Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Every couple of months I sit down and look at my writing process, trying to pick up inefficiencies. I study my habits and the things that go wrong, and I double-check systems to make sure they’re working the way they should. The last time I did it, I noticed a bunch of slightly interrelated things that went something like this:

• My primary work-space had become my couch, which is also the place where I eat food, read books, waste time on social media, and stream television from Netflix. This meant I needed to be really conscious about writing, when I sat down, because there were so many other habits tied to the location that it was easy to get distracted.
• The desktop computer, which I’d originally intended to be my primary work-space, had gradually been ignored. Primarily this was because there were always multiple steps involved in sitting down and using it, starting with “move all the laundry off my office chair, then turn on the computer.”
• A secondary problem with the desktop – it was tucked out of the way, in the corner of my bedroom. It never served as a trigger for behaviour in and of itself, which meant I had to rely on other habits to get me there.

If that sounds minor, you’re right. It’s totally minor shit, but it’s often the minor shit that gets in the way of building an effective habit by inserting little moments of resistance, which is why I try looking at this stuff.

When I started coming up with solutions, a lot of it came down to a pretty drastic rearrangement of my small flat, with the accompanying disruption to my entire house. I probably would have left it alone, except that I went through this at the same time I started to have people around to my house semi-regularly for the first time in about seven years. This made me acutely aware of the set-up in my non-sleeping spaces, which were designed with the idea that there would rarely be more than one person in the flat at a time.

So re-arranging furniture became the solution du-jour, and it’s been interesting. I spent a few weeks making notes and pricing options, spending some quality time with the measuring tape figuring out where things will fit. And finally, last Friday, I started rearranging my apartment to start making better use of the space and hack my habits a little.

A lot of the changes are pretty minor, or not writing related, but there have been two changes that are paying off right now.

Hacking My Space, Part One: The Writing Desk

My primary goal with the rearrangement was this: I wanted the absolute minimum level of resistance between me and the act of writing. In both cases, when I identified issues, chairs were a major problem, so I’m currently experimenting with a standing desk under the theory that I don’t have to sit down to start working. Any time I am in the vicinity of the desktop, I am now in the position to start typing, and that seemed like a useful thing.

With that decided, I started to put together a room layout that put me in the vicinity of the standing desk as much as possible. The first step was putting the bookshelf where I store my keys, wallet, and work ID next to the standing desk, which means it’s the first place I walk when I step into the apartment. With the writing computer right there, it makes stepping away from the computer a conscious thing rather than a subconscious habit.

It also puts the writing computer between literally everything else in the apartment and the couch, which tends to rack up another couple of moments where I find myself thinking oh, yeah, I should write on a given day.

It also had an unexpected side-effect: because I am standing already, and listen to music when I write, I am 60% more likely to start dancing when I hit a pause at the keyboard instead of switching over to Facebook and Twitter.

Also, because there is no chair to dump things on, I am more likely to put things in my bedroom.

Hacking My Space, Part Two: The White Board

Here;s a useful thing I learned from checking my RescueTime Stats: Television distracts me from writing. And it’s not that I watch a lot of television – by the standards of the average viewer, I’m pretty low on the hours spent staring at a screen – but the stats tend to show that if I sit down at the computer and start streaming something, I will keep watching for the rest of the evening instead of watching an episode and then doing something else.

Given that I’d fallen into the habit of watching TV while eating dinner, that was becoming a problem. Setting up the standing desk went a long way to stopping that, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with that as a solution. I didn’t mind watching TV – hell, I like the television series as a narrative format – but I wanted it to be more conscious and less automatic.

Enter the white-board, which now sits in front of my television and holds the highlights of my weekly Checkpoint from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative process.

This shit is one of the reasons I like living alone. It would be absolutely impossible to pull this shit in a shared lounge space where other people want to watch things and the process of pulling down the whiteboard would be an imposition. Me, i just whack it up there and take it away the two or three times I actually want to watch TV a week, and the rest of the time it reminds me of the things that need doing.

It’s proving to be really great for the small tasks that I’d otherwise forget about, I do love marking off a check-box, after all, and there’s a lot of process tasks I can get done in twenty or thirty minutes of free time so long as I remember them. It’s already proving to be horribly efficient for writing tasks, since I’ve ticked off half the writing work on there in the space of two days.

The best part about this set-up is that it doesn’t interfere with the thing I primarily use the television for, which is streaming youtube music playlists while I work.

