More than Numbers

Technology has made tracking ourselves in numbers easier than ever. At a glance I can tell you how many miles I ran last month, last year, or in the last 3 years. I can tell you how many people follow me on Twitter. I can tell you how many songs I have in my music library, or how many photos I've taken with my phone. I can share a lot of numbers with you.

But numbers never, ever tell the whole story. Ever. They do not express value. They are not the story. They are not us, ultimately. We regularly try to assign value to numbers - in terms of stats, in terms of size and weight, in terms of those "good" and "bad" extremes.

How do we assign value to what we do, and what we say? How do we understand not the quantified self, but the qualified self?

 

Bigger and better than ever

Since the web became popular I've scooped up domain names here and there, thinking something would come of them someday. In the early days of my own domain, I considered splitting phonezilla.net (my personal site) into two sites. I wanted to test out my creativity and see if it made sense to separate my journal and personal information from my art and work. It didn't.

I wasn't quite sure where that second site would go. I experimented. But there wasn't a real goal in mind.

Sometime after that, web stats packages became available and popular. The parts of me that love numbers started to love these things and realized, "Ah! This is one of the reasons I'm doing websites! Because visitors." Note that - not people. Visitors. Hits. Page views. Referrers. All of that became increasingly important to me to the point that reviewing my site's stats became a daily ritual.

It grew from there. How can I get more people to read my stuff, or view my web projects? Getting listed on Yahoo!, sure. Trying to get on Cool Site of the Day, sure. Just getting out to more people. Not necessarily the right people - just people.

Over time, traffic to my site picked up a lot. Many, many more people were visiting my site in the early 2000s than now. But because of where I was at the time, I let one particularly nasty and relentless troll get to me, and I took all of it down. All of it. I found a risk to putting one's self on the web: getting hurt. And I got hurt, bad. My ideas of numbers and connecting with people and all of that was blown away by one person whose goal was to make my life miserable.

So I didn't have a website for a very long time. Here's the problem: I missed it. A lot. It ultimately took me about 7 1/2 years to figure out what my website could do, and should do, for me at this point in my life.

However, numbers

I mention all of this because of numbers. That part of me that still loves to obsess over numbers hasn't gone anywhere, so I check the stats for my site regularly.

But there's a twist now: if someone I respect favorites or retweets something I post (and especially if it's a link to something I wrote), that feels very good. It has at least as much meaning as a big day in the stats tab, if not much more.

More importantly, I interpret that as a connection with someone.

And that right there is why I do this.

Gone

One of the routes I run takes me up and down a main business district in my town. And, there's a plot of land that has been vacant for about 10 years or so, adjacent to a lovely historical building.

I remember the buildings on that site because one of them was the computer store where I worked in high school. My first job! So many first experiences there. I learned about hard work. I learned the basics of running a retail business. My boss introduced me to falafel.

But today that building is gone.

There was an adjacent building, a beautiful red brick 2-story commercial building, for a travel agency. It had a neon sign hanging over the sidewalk. "SEE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU LEAVE IT!" I saw that sign for all of my childhood, just about every day, even before I understood what it meant.

That building is gone too.

These things are temporary, and it is harsh for me to realize that in the present, these places don't exist anymore. Instead I tell stories and share memories of what happened in those places, and how those places were parts of my life.

What will we say about our places, our selves, and our lives? What do we say, now? And more importantly, what will we *do*?

I Never

As we learn and grow and live we create the story that is our life. We write that story intentionally... or not. Others read it. We live it.

A good story requires editing and revision. It's not static. It changes over time. It expands. It contracts. It has a journey and lessons learned. It can be fun or serious, or a little of both and everything in between. It can be long. It can be short. It can be all of these things.

But first we must ensure we're allowing ourselves to be open to many possibilities, many directions, many plots, and many subplots. What are you leaving out of your story that really could be let back in? How can you be more open to what's happening right now and do something truly great with that?

Big thanks to Whitney Hess for inspiring this one; our conversation around this topic will be on the next ep of Designing Yourself.

