Alright, more fun content for the kids.
There’s some new flikr goodness here.
New Raw file and photo review over at learningphoto.com.
New picture over on the side bar there. Taken while testing out lighting setups and hamming around. Good Stuff.
So recently I’ve been really confronted with my own brain issues in ways I’ve never had to before. My little brother has ADD, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do as well, albeit in a high functioning way. My mind is constantly following tangents. Constantly. When I’m in a meeting, someone will say something interesting, and I’ll be looking at them and nodding, and my mind will be racing off through possibilities and I won’t be paying attention to anything they say after that until I manage to hone back in on them.
I am constantly thinking about one thing or another, but I am easily distracted. When I’m working on something, and some little thing breaks my concentration, I will go off on working on that thing, sometimes getting back to the original thing, sometimes not. I’m really really good at doing lots and lots of small projects at once, but bad at working on one thing for extended periods of time. I’m also bad at prioritizing.
Reading Getting Things Done has shown me that this is a pretty common problem for modern knowledge workers, and we’re really slamming into the limits of the brain’s attention abilities in modern workplaces. I’ve never really encountered it before, so it’s disconcerting.
One thing is for sure, if I can’t connect meaning to something I’m hearing, I won’t pay enough attention to remember it. If something is interesting and meaningful, I’ll remember it perfectly. I’ve always joked that my mind has too much going on to remember stupid shit, and that kind of applies until your boss is concerned with that stupid shit and never really conveyed how important it was.
So important lessons I’ve been picking up recently have been:
learn what your boss considers important. If you have a sort of emotionally flat boss, sometimes they won’t really give away what their priorities are through body language or voice inflection. Ask.
Just write down everything and filter it later. Don’t trust your brain to decide what to remember and what not to remember. If you’re not emotionally or intellectually invested in it, you probably won’t remember it, but you might still be responsible for it.
Cutting way back on caffeine is not the best thing for people with focus problems. If you’re a day dreamer, getting into a healthier lifestyle might have negative consequences on your ability to stay on target. There’s a reason that ADD people take speed.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t care about. Most of those things are small details about things not happening immediately. I have great attention to small details happening soon or now, but not weeks in advance. I just don’t see them as a priority or something to be worried about. As a consequence I forget them. Need to be capturing them reliably.
Talked to the apartment office today and got the “go to hell” speech about getting ongoing concessions. She told me the current market rate on my apartment is $1400 a month. Boo. Nothing unexpected, but they have treated us well so far, so I thought I would give it a shot.
Lease expires Jan 29th, so we have plenty of time to look. This is a good thing.
I’ll probably change the layout here pretty soon and clean things up as most people are just digging the RSS thing for browsing my page. Lowered the default number of posts on the front page to 3. Less is more.
TGB is now on moderation for all comments as spammers have been getting through.