A Clear Life

The meaning of the Sun

2010-01-23T08:54:00.001-08:00

This morning I go for a walk on the first sunny day on which I do not need to be at the office. The possible warmth pulls at the edges of my skin as I walk within the house. My retinas are full of the attraction of light. They burst as tangerines will upon one’s tongue. I tug on my hiking boots and fleece to step outside under the orange orb and a black wool cap that immediately cools in the air but then begins to warm again. The dark material absorbs the light and converts it into heat.

There is a reaction between the body and the natural sunlight that produces vitamin D which is of great importance to calcium production and bone strength. I start walking East through the village in order to have the sun directly on my face. I can almost feel my bones growing in density but not quite.

All week I have been rising and going to work in the dark, and coming home at dusk. The sky has been gray for weeks here on The North Coast. To be out under blue, to feel the warmth of the yellow blaze, to hear a lively cluster of birds in the bare branched tree, is all so glorious! I glance over at the corner of a house at the sound of soft wind chimes and see that ice melt is cascading over the edge of the roof and onto the chimes making them gently twist and reverberate.

A huge gaseous ball of fire in the center of orbital chunks of rock takes dullness in the brain of a lumbering biped and creates sensuous repercussions of joy. This is the meaning of the sun. This is photosynthesis.

This Blog is Moving

2009-12-23T14:45:00.001-08:00

I have created an new site where these posts will be hosted Dave Tilley's Blog. This new site will host multiple pages:

A Blog - the kinds of posts you have seen here

Meaning Coaching - Longer Articles about clarity and meaning.

Creative Writing - Articles on Creative Writing and some of my own Creative Writing.

The Road To Productivity: Reduce Cycle Time

2009-12-21T04:50:00.001-08:00

In a previous post I discussed how to reduce WIP, a major leech that keeps us from achieving our goals. In this post I want to discus another major leech Cycle Time.

Cycle time is the amount of time it takes us to go through one work cycle, it is one turn of the crank on producing our work products. It is the time span that we have before we have to be accountable to somebody else for producing what we committed to.

The human tendency is to make this time span as long as possible because that removes the pressure on us to perform and pressure means stress and everybody knows that stress is bad.

However, another way to look at it is to notice that we often learn at the end of a work cycle when we see what we’ve got and what needs to change in both the result and the process that got us to that result. The shorter our cycle time is the more cycles we get and the more opportunities we have to learn and adapt. When you want to improve productivity, to adapt is where it’s at.

If you find that you can not make your deadlines with a short cycle time, the first reaction is to lengthen the cycle time; nothing could be worse. It is important to realize that if you don’t get your work product done in the allotted cycle time, the thing to do is to reduce the cycle time and the committed work. This lets you learn and adapt more and debug what is wrong. Keep shortening your cycle time until things are fixed. Even if your cycle time goes to one hour, this is not too bad.

How small is too small? Well, the learning is at the end of a cycle is really a step in the process that is about the process. It is meta-work. The same with any planning at the beginning. When the meta-work approaches being a significant piece of the time budget, it may be time to fall back to a slightly larger cycle time to get the right ratio of work to meta-work. This is a balancing act but you will hone in on the right cycle time.

I find that anything longer than two weeks is too long. Find what works for you.

The Road To Productivity: Reduce WIP

2009-12-20T08:11:00.001-08:00

Looking to boost your productivity? The first and best way forward is to remove the leeches. Leeches suck the very life blood out of you and drain your ability to drive to completion on tasks and larger goals. There are many leeches of course, but one that has gotten my attention over the last few months has been WIP (Work In Progress).

David Allen discusses WIP in Getting Things Done when he talks about how the mind can only hold so much at once and every undone thing on your todo list in your head saps your brain power that could be applied more productively to the current task. David’s whole process centers around driving every “thing to do” into a few simple lists that you can process.

The Agile Software community has gone to creating software products by breaking the product into a list of simple user stories. The team then works on ONE STORY at a time. Developers are often tempted to start another story every time they hit a roadblock on the current story. The Product Owner and Scrum Master must keep them from doing this. Why? Read on.

We can not really work on more than one problem at a time. That is the myth of multi-tasking. We can only really do one thing. When we try to do more that that one thing, we end up switching between tasks and this takes time and energy, just to swap to the next thing. So there is overhead cost for each additional thing. Plus, then the background brain keeps worried about the things not being worked (David Allen).