Taking Care of Your Needs

Last year I made a number of big observations about myself. One of them was that I was - to borrow a tech term - DDOSing myself. I wasn't giving myself the opportunity nor the space to allow my needs, my wants, and my desires to take any kind of shape.

Looking back at that piece, I found one throwaway sentence I want to come back to.

I'm thus carving out a space where I can get my needs met and also still be a non-jerk.

At the time I wasn't quite sure what that space would look like, so I didn't discuss it much. That post was more about the fact that, oh yeah, I have needs - and they are important. At the time, giving myself permission to feel that was a big step forward.

Just having that feeling is a great start, but I felt a little lost on what to do next.

Knowing Your Needs

I find it useful to check in with myself about my needs. Then, and only then, can I deal with them in a satisfying way. Here's a few ways I approach this.

First, is it immediate? If my stomach is rumbling, I'm hungry. I should try to not wait until I finish my current task to take care of myself unless I am physically unable to do so (like, say, giving a talk.) Whitney & I discussed this in episode 1 of Designing Yourself. (transcript here, below edited slightly for clarity)

...I can definitely remember times when I’ve held off going to the bathroom because I’ve really got to finish this screen or I’ve really got to finish this thing. And for goodness’ sake, your body’s saying, hey, we’ve got to go now. ... that’s a part of self-care. And it’s really weird to me, and very troubling when it’s a matter of something like going to the bathroom. These are really basic things. ...these are super basic, and we deny them. We say, "Hey, that can wait." Is that really taking care of yourself, really?

Short answer, no! It's not! If it's immediate, take care of yourself now. NOW.

All right. If it's not immediate, then I start to figure out when I can satisfy myself. For instance, if I feel the need to move my body, I check in with myself and see what I can do. Can I do something now like stand up from my desk and take a walk? No? Okay. That's sad. I think about time next: can I find a time soon that I can do this?

Mind you, a part of me will be upset if I can't find that time right now, but I need to call on other, calming parts of myself to say, "No, it's cool - we won't let this slip. It's important." One example: I would very much like a massage. But it requires a bit of planning (checking the schedule, finding a babysitter, scheduling the appointment, finding the money for it in my budget...) so I can't do it right now. Thus, I'll pop it in my to do list and prioritize it appropriately.

If the need isn't immediate and I feel it's important, then yes, it comes down to prioritizing this against everything else in my life, which is probably the most difficult thing to do. A massage for me isn't just a one-hour period of rest and care; it's also the planning that goes into it, including putting myself in a state of mind and presence where I can truly enjoy the massage and not feel stressed. That is not trivial!

The planning piece, then, includes all of those tasks outlined above plus this: is there anything that my family needs that is more important at that particular moment? Now, I always used to default to, "Yes!" in an effort to be selfless. But I found that if I always did that, I was actually not helping because it meant I was saying no to self-care. And when you don't take care of yourself, then you can't take care of others. Simple as that.

(I'm also in a position where I'm not, say, taking full-time care of a family member, or the like. I recognize this is a luxury and a privilege.)

At some later time, I'll (hopefully) come back to my to do list and break out "Get a massage" into discrete tasks. It's mechanical, but the mechanical parts of me need to lend a hand so I can have my needs met. Otherwise, I'll feel longing and sadness over having "Get a message" on my list and seeing no forward progress on it. And then I'm not really taking care of myself.

It's important

Again, self-care is important. Over time, you'll find an amount of care that you need. Sometimes it will be a lot more and sometimes it may be less. But be sure to not cut it out of your life altogether.

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Observations on self-compassion

Last year, a theme emerged for me around change and growth. This year, it's refinement and improvement. With that in mind I want to come back to something I had posted in 2013 about compassion for ourselves:

It's easy to [be compassionate with myself] with things that are in the past, for me, but it is also limiting as the past can't be changed. So I'm working on being compassionate with myself in the now.

And sometimes, that is what I need the most.

A few weeks ago I was out running errands. I drove to a store, parked in a spot, and got out of the car. I started walking towards the store, car remote in hand, and locked my vehicle. Not three steps later I realized, whoops, I forgot my wallet in the car. My mind flashed an image of it sitting in my cup holder.

