DavidGoodman.Net

I gotta stop re-posting Metafilter comments, but hey, there’s something about the standard of discourse over there that gets me fired up and often leads to rather long comments. I did a comment export and realised I’d written 66,000 words over there in the last two years. Wowza.

Anyway, here’s a post I wrote in this thread about maintaining motivation, as a follow-on to this answer in another thread about finding purpose (man, Ask Metafilter deals with some pretty deep questions sometimes).

So here it is, ‘Getting a Purpose and the Self Improvement Dialogue’:

There’s an essential thing you need to sustain motivation - an ultimate aim.

At the moment, these bursts of inspiration and motivation you’re having are linked to a general sense of dissatisfaction with your life (I don’t read enough, I’m not fit enough, I’m not cultured enough, whatever). The problem with using the ‘I’m not X enough’ as an aim is that it is a moving and cycling target.

In the Western world, we have more leisure time than at any point in history. A large number of us also work at sedentary jobs, and don’t get exercise (or indeed a great deal of stimulation) from our work. This leads to the hampster wheel of personal fitness, and the nagging, constant feeling that we should be doing something constructive with our off time.

The problem is, a lot of people aren’t wired to respond to a personal improvement aim simply for its own sake.

I present to you - the Self Improvement Internal Dialogue:

I really need to get fit
Running around a park to keep fit? Ugh. Unless you’ve actually been fit before in your life, this is a horrible thing to contemplate. Why can’t I skip to the part where I wake up energised and full of life every day because of my hard, shiny abs?

Wouldn’t it be great to speak another language?
Learning a language? Ugh. That’s really hard and complicated and I was never good at languages in school. Why can’t I just skip to the part where I navigate through an exotic city using only wordplay and charm?

I’d love to be able to play guitar like that guy
Learning to play an instrument? Ugh. Equally hard, why can’t I just skip to the part where I strum my guitar by a fire on a beach somewhere with lots of admirers around me?

I need to read War and Peace
Reading the classics? Ugh. The plots are complex and the language arcane, and I’m knackered from work and anyway I don’t know anyone who has the knowledge or inclination to discuss them with me, so what’s the point? Why can’t I just skip to the part where I discuss philosophy in a Left Bank philocafe before drinking red wine and waving a Gauloise in the air?

Maybe I should write that novel
A novel - fuck off - that’s 2 or 3 hours a night for the next six months. My hands hurt from typing all day at work and you want me to type more? Plus, what the hell am I going to write about? Working in advertising? Suburban ennui? Why can’t I just skip to the part where I graciously accept my Man Booker and quaff wine with the literati while explaining how my work isn’t at all autobiographical.

All of this flows from one thing - a vague feeling that you should be doing better with your life. The various ‘things’ you choose to consider are often informed by your perceptions of skills, jobs, lifestyles and places, rather than the reality of them. And frankly, its easier to refresh Lifehacker once a day looking for that sure-fire motivational habit than it is to honestly assess and change your direction in life.

As I said in the other thread, the way to overcome this dialogue is not to improve yourself for the sake of acquiring skill A, experience B or body state C. You need a reason to go about these things. Check my other answer for the detail, but it boils down to figuring out what you really, really want to do, and where you want to be, in a few years time, then using that as the basis for acquiring skills, getting fit and otherwise improving yourself.

In a nutshell: You can fart around for the rest of your life with the dilletante route and your bursts of motivations. Or, you could decide to become a mountain guide in Norway, and use that to:

• Get fit - through regular hillwalks, expeditions and the fitness you need to do to do this kind of work safely
• Learn a language - duh, you’re going to Norway - better snakker Norsk before you do!
• Play guitar - if you’re actually on the route to becoming a mountain guide, you’re going to need some way to entertain a camp full of clients on a rainy evening, and you can only play so many games of gin rummy.
• Read War and Peace - funny how many great books you’ll read in a tent on the side of a fjord when your attention span has re-constituted itself from the thousands of tiny pieces TV and the web has smashed it into, and the only sound is herring gulls in the cold water below.
• Write that novel - funny how it’ll be easier to come up with ideas when you’re doing something unbelievable and meeting people from all over the world every day.

An intentionally extreme (and specific) example, but you get the point - get a purpose, the rest will follow.

As much as I love the relative understatement and short length of the British election process, I am incredibly drawn to the razzamatazz and sheer feeling of deep consequence that attends the US elections. Last night, my wife and I watched a couple of hours of streaming video from the Democratic Convention website (rock-solid, crystal clear and packaged up nicely with on-demand highlights of other speeches from the convention). Today, the whole thing is available on-demand.

Being married to an American, I now have a direct stake in the future of the US that I never had before. Not only are many of my friends and wife’s friends and family American, but our children will have American citizenship. I deeply hope that Barack Obama is elected. We have talked about moving to the US one day, and with him as president, I do believe I could.

As I described in yesterday’s post, I’m moving from the ‘firehose’ model of taking in information to a more nuanced, and, I hope, cognitively healthy model based on selective reading and limited participation. Regularly following the feeds of over 60 websites was leaving me in a twitchy state of continuous partial attention.