In the Movie City Slickers, Jack Palance plays the character Curly Washburn who has a line “Just One Thing.” Now the point of the line is different from my point here. My point here is “Just One Thing” until it’s done. Then take the next and that becomes the “Just One Thing.” If we always have only one thing at any given moment, then there is zero WIP, and thus zero overhead.

Reducing WIP is just learning how to focus. It can be a chore for some of us, but it is well worth the effort. Getting to zero WIP is the goal, but every bit of WIP we eliminate goes back into our productivity bank.

Awareness and Possibility

2009-12-19T06:51:00.001-08:00

How often do you find yourself in a negative situation in the workplace? Do you face organizational challenges? Is there a particular individual that you either don’t get a long with or that you believe is bring the organization down? Have you just gone through or are you looking at layoffs? Has your budget been slashed?

When we are faced with an adverse situation we can choose to be part of the problem or part of the solution. The one thing that we can always depend on is our choice of how to react to the situation. Even if we have totally lost control of the situation and are faced with impending death, we still have the ability to control our attitude.

This is an exercise in clarity, in awareness. If we can be clear about the situation, if we can be aware of our own attitude towards the situation which is driven by habit if we are not present to ourselves, then we will often be driven by habit into being part of the problem.

All that is required to be part of the problem is to do nothing. But we can do so much more than nothing to be part of the problem. We can choose to complain, walking from person to person that we know and telling them the tale of woe. We can really do harm if we can criticize others in the story.

However we can choose to be part of the solution, and all that is required to be part of the solution is to:

Develop a positive attitude for creating a better situation.
This attitude must support our creative visualization of what is possible in this situation. This vision of the possible aims the arrow of our intent.
The attitude must generate passion for action that is the muscle that draws back the bow and lets the arrow fly.

To try this on a situation that seems impossibly negative, list 10 Positive things that can happen if you died today.

Once you have the list, what do you notice about the list? Who is the center of attention?

Can you be passionate enough about the outcomes to take action now?

Give the Gift Of Work

2009-12-18T08:22:00.001-08:00

Know somebody that is out of work? Can you imagine how that feels at this time of year? If you do know somebody in this situation you can take some time from your schedule and make a connection for them, recommend them, give them a recommendation on Linked-In, check your company’s open jobs postings and pass the information on.

If you have a friend with a business that is in trouble, use their business for a Christmas gift, Holiday get together, etc. If your friend has a small service business such as yoga, massage, dog walking, house cleaning, personal trainer, or music lessons, consider giving their service as a gift.

Nothing says you care like giving a person some honest employment. Even a wee bit.

Holiday Opportunity

2009-12-18T08:15:00.001-08:00

At the close of the year, as people get so busy, one can feel overwhelmed by the need to socialize, get your year end work done, shop, and handle the extra costs of the season. Still, there are some real opportunities of the time of year and one should not forget to take advantage of them.

This year take the holiday season as an opportunity to connect with three friends that you have not connected with in the year. Here are a few ways:

Call someone far away and check in with them.

Send a handwritten personal letter to someone. (NO HOLIDAY FORM LETTERS).

Invite a local friend out for coffee.

Gather a few friends and walk the neighborhood knocking and doors and wishing happy holidays.

Have a 2 hour open house with hot cider.

The point is connection with those we rarely see. Like neural pathways, our friendships need to be exercised or they fade away.

QOTD

2009-12-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day: "Difference is the beginning of synergy" - Stephen R. Covey

The Death of an Idea

2009-12-03T20:24:00.001-08:00

The more I think about the writings I have seen recently on meaning in the workplace, the more outdated they seem to me. These ideas of management empowering workers is so...well...old. Think about it for a moment. Is the world not moving away from the concept of worker, the idea of drones? And have we the people not moved beyond the limited mindscape of some management team letting us do something? It feels so WWII not Gen X and Gen Y. In a world of social media and small business and entrepreneurial spirit, even in large major corporations have we not moved beyond these rusted hulk ideas?

Take back your meanings

2009-12-03T14:49:00.001-08:00

While doing some research this afternoon on meaning in the workplace for an upcoming article, I found that most of the existing material and research has been in area of corporate management research. The corporations and even the Universities seem to think that meaning is something that management bestows on "workers."

Hmm. How shall I put this? .... BUNK!

Each individual is the creator and owner of their own meaning. Can you IMAGINE that another person or entity (corporation, God, government, etc.) could be responsible for the meanings in your life?

Each of us is responsible for creating daily, the meaningful nature of our lives. Today I choose to create meaning through writing. Tomorrow I choose to create meaning through technology. On Saturday I will probably create meaning by teaching my son to drive. No Manager, HR rep, priest, or congressman will be getting within a mile of my meanings, thank you.

