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21.23: Barrier Breaking: Interruptions · Writing Excuses

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Season 21, Episode 23.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is writing excuses.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_06]: Area breaking interruptions.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Tools not rules.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Four writers by writers.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Mary Robinette.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Don Lawn.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Erin.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Howard.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to be talking about interruptions today as another form of barriers.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: When we did the last of our barriers.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: episodes we talked about the environmental problems that you might run into.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a very specific environmental problem, which is sometimes your family.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: We love them.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: We love them, but they do kind of interrupt us.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's not always family, sometimes it's co-workers, sometimes it's just, you know,
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: something else, someone comes to the front door, you have to stop writing because you have to go to work.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Your cat is adorable and also very persistent, power outages.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a bunch of different things that can cause an interruption.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I find that sometimes I don't want to start writing when I have like 15 minutes or half an hour because I'm afraid I will get interrupted.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what we want to talk about is how to deal with interruptions so that they are not a barrier to writing.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: What are some of the strategies that you all use when you are interrupted?
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: Um, it's, it sounds maybe a little trite to say it, but if writing 500 words is better than writing zero words, writing 10 words is better than writing zero words.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_05]: If I've only got 15 minutes, I, it, it's a mindset thing.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: I just have to give my permission to only get a tiny bit done.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: Maybe I'm only at 10 words written.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_05]: Maybe I'm only going to, lately, I've been doing sketchcards.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_05]: Maybe I'm only gonna get one marker color applied to one card, but you know what?
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's work that wouldn't have happened if I don't sit down and try to do it.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_05]: And if I don't get interrupted, hey, maybe I'll get two cards colored.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's interesting you say that because I've used this exact, I mean, not about cards, but this same conversation with other people in with myself.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I only recently realized that part of what happens was me.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: is that I have ADHD, which I didn't know for most of my life, I didn't get diagnosed until I was 50, and that for much of my life, I would get punished when I dropped into hyperfocus, because I would miss appointments, I would, someone would talk to me and I wouldn't hear it, and so I would avoid writing except in situations where I knew that there weren't going to be
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, where I wasn't going to have to get deal with getting interrupted.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's fascinating because there's two sides to the consequences there.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, side one, if I'm hyper-focused and I get interrupted, I often merge from the zone angry.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I don't like being angry.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_05]: And the flip side of that, the other consequence is,
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: if I'm in the zone and I miss something, well, I've missed a thing.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_05]: That's problematic.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_05]: Or if I'm in the zone and I'm interrupted and I emerge angry and that spills on to other people, then I've created some external consequences that I don't want.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_05]: And for me, by far, the most effective, the most effective tool to dealing with this is being able to articulate the shape of the
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_05]: because now that I know that that's the shape of the problem, when I think I might be facing it, I'm actually going to emerge from hyperfocus a little less angry.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm actually going to take a few more steps to make sure that maybe my phone isn't muted, so that the alarms will go off for an appointment.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_05]: I'm just a little bit more conscious of the fact that the hyperfocus has it outside.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me, I would say one thing I like to do is think about like, what is the zone?
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So like, am I end the end zone, am I at autosone, am I?
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: All right.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the strike zone, those are three different zones.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what happens is what can happen is you get into trouble.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_05]: If you're writing romance, I'm not going to finish this sentence.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are in the middle of something and you get interrupted, I think one thing that I fall prey to is thinking that you will remember, which is a wrong turn, you may not, you may take a wrong turn.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so a lot of times what I will do is give myself permission, unless like the if the house is like actually on fire and I have to like grab my cat and run, fine, I have bigger problems.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if it is not that kind of interruption, I will try to at least summarize for myself on the thing that I'm writing in a no tap to say it out loud.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, this is where I was, and this is what I was thinking at this moment so that when I come back, I can get back into the zone and it makes me less upset because I'm just basically saying, I can pause this for a moment and get back into it versus it's going to be lost forever.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do this to I call it breadcrumbs.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you have a name for it, but I will jot down like, you know, sevenish words sometimes about this is generally where I was headed and then when I come back and I look at it because this is the other trick you come back and you look at it and even though it's like this is where I was headed you're not in the same headspace and so I will often come back and start with a sensory detail in a goal.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Actually what I'll often do is start by rereading what I had just previously written.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Then do a sensory detail in a goal to get in.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I do the same technique of Dropping a breadcrum for myself.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna and similarly like to fought to fall that breadcrum.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes what I'll do is Look at where I was and instead of immediately going back to right I will actually like go take a walk or something like I'll actually try to like
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: think about what I'm like, okay, what was I getting at with these five words that I thought were very deep at the time, but now I don't understand them completely.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I will try to like think, okay, what was it?
