I’ve spoken before about fear. Fear is a terrible motivator, at least in the long term. Fear takes a lot out of a person. Fear amps your body’s systems to the maximum. While fear is in control you can accomplish incredible feats at great physical cost, true. However, you can only run so far, and you can only fight so hard before your reserves are depleted. When that happens, you’re done. With any luck, whatever your body stored up in preparation for your fear event was enough to get you through it. If not, you’ll end up worse than when you started, drained and pained, and in deep trouble.

Living a life in perpetual fear is a guaranteed recipe for utter and complete misery.

Why?

Fundamentally, it’s biology. The human limbic system evolved in a way to ensure our survival against very real, very present, very specific threats to our person. I’m talking about “being attacked by a hungry lioness,” or “facing down an angry rhinoceros” sort of threats. Now-a-days, however, our chances of facing down a dangerous animal that could kill us is exceedingly rare. The limbic system is well-suited for when a car veers out of control at you while you’re crossing the street. It is not suited for when you have, say, an overdue tax bill that you can’t afford. One is an immediate threat; you either escape, or don’t. There’s going to be a very quick resolution when a car is coming at you. The other threat is going to linger…

When you become afraid or experience a threat, the body experiences a number of symptoms that work to prepare it for either fight or flight. The heart accelerates, lung action increases, blood vessels in the muscles dilate to increase blood flow, and the body becomes ready for action. Sure, in the face of a less tangible threat, you can leap into action and start doing stuff, but you’re probably not going to neutralize anything in the time it takes for your hormones to metabolize and your body to crash. At this point, the body needs rest and nutrients to replenish itself, which—one hopes—are in supply, and rest is hard to get when you’re still afraid.

It’s not a huge leap from here to the effects of the fear cycle we can get ourselves caught up in, but fear isn’t the only thing that taxes our systems. Anger triggers a lot of the same systems as fear. An angry life is just as bad as a fearful life. When we talk about stress, this is, in many cases, a function of long term fear and/or anger. Think about it: you’re not going to be stressed if the thing you’re afraid of or angry about is not a threat anymore. That is, if the mind can let go of it.

The mind sucks at this.

We see it manifested as Posttraumatic stress disorder, and it doesn’t just happen to people who survive war, natural disasters, or acts of criminality. Any stressful experience can cause it, and it may be one of the biggest public health problems facing America—especially children.

Severe and chronic trauma… causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible.

When you’re afraid, when you’re stressed, when you’re angry, it drives you toward one thing above all: to escape. This is biology. Nothing more. Our bodies evolved to address threats that manifest as tangible, physical things. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re not living the sort of lifestyle that would put you in the presence of free wild carnivores and other dangerous beasts. Instead, your threats, as stated, become more existential and far less tangible. We can be paralyzed by this, unable to fix anything, and unable to escape. You may know someone like this. You may be someone like this.

There are no easy answers to escaping the fear cycle. Medication, meditation, and therapy, are all options, but as I am not a licensed psychiatrist or therapist, I can’t give you a prescription.

The worst part, though, is that when you’re afraid—at least early on—you can accomplish wonders. Think of all the all-nighters you’ve pulled in college, or the last minute preparation for your work presentation. Think of every time you’ve flown by the seat of your pants, and lived. If that number is greater than the times you’ve done it and crashed, you’re going to think that it’s okay. I’ve gotten plenty of A grades on papers I churned out the day before, night before, or two or three hours before they became due.

That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have done better.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do better, either.