On the LAMY

2009-12-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

Is there a simple thing in your life that is pure pleasure? Do you crave Dark Chocolate or a good glass of wine? What is it that makes your eyes flutter when nobody is looking? For me it is the feel of ink flowing across paper. And nothing makes me happier than using my LAMY Safari fountain pen in a Moleskine Notebook. I tend to use the Moleskine Pocket Squared Notebook.

When you buy a Moleskine, you are buying quality. There is a durability to the book and to each individual page. A density that sustains the liquidity of the ink that pools just a little bit before the paper gives itself fully to the saturation and dries. Of course other notebooks are cheaper or bigger or have gadgets built in, but this is the draw of the Moleskine. It is akin to Apple products, though you can never quite justify the cost in comparison to the swath of clones, you just want one.

The LAMY Safari is pure simplicity. No fancy swirls on the outside, just the solid slate color that goes nicely with the Moleskine. There is no heft of the fine expensive pens, no balanced weight, no slow twist-off, micrometer measured top. A simple pull-off top with a single clip and a smooth velvety ink that flows out nicely. And the cost of the LAMY is so affordable and yet high enough to make you take care. No clicking, no worrying that it will be stolen, it is silent and has the look of an inexpensive ballpoint. This pen stays around at the coffee shop and drops lightly into my pocket.

What do I use these delicious tools for? Well I hacked my Moleskine into a PigPog PDA for Getting Things Done. I also use the Notes section for capturing Haiku or other bits of poetry. Sometimes it's just a doodle (I knew about doodling for knowledge absorption long before the scientific studies).

Mostly, I use them just to feel good as the ink flows across the paper.

Meaning Portfolio

2009-07-18T10:17:00.001-07:00

One easy step in choosing how to create meaning in your life is to write down a list of the areas in your life that you find hold significance for you. It may look like the following:

Family
Career
Health
Painting
Meditation
Volunteering

What does your list look like? Take a minute and develop one for yourself.

Once you have a list you can think about which areas have Meaning Goals and which do not. Then you can start planning your Meaning Investments.

When you are done you have a view of how you plan to invest time (and therefore meaning) in your life.

Here is an example for my life. I set up my spreadsheet to give me 8 hours a day for sleep. I lumped in my coaching with my normal day job as career.

	PORTFOLIO
Areas Of Significance	Meaning Investments (in Hrs.)	Meaning Goals

Family	20	College Driving Relationship
Friends	10
Health	10	Eat well (1900 Cals.) Exercise
Writing	15
Meditation	7
Career	50	Support Family Goals

Meaning Investments

2009-07-18T08:53:00.001-07:00

Once we have discovered an area of significance in our lives, we can develop Meaning Goals. Given a particular goal, we need to decide how much investment we need to make (in terms of time, money, energy, etc.) to achieve the goal. It is important to get the right balance of investment for the goal. We want to invest enough to achieve the goal, but we may not want to invest more than is required. For instance if my goal for health is to lose twenty pounds this year then I may need to invest an hour a day in exercise. However, I may not want to invest four hours a day because that may pull from my ability to invest in other areas as well.

Some areas will have no goal. You may decide that every minute spent in meditation results in joy and peace. If you have three hours a day free, then spend one on exercise and two in meditation.

Some things to ponder:

What does your meaning pie look like?
What meaning goals do you have?
What is your currency? Time, Money?
If you have a meaning goal, how do you know when you are done?

Meaning Goals

2009-07-18T08:37:00.001-07:00

When we take the time to inquire into how we create meaning in our lives, we discover (if we are lucky and/or persistent) an area or two that hold significance for us. In some of these areas we may derive relevance by just participating in an activity. An example of this might be camping. We are joyous merely by being-in-nature.

However, sometimes, we invest meaning in achieving particular goals. For instance a writer may have a goal of writing a novel. This goal may include publication. This is termed a “Meaning Goal.”

It is important to identify our meaning goals because they can give us direction, a path forward, even entire projects to work on. By looking at our meaning goals we can begin to plan our Meaning Investments.

Creating Meaning: The Artist’s Way

2009-06-22T16:22:00.001-07:00

Colleen Blackard creates meaning in her life by creating the universe from the tip of a ball point pen.

