Foggy mornings

Almost seems like a crime to post these in the days of sun and warmth, but walking to my tube station in the early morning yesterday I was almost afraid I'd walk into a Stephen King movie.

Spring is coming

5 things this week:

• journaling
• hanging out with wonderful people
• playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• watching My Mad Fat Diary
• taking it (very) easy

I bought the journal above only this weekend. I keep seeing these in the shops, and I keep thinking what perfect presents they make (and would make if anybody wanted to give me one...), so during the time leading up to a difficult situation I was about to have, I thought I finally deserved getting one.

I've got nothing to write today. My brain is in a jumble. Here, have some more pictures of spring:

Productivity Month, Week 3 and 4 – On listening

Yep, this is the colour of my desk. Believe me, it hurts me more than it hurts you.

Altogether, February hasn't been the greatest month. At the beginning, I was pumped to get things going, be more productive, create more, do more, and get things going in my life. It has happened, but unfortunately it hasn't happened as much as I'd like to.

So right now, I'm setting up my life on Evernote (How did I live without Evernote all these years?) while reading the book above to make it more organised (Sneer all you want at self-help books if that's something you do, but come on, "mind like water"? YES PLEASE TEACH ME). I'm trying to eat well, sleep well and take care of myself, and just do whatever I can.

One thing this month has definitely taught me is listening.

I have an odd relationship with noise. I'm super-sensitive to it; if you live with me and you meet me in the evening with murder in my eyes, you better turn down the volume of your TV. On the other hand, I absolutely cannot stand complete silence. I used to be able to do that, but these days nothing gets done if I don't have background noise.

There are studies on how moderate ambient noise makes us more creative, how music helps us perform mental tasks, and if anybody knows a study that explains why I love listening to whole movies while working, please point me towards it. Either way, the right kind of background noise can boost our performance massively.

So here is a list of my 5 favourite online noise providers:

1. Rainy Mood

The classic. Best rain loop I'm aware of, and it comes with different music every day if you want to.

2. Coffitivity

I don't use this one very often, but you can switch between three different loops of a café in the morning, a lunchtime cafeteria, and a campus café. It's nice if you're looking for voices.

3. soundrown

10(!) different kinds of background noises which you can play simultaneously at different volumes. A café on fire, in the rain!
Seriously though, I love the coffee shop and the birds. The most precious, though, is definitely the train. I switch the train on when I need to focus at work. Usually it's a task I don't want to do, and it does wonders getting my mind on track.

4. Noisli

 My favourite. A selection of 14 (FOURTEEN be still my beating heart) different sounds you can also mix at different volume levels. It even changes background colour at all times, and there's a text editor I'm crying tears of joy inside it's like OmmWriter in your browser it's so wonderful. The sounds are great, and you even get white, pink and brown noise if you're into that. My absolute favourite are the leaves, though; they make me happy.

5. 8tracks

If you're looking for some Mozart Effect, browse 8tracks. It's full of all kinds of wonderful playlists, but oh my do I love the ones created for writing. I first really discovered 8tracks when I started work and needed some instrumental Christmas music to get me through December. There's even a rating system so you can find the most popular, most liked mixes (usually the most awesome). It's... just... my love for 8tracks cannot be put into words. I don't get any creative writing done without it.

Right. And yet again I have successfully avoided doing the work I actually wanted to do. Hooray structured procrastination!

And a compass wouldn't help at all – but fiction might

Le fils de l'épicier (The Grocer's Son), 2007

Happy March y'all! I'm currently procrastinating. But writing a blog post means it's structured procrastination, so we're good.

Last night I watched The Grocer's Son, a film I inherited on DVD from a former flatmate, like, six months ago. In short, it's about a young man who, having left his family years ago to live in la City de Light, returns to the country when his father falls ill. Taking over the family business of a travelling grocery shop, he finds himself quite unable to relate to the people he's meant to be helping, or his family, or... anyone, really.

I found myself really liking this movie. First off, the south of France is gorgeous and now I want to go there. I adored the snappy exchanges between the characters, and the visuals are beautiful. What got me most, however, was the humanity.

This film does an extraordinary job capturing human emotions and human behaviour, and doing this in a very subtle way. The three main themes I recognised were bitterness (Antoine is so caught up in his resentment of his parents that he's unable to relate to other people), pride (Antoine's father, forced to rest and unable to provide for his family and help the people who depend on his work, lashing out aggressively at the people closest to him) and something like fear of commitment (both Antoine and Claire are unable to fully acknowledge their mutual attraction, and it ends up in painful awkwardness and hurt feelings). There is certainly more – I also saw compassion, friendship, and a good deal of sorrow (especially in Antoine's mother, bless her soul). It's not an epic story, nor a hugely impressive one. But I enjoyed it thorougly, for the very reason that it wasn't outstanding. These things happen. Often.