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me like eat something really quick or have a drink of tea while I get back into the right place.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I can go from there.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_06]: This is probably my biggest productivity issue is interruptions.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_06]: And it's one that I have not solved for myself yet.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_06]: It continues to be a problem.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_06]: And you know, whenever I try to put systems around it in terms of like, oh, I'm going to contain interruptions.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_06]: There's some I can do that with, like, I am an office door.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_06]: I can close it.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_06]: And when it's closed, my partner knows not to interrupt me unless it's the house is on fire, right, and, you know, that's an easy solution.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_06]: So there's like some simple stuff you can do, right, like I have mostly removed social media apps from my life.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_06]: And so those aren't interrupting me in terms of those notifications.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_06]: But a lot of my work life is necessarily oriented around lots of interruptions, whether that's I have random meetings throughout the day, then I'm going to need to hop on Zoom for incoming emails of this is an emergency.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_06]: This is a crisis.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_06]: Text from, you know, people about issues that are coming up, you know, that's coming across, you know, my text messages, signal, discord, email,
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_06]: all of these things are act people calling me, might while I'm at work, I sort of necessarily need to be open to interruption, to respond to things.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_06]: And so I spend a lot of my life in triage mode.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_06]: Of this is a crisis, I need to be dealt with right now.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_06]: This can wait, this is a long-term task.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_06]: The end result of living your life in triage mode is category two, sometimes get dealt with category three is a black hole that disappears because it's out of my line of sight.
• 8:13
  [SPEAKER_06]: And so that is the biggest thing that's a problem for me and is consistently an issue in terms of measting on top of certain tasks, me getting back to people in a timely way and it's a thing that I'm constantly working on and struggling with.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_06]: And the thing that I also want to say is this entire topic
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_06]: deeply deeply intersects with neurodivertions.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_06]: Right.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_06]: In my Robinette, you can't bother stuff up with ADHD.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_06]: This intersects with people who are, you know, on the autism spectrum, this intersects with people who have a variety of different, you know,
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_06]: neural divergences, mental health issues, things like that, that cause you to respond to different stimuli in different ways.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, one thing that's really common is task switching has a very high cost for some people and a lower cost for other people.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_06]: I spent a lot of my thinking my task switching was quite low in terms of cost, but I've come to realize that's not true.
• 9:07
  [SPEAKER_06]: And in part, my life requires a very high amount of task switching, which means that there's a lot of like, turn in my den, and then suddenly I'll be like, how is it three o'clock already?
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_06]: And I've only accomplished a quarter of the things I set out to do today, right?
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_06]: And it's because I've had to do all these little tasks.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_06]: I've had to respond all these little emails, and you know,
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_06]: I don't have a good solution to any of these things, right?
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_06]: Some people suggest you bundle it, you package like certain types of tasks together, and then I only look at the email this time, and I only look at it this time.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_06]: But if I do that, that causes other cascading problems.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_06]: Anyways, I'm just complaining at this point.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_05]: But you've raised an important point, which is that there are two sides to the interruption problem.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: One is, how do I manage myself when I'm interrupted?
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_05]: And the other is, how do I manage the rest of the world so that it will stop interrupting me?
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_06]: Which is like my job requires that kind of interruption.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_06]: If you have small children, it requires an eruption.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_06]: If you have a dog, that dog's going to get locked.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_06]: In fact, you know, there's all kinds of different things that are unavoidable as part of your life that will be interrupting you at some point.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I think the at some point is also a thing when you were talking about neurodivergence.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like, yes, I have ADHD, depression, those things.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I also know that when I am fatigued, I get like all those symptoms ratchet up.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I know from other people that even if they don't, if they are somehow miraculously not neurodivergent, um, that fatigue or other stressors can cause the same problems of making decisions in that moment of interruption.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you had talked about having systems and I think coming up with systems so that when it happens like like Erin's system can be one of the things that can help so when we come back from the break we're going to talk a little bit about some systems.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So systems, the reason I want to talk about this is that I find that one of the things that can help is to have an answer to a problem before the problem arises, so that when it arises, you know, this is how I deal with it.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like Howard was saying earlier before the break that he knows this is how he behaves when his hyperfocus is interrupted, you can have a system and it's like, okay, this is how it happens.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can also have that conversation with your family and if you have that conversation with your family or whoever you're co-habiting with, co-worker, why are you co-habiting with a co-worker, you're traveling with the monobusiness trip anyway.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if you can have that conversation with people before the problem arises, so before they interrupt you, you can say, hey, I find that when I'm working, I need X.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: One example would be like, you want to spend time with your family, but you also need to get writing done.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you sit down with your family and say, and I realize not everybody has this
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if you sit down with someone who cares about you, family, housemates, you know, whatever.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: That, and you say, hey, I have writing done, and I've found that I get distracted easily.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you help me?
