incapable of linear processing. this is a collection of my processes.
digital bee by day. wannabe tailor by night.
I'm obsessed with menswear.
@tammertron
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Time management failure or achievement?
I struggle so much with my personal time management. There are days when I am lazy, aimless, and those days are fine. We all have those. We all need downtimes to stare at screens and walls and not do much to recuperate.
But I also have days where I feel like I am running out of time. This isn’t because there are dinner plans or yoga challenges, but with a strong urge to do things that one might not categorize as “productive”.
On a regular basis, I don’t have enough time to read. I read three books at the same time, not something I used to do. I get interested in something, Jung, for example, and search excessively online for more information. I want to buy a magazine, but I don’t have time to read that. I want to subscribe to the NYT, but I don’t have time to do that either.
I read about things that have absolutely nothing to do with my life, my job, my friends’ jobs, my family. Nothing. I just want to know. I want to know excessively. National Geographic recently had a series on drugs, called Drugs Inc. Fascinating series, very educational. But because my brain works by Association:
National Geographic -> Drugs Inc -> Fascination with Mexico -> Look for documentaries -> Search “best of” list -> Netflix -> Line 19 movies in queue -> Overwhelmed and it’s 12midnight, abandon all.
That would be a pretty dismal scenario. Most days I usually do get to read a fair number of articles and a respectable number of pages on my books. But when I’m asked, “What did you do last night”, what do I say?
NOTHING?
No. I felt like I did a lot. In fact, I felt like I did more learning than a team combined. I do not know what quantifies as “doing something”, but I know if I had replied “I went for drinks”, that would sound a lot more like “something”, even though, to me, that’s really more nothing than something.
I can only say I read about useless crap. Useless in the sense that I have absolutely NO output to all this information. I might not even retain all of it. So does that count as being unproductive? Because there is no product? Is the intake of irrelevant information useless and time-wasting?
This coming February
I haven’t played Skyrim since 2 days after I returned from London. I played when I got back, because I was getting over my post-vacation blues, and playing helped me stay up in the afternoon when I wanted to sleep.
Basically, I realized that it was sucking up all my time. Einstein moment, right? Playing Skyrim reduced my existence to a very few basics:
1. I go to work. I work there.
2(a). I go home. Make dinner, or,
2(b). I go out. Have dinner and drinks, think about playing Skyrim.
3. I sleep.
Like any normal person, I brought a suitcase full of clothes and shoes (maybe a bit more clothes and shoes than the normal person) and left my xbox at home. And I travelled.
What happened in London would be another post, but what happened when I came back, was knowing that I’d been wasting a shit ton of time doing nothing. Bertrand Russell said, “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”. Sure, I can get with that. Though I’m sure there are better way to waste that time other than trying to kill a giant.
Mostly, I just want to live more in the present instead of an alternate universe. Something happened to me in London and snapped me out of it.
Since then, I have:
- Read books. Currently on my Kindle are Game of Thrones, The Art of Travel, Jung: A very short introduction, Shirtmaking
- Read feeds. I wouldn’t know what to do without Feedly and my 236 sources.
- Watch the news. I remember a time when I didn’t know about Hurricane Irene, that was really sad.
- Learned how to tailor. Still learning, very beginners right now.
- Signed up for 30 day yoga challenge in February.
- Started a new blog
I found myself now running out of time daily, which is a pretty good feeling.
How I got rid of Facebook
It was pretty simple actually - I just deleted my account.
When I meet new people, the inevitable question always comes up. ”Do you have Facebook?” No. I do not. And 100% of the time I get a look. The looks ranges from awe, to admiration, to confusion, to “what the fuck and how do you go about your daily life?”
The thing is, I’ve had Facebook forever. Maybe not as forever as some of you, but pretty forever. I’ve collected some people, but over half of those people I don’t really care for. This is sounding like your story, isn’t it?
What really happened was, something traumatic happened. That trauma made me wanted to go into a shell, and not have to deal with the real world for a bit. That included knowing about what other people who were living in the real world were doing. If I was unable to participate in this world, you shouldn’t either. At least that was my logic then.
It became a bit like the elephant in the room. Facebook! Facebook! Just click it. I’d go onto Facebook and secretly hope that I didn’t see anything I didn’t want to see. I actually had no idea why I even got on Facebook then, other than to find people’s contacts and to message them.