Fear is a motivator, but it’s a terrible motivator, because it doesn’t keep things going for very long. If you expect to keep moving, keep surviving and fighting, and doing the work, what motivates you needs to be something more sustaining than sheer, blind animal fear. What that is will vary from person to person. Whatever it is, long- term success will only come from using a motivator that can sustain you in the future.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

—Frank Herbert, Dune

I consume a lot of media. Daily, there’s something new about either technology, Apple products, creative work, culture, and/or current events that gets downloaded to my iPhone and pumped into my brain. My RSS Reader picks up dozens of articles about these same things, along with a few dozen online comics. On every page of this website there’s pictures of the books I’m reading, and every month I get a credit for an audiobook. I get a daily email newsletter with interesting, curated, articles to read. I’m often prowling for new, interesting music. My Twitter and Tumblr feeds are constantly refreshing with links, commentary, and humor from people I like. Then there’s Facebook.[1] Oh, God, there’s Facebook and its endless stream of personal updates, pictures of cats, event invitations, calls to political action, game updates, event invitations, pictures of people, friend requests, and event invitations.

It’s overwhelming, and keeping up with it all is taking a lot of time. This has me thinking about the inputs in my life, and how many of them actually something I care about. For example, as much as I love technology, do I really need to get a daily recap of the day’s technology news via podcast? So much of tech news is the same stuff over and over, and comparatively little of it is compelling. Is this actually worth the thirty to sixty minute time investment? How much of what I’m consuming in content each day is signal, and how much is noise?

So, I’ve been trying to evaluate what comes in, and if it’s worth keeping. The criteria is entirely subjective, as it should be. What I want to fall into my inboxes of consumption are things that scratch itches I have. My itches are personal and heavily dependent on the medium. Let’s just pick podcasts to start, as that’s what set me off on this rant. I like to know what’s happening in technology, but only to a point. When it’s about Apple products, cool apps, actual new technological breakthroughs, and using my gizmos and gadgets better, I can’t get enough. When a show gets to the point that I can skip an episode or three with no guilt, that’s probably a sign I should stop downloading it. I’ve found myself gravitating to shows that have a distinct editorial voice about the things I like. With technology, I’ve been listening to stuff from the 5by5 Network. Something about they way they do technology just clicks in a way that a more traditional news show doesn’t.

Thankfully, that part’s easy. With RSS feeds, I wish there was a way to see how many articles I read all the way through, or Instapapered, or clicked through on so I could prune what I read a bit better. Awareness and mindfulness can take care of that. Each individual input has is own signal-to-noise ratio. Another example: for every really cool thing on Boing Boing, there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t care about. However, when they post something cool, it’s often really cool. Cool enough, at least, to be willing to put up with the stuff that I have zero interest in. Sources with less really cool stuff, however, I have to just put aside. The time spent filtering the signal from the noise could be better spent doing something else, even if it’s just spent digesting more cool stuff.

With social networks, things get a bit thornier. On Facebook particularly, but other places too, the people you’ve friended and followed are often people you know in real life. You will see them, interact with them, shake hands with them, hug them—and dropping them
from your friends list can be seen as a personal thing. The best thing the Facebook people have ever done was offer the option to unsubscribe from people’s updates, or to just show what’s “important” I do wish I knew how Facebook determines what “important” is, but if it reduces how much noise I get, I’ll take it. I’d love it if I could keep up with the people I care about in a way that allows deeper interaction and is less of a timesink, but Facebook is, sadly, where the action is.

But, once the noise is filtered out, as best as one can, we can focus more on what’s important to us. Perhaps more importantly, we can come back to things that touched us. In the “tap essay,” Fish, Robin Sloan discusses just how rarely we go back and re-read the things that we favorite, like, love, +1, thumbs up, upvote, bookmark, etc. online. There’s just so much coming in from the information firehose that we so often can’t go back and re-read, re-watch, re-listen, because we’re caught up chasing that next thing. It’s been said that “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” I’m not sure I agree. If what you wasted your time on came at the expense of something you should have been doing, or would rather be doing, or even something you like doing better, then you did waste it. It may not feel that way from the little endorphin rush that comes from each tap and click, but it is. Every click brings us a little shot of pure, full-strength dopamine. Don’t tell me you don’t get just the tiniest little thrill when you open your Twitter client, refresh your RSS feeds, or refresh your Instagram feed.