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can we come up with a system so that you can know when I'm writing, so that I can guard my safe time?
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or I want to spend time with you.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you sit down with me with the calendar?
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: and we can look at when I can write that doesn't take me away from spending time with you.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you can come up with those systems so that when you get interrupted, it is only emergencies, then it's going to be a lot easier on everyone involved.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_06]: And the thing I'll also point out is, in terms of things like that, there's lots of digital tools I can help you.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_06]: Your phone has lots of settings that allow you to filter who comes through your messages and who doesn't, right?
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_06]: Have I done this on my phone?
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_06]: Absolutely not, that would take me spending 10 minutes to figure it out.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_06]: Other people, you can set it up so that only your mom can call you, you know, in case if she has a health emergency or something like that right or like there are things that if somebody repeat calls it'll break through you do not disturb settings right so there are lots of filters and settings you put on your phone of like I'm in work mode.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_06]: you know, if you have an iPhone, they've added like many different layers of, you know, focus modes, do not disturb sleep modes, things like that.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_06]: And have different layers of interruptibility.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_06]: And you know, I encourage you to figure out those digital tools and use them as they are helpful to you.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_06]: Again, have I done this in my life?
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_05]: No, we'll do it after the end of the week.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_05]: Nineteen.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_05]: Nineteen 87.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_05]: To Mr. Tom Demarco wrote a book called People Where That Was About.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_05]: Basically it was about how writing software is different than building cars on an assembly line.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_05]: And they explored this thing, this very thing that we're talking about, because corporations and large workplaces were not organized well.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_05]: People didn't know how to build them, so that knowledge workers, people who write code.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_05]: uh, with mostly that they were talking about, could get into the zone for hours at a time and get work done.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_05]: You know, one of the problem with the open plan office, which somehow requires what the open plan office, um, one of the first things that they said that you, you just need to throw out is uh, the inner come.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: The only thing that should go over the Intercom is the buildings on fire, please get up and leave.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_05]: They're because the Intercom interrupts everyone, so you don't use that.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_05]: And they drew a comparison between two companies, one of which did all of these things that were cool, but were very expensive in terms of protecting employees' ability to not be interrupted, and the other didn't.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: And one of the companies, none of us had ever heard of, and the other one was
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_05]: who had gone on to make all kinds of stuff.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_05]: And I worked in the software industry from 1993 until 2004.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_05]: Started working there five years after this book was published.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_05]: And the lessons that I learned as a knowledge worker in an office space, trying to defend my ability
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: get into the zone.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_05]: I wasn't writing code as writing product requirements.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_05]: I would basically filling spreadsheet shell cells with amazingly good ideas that I had.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_05]: Right.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: I said with sarcasm, but between meetings and phone calls and knocks on the door and everything, we all had rafts.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_05]: truckloads of strategies for protecting our time and when I left Nobel to be a cartoonist full time, it was so easy for me to be able to defend my time because I was now defending it against a much smaller group of people who were much more invested in me being successful.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also was like, oh, 1987, I don't know, it seems like a cool year.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: I graduated from high school then.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, five.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I was thinking about, I was like, I'm going to leave that in the past.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think that a lot of it is knowing yourself.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I've talked before on the podcast about the concept of putting the shoe rack by the door.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: figuring out who you are and then hacking your life as much as you can to match it.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what I finally interesting is I live alone and so I actually am like a reverse which is that I like microinterruption that stop me from wandering off mindwise.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I mean by that it's like if I think maybe an interesting email will be coming in and I turn off all email.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: on my computer.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will spend a lot of time going back to check.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You see, if it came in, did it come in, did it not come in, what's going on?
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I got a smart watch so that it will ping me when an email that's important comes in.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can, because I know myself, look at it, be like, okay, great.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll deal with that in a few minutes, but I haven't missed anything.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I'm alone in the house, it's like, I'm the only one paying attention to things.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Same with like, I had an apartment at one point
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I actually got a little camera that only was on the mat so that when a package was delivered, I would know.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: As opposed to going back and checking every 22 seconds to be like, was the package delivered?
