Jake Lodwick’s Blog

The Standards project continues.

When I began the project, I imagined myself turning into an uberman within a few months. A high-powered eccentric with a schedule no one could match or understand. But look where evolution has taken me! Starting tomorrow, I will be someone who wakes up in the morning, works for eight hours (with a one hour lunch break), then winds down for sleep. Sort of like every motherfucker on the planet.

To give myself some credit, a disciplined human who holds himself accountable for everything. But I suppose I’m learning that there’s some sanity to a M-F 9-5 existence, no matter how different I feel I am from the other members of my species. If I’m an autistic bipolar wackjob you might not know it from my schedule.

This is not the first time I’ve reinvented the wheel. Probably not the last, either… I like knowing the why of a system. I have trouble ‘taking someone’s word for it’.

So how did last week go? It went ok, but an unanticipated problem of switching to pen & paper (from whiteboard) was the loss of color, which made it very hard to tell, at a glance, how I was doing. Instead I had a page full of chicken scratch. This was demotivating because I was trapped in the moment; I had no sense of being in the midst of a purposeful whole… so tonight I bought colored pens.

Last week I also felt overwhelmed with tasks, and wasted lots of energy planning my day, each morning (“Should I read after the gym? Should I work before Odwick?” etc). This week’s Standards gives me a schedule each day. I wanted that so bad last week! ‘Choice paralysis’ sucks.

I also have a new page, my Data Log. There are four boxes per day. “Sleep” is the number of hours I get (target: 7). “Workindex” is the sum of all items in all my inboxes (email, paper, Normative orders, voicemail, errands, etc). “Drugs” is drug use* (target: nothing). “Score” is a numeric score for total points accumulated that day based on performance in each of the five ‘big blocks’; a perfect score for the week is 100. I like the idea of having that number to judge my overall performance. “Sorry, no time for blowjobs, I’m trying to get a perfect score.”

Ok, time to kick my ass for five straight days!

*A word on my drug use. At various times in the past few years I smoked a lot of pot and drank a lot of caffeine, and would often drink irresponsibly. I cut out the pot completely ~4 months ago when I realized it made me absolutely fucking retarded every time. I drink a low dose of caffeine maybe once every week or two, and drink alcohol, now, only on the weekends, and in increasing moderation. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these drugs at all, it’s that they’re usually not worth the cost. I don’t know what’s up with my brain chemistry but I tend to fly off the rails quickly and with a long recovery period. General sobriety seems the only wait to function sustainably. Perhaps there’s also a little of the phenomenon known as “growing up”.