not just random

I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

The author was able to build up considerable buzz before the book’s release via his blog as well as other public appearances. There is a podcast of his presentation at SXSW available online.

The book is about the author’s lessons in life style design and include some of the following concepts:

• Elimination of unneeded activities
• Applying of the 80/20 rule to increase productivity/profits.
• Usage of virtual assistants to outsource various activities
• Working remotely
• Taking advantage of currency differences
• etc.

There are a lot of interesting, useful ideas here. Not all of them are for everyone of course and not all occupations are very well suited here. How are you going to convince your supervisor that you can work at home, if your presence in the office/lab/etc. is required? Knowledge workers though might probably have the easier time with many of Tim Ferriss’ ideas.

I believe that books of this type (self-help/business/motivation/etc.) typically do not need to offer more than one or two really useful pieces of information to make them a valuable investment. In this particular case, the bits on his Low Information Diet make the entire book worthwhile for me. Tim is the enemy of wilfing.

It also sounds like he hates the very idea of dealing with interruptions to productivity and he ensures that this is clear: Being busy does not mean being productive. And being productive does not necessarily mean having to work eight hours a day. Having the liberties of a millionaire does not require being a millionaire and What Do You Do? does not necessarily ask for your job description.

He calls for counter-intuitive approaches as well as aiming for unrealistic goals. Unrealistic? Well, yes, the competition for the more doable ones is fierce!

In all seriousness though, I recommend this book. He has done a lot of outside-the-box thinking and it clearly must be working for him and I believe it can for others. If nothing else people will be able to gain a different perspective on modern life and work.

This is one of those posts that I feel tempted to prefix with the words “well, if you could add some additional hardware in your head …”, but I won’t go there.

We all follow patterns in some way. Habits and conscious/subconscious behavior. Far is it from me to declare judgment on any of those but it is probably safe to say that some patterns are more helpful than others and often we may not even be aware of how/to what extend we are following them.

Observing/being aware of a pattern seems to be a good prerequisite to understanding, measuring and eventually changing it. Really, what could be a good way though to find the patterns in one’s behavior?

There seem to be two components:

• Log all (relevant) events.
• Indicate patterns.

If you wanted to see, how you spend your time you could carry a notebook with you and carefully log down each thing you do, being as granular as you want. After keeping this up for a couple days you will probably get an idea as to how often your flow is interrupted by phone calls, restroom visits, eating, etc.

Are you going to keep up the logging though? Probably not. It’s not a whole lot of fun and eventually incurs a noticeable time overhead.

If a process is disruptive to your normal behavior your are not likely to keep following it, unless the rewards clearly outweigh the costs. It simply does not feel right. There are some patterns we should be able to work with more easily though.

Two examples that immediately come to mind are:

• Internet browsing. What sites are visited, how often, at what times, etc.
• Software usage. How many programs are open at the same time, at what times, what programs, etc.

That works, because you use the computer as the interface. Life really is not in general like that though.

I recently came across some of John Krumm’s work, such as Predestination: Where Do You Want to Go Today? (pdf), in which driving patterns (via GPS) of people are analyzed to determine probabilities of locations. That is fascinating material.

There are of course a lot of different areas where people follow noteworthy patterns:

• Location
• Walking speed
• Speech
• Alertness
• Health
• Activity
• etc.

I am sure some day we will be able to measure and log all of those and more in unobtrusive ways. A lot of things will probably become obvious and more readily interpreted than without. Patterns will emerge that existed before, though weren’t clear to see because no one knew where/how exactly to look.

If we can get the computer interface into those areas in a way that is not disruptive to your daily routine, maybe some hardware implants …

Clearly violating the DRY principle, taking a shower typically has the following problem: You need to figure out the right temperature, usually by trial and error.

The better you know your shower (i.e., the more often you have used it), the shorter this process will eventually become as you intuitively develop an increasingly accurate heuristic. Still though, with most common showers this temperature setting phase never goes away and your results are never consistently the same or consistently quickly achieved.

The better shower then would have to improve on this. Maybe you enter the desired temperature and then simply turn on the water. Maybe it could respond to voice commands. Perhaps each user could determine (again, by trial and error) the desired water temperature once and the shower would remember the setting in the future.

Similar features could be implemented with regard to water pressure, of course, though personally, I find the temperature adjustment more urgent. I wonder if there is such a thing out there already and at what price.

Update: Kohler appears to have something to offer, according to Kohler DTV Delivers High-Tech Shower Experience. Not inexpensive, of course.

Online distractions lead us to ‘wilf’:

To ‘wilf’ - an acronym for What was I looking for? - is the new verb for wasting one’s time when surfing the web, not looking for anything in particular.

So we have on the one hand sites like reddit, digg, etc. that make wilfing easier, if not encourage it. On the other hand, people who lose time engaging in it.

I would prefer not to blame the sites, in the same way as I would prefer not to blame available selection, when it’s the person having the freedom to pick. Choice should be deliberate, conscious though. Wilfing, in its more extreme form would probably be a mindless browsing with little to no regard at all for direction and/or outcome.

I would assume that the social components (i.e. discussion forum like features) that social link/news sites offer would go some way in making further browsing, potentially to sites of restricted relevance, more appealing, as for the user the focus could become more centered around the interaction with other users than the link content itself. If the social component is valued high enough, the time spent, even if it adds up to quite a bit, might not even be considered excessive.

I have heard people joke about voluntarily blocking access to certain websites for themselves during the day, as the sites were becoming to time consuming during their regular daily routine.

Others have suggested the problem may not be with the distraction, but rather with the activity that is being distracted from.

In the middle of it all, of course, is the individual who has to make a choice.