Tag: Reflection

Nicola McDermott’s Notebook

As my wife and I were watching some of the Olympic coverage, we caught a recap of the finals for the women’s high jump event. I was always terrible at high jump as a child, but I stand at around 191cm (over 6-feet tall), so watching the athletes jumping heights that would clear my head instils a lot of awe in me. One jumper in particular caught my eye – silver-medalist Nicola McDermott from Australia. After each of her jumps, the camera would catch her diligently writing in a notebook.

Screencap from video: https://youtu.be/tYFV02xldbE

I have heard of athletes who meticulously journal to help with performance psychology, but this was the first time I caught it live. You can learn a bit more about what she records after each jump in this Guardian piece. One quote from the piece caught my eye:

“The 2.04m – I gave myself a 10/10 for that jump, the execution,” McDermott explained. “I felt the clearance in the air. But the lack of experience with the timing meant that it just didn’t happen today.”

I like that she framed it not as a failure of her abilities, but instead a lack of experience with the execution. Instead of seeing it as “I can’t do this,” it’s “I haven’t done this yet.” The productivity sphere labels this as an example of growth mindset, and given the stakes of the Olympics it’s inspiring to see an athlete have such an upbeat, positive attitude that would likely cause me to beat myself down in defeat.

While mere mortals like myself typically go through the motions of any given action, Nicola’s journaling habit and mindset is worth modelling as a method of providing yourself with immediate feedback and a view from without – one that gets you out of your own head. It also takes ownership over the process, because it forces you to break the activity down into discrete parts that you can focus on and improve.

Congratulations to Nicola on her personal best, and the example she sets in performance excellence.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

For the First Time, Since

Last week was a wonderful week of “first time, since” events for me. It was the first time, since the pandemic started, that I played board games with friends in their home. It was the first time, since probably the start of the pandemic, that I ate inside at a restaurant. It was the first time, since the bar closed, I got to see my colleagues and have a drink. And for the first time, since the birth of our son, I got my hair cut.

I’m under no illusions that this is over. The cynical side of me is expecting another lockdown (or at least a retraction of re-opening plans) in the fall. I know we are still a ways to go from where we ought to be if everyone bought into the plan by masking-up and getting double-dosed.

But for a brief moment, I got a chance to flex my extraverted side and give him some fresh air, while looking slight less like a caveman.

It’s the small things I get to relish for the first time, since.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Parenting and the Return to “Normal”

I’ve been very fortunate to work from home since the start of the pandemic. I have only stepped foot in the office once in the last year, and have otherwise been plugging away at tasks from home. I was also fortunate that this time overlapped with the birth of our son, so I have been home for his first year of life. My wife returns to work in September, and our son will head off to daycare, signaling our first steps towards a return to “normal.” At present, I will likely continue working from home until January, assuming public health doesn’t pull back on restrictions to limit the virus spread.

Two recent podcasts had me reflecting on the kinds of things that changed about life both as a result of the pandemic as well as experiencing parenthood while at home. The first was a musing from The Daily Dad on the slow life of the pandemic, and the second was from Scott Young on how parenting changed his views on productivity.

The pandemic hit a hard stop to the busy lifestyle I had adopted. This isn’t to say I embraced “busyness” as a mark of distinction, but rather I was the kind of person who said yes to a lot of things and wanted to be involved in cool stuff. My calendar was filled with lots of obligations, work and social alike. I juggled three jobs while running a non-profit, a social club, and podcasting and vlogging projects. I enjoyed being busy and helping others.

But as a parent, I carry a different set of responsibilities that conflict with this kind of lifestyle. I was never faced with the choices to prune back my (mostly) optional obligations in order to fulfill my parental duties – the pandemic largely did that for me.

And as we think about returning to “normal,” I will obviously have to think carefully about what sorts of things I add back into my life (the pandemic will end, but being a parent won’t). Some of the effects from the pandemic and being at home to take a greater prominence in co-parenting our child makes me reflect on what kind of home life I wish to cultivate, and ask which elements of the pandemic do I want to carry forward into the new normal. For instance, in thinking about the slow life, things like bedtime routines, long blocks of time with kid(s), weekends set aside for family time, are all things I want to hold sacred.

