Disphoria
January 3rd, 2008Dan discussed “flow” recently and made some observations that stunningly mirror my own life. Quoth Dan:
I’d deliberately side-stepped IM and Twitter, but without consciously noticing it, I let my email and blogs reading habits — distractions on their own — to become interrupts…Previously, I’d get to the end of the day and feel unsatisfied. One of the ways I feel satisfied when I’m creating and learning, so I’d go looking for something new to read about in blogland and, before I knew it, it’d be 1:00am.
Dan plans to re-arrange his life so that all of his activities — work or leisure — are broken into uninterrupted chunks. That means scheduling time to check email and read blogs, rather than letting such activities creep in throughout the daily routine.
I’m so sympathetic to this it hurts. But I have a problem: my workday tasks contain empty space. Much of my worktime consists of the following cycle:
- think
- write
- compile
- test
Steps 3 and 4 are mostly automated, so they don’t require a lot of active engagement. Furthermore, they take time enough that it’s difficult to sit and stare at the screen and wait for them to finish without doing something else. But they’re not long enough to really dig in and engage in other work-related tasks.
So I often fill my time in steps 3 and 4 with activities like emails or a blog reading. (For example, I’m writing this amidst build-and-test cycles.) But I find the context switch to be tiring by day’s end, thus leaving me in what I call “disphoria” — an over-stimulated, partially-connected brain-state that’s productive but unfulfilled and disorienting. Exactly what Dan describes.
So what does one do during these empty mid-task moments? Meditate?
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Good question. I don’t have a very good answer.
I’ve been working on stuff that is very new to me (Ruby 1.9 and Ragel), so I’ve spent the compile-time reading reference materials on both.
My projects tend to be dynamic (no compile) and small (automated tests only take a handful of seconds), so that’s different too.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
You can go out, do pull ups, make a coffee, sketch out some random idea, tidy up documents folder.
Distraction between separate tasks won’t make a harm.
Keeping in mind several things at a time - that’s what exhausts. So IM messages and e-mails can wait for a while.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Disphoria - I’ve been looking for a way to describe my state of mind at the end of the day. I get home and I’m ready to do something… but everything I can think of doing seems exhausting.
Seems like if the problem is a disconnected mental state, the solution would be to take time to reconnect. The suggestion of “meditation” sounds a bit new-agey, but it seems like a good idea: in your empty spaces, relax and reconnect. Take a walk around the office. Go outside for five minutes. Think about something else that doesn’t take mental effort. Stare out the window and let your mind wander. I’ve found that drinking water throughout the day also helps avoid this. Coffee is tasty and ZING you get energy, but it’s a crushing energy that leaves you devastated an hour later with that scratchy feeling behind the eyes.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I agree with StormSilver. Get up out of your chair and either walk down the hall or look out the window. Stretch. Anything but thinking you’ll spend just the next 15 seconds catching up on analysis of the Iowa presidential primaries.
But then, I’m a full-time manager now, so everything I do is interrupt-driven. Disphoric, indeed :-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm
http://xkcd.com/303/
January 12th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Don’t know if you saw this article, but it reminded me of disphoria: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-stone/fine-dining-with-mobile-d_b_80819.html