Jake Lodwick’s Blog

I love the feeling on Monday morning of a crisp new Standards chart for my week, revised and improved since last week. We’re so accustomed to systems that don’t budge, that we must conform to. But what if the system was the slave?

I created a separate blog called Jake Has Standards; the majority of my Standards posts will go there from now on.

Week 6 of my Standards project.

I decided to take a cue from Nick Gray’s system and switch to a computer printout. It’s easier to create your grid using a computer & printer than a labelmaker and whiteboard … plus, I want my whiteboard to be a whiteboard. I want to be able to sketch ideas there.

It seems a little less ‘epic’ in black & white on a little piece of paper; appropriate since it’s becoming so engrained in my thinking. So maybe now is a good time to stop calling it “STANDARDS” and start calling it “Standards”.

Changes from last week:

• Consolidated seven items into three; for example, “Tidy apt (5 min)” and “Visualize rest of day (10 min)” are now one thing: “Wake routine (tidy 5m, pre-vis 10m)”. Such consolidation will allegedly make me feel like my day is more manageable.
• Added a statistic: “Inbox Index”, a sum of the number of items waiting in my various inboxes. The goal is just to keep track of the sum; I realize it is VERY difficult to get them all to zero.
• Renamed “Unpleasantries” (my time for stuff I’ve been procrastinating) to “dread” in the context of my “Business” time. I’m trying to find just the right word to describe stuff I’ve been putting off.
• Renamed “Odwick.com” to “Main project”. Separately, I started keeping a list of potential next ‘main projects’. It’s actually agonizing to wait, but I’m committed to Odwick for 7 more weeks and I know I don’t have time for anything else right now.
• Added “<10m egosurfing” … I realized my default go-to activity is searching for my name, and the names of my projects, on various sites and search engines. I think an embarrassing amount of time was going into that, an immeasurable amount of time, since was a deep, dark habit with very little consciousness. (UPDATE: this includes checking Notes on my Tumblr posts)

In a conversation about consciousness, my woman mentioned seeing a young human look at itself in the mirror, and recognize that it wasn’t “a baby” but “Zed”. I think my Standards are having the same effect on me. I can now see myself.

My only red X was because I forgot to tidy my apartment for 5 minutes after waking up. The numbers that look red are actually orange, a color indicating I was “off” by a little.

I spent a little too much time on Business, Unpleasantries, and Reading. But now it’s 9:15pm and I don’t know what to do. I already did everything. Today was one of the most productive days of my life, and had some of the most relaxing moments I’ve had off-vacation in years.

“Unpleasantries” is an emotional category. It means, “things I never feel like doing in the moment”, such as making a dentist appointment or calling Verizon. These are candidates for procrastination, and if I don’t make a special category for them, they will never get done.

It’s all about limits. I can get neurotic with unlimited time — not just in general in my life, but in any moment. I love that everything I do has an impending cutoff. It doesn’t make me work harder, but smarter. “I shouldn’t be checking Tumblr” is a MUCH easier thing to admit during a 90-minute business sprint than a 7 hour shift.

Oh, and I credit some of this to Rob Mizell’s suggestion of pre-visualizing the day. In ten minutes I solved a lot of daunting problems, which were really just balls of anxiety that held no power whatsoever. The instant I brought them into my awareness they evaporated.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. This is a computer program that I build on the weekend and takes a whole week to run. A good Monday is no guarantee of a good Tuesday, etc.

Good night.

Clean slate, ready for a new week.

I tried a labelmaker instead of making my own labels out of Sharpie and masking tape. This shit is getting serious.

My life has taken place in a series of systems. A family-home, various schooling institutions, a small startup company, a large corporation. Each existed within larger systems: a planet-ecosystem, the global economy, a nation. Each of these systems has served its purpose and I am at peace with it. But never has a system felt just right for my needs. Each one seemed to have its own agenda which, to some extent was in conflict with my goals.

“STANDARDS” is a system I both live in and control. Its entire purpose is sanctioned by me, for the purpose of allowing me to consciously guide my life into a state of long-term happiness. It is a gentle system; it knows that sudden, drastic change is counterproductive. Every week is slightly different than the last; it is evolving into a progressively complex mechanism for optimizing my behavior… in a sense, it is my behavior. I think about it constantly; I judge the merit of my own actions in reference to its directives; I do what it says. It’s not enough to say we exist symbiotically; it is part of me.

I realize I may sound infatuated or hyperbolic. But there’s also a mild undercurrent of fear. A quiet feeling around my stomach seems to say, “Hey, just so you know, you might be headed for a point of no return.” … ie, dependency. It’s hard to argue with that; it’s much harder to imagine stopping. A sense of wasting away was why I started the project. I can’t go back to that.

The challenge is heightened by an “analytic lag”, or what a less geeky person might call “letting go”. I don’t know what I’m doing, only that I am doing it… and that it’s affecting me in normal “productivity boost” ways BUT ALSO “weird” ways. For example. I have a strict “No drugs” directive, which includes ALL mind-altering chemicals, except on the weekends. Well, MakerBot had a party on Friday night, and I felt like drinking, earning a big red X. I also got an X for “Begin bed routine by 11pm.” In addition, Sunday nights I shouldn’t do drugs or stay up late, since I take Mondays seriously. So, the solution, which I’m implementing eight hours from now, is to begin each day at 11pm. That is, in my mind, my day will begin at 11pm, as I go to sleep. When I wake up around 7:30am, I will be 1/3 into my day. I have a history of doing weird things in an immature attempt to distinguish myself from my environment. This is not one of them. This is a weird thing to fit in.

