walls.corpus

Deliberately spending time

Monday, 04 January, 2010 — mindfulness productivity

I’ve been reading New Year’s related tweets and links with interest over the last few days. New Year’s and resulting resolutions make for a favorite time to rethink prioritization and life lived. I’m in that considering group. I changed jobs not quite halfway through 2009 and became a manager in October. Consequently, I’m very deliberately studying my new role, where I want to go and how I want to get there. I’m also looking at personal goals.

Three books I’ve read in the last 12 months are shaping my thinking. I recently finished Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less. I eagerly devoured Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning after his presentation at the inaugural Developer Day. After I landed the new gig, but before becoming a manager, I read Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans.

I found more value in the last two books than in The Power of Less, quite probably since most of the material is very similar to what I’ve read elsewhere. If you’re familiar with 37signals and underdoing your competition, David Allen’s Getting Things Done or even Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Babauta’s not breaking much new ground for you.

But, what I have been focusing on after reading Babauta’s book is refining my processes of time management. Despite the book not striking me as original thinking, I may be working with it best in terms of actually getting my butt in gear and establishing new habits. Enter Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and something Lopp/Rands calls the Trickle List.

After reading The Power of Less I found myself thinking of several things I want to spend time on, and get cranky about when I don’t. I decided to use one of the techniques Hunt talks about — a mental map. On it went things I already do out of habit, things I want to start doing. It’s ambitious, more for the amount of things I want to try to get to, but I’m not planning on doing everything every day, either. Nor are these things that are particularly large. It is a helpful tool for me to see what spills out as important. I’m going to turn this into my own trickle list (possibly two, split between work and home).

As the seed of this post germinated, I saw two items on Twitter. The first was a tweet from my friend Steve Burnett, leading to the One Week Digital Cleanse. In a nut, spend the first week of the year without social media or spending time on empty net calories. Perhaps that Twitter/Facebook addiction isn’t so hard to break, after all. That’s more than I care to do. Instead, I’ve distilled what I want into this: Be deliberate about how and where I spend my time. What time I do spend on Twitter or watching Hulu is predicated on completely enjoying it. When it’s interfering with the other things I want to do and enjoy, stop.

The second Twitter item was from Dan Benjamin on New Year’s Day:

The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

While the New Year is a convenient time to decide on changing life, there is zero reason why right now is not a better time instead.

Mindfulness at a coffeeshop with a press pot emphasis

Tuesday, 05 May, 2009 — coffee mindfulness

I finally made it to Chapel Hill’s 3Cups for coffee this afternoon and it was a wonderful experience. I picked from a nice list of coffees, the staff was able to explain what I might like, based on stated roast preference (dark), and served it in a press pot with a timer. The second timer in the photo was for @5by5’s pot of chamomile tea, which was also incredibly tasty.

I chose a two-cup pot of Dolok Sanggul from Sumatra, which the tasting notes describe as “earthy” with spices and “hints of green peppers.” Perhaps it’s overly fussy, but I am interested in tasting some of the different flavors in my coffee. Tasting notes are a reminder to mindfully drink the coffee and enjoy it for itself rather than absently consume it.

Since it seems like everyone gets press pots or their own drip filters per order, the coffee is the absolute freshest you can have. Most places with large drip pots, including some of my favorite Raleigh shops, brew new every 60 to 90 minutes, and that’s pretty good. But if it’s fresh ground – and the grind for this was very coarse and almost springy – it’s encouragement to not load the coffee with milk or sugar but taste it strictly on its own merits. As fresh as other shops brew coffee, I’m not taking the time to slow down and pay sole attention to the coffee itself. It’s good, but I’m not focused on it.

Some other observations:

• 3Cups does coffee tastings every Saturday at noon. I marked a session on the calendar, if only to broaden my experience in tasting different coffees.
• I use a fairly coarse grind on my burr grinder and I’ve been very satisfied with the results. 3Cups’ grind seemed coarser still, with more ribbons and strands of bean. Again, it was springy against the plunger.
• I was also surprised at the amount of coffee 3Cups put in the press pot. About half again as much as I typically use, but I’ll try a coarser grind and more coffee and see what I think.

Anyhow, I’m on vacation and I made a long list of tasks I wanted to accomplish during the week. What I didn’t have on the list was drinking coffee as a solitary task. But, for about half-an-hour, that’s what I did, drank and savored coffee, relishing the experience with my wife.