ScatteredGenius.com

I’ve never liked the idea of twitter, but I didn’t know why until I read up on these things.

I’ve often studied the many ways that we communicate with each other, and have an idea of a bit of a spectrum or two on how we do so. Sometimes I chart it out in my head as to how intimate the connections are, with one extreme being two humans melding minds and reading thoughts, and the other being seeing some writing on a wall.

Twitter exemplifies another scenario in my head, which is basically ‘what is the smallest unit of diary-esqeu documentation can you make…’ It’s based around the concept that you’re technically answering the question “what are you doing right now?”

I’ve come to realize at this moment, though, that I don’t like twitter because it’s exactly too technically interruptive in my life. I have big issues with focus, flow, and being ‘in the zone’ in terms of work. I long for a job where I’ll get my own office, where I can focus and concentrate and not be distracted by people walking around or music playing or having to prevent myself from eavesdropping. Basically I have trouble getting in the zone:

Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy. It’s like rem sleep – you don’t just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.

Another example I stumbled upon when looking into this stuff:

Here’s the simple algebra. Let’s say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we’re really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can’t remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he’s sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

So this article sums up my main issue:
Creating Passionate Users: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve

The crux of my point is that knowing that there’s a bunch of tweets going on out there constantly, I’m more inclined to check things constantly. You know what I’m talking about when I say I check my email constantly, I check my friends away messages constantly, I check livejournals and forums and communities and feed readers. There’s enough information out there that you can do nothing but ‘check’ all day long. I’m sure you also know what I mean when I say how passively antsy you get when all of your sources of information are ‘caught up’ and there’s no new information to consume. Twitter is the heroin to this vein.

It’s not all bad, I don’t hate it. I think people are doing cool stuff with twitter like this: twistori

I, of course, went ahead and made a twitter account and will likely play with it. I’m fascinated by the idea, I really truly love the idea, but I can’t suffer any more distractions. I know I won’t use it but, like with most all of my other ’social networking’ things, I will make one so I can at least participate.

So for my last birthday, my friend got me a CD of The Dip. Pretty cool, read by the author. In short, this is about the following two fairly simple concepts.

• Becoming the best in the world.
• Dips and CulDeSacs
• Strategic quitting

Becoming the best in the world may sound a little self-helpish, at first but it comes with some interesting qualifiers. Being the best (x134) means knowing exactly what your niche is. It should be very specific. The ‘in the world‘ part is something you define as well. What ‘world’ are you trying to be ‘the best’ in?

Some examples:
“I want to be the most affordable chiropractor in Los Angeles.”
“I want to make the best custom-made gothic lolita outfits on the internet!”
“I want to offer moving services which allow as short notice as possible in the phone book.”

I guess in some ways it’s a mission statement of sorts. It’s worth mentioning that he brings up the long tail. This concept, in short, is that something like ‘first and second place make the most money by themselves, but places 3 through 10 equal a the same total amount of success.” This concept is best explained by things like amazon or itunes selling really obscure stuff for cheap vs. selling all the popular stuff for ‘expensive.’ The total cheap sales add up. So I bring this up because one might say, “But why be the best in the world? The long tail is proven to work? Why can’t I ‘focus’ on being places 3rd through 10th?” His answer of course is fine, if that is your focus, then make that your ‘best’. I.e. provide people with the widest selection of obscure whatevers ever.

As a side note, you can look at existing ‘bests in the world’ and frame them as such. I.e. World of Warcraft, while it might be ‘the best MMO ever,’ more specifically it can be ‘the most polished mmo with the most gradual learning curve, while still being easy to play if needed.’ or ‘the best and most balanced team-based player vs. player arena experience’ or whatever. He goes on to say if you’re trying to be the best in the world at something that someone already is the best in the world at, I.e. “The most delicious cola drink in the world,” or “best mint toothpaste in the world,’ you see that there’s already people with that title, so barring any crazy circumstances, don’t compete unless you change some paradigms. The awesome example he gave for this was how Microsoft basically has the monopoly on ‘the best word processing and spreadsheeting software in the world,’ but looking at things like Google Docs, they are pretty damn awesome, but changing then to say then google has made ‘the best, free, web-based word processing and spreadsheeting applications on the internet’.

Dips and Cul De Sacs are fairly simple to understand. A dip is a period of work when it stops being fun and starts being work. The part where you stop learning and start having to ’slog through it.’ It’s also, coincidentally, the period when you most want to quit things. Cul De Sacs are basically dips with no end. It’s basically a dead end, where you’re working on stuff with no considerable outcome. Advice is given on how to recognize if your issue is a dip or culdesac, if you can change your culdesac into a dip, and if your dip is worth powering through or quitting. It sounds really corny, I know, but that’s why he wrote the book and I didn’t.

The sections on strategic quitting were basically empowering advice explaining to you that quitting is ok, and how to recognize what needs quitting. The point of quitting something is help consolidate your resources so that you can use that energy to push through other ‘dips’ you’re stuck on. It’s contrary, he points out early, to what most self help-ish stuff advises, OMG NEVER QUIT! but in actuality it has some very good benefits. As he’s talking, my mind of course walked down the lists and lists of projects that I’ve not even started yet for this reason, which was reassuring. I’ve often complained about taking on too many side projects and never finishing any of them, so to use his words, I was in the dips of all of them and quit all of them. It was a cycle. It also has made me critical of any ‘open loops’ and dips I’m currently in and am taking the steps to decide to quit on a few of them. Quitting can also mean shelving, imo. One example being how I recently trashed hundreds of old archived blog posts I was trying to slog through. Having just erased them all made me have that much more time each day of not having to post links, and can now be spent on procrastinating on other things.

I highly recommend reading/listening to it, especially if you’re in any kind of rut. It’s a good perspective-shifter.

Look. I’m sorry. I had over FOUR HUNDRED LINKS that I had backlogged and wanted to show the world, but it was just becoming so unbearable to try to do so. For the longest time I was using this blog as a bookmarking type thing, saying ‘oh I’ll look at this later,” instead of immediately putting it up. It snowballed and soon a few links became OVER FOUR HUNDRED.

Knowing that even if I posted like 10 links a day, it would take me FOURTY DAYS to post all of the links, and that’s assuming I get no new links at all. Knowing that I get 5 or so links a day that would mean something like FOUR MONTHS TIME of TEN LINKS A DAY before I had no backlog.

And it’s less ‘omg must share’ and now more ‘omg must catch up.’

So in an act of desperation, I’ve deleted a majority of the links. Should I come across them again, in smaller bite-sized periods of time, I will repost. However now I have a ‘void of internet’ that goes back as far as November. Fads have come and gone and aren’t worth posting about, etc etc. So I might end up double posting some things that I forgot I posted a long time ago.

Again, I’m sorry. I feel much better now to be caught up, my life much more consolidated, and the buzzing in my head is quieter.

I now have a handy dandy place to put all featured ScatteredGenius.com content now.

http://www.scatteredgenius.com/features/

I’ve found that this Vertical Mapping thing is kind of radical. I think you should try it.
(Continued)