The pandemic was referred to as The Great Pause. I should get some more of this thinking done before we un-pause and move on with life.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Return to Normal

Well, I certainly was optimistic in my last post about when I’d return to normal. The move proved to be a bit more onerous, so I missed last week’s post, as well as this week’s deadline. C’est la vie. We press on.

As we start getting our vaccines rolled out to younger folks in my part of the country, we are beginning to have virtual watercooler chats about what the return to normal will be. The gut-reaction is that our higher education institutions will kowtow to pressure to return to face-to-face delivery as soon as possible – whether it’s students looking for the ol’ college experience, administrators looking to address gaps in the bottom line, or employees desperate to escape working from home.

It’s tempting to think things will return to normal, back to the pre-pandemic status quo. We, as creatures of habit, like to slide back into what’s comfortable and expend the least amount of energy that we need to.

But knowing what I know about people, a “return to normal” is going to smack straight into the loss aversion wall – people don’t like to lose benefits once they have them. It switches to an entitlement mentality. I don’t mean this in a negative sense. Entitlements are good! When we talk about entitlements, it carries a negative connotation of something not earned. But to the contrary, I think “unearned” entitlements are the point of society, culture, and government. Rather than everyone being forced to create everything for themselves, we can leverage divisions in labour, experience, technology, and collective action to ensure that benefits get spread around. The metaphorical tide should raise all ships.

So, what does it mean when we are rushing back to return to normal – what do we think we are missing, and what would a return to normal cost us?

A return to normal means hours of commuting per week, instead of going upstairs to work.

A return to normal means rigid schedules and limited campus space, instead of blending the flexibility of synchronous and asynchronous delivery.

A return to normal means bringing back flu seasons at work.

A return to normal brings back all the issues around inclusion and accessibility for those who don’t fit the “normal” not built for them.

Here at home, a return to normal means less time with our infant son. It would also mean less quality time with my wife.

I haven’t packed a lunch in a year. My office dress clothes have been hanging untouched in my closet. I’ve fueled up as many times as maybe months we’ve been working from home.

Not everyone is as fortunate as I am to still be working from home. Many employees at my institution still have to go on campus to work because they’re essential, so their current normal differs from mine. However, we must question whether we want the consequences of having the rest of us join the essential few. I sincerely doubt it is automatically a return to something better.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

A Well-Designed Vaccination Process

I was fortunate to receive my first vaccine dose yesterday. While I initially thought I would have to wait until a later phase, I recently found out that I qualified based on my BMI. It bummed me out to learn that I’m perhaps not as “healthy” as I thought and I had felt a sense of pride being among those who would have to wait until the end. It’s irrational, I know. However, I felt it was my duty to get my vaccine as soon as I was eligible in order to do my part and help with public health measures.

The vaccination process I participated in was very smooth and efficient. A friend asked me how the experience went – here were the notes I sent:

My appointment was scheduled for 4:45pm, and I arrived at 4:40 (a 30min commute from home to the site).  They had a sign outside saying they were now taking the 4:45 appointments.  I went through several layers of people asking me questions, but it was super smooth and efficient:

  • Security Guard at the door ask the standard screeners (I don’t have symptoms, no one in my house has symptoms, I haven’t travelled in the last 14 days), and to check I had an appointment confirmation email/text.
  • Queue person to direct me to the check-in.  They also directed me to sanitize my hands and handed me a mask with tongs, saying I could either replace the one I was wearing or use it to double-up.  I chose to just double-up.
  • Check-in to confirm my appointment.
  • Nurse to take my health card info.
  • Queue person to direct me to which chair to sit in.
  • Doctor who asked screeners and gained consent. (we chatted for a little bit)  My receipt notes I received my shot at 4:43.
  • After the shot, the doctor wrote a time on the top of my information form and directed me through a door to a gymnasium for observation.
  • Queue person to explain the chairs (basically, wait until my time was up, and whatever chair I chose, flip the sign to indicate I sat in it so it could be sanitized when I left).
  • Get up from the chair at 5:04 and go in one direction around the seating area to another nurse (observed by security guard).
  • Final nurse confirmed who I was, ask for family physician to notify them, confirmed my email, then printed and emailed me my receipt.

