Life Pattern

Month: March 2008

  • Life Patterns

    While looking for something else in my web server logs I noticed that some of the visitors of this blog came across by searching for phrases like “pattern of life”, “patterns in life”, “what is life pattern” and so on which also happens to be the title of this blog. I’ve chosen this title because one of the main features of the human species is the ability to discover patterns and relationships between events and to use these models and relations to make conclusions and generalizations. That’s what I do as I try to understand things in my journey through life.

    I don’t know what were my readers actually looking for, because the aforementioned expressions may relate to many different things. Nevertheless I looked on teh interwebs to check what’s out there on the subject and that’s what I found:

    There is a mathematical game called Game of Life, Life patterns or sometimes simply Life. It’s one of the best known examples of a cellular automaton. The game was devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Learn more and try it here.

    Then there is this very interesting Life Patterning Exercise by Results in No Time. It looks like a good way to mind map your life in order to create a more clear picture of who and where you are at the moment.

    According to Monte Zweben there is marketing practice called Life Pattern Marketing. “Life Pattern Marketing is the practice of placing companies’ brand messages on digital screens and billboards that are located where busy people really are. Digital screens are popping up in great places to reach people, carrying short, punchy brand messages that reach potential customers while they pump gasoline in the morning, while they shop for groceries in the afternoon and while they withdraw money from an ATM in the evening. The key is context.”

    On the music front I’m aware of two works that have related titles. One is Life is a Pattern by System of a Down and the other one is the Pattern Life by Despair. I liked the description of Despair from this page: “The heaviest thing in Buffalo, New York, next to the snowfall”.

    There is also a book (xpensive!) called The Pattern of Life. According to Wikipedia its author Alfred Adler was an Austrian psychologist and was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement.

    So there are plenty of things to be found while searching for “life pattern” 🙂

  • Stroke of insight

    This is an impressive talk from TED 2008 by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who had suffered a brain stroke. She tells a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to each other and to the surrounding environment. The story is both fascinating and scary because it took doctor Jill about 8 years to completely recover from the brain damage.

    This is the second TED video I write about and I have already begun seeing a pattern – both of them are neuroscience related. The way the human brain works is really intriguing for me.

  • So many things, so little time

    Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair, hot wench in flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

    — William Shakespeare

    I feel a little bit overwhelmed lately with so many things to do and so little time. Currently there are some big work flow changes going on at the office. At the same time I’m attending IELTS preparation course. We (me and my wife, well mostly my wife) are also doing a major repair and reconstruction of the small apartment we recently bought. Moreover I’m trying to push forward two more projects of mine and to write to this blog as well. Add all those little things that constantly need your attention – like housekeeping, personal finance management, shopping, paying the bills and so on. My hobbies are almost completely suspended – no time for reading blogs or books, no time for movies, irregular physical activity etc. I can’t wait for the weather to warm up so I could go to work by bike at least (and at last). This way I’ll save some commuting time, will do some exercising and of course I’ll be doing something I enjoy.

    It is easy to feel out of control. And it’s easy to actually get out of control if you don’t have a proper to do system or perhaps exceptional natural organizational abilities. You may choose to be out of control deliberately or to skip tasks entirely until their number drops to the point you don’t need a to do system again… but is that really an option for you? I know there are also some people who really and naturally work well when the final dates are getting closer. But the truth is, most people who claim they work best under pressure actually fall apart, lose sleep, do a sloppy job, become sick, or eventually miss the deadline.

    It’s tricky because you have to do a lot of things but research shows that multitasking is bad for your efficiency. “People who multi-task are less efficient than those who focus on one project at a time”, says a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. “The time lost switching among tasks increases with the complexity of the tasks, according to the research by David Meyer, psychology professor at the University of Michigan and others”. So eventually it turns out that multitasking is not a good option and in order to do more you should do less.

    While my productivity is still far from being at the level I’d like it to be it’s much better than a few years ago. At some point I began to feel that I wasn’t advancing very well. I was switching between various projects sometimes delaying some of them for long periods of time for no good reason. I either kept forgetting some detail or once stopped working on them I was hesitant to start again. And I still felt overwhelmed. I had already tried some project management software like korganizer, planner and Request Tracker, which is actually more of a bug tracking system, but none of them worked for me. So I concluded it’s not only matter of tools but the problem is in my basic understanding of task management or probably my lack of it.

    I’ve performed an extensive research and the most sound system I found was David Allen’s GTD. Since then I have devised pretty good set of rules and tools that help me stay on track and be more productive. I’m constantly getting better at it.

    I still have those waves of entropy when I don’t feel like I want to be organized and just give into procrastination. It might be fatigue or just laziness – I really can’t tell. Probably the better way around would be to just take a leave when I feel down and generally to draw more clear line between work and play. Work hard, play hard as the saying goes.

    My project management system (or should I say my life management system) – I mean the thing that works for me – incorporates bits from many other systems such as GTD methodology by David Alen, some ideas from “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” – the book by Stephen Covey, “Peopleware” – the book by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, the Most Important Tasks idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog and many more. I also use some traditional techniques like Mind Mapping, and in particular cases things like CPM, PERT and GANTT have been useful.

    And of course knowledge doesn’t do any good without the will and discipline to apply it but anyway a proper to do system makes things easier by broking “stuff” down to a more manageable chunks.

    I’m going to cover the specifics of my way to cope with tasks and projects in a series of posts. I hope I’ll further refine, tidy up and improve my system by trying to explain it. I might get some useful comments as well although this blog has very few readers for now.