More importantly, this extends far beyond just your RSS reader, and Twitter account. Any sort of input source can have a signal-to-noise ratio that is not helping you. As long as we have the mindfulness to stay aware of what we’re consuming, why we consume it, and what we get from it, it is possible to control that incoming flow of information. You can’t drink from a firehose. You need a way to slow, control, and filter your inputs so that what you get is truly what you’re looking for, inasmuch as possible. It’s liberating to be free from the weight of obligation to consume everything, and there’s many ways to channel that liberation. You can use it to consume more cool stuff, or go back to what you’ve loved before. You can even use that time to make something cool for someone else. All of these are fine, but you’ll never do any of them while digging through the dirt for the diamonds.

“We procrastinate when we’ve forgotten who we are.”
– Merlin Mann

This is true, but what if we don’t know who we are?

There’s a box of business cards on my desk, the kind you can get for almost free though an online service. They have my name and the words “Administrative Professional” written in Copperplate Gothic. Patrick Bateman would be unimpressed. I bought them during my extended unemployment, intending to use them while networking to find a job. Of the 250 cards I ordered, at least 225 are still in the box, collecting dust. The rest simply vanished into the wind. One the one hand, I didn’t exactly go out of my way to “network.” On the other hand, I don’t see myself as an “Administrative Professional,” either. If that’s not who I am, then no wonder I kept procrastinating on putting cards in people’s hands.

I’ve said that I’m a writer, but for a writer, I certainly don’t do a hell of a lot of it. What I do a lot of is… well… In terms of real hours, I spend the majority of my time running between a computer and a printer, doing a task that—aside from moving paper from point A to point B—could be easily replaced by some clever UI scripting. The next largest chunk of my time, is spent on the phone trying to convince people to either donate money or buy a theatre subscription. Neither of these are writing. Neither of these are creative. Neither of these are who I am, or who I want to be. I’m in the process of trying to fix that by changing my physical location, but that’s really only a start. In the meantime, I’m at my job where I move papers from point A to point B, feeling my brain atrophy.

On the chart there, devised by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, [1]: I’m spending the majority of my time stuck bouncing between the “Apathy” and “Boredom” wedges. Why? It’s not a hard job, and it’s not a particularly difficult one. I can’t make myself develop enough of an emotional attachment to the work to make the lack of challenge worth it. Or, I should say that the emotional attachment I had when I started the job has withered away. Part of the reason why is that I never intended this job to be a permanent, long-term thing. This isn’t a career, it’s a means to an end—putting a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and money in the hands of my creditors.

There is nothing wrong with this. Per se. It’s the sort of work life that millions of people have now, and have had for decades. It worked for my parents, and probably yours, too. There are plenty of people who are content to have a job that is fulfilling on a purely economic level. There many not be as many as there used to be, but you can still get a Richard Scarry job.

Where things fall down for me is the conflation of what I do with who I am, and it’s an easy trap to fall into. So much of the American identity is based around work. So often, the first thing you ask when meeting a new person is: “What do you do?” I hate having to answer this. It’s embarrassing, at least depending on which of the correct answers I give. I could say, “I’m a writer,” and leave it at that, but that doesn’t explain why I’m waiting at the counter of the coffee shop at eight in the morning for my first caffeine infusion of the day, haggard and sleep-deprived, but well-dressed and carrying a bag on my shoulder . Clearly, I’m going somewhere. So I have to tell the nice barista, “Oh, uh, I’m a clerk for the government…,” then look sheepish, put the lid on my coffee, and run to catch the train. I am going somewhere, but I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere at all.