I texted my wife at 5:11 that I was done and heading back.  Well oiled, well directed, very relaxed. 

I am incredibly grateful for the care and thought the local Public Health Unit put into this process. I never felt lost or unsure about how to proceed, and all the staff were friendly and professional.

So far, almost 20-hours post-shot, I feel great. The soreness in my arm is similar to vaccines I received previously, so time will tell if I feel any of the other side effects (aches, fever, etc.).

We’re all in this together.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Editing with Rapt Attention

Last week I discussed how I created a video training series for one of the ethics boards I serve on. All told, I’d estimate it took me around twenty hours to sketch, film, edit, and publish the series (this is an ad hoc estimate; sadly I didn’t do any time tracking to appreciate the effort). While I’m comfortable with the filming, I noticed a particular period of the work that created a bit of a flow state for me.

On the last day of editing, I was up against a bit of a deadline to finish the videos and push them out to the trainees. I admit that the deadline helped me to focus more (or at least resist the temptation to get distracted), but I noticed that when I was editing the videos, I hit a bit of a flow state. It’s not that I found the tasks particularly challenging, but there was something about the rote, somewhat monotonous task of watching and cutting footage that helped me move through the videos fairly quickly. It was almost 4-hours of editing before I felt like I should take a break to stretch and shift my mind to something else – the time seemed to go quickly. Then, after my break, I returned for another multi-hour stretch to finish off the last of the videos for the rendering queue.

It’s not often that I feel myself working in this state, where time gets away from me for hours at a time. In fact, most of the time I feel somewhat disengaged with my work, and I have to apply discipline in order to work on tasks. This was a rare example of working on something that felt right.

I joked with my wife that I wish I found a job as an editor, but I was only half joking. The lesson I take from this is to be mindful with how I engage with activities that trigger flow, and find a way to go back to that state in other areas of my work.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Material Possessions and Perspective

While walking the dog the other day, I seemed to have dropped the case for my wireless ear buds. It was night time, I was listening to a podcast, it was cold and a little slippery, and somewhere along the short route the case appears to have fallen out of my sweater pocket. It might have been while I was pulling a flashlight out to pick up after my dog, or it could have been one of the times I pulled my phone out along the route. After discovering the missing case (the case is important because it’s the only way to a.) turn the buds off when not in use, and b.) to charge the buds after use), I dropped the dog off at home and re-walked the route twice to see if I dropped it somewhere on the sidewalk or in the snow. Sadly, I couldn’t find it.

I’m embarrassed to say that losing the case majorly bummed me out that night. I tried to remind myself that it’s only a thing (albeit a somewhat expensive thing) and that I shouldn’t take its loss so hard. Our book club recently finished reading Meditations by the stoic emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, and I admonished myself for feeling sad over the missing possession – how utterly unstoic I was at allowing myself to be affected by a trivial event. I even confessed to my lovely wife the next day that I felt conflicted over feeling bad for losing the case AND feeling bad about allowing myself to feel bad (my wife is awesome – she reminded me to give myself permission to feel bad about something I was using on a near-daily basis since I purchased the headphones mid-last year).

After some quick research, I found that I could purchase an inexpensive off-brand case that will provide charging capacity to the earbuds so that I don’t have to discard them. The unit thankfully works as I had hoped and I’ve been reunited with my bluetooth audio experience once more.

It’s such a silly thing to write about; I almost feel a sense of embarrassment in talking about the experience because it’s a perfect example of a “first world problem.” But I thought I’d also document the self-reflection that happened as a reminder that these kinds of silly things do affect me, and that I’m not immune to these kinds of material losses. Yes, it’s just a thing and I shouldn’t allow it to occupy my thoughts so readily (or “rent-free” as is now the apt description), but I should also remember to feel free to live with these feelings. It might just be an object, but it’s also a nice tool that I’ve used to make my life just a little happier during the pandemic. And I’m allowed to feel bad at the economics of it – money is a representation of the time I spent exchanging my labour for, so losing the item and having to replace it is a further loss of my time.