Exploration: Embracing Distraction

2009-06-21T08:02:00.001-07:00

Some people find A.D.D. to be an affliction, but I think of it as a life style to be embraced. Why does this work for me? I am an explorer. I create meaning in my life by charting new territories, this may mean hiking, kayaking, or surfing the web. One day I read Sartre, the next a textbook on biochemistry. In between it all I am developing maps from one place to the next and noting connections that may turn out to be of benefit. Of course there is a balance to be struck between following new pathways and being totally scattered. Here are three questions to consider.

Do you complete your projects? If your answer is no, then you may need to develop habits for noting areas to investigate. If you are not worried about losing a connection that occurs to you then you can return to your current activity right away and stay on it to completion.
Do you spend most of your time context switching? Many people think they are multi-tasking when in reality there are always in-between tasks rather than making progress in any of them.
Do you spend the first 10 minutes of each business meeting coming up to speed? This may be a hint that you have too many items on your plate at once, and you may be pulling your colleagues down. Only attend meetings where you are ready to add value on minute one.

If you find that you do complete projects and do add value in meetings and spend more time on task than not (even if the number of endeavors is high) then you may be managing the different threads of your life just fine. In this case you are a functioning trail blazer. If not, a few tricks of the trade can help you embrace your inner explorer.

Anti-Patterns: Choosing our behavior

2009-06-14T07:15:00.001-07:00

In the last post I talked about removing habitual forms in our life, and the importance of awareness in spotting our ways as they arise. The point was to see the behavior we don’t want, and then actively pick a different action.

In pattern replacement the idea is to swap one pattern for another. Analyze the form that holds us back and create a new activity that achieves our goal. For example if you are trying to lose weight, look at your eating habits. Do you tend to eat lots of salty snacks? Do you drink soda at work? Do you have a mid evening snack of cookies and then a late night snack of ice cream? It can be very difficult to make the right choices at the moment of hunger.

Rather than stare down that pint of Haagen-Dazs at 10:30 pm, you can set yourself up for success at earlier points.

Replace the early evening snack, with a fast paced early evening walk for thirty minutes. This will burn calories rather than ingest them. Further, exercise reduces the desire for snack food.
Don’t buy the food you don’t want to eat, rather replace that buying pattern with a buying pattern that supports your goal. Buy fresh fruit, the kinds you really love, and will gladly eat. It is easier to beat a craving at the grocery store on Sunday morning than in the freezer on Thursday night.
Soda at work breaks the cardinal rule; don’t drink your calories. Drink water or unsweetened ice tea. Diet soda has been linked to weight gain (Swithers & Davidson, Science Daily 2008)
Replace late night television with sleep. It will boost your energy, enable more time to eat a good breakfast or get in a morning walk. If this means losing a show you don’t want to miss, invest in DVR.

As with Pattern Removal, Pattern Replacement is about choices. We have the power to change our own lives. Nobody else has can or will do it for you. Practice awareness, see your actions, own them, and make your wise choices.

Awareness and Pattern Removal

2009-06-14T06:13:00.001-07:00

The key to removing patterns is awareness. We need to be able to recognize our behaviors as they occur. For instance if we feel that we are not good enough, we must see these feelings of inadequacy as they arise. One tool is to recognize the effects on your body. Does your face become flushed? Do your shoulders droop? Do you lower your gaze? Another device is developing the intent each morning to become aware of the moment that you fall into the pattern. A watchdog that barks at the right time can signal a need for a better choice.

Book Review: Existentialism is a humanism

2009-06-13T09:00:00.001-07:00

A great book by Jean-Paul Sartre that sums up how we make choices and create who we are. You make our your meanings. Quick read.

Between Things: Patterns and the Creative Mind

2009-06-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

What is so hard about being creative? What obstacles get in our way? Well, one obstacle is that we limit our own creative spark by falling into habitual patterns. Last time I talked about the patterns created by our living spaces. Another example of one of these patterns in how we look at the world; how we actually see it. A few years ago, while sitting in meditation looking out at a large Maple tree outside my window, I started noticing the leaves more deeply. I noticed their shape replicated over and over a gain. Each had veins that were visible in the sunlight. After a few minutes of meditative breathing the shape of the blue sky between the clusters of leaves garnered my attention. Rather than discuss my personal observations, I prefer to help you have your own direct experience. Try the following exercise.

Go outside and sit where you can observe a tree from a close enough distance to see individual leaves and yet far enough away that you can see the whole tree.
Sit comfortably (so that you can maintain your position for 15 minutes) with your back straight in view of the tree.
Breathe in and out naturally through your nose with your mouth closed. Feel yourself relax as you breathe.
Bring your gaze comfortably to the tree.
Observe the individual leaves, their movements, their shapes. What do you notice about the leaves? How do they change over time?
Observe the spaces, the larger gaps between clumps of leaves. What do you notices about the spaces? How to the spaces change over time?

