Transiency Diary

At the beginning of few hours of work, I often have difficulties to pick-up the right order for activities, and often have the feeling, at the end of the period, of having been unproductive. Here are a few scheduling patterns I experimented and found quite efficient. Start with activities unpredictible in time I observed that I often was late or stressed at the moment of departures. I noticed that I frequently underestimated the time needed to group all the necessary stuff for leaving, and ended up running everywhere in the studio to find, for instance, my shoes. On the contrary, I sometimes ended up being completely ready to go fifteen minutes early. Everything was packed up, and I did not know what to do before departure. After a few of these two types of experiences, I decided to reverse the process. I would prepare my departure as much as possible very early - at the beginning of a half-day of work, for instance. Everything except what I needed for work was packed up early, and my remaining pre-departure activities (mostly packing up my computer) became predictibles and very short. I therefore started to act as follow: starting with activities unpredictible in time, and continuing with those with predictible or adjustable duration. I had the sense of making much more of my time, and, more importantly being very relaxed. The unpredictibility of departure preparation duration and the perspective of stress often was no longer perturbing me during my work. Perform immediately the small tasks you tend to forget I noticed that I often was struck by the remembrance of an activity while performing another one. My reaction often was to add it up to some kind of (sometimes mental) checklist. This system showed up to be quite inefficient, as I often did not remember of the activities. Now, rather than writing it down, I decided to stop whatever I was doing to perform this small task immediately. Basically, I order the activities by likelihood of forgetting them. If the activity I am currently performing is more likely to be remembered than the one I just thought of, I stop everything and perform the latter. I also decided to let me some time, before starting a long activity, to perform a few small urgent ones. I start with one randomly popping up in my mind, and some other almost always pop up in the process of doing the first one. Once I have finished with a few of them, and that no other pop up in my mind, I breathe deeply a few times, and start my main activity. Keep online computer tasks for the end I sense that the computer always has been a brain freezer for me. Once I start working on the computer, I stop thinking and almost forget about anything else in the outside world. When starting my day by lighting up the computer, I often remember, at the end of the day, many small activities I intended to perform but did not, because I could not remember them while sitting in front of the computer. My approach is now to take the time to perform all these activities before lighting up the computer. Within computer tasks, I also start with offline activities, before going to online ones. The world wide web endless possibilities seem to be responsible for most of my memory bleaches, so I choose to reduce the risk of falling under the charm unless all urgent real-world matters are solved. Move out of the web, once in a while

This experiment was inspired by a comment of Maja on this blog.

Everytime I work on computer tasks, I kind of feel numb at some point. This is the right time to refill my cup of tea, water the plants, wash the dishes, or perform any other kind of body-involving activity out of the screen. The first step is the hardest, but then, I feel energy flowing again in my body & ideas, which is very pleasant. I now willingly keep some housework to do when I start a computer activity, to make the first step very easy. My general well-being and sensation of productivity have greatly improved since then.

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On the small balcony will sprout my Bioproductive Balcony project when Spring comes.

I plan to transform it into a vertical vegetable garden and use side-products to perform other bioproduction activities.

Yesterday, I had the pleasant visit of Sebastiaan, my former supervisor from Greenloop, thanks to whom I have been in contact with FoAM in the first place.

We talked about Biomimicry Life Principles for the ResilientWeb project, but also about what could a workload-descent company look like.

It always has been complicated to develop blossoming business activities within biomimicry. Currently, many players within the environmental consulting scene seem to undergo difficulties finding enough contracts to pay everyone. In these conditions of Workload-Descent, how should companies behave ?

Here are two ideas we passed through and which I would like to preserve for a potential future collective project.

Collective Demonetized Need-Fulfillment Activities. Most of these companies include at least three employees, benefit from an office, and sometimes some more resources. Why not use this collective force and equipment to directly fulfill needs ? Spend some hours of work building a productive permaculture garden, and bring fruits and vegetables home. Spend one week a year all together (legally) cutting wood in the forest to provide everyone with something to put in the furnace for the winter. In other words, work together not only for money - which is not available anymore in sufficient quantities - but to directly fulfill needs you would have a harder time trying to fulfill on your own.

