It feels like I've had much less focused time over the past two months. Weaning, sickness, and A-‘s bigger emotions all needed more patience and energy. I've been prioritizing sleep and household maintenance over things like staying up to consult or write. On the plus side, we've gotten back into the rhythm of preparing meals for the week, and cleaning the house is a little easier now.

How can I adapt if this is my new normal?

I've been setting more firm boundaries (myself, bedtime routines, etc.), and that's been working reasonably well. I've also adjusted my plans and made sure not to commit to more consulting than I could do.

I'm not keen on making videos a regular part of her day, since we don't want to add another cause for conflict. I considered creating space by having a babysitter come over for 3-4 hours. A- is still not keen on the idea, though, and I can see how we both benefit from the time we spend with each other.

So the main thing to do, I think, is to rejig my plans in order to make the most of the constraints. What do I want to learn even without lots of focused sit-down time? How do I want to grow?

• Equanimity: This lets me turn A-‘s tantrums into learning opportunities. I can practise appreciating her and this life, especially when we're in the thick of things. Taking care of our basic needs gives me the space to be patient and kind when A- needs me to be, and it's good practice in anticipating and heading off challenges. I tend to be firmer than W- is, so I can work on noticing when a little kindness or flexibility might help a lot when A- and I are on our own.
• Household maintenance: I want to take on more chores, help A- get involved, and become more effective. This is also a good opportunity to practise noticing things. I can learn things from W- and from the Internet.
• Thinking, learning, and improving in short bursts: I want to get better at using little pockets of time. Drawing and dictating might be good techniques to explore further.
• Mindfulness and being present: I want to get better at being there for A- instead of letting myself be distracted. I want to get better at enjoying now. I also want to balance that with thinking about and doing my own things. I can start with a few magic moments a day, and then expand from there.
• Playfulness and creativity: I like the way W- interacts with A-. It might be interesting to practise playfulness and creativity, especially since A- can be my play partner and guide. I can pick up ideas at the drop-in centres, and sometimes reading helps.

These things are less obviously rewarding than, say, figuring out a clever solution for a client problem or coming up with a neat Emacs hack and blogging about it. But they're worthwhile things to learn anyway.

How can I make my learning more intentional? It might be interesting to make myself a list of things to focus on or try out, and then try one at time while keeping an eye out for other things that are relevant to the situation. For example, I could have a day of involving A-‘s toys in tasks, then see how that resonates with A-.

How can I make my learning more visible? I think journal entries will help a little. Sometimes A- insists that I stay close while she's sleeping, so that might be a good time to write. I can draw thoughts while waiting for A-, too, which is a good way to model writing and drawing. Paper seems to work a little better than drawing on my phone, although maybe that's a matter of practice. I don't have a good workflow for dealing with notes yet, but I can archive pictures for now and deal with them as mostly transitory thinking aids.

I'll probably have lots of focused time later on. Crunch time isn't forever. Even if I may need to start over, I'm not too worried. I think I'll be able to get the hang of things again.

In the meantime, we're mostly set up for playing and doing chores at home. Once we recover from this cold and cough, I think our daily rhythm will involve drop-in centres as well as home time. I've got things to learn and ways to grow. I can do this, even though it's a bit different from what I'm used to.

Life changes. It's good to adapt.

I like working. It tickles my brain, and I enjoy helping people through code. Sometimes I get stuck on stuff, but I can generally solve problems and make stuff easier. It's also good for long-term stuff.

I also like spending time with A- and learning from her. I'd pick A- over consulting because tasks generally keep and kiddos don't. I like snuggling with A-, and I like playing with her.

If I work late at night, I can generally do 1 to 2 hours of work between interruptions, so there's a bit of task switching. I can usually pick my stopping point for the night if I stay up a little later. My brain buzzes a bit afterwards, so it's hard to sleep. That sometimes affects my time with A- the next day.

If I get a babysitter and work in the afternoon, I can talk to people and focus better. I can generally do 2 hours of focused work, and sometimes more if A- is having fun. She strongly prefers playing with me, though.

If I wake up early, A- often insists on snuggling in bed. When she wakes up, I end up stopping work abruptly, so it's good to take notes along the way.