If you break that phrase down, you get a good idea of the problem. It’s continuous, i.e. all the time. Even when I wasn’t in front of a computer, I had a phone. ‘Clearing my feeds’ became a constant, and I’d guess, conservatively, I was scanning and marking feeds read 20 or 30 times a day. It’s partial - because it didn’t take all that much effort, it’s something I’d do constantly, through a browser, on my phone, you name it. Even when there are much bigger things going on, a part of my attention was always on RSS. Finally, there’s the word itself - attention. I think some of the web punditry about attention borders on the absurd (I can’t help but think of this guy going on about protecting our precious bodily fluids), but at the same time, it is very easy to burn away hours and hours of your life on utter trivialities. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want and need to do - I don’t regret a minute spent completing Grand Theft Auto IV for example, which I’m sure the world at large sees as a triviality, but which I see as 60+ hours of interactive entertainment, and significantly more fun that sitting watching TV. But when trivialities become daily, and eat up a steadily larger chunk of time, they start to become unconscious obligations. RSS was becoming that for me.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad. I had RSS feeds which only updated two or three times a month, but which always provided in-depth, detailed, fascinating writing. Or indeed, just a bloody good chuckle. These longer, fascinating articles were what I really wanted, so when I binned RSS yesterday, I took note of the dozen or so sites I regularly found good, lengthy, interesting articles at, then stuck them in a bookmarks folder. Using Firefox’s open all in tabs functionality, I’ll scan these once or twice a day (taking maybe a sixth of the time it took to ‘clear my feeds’) and spot articles I’m interested in reading. In the past, this is where reading long articles fell down for me. I’d open a load of tabs, leaving articles open for days at a time and never getting round to reading them.

Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper is an incredibly simple, elegant solution to finding, storing and reading long content on the web. Clicking a ‘Read Later’ bookmarklet instantly saves any article to reading page associated with an email address or username you supply. You can also password protect it. You can then log in from any browser, (including your phone) to read your articles, which are formatted for simple reading on any device. If you finish the articles you’ve stored, you can read the top articles saved by other Instapaper users. In a single move, this has made long web content accessible and removed any need for RSS. I’m still reading words on the web, but now I’m enjoying it again.

This is a post that I wrote on a Metafilter thread about focus while reading, which I thought might also make a good post here. The poster asked how to create and maintain focus on their reading, and wondered aloud what was causing it. I immediately thought of my own attention-destroyer - the web itself.

I’ve found in the last couple of years that regular web use has pretty much smashed my attention span into tiny, tiny bits. This is a relatively recent phenomenon - I’ve been a web user for over ten years, and used it heavily for about five. I can sum up what’s destroyed my attention span in a handy acronym:

RSS

The constant drip-drip-drip of RSS makes the web a non-static, ever changing source of information, and makes it exponentially easier to stay glued to it. Five years ago, I’d log on at most once per day, often going without for days at a time. Then I got Bloglines, and latterly Google Reader, and now I can see, in close to real-time, when and how things are being updated. For sites like MeFi with a high update rate, that’s killer (in a bad way). I’ve slowly pruned my RSS feeds of the high-volume, short length, low value feeds (the Engadgets and BoingBoings of the world) in favour of MeFi and sites which publish relatively long pieces.

However, these pieces are still generally short in the grand scheme of things. A couple of thousand words from Bruce Schneier is awesome, but I miss being able to sit down with any book and get a lot out of it, fiction or non-fiction. I mean, really, six or seven years ago I was a two-books-a-week type. Now I’m lucky if I get through one a month. And I know exactly where that time has gone - web surfing. For a while now I’ve been considering junking RSS entirely, and going cold turkey on the web at large, because I really, really don’t want to wake up in my mid-forties and have spent twenty years punching F5 like a rat in a lab for what is, in essence, pretty ephemeral stuff.

General tips that I’ve found work even despite my small-invertebrate-like attention span?

• Good light (I sit by the door in bright sunlight).
• Good seating - get a good reading chair, and a lamp for the evening.
• Don’t read in bed if you can help it, you’ll drift off.
• Turn off the TV, radio and any other background noise (although nice music can really help if you have the ’silent room’ issue, which I’m convinced for many is a mental block created by memories of trying to study in school libraries in their youth).
• Have a glass of water at hand to still the ‘make a cup of tea/coffee/whatever’ instinct.
• I also like the ideas presented about using a notebook to record what I see as the ‘Google Twitch’. Constant exposure to the web makes it very easy to develop the habit of instantly acting on any mental question or query, in part because of ease of accessibility (why wouldn’t you look up the answer?) and partly because of the fear, whether conscious or not, that you’ll forget the question if you don’t act on it instantly. This is a valid fear in the kind of mind that RSS create - a constant river of new content. It’s less of a risk in slower, longer form discursive thought, but the notepad will be a handy crutch.

Since writing this post, I’ve gone through the sixty five plus feeds I was tracking and grabbed the ten or fifteen websites I spend 80% of my time on, copied them to a Bookmarks folder on the toolbar and wiped my Google Reader subscriptions list. Now I have a ‘Daily Tabs’ folder of regularly updated, interesting stuff, and a slightly bigger folder of ‘Weekly Reads’ with the low-volume, longer length stuff.

Let’s see how it works out. Do you feel your attention span getting shorter? Did you even make it to the end of this article?

So I took the chance while updating the backend (again, fucking hell Wordpress, any chance you could find more bugs before you post new versions, so we don’t have to go through the upgrade rigamarole every other week) to fiddle around with the visuals. I’m staying with the simple vibe, but fancied something with nicer typesetting. What do you reckon?