The way people behave has been a mystery for as long as I can remember. The more people I meet, the more confused I get. Hell, my own actions and reactions barely make sense – quite often I find myself doing or saying something, while some part of my mind goes, "What is happening? Why is this happening? Why are you doing that? I DO NOT APPROVE."
I don't know if anybody else is as clueless as I am, but it isn't easy. Maybe that's why I go for pretty much anything that could possibly make some sense of this mess – psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social science. All my non-fiction books fit into one of those categories. (Anyone read The Examined Life? I only read it last week; during some chapters it was like a brilliant ray of light had come shining down straight from the heavens to illuminate the darkest corners of my clueless mind. Seriously though, it's good.)
But most of all, there is fiction.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

— George R.R. Martin

I've had discussions with people who don't read fiction. I've had discussions with people who think studying literature is useless (the audacity!). Fact is, as much as it is entertainment, fiction is also the study of human nature. DEAL WITH IT, haters.

In fiction I find stories similar to my own – situations and people I can relate to. But even more importantly, I can find stories that are not my own at all. And this becomes invaluable when I can use it in my own life.

Take The Grocer's Son, for example. I'm not a very proud person, so I don't relate well to proud people. Watching the father in the movie, unable to work and provide for his family, take out his frustration on his loved ones, gave me a lightbulb moment. I understood him (somewhat) – and then I remembered scenes from my own life. Slightly similar situations, and people whose behaviour was a mystery, and BOOM – some assholes have just been humanised.
I'm not saying I've found the capital-T Truth in this movie, but there is the occasional discovery of parallels that makes it just slightly easier to at least imagine other people being people. And whether I'm right about them or not doesn't matter. What matters is that someone I've filed under "massive douchebag" becomes a lot easier to deal with once I entertain the idea that there might be an understandable reason for their behaviour. (Which, funnily, is what the capital-T Truth is about after all.)

Not everybody might know a Sherlock Holmes or a Severus Snape, or even a Walter White. But their stories will always be, in some small way, reminiscent of other people's stories, and by humanising them we can hope to find a way to humanise our own personal enemies and enigmas.

And if some "entertaining" movie, or novel, or comic, helps me with that?
Then, I say:

---

PS: Yep, the first part of this post title is totally from this song.
PPS: I'm also mighty proud I managed to link to three fantastic and improving texts you should absolutely read within just one post. Must be the structured procastination.

DROP EVERYTHING, I WENT TO EDINBURGH

This is where I was when I should have been writing the recap of Week 3.

Productivity Month, Week 2 – On Internet use

When in doubt about life and all that, go to the V&A.

So last week I said I would not use the Internet, from home, for six whole days. I did not make that completely (I read my RSS feeds on Friday night, and was back on Youtube on Saturday), but I've definitely calmed down a lot. It's been an interesting week.

I believe my current Internet behaviour is a remnant of the olden times, when I was growing up. I'm old enough to have experienced a world completely without Internet (in those days we read books!), but I still had my first own email address at the age of ten.
However, it took me and my mum a relatively long time to switch to a fast 24/7 connection. We must've used dial-up for at least five years, so my use of the Internet was always characterised by

1. Paying by the minute,
2. which led to a limited time span of availability (1 hour a day),
3. which led to long afternoons of offline activity,
4. and a painfully slow connection.

For a long time I didn't take part in online discussions since I wasn't around often enough to follow the conversations. Every day that precious hour needed to be planned in advance, and every day, after the obligatory question "Are you finished? Can I turn it off?", I knew I'd only seen a tiny glimpse of what was out there.

Now being connected everywhere, at all times, is what we all know, but I haven't outgrown this sense of urgency I felt during those years. Whenever I am at my computer, and the Wi-Fi is on and I'm connected, I get just the slightest bit nervous. I feel like now is the time, and if I don't use it I won't have the time later. So this compulsion to browse the Internet whenever I have access never really goes away.

And it seems to trump everything else. For example: I like buying magazines. (They're like tumblr, but on paper! Hah.) I always buy them, flick through them and never read them. This past Monday, when I woke up and found myself with my morning cappuccino and no Internet, what was the first thing I did? I picked up a magazine and read it cover to cover. And I registered a thought, running somewhere very quietly in the background: I've got nothing better to do.

