Hello, and happy New Year! I'm Jesse Alford, and you're reading Nonlinear Garden, a newsletter about humans and our relationship to technology.
What should I be working on, right now?
I call this question "Problem Zero." You can't make progress on your number-one problem without a stable solution to your number-zero problem.
Problem Zero is different from Problem One. When Problem One gets solved, Problem Two gets a promotion! When Problem Zero gets solved, ordering or recognizing other problems is entirely within the context of that solution.
What do I mean by "stable" solution? I mean that it doesn't flicker, or shift, or constantly return different answers. If you have a really stable solution to Problem Zero, you can forget you even have Problem Zero, most of the time.
That's not how I usually experience life.
I have a... neurodivergence. You know the one: it gets diagnosed in kids (but lots of adults have it), doctors proscribe stimulants for it? It used to be called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). I guess we're calling it Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) now, but I grew up with the shorter acronym. Its basic characteristic for me is relatively lower control over the subject of my conscious attention. My mind is constantly offering itself new potential things to attend to. It's a lot more complicated than that, and very individual, but I think that's a very broad experience for people with this kind of diagnosis. Beyond that, I expect it's relatable to people without a diagnosis, sometimes even those for whom such a diagnosis wouldn't apply.
I don't think it particularly gets diagnosed in teams, or in companies. I don't know what doctors would proscribe them for it. Maybe it would be something like eXtreme Programming (XP); I can tell you that when I'm writing code on an XP team, I find the marginal value of the medication I sometimes use much reduced.
As a result of living as an individual with this characteristic for more than thirty years, the vast majority of that time unmedicated, I've developed a lot of skills. And paid a lot of attention to how my own mind works. I've developed appreciation for the cognitive capabilities I have that I'm not sure I would without whatever neurodiverse trade-off brings me a case of ADD. I can hyperfocus, immersed in the minute details of an interesting situation for hours and hours, forgetting to eat, neglecting sleep. (It irritates me that they changed the name of the diagnosis, but didn't correct the "attention deficit" part. I assure you that hyperfocus attention is quite surplus.)
I can sometimes notice new things that maybe I should attend to very easily. I can sometimes ignore things that maybe I should attend to very easily. If it was as simple as moving a slider around on this spectrum, this would be a great power.
And, in fact, it is - when I can get that level of control. Sometimes it comes easy. Sometimes it takes all my art. Sometimes, it's not available even then. Regardless, my skill at modulating this is essentially a multiplier, for good and ill, on my skill at everything else.
It's not my intention to get into how much pairing helps with this generally, but I have to at least mention that it does. So does slicing, a topic I've sliced out of this newsletter to treat properly in the next one.
Consciously managing Problem Zero is a prerequisite for any of these techniques in any case where I need to accomplish anything beyond the obvious, the serendipitous, and the habitual. Those are important exceptions! Sometimes I can drift around my spaces, just doing whatever I happen to do, holding only vague intentions at best, of improving some condition, starting things, stopping them, until after a few hours, progress has been made! And sometimes that's very satisfying, or restorative. But often it's avoidance, or failure to make - or even have! - a choice. It can get to feel like I can't do anything I don't happen to do.
My taxes can't get done this way. My software can't get programmed this way. My newsletter can't be written this way. Friends, I don't know if this is true for all of you, but I can't even consistently make coffee and eat breakfast in the morning this way.
I think it worth noting: I can make progress on any of these things - though taxes are a bit of a stretch. But, critically, I cannot reliably finish them. I need to finish things, because otherwise I drown in the ocean of the unfinished. As I wrote in Issue #1, "to get better at finishing things, you have to finish things."
Before we get into more detail on Problem Zero's characteristics, I'll say two more things about ADD. One, I think being the whole way that I am has produced insight into a problem that applies to people and organizations who are not the whole way that I am. The tools and models I have to develop for myself offer gains for people who can get by without them. Two, I really do think I get cognitive benefits along with drawbacks, from my "disorder." For example, increased ability to notice - how things are, could be, how they got that way. And, I think many of those benefits become available in a controlled way when using my techniques to manage focus, "disorder" or no.
Two Parts of The Zeroth Problem
A solution to Problem Zero needs to offer a selection of Problem One that is compelling to you personally. Selection is the thing people usually think of. It's what's directly asked for by the question, "what should I be working on right now?"
But any ol' solution won't do. To have stability, a solution must offer a selection that is compelling enough be accepted. Some things are self-evidently valid to my attention system. Others need some justification or other added oomph. Let's call that, all together, validity.
Validity isn't permanent. Circumstances change, resources are depleted, other things come up. Consciously checking validity is a flicker. That flicker is a context-switch, an interruption point, and a sign that validity has or is about to drop below the threshold of sustainable attention. It means your solution to Problem Zero could be stronger.
How? Especially assuming we have put a lot of effort into increasing validity?
Problem Zero solution stability is a function of selection validity and selection duration, among other things we haven't thought of or aren't including right now for our own reasons.
As Jerry Weinberg taught me to write it in An Introduction to General Systems Thinking,
Stability = f(validity, duration, ...)
The problem is that the threshold for validity, isn't stable across people, or within a single person over time.
This makes duration's impact on stability a double-whammy. Not only does the validity itself tend to decay over time, but the duration of the task to be worked is a dominant factor in how much threshold variation the validity will be exposed to over the course of the task.
The more turbulent the validity threshold is over time, the more this second impact is amplified, and the more out-of-control problem-selection feels.
What distraction might come up is hard to predict or control. Duration can be easier to predict and control, though it's a whole art, which I'm calling slicing. (I'm not entirely happy with that, and would love suggestions for alternatives.) The next newsletter will be about slicing.
People can try and predict or control what might come up. Setting is one of the factors I left out earlier.
Stability = f(validity, duration, setting, ...)
A setting with lots of novelty, or intense, threatening, or engaging activity increases threshold turbulence. Each thing that might demand your attention spikes the threshold for validity, and causes a flicker, even if it doesn't cause a full selection change.
Sometimes you can control the relevant setting enough to reduce this disruption, sometimes, less so.
Honestly, a lot of people have written about trying to control setting. It can be a major part of people's solutions! I find it a dubious path for me personally, but more importantly, it's something that is often itself a problem! Maybe even your Number One problem!
I want tools that can be used even when my setting is turbulent, and my resources are exhausted, because that describes much more of my life.
See you in a few days to talk about slicing.