Theoretical to Practical Nested projects. In biomimicry, many of us are interested in 1) giving trainings, conferences, writing or telling about this fascinating topic. However, it rarely brings home a sufficient income. We are not reluctant to 2) work with start-ups and companies interested to incorporate biomimicry aspects in their strategy, vision and activities. These companies are however quite few, and often not rich enough to afford consulting. In addition, who are we to advise them on a process we often did not try on our own ? We would certainly be more credible if we ourselves 3) led an exemplary "biomimicry implementation" project. As each of this offers are interesting for us to perform, and non of these bring home a sufficient income, why not proposing all of them ? All the three activities would benefit from each other, and diversifying is an interesting strategy in periods of scarcity.

A comment Maja wrote on my post on Part-Time Jobs got me thinking. Why am I looking for a part-time job rather than trying to become self-employed ?

I see at least three reasons:

I feel that self-employment is a severe threat to a slow life. Most of entrepreneurs I know end up working more than full-time, and putting aside most of their passions/friends for a while when starting their activity. After my engineering studies, I am no stranger to this kind of life, and I do not especially want to get back to this, at least not now. Unless there are some self-employed here who managed to conciliate a slow and entrepreneur life ?

I feel like self-employment requires to do much more than what I am currently good at. I have to learn how to sell what I do to others, to understand how the self-employed status work, not to feel overwhelmed by having to find the next contract, keep in touch with regulations, accounting and stuff, potentially lead a team. I think that I can learn these things, but right now, I prefer much more to learn how to grow vegetables on the balcony, Aïkido, meditation and the kind of skills I feel at the roots of well-being. Maybe will I get back to learning more industrial-world-specific skills once this basis is more stable ?

I have the feeling that self-employment requires the identification of a service to offer, something to sell, some kind of commercial project people (or institutions) are ready to give you money for. At the moment, I do not see how to shape my skills into such an offer. Maybe I lack some skills to get such a project started. Maybe I lack confidence into my current skills. And this third reason feedbacks to the other two: what service can I offer as self-employed, which would allow me to slowly learn the necessary side-skills (reason 2) without threatening my well-being by getting into an unbalanced lifestyle (reason 1) ?

I have more and more difficulties to find the motivation to go to Aïkido. I find it quite hard to have arrived in November when everyone started at least in September. I keep feeling behind the group in an activity where I already are far from being comfortable - i. e. learning gestures.

I fell badly last week, which resulted in neckache for several days in a row. This may have had an influence too.

More generally, I observe the return of feeling I did no miss: the one of feeling lost. I feel lost in this process of learning gestures.

I am not feeling lost in a poetic wandering way, I am feeling lost in the sense "having no grisp", "having no idea where to start to progress", "having no idea if the effort you are investing will be rewarded some day". This feeling of investing energy to heat the cold winter wind, this feeling that makes want to stop to learn forever.

I know pretty well this feeling back from my engineering studies, and just never got used to it. I think that I have developed some kind of allergy to it, that everytime I see it coming back, I loose my temper even more.

As it is stated in the Doing Nothing research page, I observed that cutting focus-demanding activities with e-mail checking and replying can be highly energy-demanding.

At some point the brain gets tired of focusing back on the activity, and productivity drops.

However, when dealing with a tiring activity, it is almost a reflex to check e-mails when I am sick of it, which induces a drop in productivity and makes the activity even more tiring.

I observe that I take more time than expected to start an activity - yeah, I know this is called procrastination - but that I also usually like to perform a given activity longer than I expected when scheduling it.

I know that I can also be trapped in the "too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing".

Two examples to explain this pretty straightforward idea.

First, about cooking. I usually get involved in work until some point, where I get hungry. I often stop to work when I am already quite hungry, and would like to prepare something quick. However, preparing something quick often means preparing someting pre-prepared, like bread, tapenade, cheese or pasta. Ideally, I should have pre-prepared them before, which requires some anticipation. A better option, in my opinion, would be to anticipate the moment at which I will start to be hungry, and prepare a regular slow meal.

Today, we had the visit of Heath Bunting at FoAM, who experiments living off-the-grid on a regular basis.

He said that during the last experiment he performed, rainfalls where very abundant in a quite cold atmosphere, and he outlined how disciplined he had to be not to get wet and risk hypothermia.

One can easily see the benefits of being self-sufficient: not being dependant from the violent industrial system and monetary economy anymore, getting some freedom of movement and action back...

Seeing the amount of industrial waste piling up is tempting, when you are short in resources. Why not digging into this waste to fulfill your needs ?

One first concern about this approach is the risk of toxicity. Most of this waste can be considered as toxic, and should therefore handled cautiously, or detoxified - which can be quite difficult.