My first reaction was to berate myself out loud in a small, quick comment. "Forgot your wallet, motherfucker."

This time, I heard myself. And I wasn't happy with it. I had simply forgotten my wallet, but a part of me felt so strongly about this that it felt I had to say something downright mean about myself, to myself, out loud. I would never treat anyone else this way. So why would I do this to me?

The Change

There were a few things I chose to do in that moment to help myself.

The first, as noted, was to really listen to myself. Have you ever had that feeling when you're saying something and a part of you feels, "Hey, wait! This isn't me talking!" It just feels like your voice and words are on autopilot, and you're elsewhere. Well, that part may be right. In my case that wasn't me talking. This was something I had internalized (deeply) and given space and power to.

I then realized, wow, I do these tiny insults a lot! And it's over little things too, usually forgetting things - like not taking out the trash, or leaving something on the kitchen counter at home.

In an effort to help, I gave myself permission in that moment to hear my internal dialogue. What parts of me were talking? What parts were checked out? And most importantly, what parts did I need to tug on to help me out in that moment? It's like parenting: if someone insults your kid, what do you do in that moment to help and what do you do to help your kid prepare for the next time that happens?

Since I had just been insulted, I needed a highly caring part to bring in the love and reassurance, and also gracefully defend myself.

Tough work

As I said last year, looking back and being compassionate with my past is much easier. It's not here now. It's a hairstyle I chose in 1993, or a size I was in 1987, or an emotion I felt in 2003. I'm removed from it.

Being compassionate with myself in the present requires me to draw on loads of skills and feelings. It demands practice and patience, but I'm feeling more me because of it.

Fresh Start

Personal finance software is generally dreadful, but in my household we've settled on You Need a Budget (YNAB) because it works closest to how we think about money. It's not perfect but it's certainly quite good.

We've been lost in a sea of budget software and planning for a while now, but we're finally getting to a point where YNAB and long-term plans are beginning to gel. It's starting. That doesn't mean we have it licked, and that means we do mess up.

With other finance software, recovering from a mess up is hard. It means a new file and complete reorganization, or reconciling out the wazoo. This is something YNAB is great at because of a single feature: Fresh Start.

Lots of people start over to reorganize, or because they stopped using YNAB for a while and just want a fresh start.

Fresh Start is great because it's got a positive vibe about it. It's not a monstrous, computer-y thing. The app simply says, "Hey, cool. Happens. I got this." And it does. It's a surprisingly human and guilt-free process, notable in both the software and financial worlds. Beyond little things like animations and copy, it proves that some features of products can be warm and helpful.

A Brand New Way of Seeing Things

I'm struggling to apply this same idea to my current state of GTD tools. The things I've felt in the past - my brain has it covered - are returning again, and outside of using Things for a daily check on what's up, my inbox is a mess of dozens of items. During my run this morning I pondered why this was.

Part of it is that I'm afraid to admit that this isn't quite working for me. It feels like I've failed this system in some way and, in turn, failed myself. While I will forgive myself, it would be lovely if Things offered a way for me to recover from this other than blitzing everything away manually. That process of deleting all my items? It's painful. Each swipe is a tiny reminder that I didn't get that thing done either.

I attach a lot of emotion to this, as you can see, and I suspect others do as well. If we set out to do something one way and it doesn't work, the question is, how long does it take us to recover and try once again?

Not So Big

I love talking about big and small changes we can make in our lives and in ourselves. I highly recommend small changes, because they can make a difference.

Those little things can be easy and juuust enough to change a routine, even a tiny bit. Parking in a different spot. Sitting in a different seat on the train than you usually do. Wearing that top at the back of your closet that isn't your favorite.

Then, there are bigger things. The way you start your day. The way you think about your body when you look in a mirror. How you treat that one co-worker. Your bedtime.

But how do we call some of these things "bigger" and some "smaller"? Let's try this: what if all of these things are equally small? What if the big things are really small things? What if the only thing separating the big and the small things is the way you're letting yourself approach them?

For me, that helps me understand what's holding me back from doing the big things - me! Observe your reaction and classification to these parts of your life and yourself, and then you'll gain the opportunity to understand, change, and grow.

