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Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#31

Post by andrewzah »

nojito wrote: post #18
ozzythecat wrote: post #15

> The goal is to have moments of clarity where you’re able to see “ah that’s what’s going on in my mind right now”. I think this is valuable advice, and it applies not only in this productivity context but in any day to day situation. I feel worked up, angry, disappointed with those around me in certain situations. Whereas 5 years ago, I might get worked up and complain about all of it to my manager, I’ve learned to…

That's a concept called Flow researched heavily by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi I highly recommend checking out his works to get through these fluffy blog posts into what the actual research says. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W94FE6/

Flow is completely, totally different. GP is discussing self-reflection and learning to be mindful of oneself and one's surroundings - which is basically meditation.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#34

Post by all2 »

danhab99 wrote: post #33

All I ever hear about this Zig is how much harder everything is. What's the point of Zig? What does it do better?

Uhhh, wrong thread? I think you might be meaning to be over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29965239

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#35

Post by godDLL »

mesaframe wrote: post #23

Whatever the author mentions is part of meditation. But observing the mind requires concentration too otherwise it will wander away with thoughts. Anyway, if you feel connected with such kind of things then I'll heavily recommend to do meditation.

Concentration is a loaded word. It is not black and white, but feels like you're talking about a value that goes from zero to one possibly? How do you think about it?

I came to think of it in terms of attention. In a model where your awareness of time, or of change is conditional on shifting your spotlight of attention it can be defined usefully, I think.

So, in such a model your concentration is conditional on your paying attention to where your awareness is not pointed. To the interplay of things outside your spotlight of awareness.

The processes that are you but outside of the seat of your awareness already have workable models for all of that. They have good guesses. Your sensory will enrich those guesses and flow them into your reality as givens.

If you think of it like that there is a clear difference between paying attention to something, and expanding your perception of the present moment by concentration.

Sometimes I hear people use the c-word to describe uninterrupted time dedicated to a task. That is to say focus. Exclusionary attention.

How do you think about it?

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#36

Post by PeterWhittaker »

kache_ wrote: post #14

I disagree that programming isn't done well in robot mode. Lots of things like test coverage & braindead text editing doesn't require analytical thinking. Hell, analytical thinking is overrated. Just pick a direction and go!

Another "yup", with personal anecdata from this weekend. Was feeling seriously underpowered on Saturday, so it was a good day to make some drudge changes to code, nothing that could be automated easily (mostly one offs and edge cases, sadly). It was very mechanical and needed doing. Perfect for Saturday Zombie Me.

Had something similar during my biweekly management and product meetings today; updates to not-quite-every syslog call where there was a tiny bit of judgement in deciding whether to make the update and a tiny bit of judgement in the making itself (a few vim macros could have sped that last part up a little, but that would almost have been too effortful).

Perfect drudge work I could do with 1/2 to 3/4 of an ear tuned in to what others were saying, not so difficult/deep that I couldn't rouse myself and comment when necessary.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#37

Post by reddit_clone »

awb wrote: post #7

In the same vein, here’s a fun illustrated guide to procrastination (and fixing it) by Tim Urban: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti... And accompanying TED Talk: https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU

That is so true it is not even funny.

But the essay(s) don't mention ADHD at all. Is that intentional ?

May be some dopomine deprived people don't even have a choice other than to embrace the monkey :-(

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#38

Post by godDLL »

Tim25659 wrote: post #21

When I am stressed out monkey mind will get stronger and stronger I will be out of control..

I put my monkey in a cage.

I went around and logged the things I happen to be doing in a spreadsheet for three weeks.

Assuming those are mostly the things I'll be doing going forward I've categorized them into action-cards. Those have groupings by space (home, out, job) and time (night, noon, morning).

One card is titled BURN. If you play that card you can do whatever for 25 minutes, but you can't play two in a row. I set a timer.

Then I have to choose a card to play, from the things I actually do.

Set a timer. When that's up choose a card again.

There is a card called SLEEP, it has a checklist. Similarly EAT/COOK has both instructions and time limits.

I ended up with more than 15 but less than 30 cards. And the single point of failure is in set-timer to choose card loop. This goes away after about 20 days where it becomes a habit.

There was another point of failure, but now there is a CALLS card that is limited to two times a day, and the phone is otherwise offline. Battery life is 5x.

Contentness is 1.0

Try it.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#39

Post by mwattsun »

This is great and also what I practice. I've tried to explain it to people with limited success, but I think you do a good job here. This type of awareness has a long tradition. Ancient Sanskrit scholars and Buddha discuss this, as well as Western philosophers.

“An unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates

https://www.civilsdaily.com/mains/an-unexamined-life-is-not-...

Mahatma Gandhi’s examination of self through his autobiography ‘My experiments with truth’ highlights the significance of reflection on life. Mahatma Gandhi was not only able to map his weaknesses and vulnerabilities through the examination but was also able to question his prejudices and understand his strength as a human being.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Finding_Fran/8CZr_HxkKs...

To both calm and stimulate the self, Gurdjieff devised two main practices: a series of movements and an exercise called "self-observation." Some of the movements draw from yoga and ancient Sufi dances and are strenuous, while others, more controlled, resemble tai chi. "Self-observation" involves focusing all one's awareness throughout the day on one's thoughts, emotions, facial expressions, and body movements. The goal is to figure out the drives, as well as the contradictions, between the mental centers, in order to pull them together into some sort of harmony. Then one is on the way to finding the elusive spiritual center in the self that remains uninfluenced by social conditioning.

Osho

Man lives like a robot: mechanically efficient, but with no awareness. Hence the whole problem! There are so many problems man has to face, but they are all by-products of his sleep. So the first thing to be understood is what this sleep consists in — because Zen is an effort to become alert and awake.

Steve Jobs

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Re: Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)

#40

Post by zackmorris »

I had an unusual experience this weekend while I was sick. After laying around for 2 days with brain fog, I woke up early Sunday morning and watched TV, checked social media, etc, but was sick of consuming information and had the strangest feeling that I wanted to work on something productive but my body aches wouldn't let me concentrate. I also felt like.. playing video games? I haven't had the urge to play video games since my first semester of college in 1995 before I discovered partying and dating.

I was bored.

It finally hit me that I haven't been bored in over 25 years. I've been hopeless, exhausted, overworked, financially destitute, depressed, burned out, lost in countless ways. But never bored.

Now, I meditate often, I've learned a great deal about the higher self on neurodivergent TikTok, and I'm mindful of my contribution in service to others. But I can't really emphasize enough how much this shook me. I'm still processing it.

I wonder if getting life goals done could be as simple as carving out large blocks of time where you aren't allowed to work on them. I don't mean filling the time with something else like work or other obligations. But literal you-time, with a rule that you can't exert yourself in any way or you'll risk relapsing into nonprogress. This is more like transmuting one form of attentive energy (negative) into another (positive) by dwelling on the opposite thing than you're used to.

For example, I perceive every stoplight as being red. Since I started commuting a half hour to work a few days per week, I've been bringing coffee. Now I find that I never get a chance to drink it, because every light is green.

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