I’m certainly not perfect and will endeavor to keep a level head about these things. I just hope that if I discover it when the snow melts, I don’t treat myself too harshly.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Falling Through My Systems

This late post is a nice springboard into something I’ve been thinking about throughout the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, when I was still commuting to work, I had a fair number of systems to help me get stuff done. My commute to work helped me film daily vlogs, listen to books, and think about big ideas for blog posts and Stay Awesome vlogs. When we started working from home, those outputs began fading. Now, I feel behind on my blog posts, I *maybe* film a personal vlog once every two weeks, and Stay Awesome has been put on an indefinite hiatus until Jim and I get some extra headspace bandwidth to devote attention to it.

I was also known for my notebook. I carried a Field Notes notebook everywhere with me, and was constantly scribbling notes into it. Then, around 4 months into working from home, I found myself abandoning the monthly notebook and appropriating a disused larger notebook to jot down tasks, lists, and random thoughts. The Field Notes book was small, portable, convenient, and had many systems to track things I found important, such as exercise, health, habits, etc. Now, my notebook is largely devoted to task management, because when every day feels the same, you can quickly find yourself several weeks down the line having nothing to show for your time.

In a sense, I’ve fallen through my systems. The various “systems” I implemented succumbed to inertia when I both lost the cues that triggered them and lost the will to keep putting effort in the system to power the flywheel, and friction has ground them to a halt.

James Clear has a pithy phrase, that “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This is a riff on an older Greek observation from Archilochus: “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Regardless, the question I have is whether I truly had a system if it was a fair-weather operation that wasn’t robust enough to adapt to these kinds of radical changes. When I lost the external liminal cues that came from commuting to work, or from even leaving the house on a regular basis, the things I called systems disappeared as well. Is it charitable to call these things “systems”? In virtue ethics, you aren’t said to possess a virtue if you only exercise it some of the time – you aren’t considered courageous if you don’t act courageously in a moment that requires it. Does this apply to systems as well?

Part of me says yes, but that’s not very helpful. Perhaps I should reframe my thinking and consider the quality and attributes of the system. Borrowing from Taleb, some systems are fragile, some are robust, and I suppose some are antifragile. I understand antifragile systems in the context of biology (e.g. stressing muscles can allow them to get stronger over time), though as of writing I can’t think of any productivity system that get stronger under pressure.

Regardless, it’s clear that much of my productivity was built upon what can now be labelled as fragile systems. They worked under certain conditions, but outside of that narrower band they are less able to withstand fluctuations or variance. In my reflections over the last few months, I’ve been seeing the value in understanding the causes of system failures so that I can create new processes to help me in work and life. For now, the first step is to acknowledge that I’ve fallen through my systems, and having acknowledged this, I can stop spinning my wheels and start seeking traction.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

WFH: Struggles in Focus

In March, I will have been working from home (WFH) for a full year. You’d think that with my experience being employed pre-pandemic, I’d know how to manage my time and motivate myself. But, I have to be honest that working from home has had its challenges. Every time I think I’ve got it figured out, I somehow end up reverting back to a less productive mode of work.

You’d also think that after working from home for a year that I’d have a handle on the situation, yet there, too, I’m finding it difficult. I could attribute it to having a child and the challenges that come with that level of life adjustment, but I feel that would be a disingenuous excuse for my poor integrity.

I know I’m not alone; many people are feeling this. In the beginning, the articles were about learning to draw boundaries in work/life balance. Then came the articles urging us to dress for the office, trying to capture the liminality inherent in a structured schedule. Then came the posts lamenting the late nights with alcohol and doom-scrolling. We all are feeling the anxiety of trying to remain in the present while our focus is pulled towards thoughts about a dimly lit uncertain future.

The best I can do is continue to experiment and see what sticks for me. At the moment I’m trying to be more intentional with my work calendar. I set up to three priorities for the week, block off time in my calendar to work, and spend the first moments at the beginning and the last moments at the end of the day to plan, reflect, plan, and review.

One thing I’m enjoying with this approach is that I’m having an ongoing dialogue with myself in my work calendar. At a high level, I’m leaving a paper-trail of my thoughts, and with that trail I can autopsy where I’m successful and why I fail. But in the day-to-day moments, voices from the past come to help my present understand itself, then I leave little notes for the future to pick things up after rest.

I’ll keep practicing this approach and write some comments in the future, if it sticks.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan