Saturday morning, I found myself at a 5k run in Parma — oddly enough, at the same field where Marie plays football.

I’d been planning on doing a 5k for a while but just didn’t really plan on going to this particular one until Friday.

Like I said in my last post, I’ve already been in postmortem mode for some time, but having actually been to a formal 5k, I had a few more thoughts on the subject.

* * *

ok so it wasn’t that formal

I was sort of expecting a lot of orientation and herding, but mostly you just filled out a little form, pinned a number to your belly, and waited around for someone to say it was time to go. No ID required, no lining up by estimated minutes-per-mile.

I don’t particularly mind, though I probably showed up way earlier than was strictly necessary.

* * *

running with water

During my practice runs, I’ve never carried water with me. I’ve never hydrated during a run; I’ve only done it afterwards, and, on rare occasion, just before.

But they had a water stop halfway through the race, so I figured it would be good to grab some. I felt a little weird drinking it while walking, and even weirder just throwing my empty cup on the street when I was done, but apparently that’s what you’re supposed to do.

* * *

frame of reference

I was going somewhat faster than usual my first mile and a half. During practice runs lately, my first mile has usually been 10 or 11 minutes/mile, but I completed my first mile’s worth of race in 9:44 — even though I thought I was going slow.

I guess, running in a crowd, since everyone’s moving with you it doesn’t feel so much like you’re going fast, and it’s harder to judge your own speed.

* * *

slope

I had a lot of trouble with some of the gently sloping roads here. It wasn’t what I’d call hilly, but I’ve been practicing on a nearly flat loop at home. I should alter my routine to include some hills; there are some good ones not far from my house.

* * *

stretching

I always stretch after running, but I have noticed a tendency for my Achilles tendon area to be particularly sore after running lately. Marie showed me a good stretch for that, and we think it may have something to do with my propensity to walk without having my heels touch the ground much of the time.

* * *

results

As I suspected, I came in last in my group, which is ok. It was my first run, and I’m just glad I showed up and did it. It seems there’s a race nearly every summer weekend, and I’m looking forward to continuing my training, and doing more races before the season is out.

And next year, there’s always the Cedar Point 5k. 😉

About a year ago, I started trying to run regularly. I’m kinda sorta trying to lose weight, though that’s just a nice-to-have; mostly I’m in it for the general health benefits, having noticed several mornings in a row that my resting heart rate was well over 100 bpm.

I was going to run my first race, a 5k, this Sunday, but a spur-of-the-moment trip to Cedar Point is going to be taking its place instead. Still, I’ve been in postmortem mode just thinking about this race, so here goes with the babbling.

* * *

tipping point

I tried to do some regular exercise with Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, and while those workouts can be fun and intense — and, most importantly to me, measurable, the running-in-place aspect always felt a bit wonky.

(I suppose I could, on my non-running days, do upper body workouts with EA Sports Active, though we do have a real weight bench now for that sort of thing.)

What really got me doing this regularly was getting my first smartphone and a RunKeeper account — so I could go out running, have the phone’s GPS track me, and view my progress on the RunKeeper site.

I can track my elliptical training there too. I highly recommend RunKeeper.

RunKeeper can tell you your pace, speed, total distance, etc, at regular intervals if you want while you’re running. I tried that a couple times, listening to little progress reports every minute over earbuds. It was kind of cool, but ultimately, I think it’s more useful to just develop a feel for that sort of thing while running.

Which brings me to my next blurb.

* * *

listening

When I started, a friend pointed me at this couch-to-5k training schedule. I appreciate the help, but in the end I sort of ignored it.

Learning how to make good decisions about how far I can push myself is just as important to me as actually making forward progress. It’s about listening to my body; knowing when to take a break from jogging and just walk a bit; being honest about when it’s really time to for the break to end.

* * *

last place

Looking at last year’s race results, if I went to this race with my current best case, 10-11 minute mile, I’d most likely come in pretty close to last in my age & gender group.

Part of the point of doing this was that I don’t generally enter contests unless I think I can at least make runner up or honorable mention of some sort.

While I do lots of things just to do them, and babble about my progress here, I’m skittish about being overly vocal about it until I’m particularly good. (In my head, this here blog is in this weird space where I’m fooling myself it’s private but it’s actually public.)

I’m trying to get over that skittishness, and just enter more contests, not to see how I rate, but as more motivation to do good work.

* * *

pacing

I still don’t have a great sense of pacing. If I run fast and take long breaks, it still feels faster than jogging slow with short breaks… but that’s totally not the case. I need to work on that.

* * *

food

Nothing is more important, it seems, than eating properly before I go running. Pasta is good. Burgers are bad. I’m getting better about picking the right meals before I go.

Beverages, though, are a bit confusing. I’m trying to drink less soda pop, but I get the vague feeling the lack of sugar is hurting me both in terms of performance and the willpower necessary to push myself harder.

There are, of course, better ways to get sugar I suppose.

Random epiphany of the day (which I might have said before, but that would just mean I haven’t internalized it yet, so it deserves to be said again):

No matter what the medium, no matter what the genre, I will always, always turn any media-consuming activity into an opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn’t in said medium/genre, and approach it from the point of view of learning instead of relaxing and opening up to someone else’s work.

The only way I’m going to relax is to take frequent breaks to stop thinking so much, which means (a) neither consuming nor building anything or (b) building something using the precise application of skills well within my comfort zone, wherein you hit a mindset not so much unlike that of (a).