If I'm careful about the tasks I commit to, I give people a chance to develop their own skills while being able to squeeze in the occasional low effort, high reward thing. I can also get better at making my prototypes easier to turn over with comments and notes.

2-4 hours is a nice chunk of focused time that I can use to make decent progress. How can I arrange my life so that I can do that regularly? Monday night or Tuesday night might be a good time to stay up late working. Monday night is particularly good, since I can take A- to the drop-in centre on Tuesday for social interaction.

It's also good to use some focused time for personal projects: journaling, Emacs News, kaizen. As A- becomes more independent, I might start modeling 15 minutes of independent reading and taking notes.

So maybe a rhythm like this:

• S: W-
• Su: Emacs News
• M: Consulting
• T: Free choice
• W: Sleep
• Th: Kaizen
• F: Journal, review

On the flipside, more sleep makes everything even better. When I'm well-rested, it's easy to be playful and creative. So I won't push myself too hard, I'll keep commitments light and manageable, and I'll code with an eye to turning things over to other people who can run with stuff.

It might be good to experiment with babysitting monthly, to monitor her readiness for it.

I like learning the things that life with A- can teach me, even though they're harder and less externally validated than coding is. The important thing is to be where I am.

Eventually A- will be in school, or independent enough to want to go play by herself or with other people, or okay with playing with sitters or in daycare. That time will come quickly enough. No need to rush it.

In anticipation of more fuzzy-brain time-confetti, I've been thinking about what I can do with short, scattered moments. The considerations are:

• They should be activities that I can pick up and put down at a moment's notice: minimal switching costs and easy availability
• They should be useful or enjoyable, and ideally both
• Ideally, they should build up over time

Here's a list of things I often find myself doing:

• Reading: nonfiction, fiction, random Internet browsing. Dusted off my Kindle and loaded it up with a few tech manuals and some fanfiction. Great for walking around, since I can use the page buttons even with gloves on.
• Tidying up or preparing: there's always something that needs to be done
• Checking out the Emacs community to see if I can answer a quick question or learn from other people's conversations
• Drawing an index card or two
• Playing casual games

I think games are worth thinking about a little more, even though I'm tempted to focus on the more useful activities. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about how to make gaming more engaging. It's a big industry. I wonder if I can turn it to my own purposes.

2016-02-01c Game endings – index card #gaming.png

I tend to like games with stories that have funny moments, like RPGs or LEGO games. Since games like that tend to require space and development effort, I play them on the PSP or the PS3. I've learned I'm not a completionist when it comes to achievements or levels – I like passing a level, but I'm not driven to reach three out of three stars. I can enjoy open-ended sandbox simulations. Games that go until failure tend to be a little depressing after a while – the abstract achievement of lasting a certain time or reaching a certain level doesn't tickle my brain the same way other things do.

2016-01-14d Thinking about games I liked – index card #play #gaming #leisure.png

Reflecting on the specific games I've liked, I notice that I usually explore games that W-‘s also playing as a way of spending time together or sharing experiences. This is how I ended up getting into Borderlands 2 and Persona 4 Golden, and why I'm playing Final Fantasy IX now. On my own, I find that I'm a little partial to time- and resource-management games. I figure that among the popular games of those genres, a game is probably as good as any other. So I'm playing through Rising Star Chef on the tablet, and just for kicks (and Takei's narration, although there's far too little of that), Star Trek: Trexels on my phone.

It seems like most of the popular games have switched to a freemium model, with in-app purchases for the impatient. I find myself liking the built-in timers and rate limits, actually. They're good for reminding me to surface from the game and look around. There's a little bit of pride, too, in the thought: “Aha, I resist your feeble attempts to convince me to spend money.” But that's only part of the picture, of course. I pay in time and attention, and often in exposure to advertisements. So if I'm going to do this, I want to make sure that I get what I want out of it.

Here are the pay-offs I think I'm getting from these games, and some alternatives if I want to play with those pay-offs.

2016-01-28c Playing with games – index card #games.png

Games give me a sense of learning and a sense of progress, although they're of arbitrary things. Games also deliberately build on the rush of intermittent rewards.