Give yourself five minutes

Before I started yoga and meditation, one of the notions I carried around was that these things were big time commitments. Many parts of me are big on schedules and efficiency, so those parts were able to readily dismiss those practices as "too time-consuming". Over time I realized was that this was also something other parts of me classified as selfless: if I chose to do something else (under the guise of helping others), then I could never be called selfish, which had been a big bad label for me.

But self-care is quite important and, really, vital to our daily lives. Sure, when someone says, "Hey, can you do a yoga class with me for 90 minutes every 3 days over lunch?" that might not be something that you can do. But I'm here to say: don't let this be an all or nothing event in your life. Find time to do self-care.

Let's start today. Let's try for five minutes. Just five! And that's all. When you're done reading this entry, five minutes or so will have passed. That's not much time. I know: I have a family and a job and a commute and never-ending laundry too. It's not going to be perfect. But it's going to be.

Here are a few ideas where and how this could happen:

  • During your commute: If you drive to work, give yourself five before or after you start the day. Radio off, eyes closed, and just listen and breathe. Easier on a train or bus.
  • At your desk: Work work work work work... pause. Stop. Take a deep, deep breath - you know, one of those super deep breaths. Go for it. And then let it all out, and chill.
  • Outside: If you have a desk job, take a brief walk around the block or in the parking lot. Get fresh air into your lungs - breathe all of it in.
  • In the shower: Awesome place to think, awesome place to take a quick moment for yourself and just be. There's a reason lots of people like the sound of running water: it's very relaxing.

And what do you do during these five minutes? Obviously I'm big on breathing: it helps with awareness, and forces me to slow down and be in the moment instead of elsewhere. But I have also found that doing one or two yoga poses is a great change of pace too. You may want to do a power pose (Amy Cuddy recommends two minutes. Just two!) Meditation is a great thing to do too. Or, listen to a song.

Don't let it go

Here's what I know is true: after even doing one of these small things, I feel much more centered and relaxed. I come back into the rest of my life feeling more refreshed, aware, and ready. Find something that sounds good for you - try things out! - and give yourself five minutes today.

IA Summit changed my life, again

Note: this article reflected my feelings on IA Summit at the time of attendance. As of 2018, I've learned of serious safety violations at the conference over many years. Please consider that when reading this, as my experience may not be typical. Until further notice, you should not attend the IA Conference (which is what IA Summit is now known as) or support the IA Foundation. – Ed.

I didn't expect it. How could anyone? A conference changed me in 2013. Yes, a conference. So while I've been an enormous booster of IA Summit, I wasn't expecting to have a similar experience in San Diego this year.

But I was wrong. IA Summit did change my life again. Truly.

Over the past day or so since my time at the conference ended, I've been reflecting on why this is. I've talked about it at length with my friends. And I think it boils down to this.

The talks are tremendous and diverse (the keynotes, in particular, are just stellar). The program is well-crafted and thoughtful. The venue and experience of the event is just about flawless. But in the end the people and the community are second to none.

I think about how attendees can go on stage at Five Minute Madness and feel comfortable and safe (!) enough to share their deepest feelings. I see how conversations run the gamut from taxonomy and emotion to design patterns and pie (yes, we talked pie). The energy of the entire conference is overwhelmingly positive, encouraging, and supportive. Flex track exists. Karaoke and game night exist. Yoga, 5K & 10Ks, and social events are plentiful. The keynote had yoga. THE KEYNOTE HAD YOGA.

Due in part to all of this, IA Summit offers that fertile ground. I can have life changing conversations with people. (LIFE CHANGING! FOR REAL!) I can approach parts of work in entirely new ways. I can get in front of a room full of strangers and sing "It's the End of the World As We Know It" without a lyric sheet. I can both see people for who they are and be seen for the person I am.

IA Summit gives people in this very special industry the chance to be themselves, fully. It is refreshing. It is true. I have not experienced this anywhere else. I do not expect to. Instead, I expect to attend this conference every year until I can no longer do so. It is my home, it is my tribe, it is my people.

I will miss all of you, stay in touch throughout the year, and see you again in Minneapolis... if not sooner.