order to better accomplish the immediate step towards that goal.  So then is it best to avoid tangents?  I’m not sure that this is true either because in many cases for myself I am so worn out from working continously on the same project for more than an hour that I end up losing productivity or quality.  However tangents that chain to other tangents and go off on a one-way train are clearly detrimental.  So then I have to cut myself off from my tangents to be effective.  Lately I’ve found that if I have multiple projects to work on simultaneously, which I usually do, then I can use the different projects as my breaks.  When I tire of reading a journal article I can outline a speech.  When I run out of ideas for an analytical paper I can go through a dataset of Korean and do glosses.  When everything else is dreary I can turn to personal goals like working on my screenplay.  Overall I’ve found this to be a fairly effective means of accomplishing large amounts of work in the smallest time frame available and still keep my sanity (and get some sleep, unlike freshman year).

My biggest setback is external distractions: other people, their music, their conversations, sometimes even their proximity.  However when a small group of people are all serious about getting work accomplished around me, I find that my productivity goes up.  Instead of considering a mental tangent and gazing off into space I see them working beside me and quickly return to my own efforts.  So then I have to find an environment that consistently fosters this sort of work attitude and provides me with necessary physical resources I require to work, namely an electrical socket for my laptop, a comfortable desk with a lot of space to spread out on, and an appropriate chair that’s not too comfortable and inspires at least decent posture.  On that note too, I’ve found that maintaining good sitting posture, or at least acceptable sitting posture while working greatly improves my efficiency.  Thanks to observing the Japanese for 4 months for that one.

Going back to what I mentioned before, maintaing proper mental attentiveness to my projects with my goals in mind doesn’t really get easier.  I just hope that I can enter into the appropriate atmosphere, with the appropriate resources, and the least distractions possible so that my opportunity for focus and efficacy are maximized.