Anyway

One of the things people always ask you as a teen­ager, or in job inter­views, or when you’re con­tem­plat­ing doing some­thing new, is: what do you want to do? And the ques­tion­er is often dis­ap­poin­ted when you don’t have a barn-burn­ing deeply-held spe­cif­ic desire just wait­ing there. Answers that are more gen­er­ic (albeit equally import­ant), such as ‘some­thing inter­est­ing’, or ‘some­thing use­ful’ are some­how unsat­is­fact­ory, even when coupled with a gen­er­al idea of the area in which you want to do some­thing use­ful and interesting. 

This morn­ing I read From “sit still” to “scratch your own itch” and it’s full of descrip­tions of expect­a­tions for pro­gram­mers that res­on­ate with me, such as the expect­a­tion that “a REAL pro­gram­mer or a REAL open source con­trib­ut­or is sup­posed to be a self-starter who comes up with their own pro­ject ideas from the start”. The art­icle has some tech­niques to stop these expect­a­tions from being over­power­ing or intim­id­at­ing. The author sug­gests, for example, that writ­ing Yet Anoth­er {Some­thing Simple} is fine, just like sew­ing an item from a pat­tern (or in my case, knit­ting it). You learn from that, and expand your knowledge.

In my case, mov­ing from pro­ject man­age­ment back into more tech­nic­al work, what helped was work­ing through online tutori­als until I was far enough along to be able to start writ­ing my own use­ful stand-alone pro­jects. Some­times I’ve sur­prised myself by how much tech­nic­al know­ledge from 10 or more years ago comes back, like wak­ing the tech­nic­al brain up again that was dormant for a while. I guess, for me, that was the itch that needed to be scratched.

It hap­pens every year — the slides are due for the XML Sum­mer School, and some people have them done early, and oth­ers don’t. Some­times it’s because Life Hap­pens — fam­ily mem­bers fall ill, bosses demand more hours, oth­er people on whom you’re depend­ing are late. Some­times it’s because you hit the log­jam or just can­’t get star­ted. (By which I mean me, not just you). The same dead­line dilemma applies to oth­er pro­jects, of course; any task that takes more than 10 minutes, and some­times even those, just Don’t Get Done.

Get­ting oth­er stuff done first can be use­ful to clear the decks, as it were. Struc­tured pro­cras­tin­a­tion can be a good way to get oth­er neces­sary tasks com­pleted in an effort to hold off the really import­ant, urgent, fright­en­ingly loom­ing task. But even­tu­ally you (by which I mean me) actu­ally do have to start work­ing on the pro­ject, have to find the motiv­a­tion from somewhere.

A couple of years ago I dis­covered the Pomodoro tech­nique. When I remem­ber to use it, it solves the prob­lem in a num­ber of ways.

The prin­ciple of work for 20 minutes, then take a 5 minute break, repeat until done is simple. It means I can give myself a reward at the end of the 20 minutes (stand up, stretch, tidy up the desk, get a glass of water). I take notes on inter­est­ing ideas or items that might side-track me, that I can get back to after the 20 minutes are up (or even later), rather than fol­low­ing them dur­ing the work time. And after 20 minutes of doing some­thing on the pro­ject, the momentum has built up and I want to keep going, want to fin­ish what I’m work­ing on. 

Nice side-effects — my office is tidi­er (I often do that dur­ing the 5‑minute break), and I think my work is bet­ter because I haven’t got side-tracked. Often which end of the ele­phant you start with is less import­ant than get­ting star­ted — you can always start at anoth­er end in the next work chunk. Mak­ing myself take a break for 5 minutes every 20 helps me pace myself. I stretch, stand up, breathe more deeply than when hunched over the com­puter screen, and feel less tired at the end of the day. I often also have ideas dur­ing the 5‑minute break that help solve whatever issue I’m work­ing on, or make it better.

Unfuck Your Hab­it­at uses the same prin­ciple — either 20 minutes on, 10 off (the 20/10), or 45 minutes on and 15 off (45/15), for clean­ing, study, or whatever needs to be done. The tagline that speaks to me the most? IT’S 20 MINUTES, NOT A LIFETIME COMMITMENT. (Their caps).

Notes: I don’t use the full pomodoro sys­tem with review and I don’t track inter­rupts. Maybe I’d get more bene­fit if I did, but I don’t feel the need.

Tools: you can get by with a kit­chen timer, but you need one that does both times (20/5, 20/10, or whatever com­bin­a­tion). I use Xor­Time on Win­dows, Pomodoro Desktop on the Mac (which appears to have been dis­con­tin­ued), and Pomo­droido (minus all the lead­er­board stuff) on Android. I turn off the tick­ing sound on all of them as I find it annoy­ing and distracting.

Now I just have to remem­ber to use this tech­nique more often. I wish I could use it in hours-long phone calls and meetings!

I know a couple of people who are on the pess­im­ist­ic side of the Peak oil hypo­thes­is, and a couple who are equally fer­vent in their optim­ist­ic belief (the idea being that we’ll always find more and/or tech­no­logy will save the day). As is my wont, I’m some­where in the middle, think­ing we’re likely to find more oil and nat­ur­al gas, but that it should still be con­served, at least until we have more pro­gress on the vari­ous replace­ment tech­no­lo­gies. Someone (I for­get who) recom­men­ded I read James Howard Kunst­ler­’s book “The Long Emer­gency” (Amazon US link, Amazon CA link). It’s an inter­est­ing read, albeit a little dated (it was pub­lished in 2006). He tends to skim over some issues such as the import­ance of the trans­ition from lots of oil to little oil, and the writ­ing does tend to the breath­less (although it’s far bet­ter in the book than on his blog). I’d recom­mend at least skim­ming through it if you’re inter­ested in the issues, maybe bor­row it from the loc­al lib­rary as I did.

What the book did accom­plish was to make me think about the con­sequences of a world in which oil is much more expens­ive than it is now. It does­n’t need to be the case that we can­’t find any more; a ser­i­ous insur­rec­tion in Saudi Ara­bia that caused major dis­rup­tions to the flow of oil is not out of the ques­tion these days, and China is using an ever-increas­ing pro­por­tion of the world’s oil, which will auto­mat­ic­ally res­ult in price increases.

Some of the ques­tions are easy to ask: What hap­pens if the cost of ship­ping cheap goods from China trebles, or quin­tuples, or worse? What hap­pens to com­muters when the cost of get­ting to work is mul­ti­plied by 3, or 5, or 10? As the cost of heat­ing goes up, how many more people will die of the cold in unheated, unin­su­lated, houses? What hap­pens to the cost of food (a large factor of the Tunisi­an upris­ing) as the cost of the fuel rises, giv­en that the Green Revolu­tion that saved so many lives depends on cheap pet­ro­leum-based fertilisers?

The price of oil has­n’t gone below $50 per bar­rel for the last 5 years (accord­ing to http://www.oil-price.net/). We don’t know what’s next: it may hov­er around $100 per bar­rel for a while, or leap to a much high­er level; either way there should be at least some dis­cus­sion of what oil is best used for, what we can sub­sti­tute oth­er tech­no­lo­gies for, and an invest­ment in those tech­no­lo­gies before we need them. There are options already for power gen­er­a­tion, even if most of them also have issues, but there seems to be less focus on food and trans­port (both people and goods), and if any­thing, there seems to be an ever-increas­ing use of pet­ro­leum-based plastic mater­i­als. I don’t see much pro­duct­ive dis­cus­sion around these issues — any­one got good point­ers that don’t veer off too much into apo­ca­lyptic fervour?