Prior to the trauma, my usage for Facebook was solely for creeping purposes. I’d come home from work and creep other peoples’ photos. But towards the end, I stopped doing that too. I was sick of people who post photos of themselves taken by themselves, and however much I love dogs (not cats) and babies, I didn’t really love their dogs or their babies. I’m sure first walks and the sound “maaaafaaaaaboooobeee” are amusing, but then again, not really.
Once I started blocking people, I knew I had a problem. This was prior to the trauma thing. Why am I blocking people? I have friends who take down their websites, block their twitter accounts, and make their web presence quite private when they’re job-hunting. I have a strong belief that if google me and don’t like what you see, you probably won’t like who I am, and therefore, probably shouldn’t hire me. It might be a bit arrogant, but I believe that to be true. So I never block me. Come see! This is me, a little bit crazy but at times loveable.
Back to Facebook. So I just decided that I didn’t need it. Creeping people wasn’t a need, it was a “I’d rather look at some party photos and hopefully find a gem where someone upskirts, or I can read the Art of Travel which has been sitting in my Kindle for three months.” So I deleted the account.
Do I miss it? No. Not one ounce. Actually the thought of using it again irks me so much that it resembles going to a high school reunion. People have argued that they use it to contact people and that it was just “easier”. Sure, it’s easier to contact people you don’t care about, and vice versa. The thing is, I’m quite ON THE INTERNET. It doesn’t really take much to get a hold of me. If someone wants to contact me, they’ll contact me. It’s that easy. I boycotted Facebook, but I didn’t boycott the internet.
That day, I lost 500 friends. But the ones I kept I know are friends. I know them, they know me. We have conversations, and then we meet up and I see their actual faces. I hear about this timeline thing and I have no idea what people are talking about. I kinda like that I don’t know what they’re talking about.
Not having Facebook has its minor inconveniences. Some sites (which I’d never return to) insist that I log in with my Facebook account. Well I don’t have one, I guess you don’t need me to buy that thing you’re selling. Moving on. Okay, maybe it’s just one inconvenience.
Now let me get back to learning how to tailor a shirt, while you… do some stuff on that Facebook thing.
Sweet Valley High Vs. Gossip Girl, and my take
I remember reading SWH. Actually, my experience with reading SWH was pretty much exactly as the Liz’s - full of guilt, envy but also with a full dose of complete detachment.
I vaguely remember reading Sweet Valley TWINS before graduating to Sweet Valley High. I was still in Hong Kong, and I didn’t understand why blondes were awesomer than all other hair colours, or why a size 6 figure had to be repeatedly mentioned in every single book like it was a prized trophy. (I have never been larger than a size 2, so size 6 to me was actually fairly giant). All that said, I wanted to be in that fucking Unicorn Club because apparently if you had friends who were snooty and white and hot, you get jock boyfriends (which I also didn’t relate to because I went to an all girls’ school.)
It didn’t matter how much I couldn’t relate to it, the point was, these girls were people all teens should aspire to be - superficial, popular, tanned and perfect. I remember starting our own Unicorn Club in school and pretty much decided we were better than all the other girls. I was capable of being mean. I was the Blair Waldorf before Blair Waldorf was born.
Now that I’m at an age where I would my head disapprovingly at inappropriate teenage behaviour, I cannot imagine what person would write something like SWH or Gossip Girl for teenagers. For kids. It’s pure poison. If you gotta feel guilty about doing something as a career, I’d put this up there with say, parking nazis.
My life with Social Media
First, a caveat lector, I am not an expert or would ever claim to be in social media (or anything really). I’m merely a user, and all sense of that word. A F’ing addict. Now, proceeding.
This is the story of me - a 31 year old full-time worker, female, and my rants and praises of information overload.
The general routine of my day starts with loading up my email and IM clients. And that would be a slow day, because really, I’ve already checked my emails on my phone 5 seconds after I open my eyes in the morning. Just in case, you know, something exploded and they decided to email me instead of using the TELEPHONE. My total usage for my phone for calls? 20 hours. And I’ve had this since December. So I use my phone less than 3 hours every month. (1h mother, 1h client, 1h fucking telemarketers).