As I start job hunting in earnest again, I’m confronting a pair of questions: “What do I want to do that’s worth doing?” and “What can I do that will pay the bills?” [2] Then there’s entrepreneurship, which is something I approach in the same way one approaches a gorilla: warily. I have no ideas for products or businesses, unless you count being a fiction writer, which is only lucrative for people like Stephen King, and even he held down his share of shitty day jobs while getting his start. After the last couple jobs I’ve held down to support myself, and seeing the effects, I just have to wonder why I even have to compromise on what my shitty day job is. The current situation might not be so bad if I wasn’t coming home after thirteen hours exhausted and exasperated. When you expend all your energy on the stuff that forms the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the rest of that climb is made exponentially harder. Naturally, what’s at the top is all that good stuff of self-actualization, and—to mix my metaphors—it dangles just out of reach.

I’m not good at knowing what I want. I’m better at knowing what I like. I like technology, writing, music, art, and variety. I like having clearly defined goals I can check off a list when they’re done. I like knowing that what’s done really is done, and I don’t have to fix it unless I made a mistake. Where do any of these things intersect, and do they intersect in a place that also provides enough money to live on while I focus on what truly matters to me? Paying dues is one thing. Actively putting aside my dreams for financial security is another.

If what I do is who I am, and I don’t do what I want to be, what have I become?

If what I do is who I don’t want to be, then how can I change who I am?

If I don’t know who I want to be, how can I find out?

I had to be sold on the job before I took it. The proposition wasn’t a bad one: three hours a night, four or five nights a week, minimum wage with generous productivity bonuses, and free tickets to the shows. A couple of days later, I was on the phones trying to wheedle money out of elderly theatre subscribers. Somehow, I developed a knack for it, and it helped pay my way through college. I still work there as I write this; I need the money and you can’t beat the perks.

It was a risk. As my academic career progressed, I opted for something that would pay for rent, textbooks, and food in lieu of an unpaid internship and experience in my field. While it worked out in the short term, once college came to an end I was forced to compete for jobs with only a Bachelor of Arts in English and four years of experience calling people at dinner time to my name. I thought I could spin it into an entry level position in non-profit development, but nothing came of it. After a few months of searching, two opportunities had been laid in front of me. Option one was a part time, temporary editing gig with a local medical college that had the possibility of becoming full time. Option two was a full time job with benefits, but consisted of calling companies on behalf of tech firms to get them to take sales pitches.

With student loans due, and an itch to get out of my parents house again, I opted for the full time job, knowing full well it wasn’t what I really wanted. I figured I’d try it for a year, and look for something else if I was unsatisfied.

This was a mistake.

Sixteen months later, I was given the boot for poor performance, and entered the dark wilderness of my Lost Year. As I searched for something else to do, I felt as though I had been typecast. When someone looks at my rèsumè and sees "Account Executive" and "Tele-Sales Agent," I can’t help but imagine them going "Yeah, we don’t need some sales guy in this position," and putting it in the circular file. During my unemployment, it seemed the only people who I excited were headhunters desperately searching for warm bodies to fill entry-level sales jobs. I probably averaged a call a week from a recruiter, and you could hear their voices sink when I told them I was not interested in sales work.

I don’t regret not taking internships. I’m of the mindset that any work that benefits an organization deserves to be compensated in some way more tangible than "college credit." That stuff wouldn’t have paid my rent. What I regret is the choice of taking what looked like the safe thing—$30,000 a year and health insurance—over a chance to try something new and more aligned with my personal interests and education. If the Many Worlds Hypothesis is correct, then there is another universe where I made the right choice. What I wouldn’t give to switch places. I knew I wanted some financial security, but what I got was ten times more of what I had at my part time college job—if not more, as I was still doing it, pulling 52 hour work weeks for minimum financial gain. The powers that be dangled two carrots in front of me, and I took the bigger one, not realizing that the big carrot was the only one I’d get.

