Scheduling

It's weird how certain concepts simply stay out of your field of 'conceivability', so to speak, until they suddenly pop in and you feel silly for not considering them earlier.

Setting up a schedule for myself has been such a concept. I have read about the concept and its advantages several times before, but for some reason I have just shrugged and never considered it seriously. And I don't really know why - that's the paradox of gestalt shifts - once you have shifted, you're unable to see the reasoning behind your old view (unless you have written it down, or something like that).

I believe that perhaps part of the reason I have been reluctant to set up a schedule is my slightly irregular sleeping habits. I have thought it more important to be rested than to wake up at a certain time. And I still do - working ten hours at sixty percent is worse than working eight at ninety. And my brain is really sensitive to this. It's like sleeping badly puts some kind of insulator between the synapses so they're unable to fire properly.

However, there are a couple of reasons I presently have for willing to try out a schedule nonetheless:

If it turns out that I'm unable to function properly because I am determined to wake up at a certain time, I could always wait with setting up the schedule until morning the same day. That way, I know how much time I have for disposal.

However, I presently have another theory: That my irregular sleep is in part due to my not having any obligations to get up in the morning. Currently, I have a research position, which means I can pretty much come and go as I want. Could this have a negative effect? Perhaps if I approach it more like I would a regular job, my brain somehow would get more 'incentive' to sleep properly during the night? You see, my problem isn't that I cannot fall asleep in the evening - I usually do pretty quickly. Rather, the problem is that my sleep is light and not 'restful' enough. Also, I usually wake up before time, and if I get up at that time, I will be tired.

In other words, this is going to be an experiment. I will schedule the following day the night before, including a time at which I wake up and a time at which I go to bed, and everything in between. Naturally, it will be impossible to follow such a schedule to the point - unexpected events do occur, of course, and there are some tasks which are hard to approximate in terms of time needed for completion. However, those things I believe will come with experience. The first hurdle is actually following through with it.

Interesting tasks as motivation

I used to play a lot of video games. I dread to count the hours spent doing this. Now, I don't play much anymore, though I have occasional bouts where I go on a total gaming spree. Usually that leaves me pretty depressed afterwards.

I currently have a hope that this will not happen anymore, now that I view being able to learn programming as a fun 'hobby'. That is, when I'm working on science-related stuff now, and I lack motivation, I tell myself that "once you're done with this, you can learn more programming". And it seems to work.

At least for now. I have found that many of these motivational techniques are fleeting, so it remains to be seen whether this technique stands the test of time. However, I do believe that the key to being productive is to combine several techniques that work for you. So if I combine the "learn programming once you're done" technique with some kind of variation on the Pomodoro technique mentioned in an earlier post, maybe the combination will yield good results.

In the end, though, I think it's a matter of teaching your brain to operate differently - to eke out new neuron patterns so that the brain have less resistance in those directions I want it to go. The way there can be hard and painful, though!

Dancing

I dance. It's a partner dance, and it is a source of great joy. I can heartily recommend learning to dance, especially a partner dance.

Someone once described dancing as 'illustrating the music'. This I find to be a beautiful and accurate description. Listening to the music, trying to anticipate what's coming, and then doing something that you think fits to that, is a lot of fun.

There is also the joy of finding a 'connection' with your partner. Sometimes, when you dance, something 'clicks' and you and your partner are able to read each other, complementing each other's moves. This is close to being a transcendental experience. It's as if you're drawing something on paper with another person, and you both know what you're going to draw, so the lead draws the main structure, and the follow embellishes the structure, turning it into something beautiful.

This experience does, though, require some skill, both for the follow and the lead. I think there are two types of skill required: Motoric skill (being able to control your body) and creative skill. I will embellish on the latter below.

When you first start dancing, you learn 'turns', which are moves or short 'dance modules', if you like, that you can string together while dancing. Learning turns is vital, especially if you're a lead. However, one can easily get into the mindset that 'in order to become a good dancer, I have to learn a lot of turns'. This is incorrect - or rather, it is correct, but not for the reason you think.

Some of their rules can be bent. Others... can be broken.

Learning turns is an important means to another end, it's not an end in itself. The true end in dancing is to be able to illustrate the music in exactly the way you want yourself. Turns can help you on the way to that goal, but eventually, if you insist on only doing 'turns' that you have learned before, they will constrain your dancing. At some point, you will find yourself in the situation where you know that you want to illustrate the music in a specific way, but you find that you don't know the turn to do that. And that is the point at which you must start to break free from the turns. You must take what you know, based on doing turns, and turning that into creative music-illustration.