One of my major tasks for my time away from the day-job was figuring out the storage problems in my apartment. I moved in with a lot of stuff and quickly discovered that there was no place to put it, whether that stuff was books or files or DVDs or kitchen utensils. I’d lived in a pretty sizeable two-bedroom place when I first put my stuff into storage, and the apartment I have now is single-bedroom and oddly shaped.

I’m coming up on my second year in the apartment and a lot of that time has been spent downsizing the stuff that was easy to get rid of. Lots of books have gone out the door. Lots of old clothing that I’m never going to wear again. A collection of sheets and towels that were well in surplus of what I’d need, bottles of wine that I’d been carting around for years (and can no longer drink). DVDs of films that I can now watch digitally. A second couch.

It’s refreshing, being forced to ruthlessly cut like that. Pretty much everything in my house gets examined with the question do I really want to store this in mind.

And yet, if you walked into my place, it wouldn’t like I’d culled a damn thing.

Partially this is because I’ve constantly moved in stuff that was kept in storage, which means that a new box arrives every time I clear the old ones out. Partially its because I’m really inefficient in my use of spaces, particularly when it comes to bookshelves.

And partially it’s because I am reluctant to let go of things.

For instance, I’ve been promising myself I will get better at filing and storing stuff for years now. I keep my filing cabinet in a prominent position. I have folders stacked up around the house, waiting to be used. I have an in/out tray for mail to go into, so I’ve got a central processing point.

Exactly why I still think I’m the kind of person who’ll magically get better at this after twenty years as an adult is beyond me.

The folders have survived three or four moves now, despite me not opening one in the better part of a decade. I went through them all yesterday – about a dozen folders that took up some meter and a bit of shelf space. Most of them contained old writing drafts – things I’d printed out, intending to edit them, and never gotten around to. Two of them contained notes for RPG campaigns that are now over. One contained print-outs of blog posts and web articles I wanted to keep handy in the days before Evernote (or, for that matter, easily set-up bookmarks and omnipresent internet access) in I needed to reference them.

In terms of content, the things inside the folders was pretty worthless. Storage for the sake of storage, or archaic systems supplanted by more efficient digital tools.

So I find myself wondering why I kept them, move after move. Why I kept finding space for them in places I lived, despite the fact that they’re pretty bulky and hard to place. Where did the reluctance come from?

In essence, the logic comes down to this:

• I spent a whole bunch of money on these folders, once upon a time, and they’re a re-usable resource.
• I was attached to the idea of becoming the kind of person who did use the folders properly.

In my head, not-using them meant that I’d wasted that money, and they were purchased during a period where I didn’t have money to waste. Worse, it meant that I’d wasted money on a problem that never actually got resolved, since the folders were not doing their job.

And so I ignored them, for the better part of seven or eight years. Letting them grow a film of dust, the metal fixtures starting to rust away, the paper growing spotty and fuzzy to touch.

One of the things I’ve learned in recent years – largely from reading The Accidental Creative – is that we shouldn’t hold onto solutions for problems that no longer exist. We are creatures of habit and strange psychology, which means objects and rituals will get invested with meaning above and beyond their actual usefulness, to the point where they actually become distractions.

So, yesterday, I went through the folders and culled them. Nine of the twelve went in the bin, ’cause if I really need another folder in the future, Officeworks is a few minutes away and the five bucks I’d need to spend is a hardship.

One of them got set aside to take to work, since I actually have a few things that could actually make use of there.

Two of them were kept so I can archive their contents properly – one, full of campaign notes, ’cause I miss the folks who were part of that game and want to read through it all for nostalgia purposes. The other, full of writing advice posts, so I can make sure I’ve got everything archived and properly tagged in Evernote.

And so new shelf-space has been claimed, and new books can go out on display.

Yesterday was a good day.

I live my life by certain un-written rules. Or principles. Or random-ass shit that gets stuck in my head and guides my decisions at various points, even when it seems counter-intuitive. They largely came about to take the element of decision making out of very small things, since I hate making decisions without access to thinking time, a white board, and a panel of experts willing to weigh in on the potential drawbacks of each option.

So, rules. I never thought of this as strange until back in 2012, when I had to explain my philosophy regarding onion rings to my boss while at GenreCon and it clicked that not everyone did this. Or, if they did, they didn’t actually talk about them.

I like to talk about things. On the internet. Not actually a rule – more an slight character flaw – but it happens. And so, a few years back, I started writing these things down, paying attention to why they’d come about and whether they were still necessary.

These are the ones that have survived the last three years.

RULE ONE: WHEN THERE’S PORK BELLY ON THE MENU, ORDER THE DAMN PORK BELLY

I come from a family that is thoroughly incapable of ordering from a menu when gathered in a group. Put the four of us around the table and give us a range of options, and you’ll be in for nearly twenty minutes of I’m thinking of getting this, what are you getting? and I think I’ve changed my mind and I can’t make up my mind until everyone else does.