2016-02-01b Playing with my brain's failure modes – index card #gaming.png

The most interesting benefit for me, though, is developing an awareness of how I think in different situations, while keeping things low-risk. Sometimes I catch myself getting flustered and messing up orders in the cooking game, or letting a party member get knocked out in FF9 because I was too distracted to pay attention to the health stats. (Trexels seems more like a virtual pet than anything else; it feels like it's just a matter of time.) I like the way games make me think a few steps ahead, take risks, recover from mistakes, and deal with (or even celebrate) the inevitable failures.

So maybe a little more gaming, with built-in limits thanks to freemium timers and the pull of other things, mixed in with all these other ways to use scattered moments. Hmm…

Any time I want to, I could spend more time consulting. This would make my clients happy. It would help me create much more value, and they would get more value from me than from other ways they could spend their budget. I would improve my skills along the way, especially with people's requests and feedback. And to top it all off, I would earn more money that I could add to my savings, exchange for other people's time or talents, or use to improve our quality of life.

How hard is it to resist the temptation to work on other people's things? It's like trying to focus on cooking lentils when there's a pan of fudge brownies right there, just waiting to for a bite. It's like wandering through the woods in hope of coming across something interesting when you know you can go back to the road and the road will take you to an enormous library. It's like trying to build something out of sand when there's a nifty LEGO Technic kit you can build instead. It's probably like Odysseus sailing past Sirens, if the Sirens sang, "We need you! You can help us! Plus you can totally kit out your ship and your crew with the treasures we'll give you and the experience you'll gain!"

Maybe I can use this temptation's strength against it.

Maybe I can treat client work (with its attendant rewards and recognition) as a carrot that I can have if I make good progress on my personal projects. If I hit the ground running in the morning, then I can work on client stuff in the afternoon. A two-hour span is probably a good-sized chunk of time for programming or reporting. It's not as efficient as a four-hour chunk, but it'll force me to keep good notes, and I know I can get a fair bit done in that time anyway.

The other part of this is making sure that I don't give myself too-low targets so that I can get to client work. It'll be tempting to pick a small task, do it, and say, "There, I'm done. Moving on!" But I have to sit with uncertainty and figure things out. I expect that learning to work on my own things will mean encountering and dealing with inner Resistance. I expect that my anxious side will whisper its self-doubt. So I lash myself to the mast and sail past the Sirens, heading towards (if I'm lucky!) years of wandering.

Part of this is the realization that even after my experiments with delegation, I'm still not good at converting money back into time, learning, ability, or enjoyment. Time is not really fungible, or at least I haven't figured out how to convert it efficiently. I can convert time to money through work, but I find it difficult to convert money back to time (through delegation) or use it to accelerate learning.

Extra money tends to go into projects, tools or cooking experiments. Gardening is one of my luxuries: a few bags of dirt, some seeds and starters, and an excuse to be outside regularly. Paying someone to do the first draft of a transcript gets around my impatience with listening to my own voice. Aside from these regular decisions, I tend to think carefully about what I spend on. Often a low-cost way of doing something also helps me learn a lot – sometimes much more than throwing money at the problem would.

But there are things that money can buy, and it's good for me to learn how to make better decisions about that. For example, a big savings goal might be "buying" more of W-'s time, saving up in case he wants to experiment with a more self-directed life as well. House maintenance projects need tools, materials, and sometimes skilled help. Cooking benefits from experimentation, better ingredients, and maybe even instruction.

What about accelerating my learning so that I can share even more useful stuff? Working with other people can help me:

• take advantage of external perspectives (great for editing)
• organize my learning path into a more effective sequence
• learn about adjacent possibilities and low-hanging fruit
• bridge gaps
• improve through feedback
• create scaffolds/structures and feed motivation
• set up and observe deliberate practice
• direct my awareness to what's important

In order to make the most of this, I need to get better at:

• identifying what I want to learn
• identifying who I can learn from
• approaching them and setting up a relationship
• experimenting
• following up

How have I invested money into learning, and what have the results been like?