A second concern is the sustainability of such an approach. Presently, it may be interesting to get rid of this waste, as it piles up and threathens human and ecosystem health.

However, producing successful products out of such waste may be problematic over the long term. This waste being now seen as a resource, success may drive the production of a kind  of waste we just wanted to get rid off. Moreover, if this waste is itself the result of the non-renewable exploitation of a resource, we end up by driving the depletion of a non-renewable resource.

I guess that the answer to this issue is likely to be an integrated approach including:

Fix the quantity of waste to process by replacing the initial and problematic production process by a benign one based on renewable use of renewable resources.

Develop an alternative process to produce the product you produce out of the waste. When the waste stock is exhausted, move to the new production process, who should also be a benign one based on renewable use of renewable resources.

(Taking the term object in the most general sense, i.e. object of study)

It is often told that the design processes have to be iterative to be efficient. The moto "fail soon, fail often" comes frequently in design thinking.

However, how do you apply such a process in long-term design ?

For instance, when designing a forest garden, you may notice after some time that some tree is not appropriate, or that such trees should be less numerous.

When bothered by something, I am currently trying the Perpetual Why Method. I ask myself :

Why does this bother me ?

Once I get to a satisfying answer, I ask myself again the same question. I try to get a more personal answer to this. If it is in reaction to someone else behavior, I try to undersand why this behavior bothered me, and how I could act so that it would not.

Once I get to a satisfying answer, I ask myself again the same question, until I get the final answer. It is the most self-centered answer, and usually the most uncomfortable. The one I am the least willing to admit.

I just finished to read Carl Honoré's book on the Slow movement. It was kind of interesting, although it was most certainly aiming at speedy-sick workhoholics - which I am not.

It becomes clearer to me everyday that I am not converging towards a moneyless-jobless lifestyle. I therefore have to start thinking what I would like to do as a part-time job once I finished this Transiency.

The most interesting jobs I have in mind are more or less always practiced full-time. I refer to design-based jobs, research-based jobs, and so on.

Part-time jobs, although they might often be less creative, nether really bored me. I guess I would have enough design and research-based job in my personal research not to be bored by a less creative job.

I believe that one of the most interesting leverage point in lifestyle-related environmental impact reduction is happy frugality.

Happy frugality is realising that you can be at least as happy as you currently are with much less material and energy intensive activities.

Examples may include prefering kitesurfing to jetskiing, because of less disturbing motor noises and enhanced sensations.

Another example commuting to work by train rather than by car, therefore not having to drive and being able to read or sleep during the commute.

However, may eco-friendly floks seems to impose frugality to themselves, when this seems to make them unhappy.

I think that asking yourself the following question can really help you get a sense of the happiness of your frugality:

Do you mind the fact that others continue the activity you just abandon ? Would you like to start again this activity knowing that others are continuing ?

If your answer to such questions is yes, it is that this particular aspect of your frugality is not happy.

As stated on my project page on FoAM's libarynth, I live quite uncomfortably since I understood how every single action I perform during the day oppresses other people somewhere else.

I was discussion this particular issue with an expert on the topic, which gave me very helpful insights to help me deal with this sometimes paralyzing issue:

Shine at your own scale. You do not have to save the world to do the right thing. Shine locally, care for your family, the one you love. This is what will make them enjoy their life. Even more than the perspective of not dying of heavy metal poisoning.

Cultivate happiness before consciousness of problems. Problems do exist, it is easy to pile up a huge stack of them. However, you may solve only few of them. You can thus spend your all life focusing on (solving) issues and nether get rid of them. So, don't forget to cultivate the actions leading you to happiness, hope and positive emotions. Otherwise you may just have a very sad life.

Do not hide in your shell when you can create well-being around you. Being aware of problems and your (potentially passive) role within them is likely to induce you to hide in your shell. This will reduce your potential to care for others, which would have improved your life and theirs. So, focus on well-being !

I noticed that I was "wasting" the pleasure of a given activity when doing a few of them altogether. Maybe I have been more sensible to this since I read about the issue in this page about FoAM's research on Doing Nothing.

I started to:

Read without listening to music.

Listen to music without reading.

Cook without listening to music.

This goes altogether with trying to fight the feeling of annoyment when doing only one activity. This is a side effect of being hyperactive all the time.

However, when days are packed up with activities or human interactions, it is so comfortable to just sit, read a few pages, listen to a piece of music or chop down vegetables, in sequence !