Posted by Danny on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at 10:06 pm
With longsuffering patience, Dad once tried to explain to me the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction when I accidentally abbreviated his preferred genre. Good science fiction—hard science fiction—worked rigorously to represent the universe according to our best scientific understanding, and then to build a plot by speculating on ideas currently under investigation at the periphery, feeding educated wonder. For an author of science fiction, the obvious risk is that your work could become dated instantly and unpredictably, but the grail was to produce something of tingling prescience. Soft science fiction, or my ignorant “sci-fi,” my father contemptuously lumped in with space opera and fantasy in general. I was heavily (exclusively) into Guy Gavriel Kay at the time, and I’m sure it was even then a great sadness that I never showed much interest in his enormous, pervasively-read collection.
While he was still alive, I ran out of patience for fantasy and tried some of his recommendations: I found I liked work set in the very near future (I was blown away by Brin’s Earth and was better than lukewarm about Greg Bear’s Darwin series), while I couldn’t stand anything involving easy space travel or anthropomorphic aliens. But, except for my beloved first-year astronomy class, at this time school and Ksenija were nudging me toward classical, historical, and Serious Contemporary Literature—ultimately away from Dad’s library.[1]
After he died, out of a stupid, belated impulse to please him, I tried giving science fiction another go. I bumped my Dawkins- and Sagan-heavy queue with books recommended by friends better versed in the area and sympathetic (resigned) to my specific irritants: I discovered Neal Stephenson (thanks again to Ksenija, incidentally), who is probably my favourite author of fiction at this point; also, attending semi-weekly readings of science fiction short stories in Thothica, expertly curated and read live by Elaine Lorefield, has softened me up nicely. New Year’s Eve, therefore, was probably an ideal time for Liz to give me the collected stories of Ted Chiang.
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Posted by Danny on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:17 pm
(This post starts with lots of tedious, whining context. If you’d like to skip to the good stuff, please click here.)
Since fourth-year of my undergrad, my academic life has been a losing struggle for productivity. Procrastination no longer tested the edge of my due-dates, but the patience of my professors. By the first couple of years at OISE, I actually got fatalistic about it, and felt often as if I was watching my own self-destruction from a safe distance with idle, morbid fascination. Sometimes, I could muster misery; often I dallied with shame and self-loathing (publically, even, to the grief and probable boredom of friends and family). My rationalizations for the consistently missed deadlines, and the undeniable fact that my peers were marching past me academically and socially, were always based in some sort of reality but they became increasingly byzantine and hollow. I incorporated my sense of futility into my identity and wondered that I had ever respected myself. It’s likely that I was clinically depressed, but consistently, I didn’t face it.
My desperation to be done with my thesis eventually grew strong enough to break through my apathy, and I started actively working on strategies to get work done. Brian and I had some productivity dates around the time I was working at Indigo, the semi-successful engine of which was simulated peer pressure (since neither of us would ever have dreamed of chewing the other out for flakiness). Scheduling and proximity were a problem, though, and made these meetings inconsistent. When I moved up north after Gideon got his job in La Loche, the distance was an issue and meetings eventually stopped altogether. There’ve been less distractions up here, and I’d become marginally more productive than I was in Toronto, but progress remained agonizing.
Over the last five days, I have (tentatively, but optimistically) turned myself around. As with anything like this, consistency is more important than initial, favourable results, and therefore the bubbly remains on ice. But, I’m chronicling how it happened here so that
- If I lose my way, I can come back here and try to reboot;
- If it turns out that this changed my life, I’ve got a record of my personality on the cusp, when I was happy and hopeful, but before I got all arrogant and preachy;
- Maybe a variant of this approach can eventually be useful to someone else.
What I’m trying came out of a few places. First, Byron mentioned during New Year’s that he’d had a lot of luck with doing daily schedules—having something to tell him what he should be doing at any given time (including when he was allowed to not be doing anything in particular) helped motivate him to work on his programming project after work, instead of immediately vegging out. I had resisted this sort of technique in the past, figuring that while I tended to get lots done working to someone else’s timetable, I’d inevitably rationalize out of following one I’d imposed on myself (on grounds of arbitrariness and lack of consequences, etc.).
Next, I’d read a piece on Life Hacker about the motivational power of keeping track of streaks—basically, if you accomplish what you want to become a regular task a few times in a row, your knowledge of the fact accrues a kind of momentum: it becomes more and more of a shame to break the streak as it gets longer and longer, making counterproductive impulses less appealing. This is something I’d definitely noticed independently over the last year when I started eating carefully and (again, with Gid’s help) exercising regularly. The crucial thing, here, is to keep your streak constantly in mind—Life Hacker recommends a full-year calendar in an obvious place, marked off after each success so that your accomplishments will be repeatedly reinforced at a glance.
Consistency seems to promote habits and eventually dispositions. Byron said that his regular schedule-writing became less important as he replaced the habit of getting home and vegging with the habit of getting home, programming for an hour, and then vegging. This plugged neatly into Shawn Achor’s TED Talk, which Joel sent me five days ago: active habits could be intentionally engineered, as Byron demonstrated (and as I’ve been pleased to find, myself)—so too, argues Achor (with encouraging evidence), can mental habits, or dispositions. Something about all of this pushed me to build the following daily checklist immediately after watch the TED, but (crucially) also to see it as an experiment in self-modification, rather than an arbitrary, self-imposed strategy I could self-destruct by failing.