Our brain loves new stuff, and the Internet constantly provides us with new stuff, and at any time, some of it could be interesting. While this is obviously a fantastic thing (I just spent five minutes googling for an article to link to, looked at about ten and found about three suitable ones – so much information!), this is what glues us to the Internet. This is why we constantly and habitually check our social media channels. This is why I can't get off tumblr or Youtube.

I also can't get off tumblr or other blogs because especially these outlets enable me to live vicariously through others. My own life isn't always great, but LOOK AT THAT BEDSPREAD and LOOK AT THOSE MOUNTAINS aaaahhh that makes me feel better. It's escapism. It encourages imagining and dreaming, and no matter how many productivity and self development articles you read, looking at someone's lifestyle blog is instant gratification and working on your own life is not. And unfortunatly, as usually, the more vulnerable people are, the worse the effect:

Regular media habits don't become really bad media habits or addictions without some help – often, depression or anxiety is involved. For those experiencing these states, being online starts as a pleasant distraction from everyday worries but can soon become a problem of its own. What can happen is that going online becomes a habitual reaction to feeling depressed, or experiencing some other aversive state. Once the linkage between emotional state and habitual response is established, it can be remarkably difficult to break down. It's a vicious cycle because depression leads to bad media habits, which leads to negative life events, which then leads back to more bad media habits.

Jeremy Dean, Making Habits, Breaking Habits

My own Internet behaviour worries me because this is what could happen. I don't like my living environment at the moment, and I find that, when I come home, I just want to put on headphones and shut out the world around me. When I didn't have the Internet this week, I just put on a DVD and did the same. I didn't automatically get to work, so I don't think that connection to the Internet per se has an effect on my productivity – it's more how I use it.

Before I went off the web for a few days, my level of distraction was so high I sometimes paused one video to start watching another. I've calmed down now, and my habits have been broken – I don't need my RSS feeds first thing in the morning. I don't need a connection as much in general. I'm perfectly happy to just be out of the house in the evenings, and I don't miss the online world.

For the upcoming week I will keep my computer off in the mornings, simply because that makes my mornings a bit quieter. I will also try what I'll call the Joe Hill approach – recreational use of the web only after I've completed a number of tasks I've set for myself. Wish me luck.


For those interested in reading about the Interwebs and our brains, best start with the classics:

• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008)
• Nicholas Carr, "The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember" (2010)
• [Video] "What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains [Epipheo.TV]"

Productivity Month, Week 1 – I was not ready

I bought an art print and framed it. Then I bought flowers to match the frame. Like a grown-up.

In my last post I wrote about how pumped I was to get things going this month. So, naturally, this week – nothing happened. In fact, it was even worse than the week before.

It was already clear on Monday. Using a variety of loopholes to sabotage myself, I just decided that this week wasn't going to bring me any joy in terms of productivity. So I sat down and watched myself instead, to... learn from my pre-planned failure, I guess?

Here's what happened:

1) I wrote down what I did at work. I've long wondered how I actually spend my time at work, so I made a list and checked in with myself every 15 minutes. I've long suspected that I have certain productive and non-productive times, and at the end of the day, there they were black on white: I'm basically useless between 10am and 3pm. During that time frame, everything is a slog and distractions are most tempting. However I focus like a boss in the (very) early morning and late afternoon.

2) I worked from home. Thanks to a disruption on public transport I worked from home for two days, which I would not recommend to anyone who only has one room to sleep, work and live in.
During those two days at home, I did nothing but work. In the evenings I had to force myself out of the house to stop and get out of that mindsoace, and when I got back in, I fell into the usual stupor.
I cannot work and play in the same place. This even goes for distractions. At home, I'm on Youtube. When I have a bit of free time in the office, I read essays, sites like lifehacker, and news websites. So when I'm not working on job things, I work on myself – because I'm in a work mindset.

3) I found the right amount of noise. Earlier this week I discovered soundrown, which is so awesome it'll get its own post soon. But it wasn't just ambient noise I discovered.
I'm currently addicted to Breaking Bad. When I was working from home, I had two laptops anyway, sooo... I got through a lot of episodes a day, playing in the background while I was getting work done. I barely remember a thing that happened in Season 3 (people probably got shot 'n stuff), but those hours just flew by. Background noise makes me focus better. Yep, even TV shows.

So what's up for next week?

A few days ago I read about how the brain is not designed to deal with all the distractions we come across every day – junk food, video games, the Internet – and that our inherent preferences for these "supernatural stimuli" can make us come back to them so often that it becomes harmful.

I don't have to think long about what my Enemy No. 1 is. So, for the next 6 days I will not access the Internet from home.
Exceptions to this rule are my email, lynda.com and soundrown.


I'm mildly nervous about this.