When it comes to food, one way or another, we are coded with a hardcore fear of missing out.

Many of my personal rules are food-focused, because of this. It speeds things up.

And here is the thing I figured out about pork belly – I’m never sorry that I ordered it, and other people are frequently sorry that they did not order it when it arrives in front of you. Therefore, in the interests of saving time, don’t fuck around with a menu when there’s a pork belly option. Just order the goddamn pork belly.

RULE TWO: WHEN THEY HAVE ONION RINGS ON THE MENU, ORDER THE DAMN ONION RINGS

Not sure this applies in countries where onion rings are actually a thing, but here in Australia they’re a relative rarity. And I like onion rings. I am never unhappy with that option.

RULE THREE: WHEN THE FOLK WORKING IN A BOOKSTORE SAY “HAVE YOU READ THIS? IT’S AWESOME,” BUY THE DAMN BOOK

There are a long list of phenomenal authors on my bookshelf that I’ve only picked up because the people working at my favourite bookstores hand-sold them: Sara Gran; James Salter; George Pelecanos; Dennis Lehane; Ben Aaronovitch. Every time I listen to a recommendation and read the book, I’ve ended up going back and collecting everything else that author had written.

Folks who work in book stores generally have pretty good tastes. And I like reading things that I wouldn’t necessarily pick up on my own. When they talk, I listen.

RULE FOUR: IF THE DRINK COMES IN A TIKI CUP, ORDER THE DAMN DRINK

It will be a terrible, rum-soaked drink intended to make you question your poor life choices. Things that come in tiki cups always are.

But, when it’s over, you still have the tiki cup.

And, if there is any justice in the world, a tiny paper umbrella that can be tucked behind one ear.

I cannot tell you why this makes me happy, but it always does.

RULE FIVE: IF YOU’RE DOING IT FOR THE MONEY, DO IT WELL (BUT EXPECT THE EXPERIENCE TO SUCK)

Every now and then I do things because the money is good. Freelance gigs, day-jobs, short-term contracts. And we’re not even talking about a lot of money – the reality of any kind of emerging creative’s life is that you’ll occasionally take gigs because there is rent to be paid and food is a nice thing to have.

Writers have to obey the laws of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs just like every other fucker on the planet, and I’ve spent enough time as one of the long-term unemployed that I have serious twitchiness about money and employment and the possibility of ever going back to that.

I don’t even like taking holidays because I fear the job not being there when I go back.

I am not against doing things for the money. And, when taking a gig for the cash, I’ll try to get that fucker done to the best of my ability. I still want to be able to look back and take a measure of pride on what was done. I still want to be able to put my name on it.

But I know the experience is going to suck at some point. It’s a given. Because, when I do things for the money, the shit that would be a mild irritation gets magnified. The shit that would ordinarily irritate you a lot becomes a source of self-flagellation.

If shit goes really, really  wrong, as Neil Gaiman points out in his Make Good Art keynote, you’ll have done a whole bunch of work and you don’t even have the money to show for it.

Even if everything goes great – and my experience with doing things for the money is that this happens less than it should – I will look back a year afterwards when money is not so tight and resent the fact that I was thinking so short-term.

Because, once the need for the money is gone and you’re further up the hierarchy of needs, you forget what it was like to be unable to write because you were panicking about how to buy groceries that week and wondering how much you’d get for your kidney on the black market.

RULE SIX: REMEMBER THE CIRCUMSTANCES

Holding onto a rule that solves a problem that no longer exists is kind of pointless. Chastising yourself for decisions that were less than ideal in hindsight often means you’ve forgotten the reasons the less-than-ideal decision looked right.

Sometimes you have to actually stop and force yourself to think about the how and why certain things were done. Half the reason I blog is so I can remember what I was thinking at a certain time and place, which is incredibly useful when I’m trying to figure out why I did something stupid.

We are forgetting creatures. We aren’t coded to remember all the things long term. We keep the results and forget the process. We let the little things fade away and remember the consequences.

Don’t do that. Decisions get made in a certain context, and assessing them without remembering the context is just going to mess up your chi.

I don’t know about you, but I need my chi. It is vital to getting shit done.

And above all else, I love getting shit done.

RULE SEVEN: FOLLOW THE LEFT WALL

When you go into the dungeon, you can usually be sure of clearing the damn thing out if you just follow the left wall and take each room, one at a time.

Mostly applicable in D&D.

Surprisingly applicable in other parts of life.