It started with this table:
I incorporated into the Disposition-Hacker elements I was most interested in from Achor’s concluding list (about 11:00 in the video), and then, for fun, added a few things I’ve regularly wished I was doing with my life but couldn’t do because I was procrastinating school work with stuff I didn’t even want to do (obsessive videogaming and mainlining episodes of 30 Rock, it turns out): reading for pleasure had become a wretched escapism, and I haven’t been patient enough to sit and just listen to music for years. These were habits I wanted to develop, and putting them in the list meant I’d need to schedule them, which meant, presumably, I’d get to do them without feeling guilty. And writing. Being good at writing, and writing enough to empty ink bottles, had been the core of my identity when I’d been at my very happiest—second- and third- year undergrad—but my desire to do it at all has been awfully low for a long time. My vocabulary has withered and my self-confidence is as doot with respect to what I produce when I do write (sporadic blog posts are, at least a little bit, a consequence of that). I miss the rush of obsessive poem-writing and the pride of sharing my creative stuff (foisting, even—who cares? It was awesome!). If I’m actively shaping my habits to reflect an ideal identity, I’ma fucking write, yeah.
(And, I figured, in case this actually works, I’ll chuck flossing in there too.)
Here’s a sample of my schedule, written without fancy, geegaw-festooned applications, in Wordpad and stored in my main Dropbox folder, at Byron’s recommendation.
When I lose myself in video games (at least lately), it starts with me thinking, “Well, I’m not doing anything right now. Of the things I could be doing, [game on the go] would be easy to do. And when I’m done doing that, it won’t be an option anymore, so then I’ll probably pick something more important and valuable to do. It’s three in the morning.” Always knowing what I wanted myself to be doing at any given time, and having the information at my fingertips, has been a very effective way of avoiding that mindset. When I recognized this, I started listing projects and ideas in the same document in case, faced with the vagueness of “writing” or “thesis,” I get the urge to mull over my options again while doing something more immediately comforting and appealing. (I copy the projects to each new schedule and then delete the entries I’ve accomplished, which helps me prime topics for Achor’s journaling recommendation.)
I’m tracking my streaks in the excel chart, and my “best streak” for each item to help motivate me if I lose a streak and get sad. Also, initially out of interest and increasingly out of compulsive data collection, I’ve been recording the amount of time I spend on each habit. At the moment, I’ve been doing much more than my allotted requirements for a number of them (this may also even benefit from the streak phenomenon—who knows?). Concordantly, I’ve decided that keeping rigidly to my schedule is less important than keeping to the daily goals: if I’m on a roll with my thesis, I won’t force myself to break for lunch (and, when I’m back in Toronto with social obligations, I can still reasonably hold myself to the minimum requirements of list).
Again, I’ll see how this goes. But, for now at least, it’s pretty great to be productive and happy.
Posted by Danny on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm
(I usually write these posts by hand before putting them up, which means, I think, somewhat less horrible prosody that may otherwise happen, but also, that I can be side-tracked and my posts are either lost or terribly delayed. And, because I don’t date the writing in my notebooks, I have no idea how long ago this was intended to go out. The timestamp is a guess—I actually posted this on May 31, 2011. Appy-polly-logies, absent reader base.)
Both of the projects planned for Exploring Our World at Youth Group have come to nought: attendance is too spotty and folks are too tired coming straight from school to generate a consistent sort of participation. We got one good petition-planning meeting in, with fun, Mark-Thomas-style discussion, but our political machinations petered out; as has been the practice in the past, it’s been just me bringing in neat things, so the Web of Awesome has similarly failed. Alas.
But! While there’s been sadness there, I have discovered a few exciting things that have occupied much of my time and may pleasantly occupy yours.
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Posted by Danny on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 12:54 pm
A whole bunch of Evenings for Brainses ago our conversation turned to the decline of funding for orchestras and the loss of public interest and understanding in concert music generally. I remember I was advancing (in part on behalf of Satan) that the end orchestras would not be synonymous with the end of culture or even with the end of sophisticated music—that, though tragic especially for the last few, lonely members of a moribund species, species do go extinct; languages do go extinct; crafts do go extinct, and life continues impoverished in that sense but certainly able to develop new species, languages, crafts, etc. For music specifically, there are neat, crowd-sourced newcomer-species like Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, arriving with the growth of access to the Internet and to creation tools; the musical language in which one needed to be fluent to understand the ideas of complex concert music is changing, like any other living language (if also simplifying); multi-track digital audio workstation software, sophisticated digital signal processing, and especially physical modeling synthesis, challenge the definition of “musician” and the nature of the craft. Rah, rah, rah. At the time, even though I was exploring the above position in earnest, I was pontificating far outside of my aesthetic: I abhor extinction because I like information; not—and this is a much better reason—because diversity of species, of ideas, and of skills makes for a more resilient system in which to live.[1] It doesn’t really matter, though, since at the time, I didn’t go to concerts or speak Concert Music; my positions were tediously academic.
Joel returned to Toronto from his work in Mongolia this summer and Gid and I became housemates in October, so I’ve had a sudden influx of concert music in my life. Among other things, this has meant three (so far) trips to Roy Thompson Hall to see the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the last two months, after a drought that probably goes back to Grade Nine. I’ve noticed some things I want to tell you about.
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Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