I’m also taking cues from other people working on similar projects. Tyler Willis posted a mockup of his own system, which I think he’s starting today. I like his idea of tracking quantities, not just “yes or no” results. I also like his notion of calculating a score for each day. And then graphing the results! I’m curious if he follows through. The first week’s the toughest, I found. Rob Mizell emailed me this idea, which I may try next week:

“I’ve found that the 30 minute review at the beginning of my day and visualizing how I want my day to go helps immensely.”

Sounds really smart. I usually write a long email the moment I wake up, so adopting this might require some discipline.

I just enabled submissions, so if you’re working on your own “STANDARDS” project, you can click here if you’d like to submit a report which I’ll consider posting on this blog. And finally, if you want to review my history with the project so far, click here.

PS. Next week, I’m writing the purple suggestions somewhere else, they have created WAY too much clutter. This thing shouldn’t be an eyesore.

Here is my “STANDARDS” project, continued. Evolution is occurring.

• The first two rules are the same: three regular meals and one 3-hour creative block per day.
• One 1-hour book reading block was changed to one hour reading print to allow more flexible scheduling, and to permit magazines.
• Added Begin bed routine by 11pm to prevent myself from losing sanity.
• Decided it’s better to get an imperfect score than to feel guilty or to exhaust myself. Will not push myself over the edge again.
• Began keeping track of suggestions for new rules (in purple). This buffer is necessary because I can’t modify the ruleset in the middle of the week. Example: 10 minutes/day of apartment improvement (not maintenance)?
• Began tracking other useful self-data below the rules:
• BAD MEALS is teaching me that I may be lactose intolerant (!) and that I shouldn’t drink Muscle Milk unless I’ve been recently active (duh).
• BUGS is a log of actions and thoughts that interfere with my goals. Example: Automatic could = should/will refers to a tendency to want to implement ideas just because I had them, as if any idea that struck me was automatically good! Reminds me of bicameralism - yeesh!
• ORDERS is an attempt to guide my future behavior, to ‘boss myself around’. I’m experimenting with statements of fact vs commands. I have a feeling that my future self is stubborn and will evade commands. So rather than saying, “Avoid drinking fluouride”, I said, “Fluoride is poison.”

How I failed to meet last week’s STANDARDS:

• On Thursday, I put off my 3-hour creative block until 10pm.
• I then worked on sumas project for 2.5 hours, then switched to “art research”, ie, intensely listening to music, which I retrospectively decided did not qualify as creative work.
• I went to sleep in a very excited state at 1:30am.
• The next morning I was even more excited; after my normal morning workout I ran across the Williamsburg Bridge and back, came home, then realized I was in a sort of delirium and needed to relax the rest of the day.
• Saturday and Sunday I went home to Baltimore for a Father’s Day trip.

I didn’t post until now because I was too embarrassed. But, this week has been much better.

Yesterday went well.

I’m starting to learn little interactions I wouldn’t have expected. For example, after a good creative block, it takes some time to ‘wind down’ before I can read or do ‘normal’ work.

It’s fun to be a little ‘out of control’ with my creativity. I no longer have the luxury of planning out and diagramming my creative efforts before starting them. Which I was doing recently, for reasons have nothing to do with creating good work, and everything to do with staying in a comfortable mental state. To me, creating is about unleashing the subconscious, which requires a disabling of the analytic faculties. This doesn’t mean losing consciousness, it means giving up control. “I” can’t decide what the brain’s subconscious generative mechanisms will produce, I can only observe.

I put “I” in quotation marks because it really is part of me, part of the same organism… but it doesn’t feel like it. If I were religious, I might say, “it’s God speaking through me.” Andre 3000 says that. It’s such a good feeling, it’s my version of ‘being alive’ and I’ve neglected it for so long. I will start sharing my output once it’s public-worthy… so far it’s mostly been phlegm. Lemme blow my nose before I starting showing you stuff.

Yesterday I spent a little too much time on creative work, which kept me up until around midnight. I was too tired to read for an hour, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. THAT feeling was like a return to college, those old days where reading was a way to avoid shame, guilt, duty, and other pains.

So now I can’t get a perfect score in the first week, but I don’t care because some dormant part of my subconscious has been nudged awake. My creative mind is creaking back to life, seeing that producing new ideas is a good use of resources, because they may actually be implemented. Like a pianist regaining use of his hands, I feel myself becoming whole again.

Day 1 notes:

• I really milked this day! It was packed, and now I’m tired at 10:30 and feel like I earned it.
• Glad I didn’t challenge myself with an insane schedule; other things came up and I appreciated the flexibility.
• My creative session went for 3.5 hours and was interrupted for dinner at 8pm. Had I not been interrupted, I probably would have gone on until well after midnight, leaving me depleted tomorrow.
• The work in the creative session was new territory for me: a short story (first since high school?) and a musical composition (first with a bass line, chord progression, melody, and beat box).
• Book was Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life.
• I was forced to abstain from the unimportant.
• I feel really good… but not too good (ie manic).

This is a self-management experiment. Living by myself and reporting to no boss makes it easy to fall into a mindless routine. I have not been living up my potential as an ‘untethered creative person’. My lack of discipline has allowed me to drift into a hazy groove. I need some accountability.

Here are my “STANDARDS” for the next week. Each day, I aim to meet all of them, and will keep track of my success or failure.

• Eat each meal within 1 hour of 9:30, 1:30, & 8:00
• One 3-hour creative block
• One 1-hour book reading block

They are pretty ‘low’ standards. The question is, “Even with low standards, am I disciplined enough to stick with a plan for a whole week?” — If yes, next week it may evolve into a slightly more demanding form.

I will post the first week’s result here, next Sunday night. By then, there should be twenty-one check marks on there. Do you think I will get a perfect score?