My Medium feed is littered with Productivity advice:
Make these 7 Changes and You’ll Start Making Money Online
Writing a Time Management Plan: 7 Essential Points
10 Beautiful Ideas to Change Your Career
It’s not that these articles are bad. Some of them have very helpful tips. The problem is that they may not always be a good fit.
Let’s say you have your kitchen remodeled and it looks wonderful. The countertops sparkle, the cabinets are rich and warm. Everything is well-organized and optimally designed. There’s just one problem – you’re 6 ft. 4 in. and you have to hunch every time you use the counter, which was set for someone of average height. Or you’re 5 ft. 2 in. and you have to strain to reach the handles on the upper cabinets.
A lot of Productivity advice is like that – it’s great if you are the author. But if your life is different, then the author’s systems might cause irritation at unexpected points.
The Process of Creating Life
Cal Newport touches on this idea of bad fit in his criticism of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. “My issue was simple: it wasn’t helping me become better.”
Newport notes that GTD helped him be supremely organized, accomplish goals, stay on top of things. But it wasn’t helping him get to the root of deeper issues. He was doing a lot of stuff but he wasn’t doing the things that mattered most to him.
For the past couple of years I’ve been noodling around with architect Christopher Alexander’s Process of Creating Life to re-shape the structures in my own life. It’s not easy but I think I’m getting close to a process that works.
A Simple Unfolding Process
Alexander’s process for building a living structure is deceptively simple.
Preserve the Whole
The “whole” is an ambiguous description that contains the entire system of the structure. This includes not just material properties or appearance but also the sense of vitality present in the structure.By Intensifying Centers
A center is a kind of focal point. In architecture it might be a door, a window, a ceiling joist. Every center has a kind of invisible field of potential around it – for instance a door could have narrow windows on either side that might intensify the “door-ness” of that center.Using an Unfolding Process
Each step involves making the simplest change that will add life to the whole. The idea is to follow a living process that is an essential part of all living structural growth. For example, a seedling doesn’t instantly sprout roots and branches. It sends out a radical that develops into roots and a coleoptile that develops into branches. Following this pattern helps ensure “good fit” within the system.Guided by Interoception
While Alexander doesn’t use the word “interoception” – and maybe for good reason – I’m using it to suggest that there are valid scientific reasons for employing an “if it feels good, do it” approach to evaluating system design. The point is that humans seem to have an internal sense of when something “feels alive” and when it doesn’t. Alexander did the math (literally) and using this sense seems to be the best way to evaluate living processes.The Process I’m Using
- Start with a vision for the life you want. Identify three, five, seven or so elements of this vision.
- Consider your current life as a whole.
- Begin to differentiate the whole by identifying the structures and patterns that make up your current life (avoid nitty gritty details at this point)
- Identify potential actions or structures (latent centers) that might act as a bridge between your vision and your current life.
- Identify the simplest action you can take to convert a latent center into a new structure.
- Create the new structure.
- Repeat from Step 2.
That’s it. I’ll post more in the coming days or weeks. I don’t have this completely nailed-down, so these posts will be a sort of “working with the garage door up” adventure.
Also on Wild Rye
Life Architecture: Start with a Vision
But also don’t forget The First Step of Design – Use Your Words as a way to avoid the trap where Imposed structure hinders thinking