When I arrive at the office, I also load up my Hootsuite (Twitter client - oh but I also added Facebook newsfeed on it, love efficiency). I don’t overdo my Twitter feeds, I only read from a very few source, and the only hashtags I follow are #vancouver #chrome #tumblr. Anyway, my Hootsuite runs on my smaller monitor and I glance at it once in awhile. I also open up my Feedly (RSS), running on the same small monitor.
Throughout the day, I work. I actually really do work. Having many client accounts is a curse and a blessing, it lets me do something for 10 minutes and I’ll have to move onto something else but it’s very hard to focus a long time on one. There’s no choice, I’ve got to make everyone happy, right? In between moving, I do quick checks on Feedly and Twitter. Oh yeah? That’s something I should retweet. And this photo, gotta get it up on Tumblr. Oh right, I forgot about Tumblr, I’ve got their widget you see, I just do a few clicks and it posts. Goes directly to my Tumblr blog, which by the magic of js, shows on my real blog, and then gets sent to my twitter. And of course, my Twitter accounts is hooked to Google Buzz. Just in case, just in case you miss one of the 11,000 accounts I have. Because that photo of the dog eating a gerbil is for sure, an LOL and the world needs to know.
During the 9 hours I am in the office, I also receive a myriad of emails and IMs with links that add to the list of “you fucking have to read/watch/listen to this RIGHT NOW or you will die”.
Now with the other “stuff” I don’t use that often (defined by, less than once a day). Flickr. But you know when I post on Flickr, it cross-posts to my blog and Facebook. I need to hook twitter up on that one too, maybe between 4:14 and 4:17 tomorrow.
Also, last.fm, but it’s pretty automated now, scrobbles my music from itunes. But I could possibly get more friends on there, just so you know, we social media about music.
I kinda skipped Facebook all together, because I don’t have time for Facebook. Don’t be appalled. I’ll be back there I promise, I just need to rejig this schedule a little bit my babies. Don’t worry.
Let’s jump a bit forward now, I feel like I’ve already been too descriptive in what I do in my day. We’ll go right to the conclusion.
Without social media, I think:
1) I will die
2) I will be stupider. More stupider than now
3) Very dull
I’m an addict, so I’m obviously going to say that I love my crack. But there is a moment in every addict’s addiction that they realize something isn’t quite right, especially when they are on the cusp of an overdose (not that I would know in the real crack world, because I have never smoked crack). I read one thing, I read 10, I read 100, faster, faster and faster. I repost, post, retweet, tweet, because the world needs to know this, they need to know as much as I need to know. And I am not even one of those people who self-promotes. I mostly share. My Asian genetics gave me an internal calculation. And by my calculation, I would need about 50 hours a day to fully LIVE. Breakdown as follows:
Work: 9 hours
Feedly: 5 hours (246 sources, as of today)
Twitter: 1 hour (following 140 people)
Tumblr: 1 hour (following 47 people)
Buzz: 15 minutes (following 30 people)
Flickr: 15 minutes (following 169 people)
subtotal: 16.5 hours just to feel adequately connected
And then I add some other more boring, mundane, I-could-live-without things:
Yoga: 1.5 hours
Commute: 0.5 hours
Sleep: 7 hours
Eat: 3 hours
Bathroom breaks: 1 hour
BE A SOCIAL PERSON AND HANG OUT WITH PEOPLE: 2 hours
By this calculation, I need about 32 hours in a day to accomplish the minimum acceptable level of 1) being a responsible employee; 2) being a sufficiently informed person, but only sufficiently, because once I get more people to follow, the above calculation is completely fucked.
Oh I guess I also forgot to put FAMILY TIME in there. Sorry Mom and Dad. Maybe next year.
Now you’ve noticed that I did not put “work faster” in the “what if there is no social media”. I decided to leave that out because I don’t believe a duller and stupider Andrea could work faster. Because I’d be STUPID.
Sorry for wasting your time, I’m sure your feeds are waiting for you and your Twitter client has already reloaded 20 times since you started reading this. And shit, I’m not sure where I’m gonna get my last half hour back either.
Fashion
I just looked at photos of a post fashion tradeshow party, my old haunt.
If I didn’t know, I’d think the new trend is dirty.
Why people would want greasy hair wrapped in sweaty headbands, I will never know.
Shower already?