 The above is probably true of all creative endeavors - you learn the ropes, but in order to be truly creative you have to understand that the ropes are structures that eventually will constrain you.

Healthy eating

Staying in shape can be tough when you're a desk-worker like me. I try to regularly exercise three times a week, and since anecdotal evidence suggests that you can't outrun your fork , I also try to eat healthy. 

Which means I won't be able to do this anymore.

I have no zen tips for accomplishing that. But once you start to actually see the contours of those abdominal muscles you thought were dissolved in fatty acids, you start to understand what Kate Moss meant when she said "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Not trying to condone anorexia here, obviously. I am currently in no danger of having that condition.

Another thing that has been important for me to keep in mind is that being hungry for an evening isn't dangerous. Going to sleep hungry isn't going to kill you. And usually you're not really hungry either, it's mostly just being half-full and/or bored.

A third important thing for me is not to fail miserably once I fail. As Jillian Michaels said: "Think of your weight loss journey as a car. If you were driving along and got a flat tire, would you slash the other 3 tires and call it a complete loss? No. You would fix that one tire and keep going."

There is one way of thinking within the fitness world that I simply find to be impractical, and that is the thought that you should eat often and eat small meals. The reason I have a problem with this is that it's thinking about food that makes me want to eat. The less I have to think about food during one day, the less I feel the need to eat. Thus, I limit my meals to three a day, and once I have finished one of them, I know that I won't be eating again for a while. And usually my stomach then tells me when it's time again.

Motivational quotes get a lot of heat from the irony generation. But I find them to be useful - they're like someone jerking your shoulder when you're about to fall asleep. Maybe I'll do a compilation of my favorites one day, for the pleasure of all my imaginary readers.

Sailing

Today I went sailing with some friends. I was originally going to do grading, but being invited for sailing is such a rare occurrence (it has never happened before) that I joined.

I enjoyed it a lot. It's a small sailboat, less than 20 feet, with no more room than necessary for the five of us. I mainly stood close to the bow while we were sailing, and I didn't do much in terms of raising and lowering the sails etc., since it was my first time.

I can really recommend sailing if you ever get the opportunity, especially on a small boat like this. It's a good way to learn what the wind does to the boat and sails, and it is interesting to see how you strategically have to move the sails in order to take advantage of the wind. I was also surprised at how straight into the wind it is possible to sail and still make good speed.

It did make me feel a little bit like I would have enjoyed to be an actual sailor on an old large sailing ship, like a frigate. However, I think there is a slight difference in sailing for four hours like we did and sailing for four months like real sailors did. I didn't get scurvy once, for instance.

But that's probably because I brought one of these.

And now it feels like everything is undulating.

Being productive

In my last post, I used the word "productive" as if it's a good thing to be exactly that.

Before I continue, I should clarify what exactly I mean by productive. I think my definition is slightly broader than your average Wall Streeter, but narrower than your average hippie. I mean it not simply as "Earning money", "Creating value", etc., but not simply as "Expanding your mind", neither. Actually, I am going to use those examples as my definition: It's neither of those, but somewhere in the middle. Something like "Working towards one's life goals". Or something.

Anyway. I think it's a Good Thing to be productive. Others, especially in the particular area of the world in which I happen to live, are not so sure. Here, the importance of relaxing and not overworking yourself is stressed. "Noone who is about to die looks back at their lives and wish they had worked more", it is said.

Well, no, probably not. But why on earth should that be the reference point? The time you spend in being in "About to die" mode is probably very small compared to most other modes you're going through. Of course when you're about to die you don't wish you had worked more. You're a sentimental being at that point . You fail to recognize how important working was at earlier stages. How it was working that put food on your table. How working hard earlier in life made you m ore qualified for better and higher life-quality jobs. How working hard at anything makes you a more complete human being. Let me rephrase that idiotic saying: "Noone who is about to enter the job market looks back at their lives and wish they had worked less". And that is a way more important reference point in your life. It basically determines how the rest of your life is going to be.

An early case of workaholism.

The issue I have with the anti-productivity-notion that we have in some parts of the world (which I imagine to be the parts where it's not really necessary to work hard in order to survive) is that those of us who don't agree tend to be a bit stigmatized. A "Workaholic" can indeed be a legitimate term, but when someone uses the word "workaholic" to mean someone who works ten hours a day instead of eight... I get slightly aggravated. Especially if some of that work is at home with loved ones.