The lesson? Don’t compromise on something as important as what you do for a living, but that’s a hard thing to do. It’s been another year since my Lost Year, and I’m still doing something that isn’t what I want, and for less money. At least there’s an escape plan that I am slowly executing. The move to New York promises to give me new opportunities and new inputs to consider. I’ve seen the wages of security, and they’re increasingly not worth it. [1] Whatever the choices end up being, once they end up in front of me, I am going to take the one that appeals to me on more than just a financial level. I make this statement publicly, and I ask the couple of dozen readers I have to hold me to it. Risk taking is not something in my blood, but it’s something I’d like to put there. It’s time to stop seeking permission to be awesome.

On a recent episode of Back to Work, Merlin bemoaned the struggles of using Apple’s new iCloud service. In short, iCloud fails to let Merlin have everything everywhere. He contrasts this with Dropbox, which–while lacking in Apple-like integration–does just that. Merlin’s iCloud woes echo a struggle I have in my own system, which is making sure that what I want is where I am, whether I’m at my computer, or on my iPhone. This isn’t nearly as complicated as Merlin’s struggles. I have only two devices after all.[1]

A long time ago, I wrote about having a hole in my software library, and the hacked together system I had developed to work around it. I still use that system, more or less, but I’ve run into a few holes that drive me bonkers now and then–and it all has to do with my task management system. For the longest time, I’ve used Things, which is a lovely, easy-to-use application. There’s an iPhone version as well, which is pretty solid and elegantly designed. Both work well on their own, but getting them to work together is a pain. It’s one of the few multi-platform applications I use that has no cloud-based synchronization.[2] To keep all my data from Things in concert across my Mac and my iPhone, I have to launch Things on my iPhone, while connected to my home Wi-Fi network, and let it sync with the desktop application.[3]

Look, despite what the folks at Cultured Code say about it, synchronization of something like this is a solved problem. Sync is hard, yes, but that doesn’t mean you need to re-invent the wheel when you’re doing something as low entropy as this. Case in point: Wunderlist. Wunderlist is not as nice, or as Mac-like as Things, but it does do one thing very well that Things does not: cloud sync. I can add something to the Wunderlist iPhone app, and it just appears, like magic, on the desktop app. They’ve got a solid web-based infrastructure for this, and it works out of the box. Also, Wunderlist is freeware, which is a nice plus compared to the expense of the more heavy-duty task management applications out there.

Wunderlist falls down for me in that it does not support repeating tasks. When David Allen suggests having a mind like water, I don’t think he meant it in the way my mind is. Without something popping up in my view to remind me about, say, watering the basil plant on my windowsill, I would no longer have access to fresh basil. I spent a couple days trying to kludge some form of reoccuring tasks using iCal and Wunderlist’s ability to add tasks by e-mail, only to throw my hands up in frustration after needing to break out Automator and Mail.app to do it–and finding even that didn’t work properly.

Here, someone would suggest using OmniFocus. I have tried. Lord, how I have tried. I tried it for the first time when it was Kinkless GTD, consisting of a bunch of scripts and things for OmniOutliner. I tried it again when it was in Public Beta. I tried it one last time before I wrote the first draft of this essay. All I can say about OmniFocus is that while it may work for certain people whose brains function in a certain way, I simply cannot wrap my head around it. We’re talking about an application for managing tasks. This is the sort of thing that could be done with a pencil and paper. After using OmniFocus for ten minutes, I felt so overwhelmed that I was ready to go back to a pencil and paper–even going so far as to check if the 2012 Moleskine Weekly Planners were on sale yet.[4]

So, I’m back to using Things. I stick with it, though I am well aware of other options like The Hit List, Remember the Milk, and a dozen or so other pretenders to the throne. Truth is, the minor inconvience of having to launch Things on my iPhone every morning and every evening to keep my world in sync is nothing compared to the sheer pain in the keister of switching systems now.

What I would like is something that combines the ease of use and design sense of Things with the power and flexibility of OmniFocus, has an iPhone app, some form of cloud-based sync, and a price point that won’t make me feel like I’m throwing away the $60 I’ve already spent on Things for the Mac and iPhone. There’s got to be an app developer out there who can do that.