Tools? Yup, totally worth it, even for the tools I didn't end up using much of (ex: ArtRage). Do more of this. How can I get better at:

• keeping an eye out for potentially useful tools:
  • Emacs packages
  • AutoHotkey scripts/ideas
  • Windows/Linux tools related to writing, drawing, coding
• evaluating whether a tool can fit my workflow
• supporting people who make good tools
  • expressing appreciation
  • contributing code
  • writing about tools
  • sending money

Books? Some books have been very useful. On the other hand, the library has tons of books, so I have an infinite backlog of free resources. Buying and sketchnoting new books (or going to author events) is good for connecting with authors and readers about the book du jour, but on the other hand, I also get a lot of value from focusing on classics that I want to remember.

Conferences? Mostly interesting for meeting people and bumping into them online through the years. Best if I go as a speaker (makes conversations much easier and reduces costs) and/or as a sketchnoter (long-term value creation). It would be even awesomer if I could combine this with in-person intensive learning, like a hackathon or a good workshop…

Courses? Meh. Not really impressed by the online courses I've taken so far, but then again, I don't think I'm approaching them with the right mindset either.

Things I will carve out opportunity-fund space for so that I can try more of them:

Pairing/coaching/tutoring? Tempting, especially in terms of Emacs, Node/Javascript, Rails, or Japanese. For example, some goals might be:

• Learn how to improve Emacs Lisp performance and reliability: profiling, code patterns, tests, etc.
• Define and adopt better Emacs habits
  • Writing
  • Organization
  • Planning
  • Programming
• Write more elegant and testable Javascript
• Set up best-practices Javascript/CSS/HTML/Rails environment in Emacs
• Learn how to take advantage of new features in WordPress
• Write more other-directed posts
• Get better at defining what I want to learn and reaching out to people

Actually, in general, how does one accelerate learning?

• General learning techniques: spaced repetition, skill breakdowns, deliberate practice…
• Structure and motivation: personal trainers, courses
• Instruction and perspective: expert, peer, or external
• Higher-quality resources: original research, well-written/organized resources, richer media, good level of detail, experience/authority
• Better tools: things are often much easier and more fun
• Experimentation: learning from experience, possibly coming up with new observations
• Feedback, analysis: experience, thoroughness
• Immersion: languages, retreats
• Outsourcing: research, summaries, scale, skills, effort
• Relationships: serendipity, connection, conversation, mentoring, sponsorship
• Community: premium courses or membership sites often offer this as a benefit
• Freedom: safety net that permits experimentation, time to focus on it instead of worrying about bills, etc.

Hmm. I have some experience in investing in better tools, higher-quality resources, experimentation, feedback/analysis, delegation, and freedom. I'd like to get better at that and at investing in relationships and outsourcing. Come to think of it, that might be more useful than focusing on learning from coaching/instruction, at least for now.

Let me imagine what using money to accelerate learning would be like:

• Relationships
  • Get to know individuals faster and deeper
    • Free: Build org-contacts profiles of people who are part of my tribe (people who comment/link/interact); think about them on a regular basis
    • Free: Proactively reach out and explore shared interests/curiosities
    • $: Figure out digital equivalent of treating people to lunch or coffee: conversation + maybe investing time into creating a good resource for them and other people + sending cash, donating to charity, or (best) cultivating reciprocal learning
    • $: Sign up for a CRM that understands Gmail, Twitter, and maybe even Disqus
  • Identify things to learn about and reach out to people who are good role models for those skills
    • Free: Be specific about things I want to learn
    • Free: Find people who know how to do those things (maybe delegate research)
    • $: Possibly buy their resources, apply their advice
    • $: Reach out with results and questions, maybe an offer to donate to their favourite charity
  • Help the community (like Emacs evil plans; rising tide lifts all boats)
    • $: Invest time and money into creating good resources
    • Be approachable
    • $: Bring the community together. Invest in platforms/organization. For example, I can use whatever I would have spent on airfare to create a decent virtual conference experience, or figure out the etiquette of having an assistant set up and manage Emacs Hangouts/Chats.
• Outsourcing
  • Identify things that I want to do, regardless of skills
  • $: Experiment with outsourcing parts that I don't know how to do yet (or even the ones I can do but want external perspectives on)
  • Use the results to determine what I actually want and what to learn more about; iterate as needed

Huh, that's interesting. When I start thinking about investing in learning, I tend to fixate on finding a coach because I feel a big gap around directly asking people for help. But I can invest in other ways that might be easier or more effective to start with. Hmm… Thoughts?