Personally, I work a lot because I enjoy it. I enjoy learning and I enjoy developing as a human being. Whenever I just watch random TV shows, I feel like Franklin and Edison are looking down at me with disdain. I can appreciate that many people feel like their spouse/friend/family member's work takes focus away from them, which I under certain circumstances can agree is not a Good Thing. However, if you complain that your partner won't rot his/her brain away watching TV with you every night, then I don't think I agree. Read a book together. Learn to dance. Anything other than being UNproductive. It's what I fear most.

Degrees of procrastination

The other day, I was supposed to start grading papers but ended up spending the whole evening watching YouTube videos from some TV show.

Procrastination is familiar to everyone, so I'm not going to talk much about what it is and to what degree that particular phenomenon is annoying me personally. I am more interested in combatting it.

That is, if it is possible to combat it. Is it possible to avoid procrastinating when you have a dreary task you have to do before you can do something you really want?

If it is possible, I think doing so is going to require a mix of several techniques. One technique that I think could be handy, but haven't really tried yet, is procrastinating
to a lesser degree.

For instance - as mentioned above, I was supposed to be grading papers but got stuck watching all the videos I could find from the particular TV show I found interesting that afternoon. Whether I found the TV show interesting in itself or whether it got more interesting because of the drearyness of the task that I was supposed to do, I don't know.

Big on inventing - not so big on procrastinating.

But what I realized was that there were so many things I could rather have been doing in that time - things that were less dreary than what I was really supposed to be doing, while still way more productive than watching YouTube videos. For instance, I could have done some Scheme programming to learn that better, or I could have written blog posts, or working on that music playlist manager I have been thinking about, etc. That would have been a good compromise between my desire to procrastinate the exam grading and my need/desire to develop as a human being.

So why didn't I? Because of the nature of procrastinating. I didn't set out with the goal of watching YouTube all afternoon. In the beginning, I just felt like watching a couple of videos. After watching a couple of videos, I just wanted to finish watching the videos from that particular show. Of course I didn't research whether that was actually feasible to do within a reasonable amount of time, which it of course wasn't. I ended up watching videos until bedtime.

The point of the above: I don't know until after it has happened that I have been procrastinating. So it's all well and good in retrospect to say that I could have done something else that would have been more productive, but I was already going to do something else - I was going to do the actual task at hand. It just... didn't happen.

Which leads to the conclusion that procrastination can't be fought. At least with this technique. At least with this technique alone. But maybe, by combining this 'lesser evils' concept with other methods, it actually can be possible to do something about it? This is something I will try to explore, and I also think this blog will make it easier to do so.

In retrospect, this post... I don't know. It's bad. Everything above has been sa id already, my someone, somewhere. Probably by a lot of people, a lot of places. But that's to be expected with this sort of blog, I guess. I just hope my posts improve.

Music makes me less productive and does not stimulate creativity

I enjoy music (wow, REALLY?? How profound and unique!) (Shut up.), and I am divided temporally over whether it's a good idea to listen to music a lot.

One the one hand, it's supposed to have all these nice effects on your brain (although while I'm writing this and researching my statements, they're not as well documented as I thought).

On the other hand, I find that when I listen to music, it becomes harder to get anything else done. I have a certain number of "Programming" tracks on my computer that I believe will have minimal disruptive effect on my work flow (being mostly instrumental tracks), but even listening to only such tracks I believe makes me less effective than I would without music.

This is related to a problem that I really want to get rid of - not being able to focus properly on the task at hand. This issue deserves a blog post on its own, but in short, I really need to build better focus discipline. And I don't think listening to music is helping with that. Rather, it is making me addicted to constantly needing stimuli that is stronger than what the task at hand is able to provide. Right now, for instance, as I wrote the last sentence, I took a break to check on some social medium. It's a terrible situation, and I must get out of it.

And it's not only while working - whenever I'm travelling, for instance, I have had the habit of bringing my music player so as to avoid the drearyness of doing nothing. I am actually slightly afraid of not having anything to do (other than entertain myself).

I think it's vital for me to accustom my brain to the notion of not getting stimuli at all times, and that if it wants stimuli, it had better make it up by itself.

Beethoven - did not constantly listen to music on his MP3 player

Doing this to your brain, however, is hard work. It yearns for input. Withdrawal happens. And somehow, it eventually manages to come up with some reason why listening to music at every idle moment actually is good for you, after all.

