Recently I did a CFAR workshop. No one has settled on a good description of CFAR, but I think a good one would be “getting the different parts of your brain to coordinate with each other.” The further I get from CFAR the more positively I view the experience, which suggests that I did the same thing with EA Global, which suggests I overestimated CFAR’s primary flaw (not being EA Global), which makes me view it even more positively.
CFAR suggests you go into the workshop with a problem to solve. Fortunately but perhaps inconveniently, I went through a personal growth spurt right before CFAR. It’s not that I was out of problems to solve, but the repercussions of the previous solutions had not yet worked their way through the system so it was hard to see what the next round would be. Then I solved food. For those of you who are just tuning in, I have/had lifelong medical issues that made food physically difficult, which made it psychologically difficult, which made the physical issues worse. Clearing out all the anxiety around food in a weekend is not a small thing. But to really achieve it’s full power I have to follow it up with things like “how do you choose food based on things other than terror?” and “stoves: how do they work?” So that’s a bunch more work.*
I left CFAR with some new things and some refinement on some old things. I didn’t want to lose what I’d gotten at the workshop so I tried to do follow ups but I felt… full. Defensive. Like it was attempting to take up space in my brain and if it succeeded I would lose a lot of work.
My way of solving problems, which is either what CFAR teaches too or what I extracted from whatever CFAR actually does, is to understand them super well. Eventually a solution just falls out and application is trivial.** Some of this comes from focused thought, but there’s a lot of opportunistic noticing. I store bits of information until suddenly they coalesce into a pattern. As anyone who’s read Getting Things Done will tell you, storing information in your brain is expensive. So I decided I needed a way to store all this opportunistic data, plus things from the conscious experiments I was running, to keep it all straight.
This is hard to do. Take the comparatively simple “go to gym every day”. There are 400 billion apps that will track this for me and I have never stuck with one of them, because they are boring and seeing the numbers go up doesn’t motivate me for more than a week. More generally, I’ve never been able to get into quantified self because if I know what data to measure the problem is already solved. I don’t really care how many calories I burned. I do care what mental blocks inhibited me from going (bed so comfy, outside is cold, feeling like I stayed in bed too long and now I have to do Real Work) and how I maneuvered things so it didn’t take willpower to fight those (“remember how you feel much more productive after the gym and have an awesome job that doesn’t care when you work?”). There is no app for that.
Then there are more difficult problems like “New information indicates I handled something 9 months ago really poorly, but I’m not sure what I’d do differently then with only the information I had at the time, without causing other problems.” Or “My friend triggered an intense premortem that made me realize I’m ignoring information on project X just like I did with project Y last year, but I don’t know what that information is.” I still don’t know what I’m going to do about the former, for the latter I tracked “things that feel like they’re hitting the same part of my brain” until a pattern emerged. Tracking patterns for “things you are actively trying not to think about” is not cheap.
So I needed a system that could hold this information for me, that would show me information I didn’t realize was connected as I recorded it. Without being cluttered. The closest analogy I could come up with was an old timey naturalist. They had a bunch of set things they knew they were looking for (what eats this flower), but also wanted to record cool things and then be able to connect to other cool things later (why are all these finches different yet similar?). I don’t know how old timey naturalists did that with pen and paper because that did not work for me at all. I tried workflowy and a google docs but just sat there frozen, unable to figure out how to sort the information.
My CFAR partner Tilia Bell had a really good idea, which was to use a private wordpress blog. I could give an entry as many tags as I wanted, and read tags when they felt relevant. Or just the success tag, because winning feels nice. This was a huge improvement, but wordpress is kind of clunky and annoying. In particular, the tagging system does not flow at all.
I talked about it with Brian, who suggested a one person slack. I could use channels for defined projects and tags for observations I wanted to connect later. To be fair, this idea is three hours old. On the other hand, in 20 minutes applying it I figured out what piece of information I was ignoring in that problem my brain didn’t want to look at. I’m not saying it’s the sole cause, I’ve gathered a lot of information this past week. But since “connecting things I already noticed” is pretty much its point, it seems promising.
*My nutritionist is finding me much easier to work with now.
**I’m exaggerating some but it’s more true than it has any right to be.
Aceso Under Glass 