I won’t get specific about what I observed in the above exercise but I will comment that there are differences in the way we perceive "things" or objects, and how we perceive the "space" between things. We, in our society at least, have acquired the habit of dividing the world into discrete objects which are separated by boundaries and distances.

How does this habit limit our creativity? By limiting our modes of perception, pinned down by habitual concepts we reduce the variety of perception of the way things are. For instance you and I perceive water as something to drink or something to wash with. However a fish perceives the water as home and as something to breathe. By allowing both perceptions the artist can discover whole new ways to create, whole new subjects to explore.

The Impressionists painted light because they trained themselves to not just see the light on the objects but also to see light as the object. That is they trained themselves to not differentiate between a flower and the light that was striking the flower. With this relaxation of a specific pattern of seeing, they created an entire artistic movement called Impressionism.

For centuries, musicians saw music as a series of notes played on a musical instrument separated by spaces called "rests." In one way a rest was seen as an object because it was indicated in a score by a symbol rather than by distance between notes. However there was a definite bias between notes and rests because musicians really saw the rests as pauses between the music. All songs were composed mainly by notes in rhythmic durations with an occasional rest to make non rhythmic spaces. In 1952 John Cage composed 4' 33'' which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of a musician not playing an instrument. This piece actually has three movements but in total there are no notes played. Although one might see this as an experiment in silence it might just as well be an experiment in environmental music where the background noise is the music; either way, a new concept in composing and a new way of perceiving music was inaugurated.

How can we break out of our habitual patterns of perception? More on that next time.

Rectangular Living: On Being Curvaceous

2009-06-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

We live in rectangles. We live in our rectangular houses, we enter and exist these houses through doors, and we look in or out of our houses through windows. When we leave the house we walk our towns and our cities which are increasingly rectangular, from the village square to the shopping malls. Our movie theaters are the same shape and we watch our films on rectangular screens. It could be argued that our cars are not rectangular but more like "round-tangles," but this is really a small argument on the limits of creating actual right angles, and again the automobiles have windows and mirrors which shape and curtail our view.

If you are reading this article, then chances are, you are reading it via a rectangle. A web page displayed on a desktop monitor, or a laptop, possibly via a PDA, cell phone, or Kindle, or (horror of horrors), via the printed page. More and more of our lives are altered by viewing the world through windows, rather than direct experience with an odd shaped universe. In 1946, we received our first view of the earth from space and then in the Sixties we received our first views of the earth from the moon, which showed the earth to be round (ok, roundish). Of course, we knew that long before but here were the images to prove it. Those rectangular images, however, were in rectangular newspapers and on rectangular televisions. Our planet and our moon have right no angles, but our experiences of them do.

A while ago, I decided to replace the habit of rectangular living with the habit of being curvaceous. If one looks at the human body it is filled with nothing but bulbous lumps of flesh which when viewed from some distance may attract or repulse but which are all remarkably similar in the end. If you have read anything on the nature of fractals, then ones view of the universe may be more jaggy than curvaceous, but this is really a matter of scale and the anti-aliasing effects (think smoothing), of the human visual system. Either way, jaggy or smooth, the universe is not cut up into rectangles and limited by edges of view.

Here are a few tips on being curvaceous:

Take a walk in the morning before reading the paper, surfing the net, or watching television. Notice the structure of trees, the structure of leaves, the structure of insects, birds, squirrels, and dogs. Look up and notice the shape of clouds. Are they wispy or puffy? Any right Angles?
Hold a piece of fruit in your hand. Or hold a vegetable . Feel the smoothness of the skin, the curve of it's form.
Look out through the window into the yard. What do you notice, what do you see? Now walk out the door in the same direction and experience that space directly. What do you see now? What do you smell? What do you feel? This is a more direct experience of the way your yard really is. If you don't have a yard then do the same with your neighborhood. The point is to smell the world. Feel the world.
Get the permission of a person in your life, trace the lines of their body with your hands. Gently squeeze their flesh and feel how their body reshapes itself in response to interaction with your body.
Go swimming in the ocean or a large lake, is the surface of the water flat when the waves are over your head?
Find a large tree and close your eyes while feeling the bark. Gently wrap your arms around the tree and let your face rest against the bark. Smell the tree.

Being curvaceous is not about having a more shapely sexy body, it is about awareness. It is about experiencing the non-rectangular world and building the habit of being aware of how things are.