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was the package delivered?
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I was creating like more interruptions for myself than the momentary interruption.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And once I knew what the interruption would be, when it would happen, what it would feel like, and how I would deal with it, I was able to make it
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: a part of my zone is like occasionally getting a buzz or and seeing that there's a package there and then figuring out what to do with it.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So really like monitoring when you're feeling interrupted, what's happening in your brain, what's the thing that's holding you up and then how can you attack that part of the problem?
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think what we're talking about here is that you can either retrain others around you or you can retrain yourself.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you have a lot more control of retraining your own.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Self, it's nice if you can have a collaborative thing with other people.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But like, I'm going to give two examples because I find them funny.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So my dad, when I was while my mom was alive, we had this rule that he could only call me.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: If it was time sensitive and about mom, because I couldn't put my phone on, do not disturb, I couldn't put it on airplane mode, which used to be my mode of protecting time.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we have this rule.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: We are recording writing excuses.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is unfortunately, you don't get to hear this because we did stop recording, but we were recording writing excuses.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm in the booth, phone rings, it's my dad, and he says, this is time-sensitive, and it is about your mom, and I'm like, oh my god.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I am out of the booth, I'm halfway down the stairs, and he says, I can't find the egg beater.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I got the onions on the stove and I'm making her some fried eggs and I can't find the egg beta.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm like you can you can beat eggs with a fork and you can so I love my dad.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's an engineer before he retired.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't understand how we were having this conversation.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was in his 80s but the point is that sometimes even when you train them, even when you have an agreement, even when they want to be helpful, they can still be a barrier.
• 20:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: sometimes you yourself are the barrier.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So coming up with a strategy for how to handle the interruption once it happens.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: The other analogy or other story is my cat Elsie, the one who uses buttons to talk.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: Before she got buttons, I would get up and she'd want to play a little bit in the morning, but I would start working.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: The morning was my working time.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: With buttons, I've learned that morning is the time that she most wants to play, and that if I don't play with her for half an hour or 45 minutes, which is not an unreasonable time to play with your pet, by the way, that she is going to be bored for the rest of the day.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if I get up and I spend that time with her, then the rest of the day is totally open for writing, she will go take an app.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: So sometimes it's often about like I can shift my behavior much more easily than I can shift hers in that case, but in both cases like I have to have a plan and I have to have strategies on what I'm going to do.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, that sort of dub tells with sort of two things I've been implementing my life that do seem to help.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_06]: One is the first is just accepting the interruptions are going to happen into a just my expectations accordingly and how like communicate those expectations other people.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_06]: Right.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_06]: So this keeps him from trying to set unrealistic timelines for myself and adjust my own expectations of what my day is going to look like.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_06]: Right.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_06]: If I'm
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_06]: planning my day around the ideal version where nobody sends me an annoying email.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_06]: Nobody text me and I don't get a random spam call about some loan offer that doesn't exist.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_06]: Then
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, if I play in my day as that, the thing that's never going to happen, then I'm always going to be disappointed and frustrated at the end of the day.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_06]: Right.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_06]: But if I learn to adjust my expectations to something more realistic and have more generosity with myself in terms of what I'm going to accomplish today, then I think that makes that much more manageable and let's me.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_06]: be more realistic about how I'm actually moving through the world.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_06]: And then the second thing is, again, kind of what you're saying is adjusting my own behaviors around that.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_06]: And the thing that I find is that if I take 30 minutes in the morning, you know, the problem with working from home is like, you wake up, you roll out a bed and you're at work.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_06]: You know what I mean?
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_06]: And if I instead say to myself, no, I'm spending 20, 30 minutes, not working the morning.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to make my coffee.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to enjoy it.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to sit with my notebook, make some notes about what my plan for the day is before I open my email.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_06]: Because if the first thing I do is get out of bed and open my email, then immediately, I'm just in it, right?
• 22:45
  [SPEAKER_06]: And I'm just in triage mode.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_06]: And I can't do a name that planning around it that will help me manage my day.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_06]: do I do this more than two days a week?
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_06]: No, but we're working on it.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_06]: You know what I mean?
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_06]: And I think that's also something that's just like, you won't be perfect about these things.