However, this time I must try to fight it. This blog post shall be a testament to my determination. I will try to stimulate brain activity by not listening to music, instead letting the mind wander to wherever it wants and explore that realm.

This is not to say I won't ever listen to music. I probably still will on a daily basis. But I will try not to fool myself into believing that the best way to stimulate my brain is to listen to music, and I will try to avoid music whenever I need to focus, to work, or whenever I have time wherein the only possible activity is to think. Thinking is a good thing!

Why programming?

I do consider myself a programmer. I have little formal education but I know how to write programs in various languages and I now have a plan to read SICP (I just have to learn some Scheme first).

Much of this blog will probably and hopefully be about my learning experiences as a programmer. There are some areas of which I think I have a pretty decent command (numerical programming, simulations, object oriented and procedural programming), but there are several areas in which I would especially like to improve:

-Algorithm analysis (knowing which algorithm to use where, complexity analysis etc.)
-Understanding what the deal is with functional programming.
-A higher low-level understanding of computers, in order to understand bottlenecks. Maybe I'll have to learn assembly at some point.
-Networking and communication programming, of which I have very little experience.
-I want more experience with open source projects. Reading other people's code, using git more effectively and actually contributing to code that is being used by others are all experiences that I think will help me improve a lot.

This all means that a lot of my programming posts will be very basic to a lot of people, and I will try to mark those with the "Quantity" label described in my last post (in addition to the "Useful" label).

And regarding the wish to contribute to open source projects - if there is anyone reading this who knows about a project that needs help, please let me know!

Why the name?

As I pondered a name for this blog, I was of course trying to find something catchy that would also describe something essential about the blog, or about myself (since the blog might and probably will change character over time (well, so will probably I (this whole parenthesis has been rendered relatively useless))).

And as I wondered about this, my thoughts went back to when I first became a Christian, which indeed was one of the Big Changes of my life, and the event which probably influenced my subsequent life in a greater way than any other event.

And I was trying to think of something related to that event - a catchphrase that could sum up what happened. And I thought of the feeling of seeing everything in a new perspective, and how it was impossible to see things in the way I used to, even if I tried. This phenomenon has several names, I believe, but one of them is "gestalt shift", and it was illustrated by Wittgenstein with the "duckrabbit" figure.

You can see both a duck and a rabbit in the picture, but you cannot see both at the exact same time (though you might be able to shift between them pretty quickly). In other words - the brain must interpret the sensual input in one way at a time.

It is not clear how or whether this simple example can be extrapolated to what happens when you have a life-changing event. But they have this in common: You can see the picture, big or small, in one way or another, but not both at the same time.

The difference between this example and my conversion is that I find it impossible to shift back. I cannot remember or understand how or what I thought about life before, just as I couldn't understand how Christians viewed the world before I became one myself.

My conversion was a sudden gestalt shift - it happened over the course of a week or so. But gestalt shifts can have varying lengths, of course. The way I think about science now that I am a Ph.D. student is very different from the way I thought as an undergrad. I also imagine having children is a huge gestalt shift, though I haven't experienced it first-hand. All of a sudden, your life revolves around someone else than yourself (though ideally, Christians should have experienced this feeling already...).

Anyway - I found "Gestalt Shift" to be a pretty catchy term and at the same time descriptive of my own history. So even if the character of this blog or my own character changes, the concept of a gestalt shift will always have a place in my life. And that's how the blog was named. The added bonus is that it could also refer to how the readers of this blog would be shifted gestaltically from reading it. Of course, one would have to be a megalomaniac to write a blog and expect it to have such an impact.

P.S. And of course, the account written above is only more or less true, chronologically speaking. In fact, the gestalt shift has been a fascinating concept to me for a long time, and when I created the blog I didn't ponder its name - I immediately knew what it was going to be. But the account above makes for better reading.

Why the blog?

At this point in my life, for various reasons (an attempt of an exhaustive list shall be made below), I want to maintain a blog. No doubt there are countless other blogs out there, and for the time being this isn't an attempt to add anything to that. Rather, the current goals are:

-To get a creative outlet
-To keep my inner Narcissus under control
-To learn stuff (because once I'm being held accountable for what I write, I have to actually make an effort to base what I write on facts).
-To practice writing

The last point is the reason I wrote "..for the time being" and "current goals" above. If I do get better at writing from this enterprise, and at the same time get better at writing stuff that others find interesting, then all the better for everyone. We'll see how it goes.