• 23:00
  [SPEAKER_06]: You'll have to learn to integrate that into your expectations and your process.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_05]: Returning for a brief moment to computer history.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_05]: Modern computers are so much more resilient to being crashed, being interrupted, power outages, whatever.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, it used to be the horror story was, oh no, the power went out and I lost my entire manuscript.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: Now, unless you're using ancient software on ancient hardware, oh, no, the power went out and when it booted up, the file was missing the last two pages.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_05]: The principle here is that computers have gotten much smarter about creating, and I'm going to use old terminology because I'm not in the business anymore, but creating swap files and putting pointers on things.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_05]: The idea that when you task swap and being interrupted is a task swap,
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_05]: you don't just drop what you're doing and move on to the next thing, you create a swap file.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_05]: You store some of it's like the seven words that you write.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_05]: It's whatever the reminders are.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_05]: Just the idea that I am caching some stuff so that when I come back to it, I come back to it cleanly instead of coming back and finding out that my memory of it is completely corrupt.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_05]: I have loved watching computers get better at this.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_05]: I have despaired at myself getting worse at this as I get older.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_05]: But I recognize that those same strategies apply.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_05]: I've started surrounding myself with index cards and post-it notes, and I will create a manual swap file.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_05]: Was doing this thing and then I get up and I sit back down and I'm like,
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_05]: Where the heck was I?
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_05]: Oh someone left me a note.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_05]: Oh goodness and we're off to the races
• 25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will also say that like what you said about memories being corrupt and don't want what you said about like going for the ideal day is also to learn that sometimes you create patterns that you think work and you've just lost your trust, lie to yourself, but for some reason it work like one time, like one day you had a perfect day and you were like it's all gonna be like this from ear on out.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_06]: Oh if I do this one thing that solves it and then six months later I'm like that that's
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: One that I find is the like I can outrun sleep is as one that I often have never seen you do that and I've never done this myself
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I've learned that there are times in which you are better off napping 45 minutes and getting back up.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you really, you know, I wouldn't do it every day.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then you are trying to press through the sleep deprivation because your brain is just lying to you that like at any second, you'll be finished if you just keep pressing through.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: but you never know it in the moment.
• 26:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so like because being really sleep deprived is like being a little tipsy and like a tipsy person, you have bad ideas about the world at that moment or like a hungry person in a grocery store.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why they tell you don't go to the grocery store hungry, you'll just start buying stuff.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so sometimes I have to remind myself like actually kind of like right down mental rules.
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when it is really late and I'm like, I'm just gonna push through for another hour, I'll be like, this is a lie.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: make up and see if you still feel this way and I will do it and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad that my past self is trying to train myself out of the habits that I thought we're working for me and are not.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, this stuff tells with the whole other conversation about burnout that we don't have time to get into right now, but it's that thing of like when you just assume that you can keep going and keep doing the thing and not putting breaks for rest into place.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_06]: leads you to a place of burnout and I do think this is really tied to interruptions because it's that task-witching that friction that I think eats more cycles than you think it does, right?
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_06]: And so again, so much of it is adjusting your own expectations and what is a coplishable.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_06]: and adjusting the expectations of people around.
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_06]: Now, sometimes those expectations are your family or your boss or your agent, who's like, where's this manuscript?
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_06]: You know what I mean?
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_06]: Like, sometimes those are very hard to adjust, but as much as you can, finding ways to carve out that space for yourself and that starts with being able to be self-aware and honest with yourself about what is possible.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: So with that, as if I was going to do that, I mean, aspirations, right?
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: You train towards what you want to be exactly.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: So with that, I have homework for you, which actually involves training you to handle interruptions in a low stakes environment.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I want you to set a series of alarms for yourself ready, so you're going to set an alarm for five minutes and then you're going to have another one that is at seven minutes, then you're going to have another one that is at nine minutes and then another one that is at 15 minutes.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: So what I'm doing here is I am giving you some random interruptions.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: After the first interruption, you're going to take a two minute break.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's what happens when we do that five to seven.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a two minute break.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: You're going to get two breaks that are two minutes long.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: So when that alarm happens, I want you to jot a breadcrumb to yourself.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: jot a note to yourself, post it, whatever.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is what I was working on, and then I want you to get up and walk around.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: and then start writing again when the seven-minute alarm happens so that you've got another span where you're going to get a little bit more writing done.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's going to be annoying, but it's a good way to practice it at a time when you have control over the situation.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then that means that you are out of excuses, now go set some alarms and write.
• 29:15
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• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts and Howard Taylor.
• 29:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
• 29:32
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