I should probably swap out ‘games’ in my rotating schedule with something like ‘doodle’; relaxing with games just isn’t working…

I think it’s safe to say it’s been years since I screwed up any one day as completely as I did this last Saturday. I’ll not itemize everything I did wrong here, but suffice it to say that it started with me trying to troubleshoot a relatively innocuous internal toilet leak, entering into a comically endless cycle of trying to make things better and actually making things worse, and ending with frighteningly massive plumbing bill.

(Now, said plumbing bill would eventually have come anyway, but it really couldn’t have come at a worse time.)

Mostly, I blame the general disorientation that comes with being sick.

* * *

I kind of value my lack of cognitive abilities while sick. It is a reminder to me that, even while healthy, my perceptions are not guaranteed to be accurate; my words are not guaranteed to convey my intent; my judgment is not guaranteed to be reliable.

I would do well to remember that focus is something you have to work for. Been a bit lazy about that lately (again, even while healthy).

* * *

To that end, I’ve gone ahead and slapped together a functional, but not particularly polished app to help me organize all the stuff I’m doing. (To recap: I’ve settled on a fixed rotation for my projects, so any time I sit down to work, I just do what’s at the top of my list, and after a fixed amount of time, I move it to the bottom of my list and work on the next thing. Not allowing myself to deviate from the rotation is important here.)

While it’s mostly pet projects, there are a few items of note in there that are more general.

• Games. As I mentioned in a previous post, I need to schedule in downtime or I won’t take it.
• Calls. This will sound like a really sterile way to approach it, but I’ve included calling relatives in my project rotation. Said relatives are themselves in a rotation, so I can make sure everyone gets a call on a regular basis. I want to keep in touch, I really do; but I literally forget that people exist if I don’t have frequent contact with them.
• Rescheduling. While my whole fixed-project-rotation thing generally works, I’m slow to make changes to the rotation. So now, questioning the contents of the rotation is itself part of the rotation. Yay checks and balances!

So there ya go. It’s been working out well the last few days.

It’s been a while since I had a post about improving my efficiency. Mostly, I’ve just been trying to stick with my cyclical schedule where I don’t get to pick what I’m working on next, and that’s been working well. Just trying to make that process more frictionless. It’s not that exciting to talk about, but reducing friction is important. And hard.

Before I get into that though, I wanted to restate the goal of all this. The goal is not to be able to do more. I forget that sometimes. Instead, the goal of improving my efficiency is to minimize the actual time I spend doing this stuff, so I can spend more of it with friends and family and, ya know, things that matter.

* * *

So on to the friction. I’ve got this simple system. To recap:

• I keep a list around of my pet projects.
• Each project in the list includes some notes about what I’m currently working on.
• Whenever I sit down to work, I look at the top of my list and work on that project, doing whatever it says in the notes I should be working on specifically.
• After 30 or 45 minutes, or when I’m done with my current task, I write down what I need to do next for the project I’ve just been working on, and move the project to the bottom of the list.
• If I have time, I repeat this with the new top-of-list project; if not, I just skim my notes for it so I know what I need to work on next time.

The point of all this is, I don’t waste a lot of time or energy trying to decide what to work on next; I don’t have a choice of what to work on next. I just go through the list. This works pretty well, when I actually do it. Trouble is, I don’t always do it.

Sometimes, when I sit at my computer, I just want to play a game. Or check up on news. Or I may have to do work for my regular job.

So the first thing I did to make things run a little more smoothy was to add games and news and job to the list, so I manage it all just like everything else. In some ways, this makes the act of relaxing with a game feel like any other chore, but that’s kind of the point. If I’m working so much that I feel like I need to stop in the middle of everything and do something mindless, I’ve failed to manage my time well. Those breaks need to be a preemptive maintenance sort of thing, not emergency damage control. Scheduling video game breaks in forces me to, well, take breaks regularly.

* * *

The second thing I’ve done is keep my head a little emptier. I’ll explain this by way of a tangent.

When programming for the Apple II, there was this concept of the Zero Page. It was a tiny, tiny section of memory — just a couple hundred characters’ worth of data — that you could access very quickly in your programs. So while you had much more memory that that total, you wanted to make sure that the things you’d be accessing the most frequently were on the Zero Page.

So, say you were making an dungeon crawl. You might store the player and monster positions on the zero page since you need to look at those every frame. You’d store the player and monster stats, items and skills in regular memory since you’d only need to check those in response to getting hit, using your current item or checking your inventory. And finally, you’d store your world map on disk, and you’d only read from the disk when you’d entered a new dungeon.

Back to project management. My head is the Zero Page, my notes are regular memory, my design documents are the disk. My head can’t actually store that much. If I’m trying to keep track of too many things, my head overflows and I get confused.

So let’s say I’m working on a font. I glance at a sample and notice that the P, G, N, W, T and Z need a bit of cleanup.

Normally what I’d do is just try to remember all that, start on the P, move on to the G… and then forget where I am.

But what I’m doing now is, I’ll glance at my font, and write in my notes that I need to work on these 6 letters. I start on the P, and completely forget about the other letters. When I’m done, I erase the P from my notes and note that the next thing that needs work is the G.

I’ve gone from editing my notes two or three times an hour to editing them every couple of minutes. Any given bullet point might only be there in my file for half an hour, or even as little as a single minute. But it’s totally worth it to sort of cache my thoughts there; and it’s not like I’m wasting paper since this is just a file on my computer.

* * *

The only problem with this is, my file is getting kind of long and unwieldy. And the longer and more detailed it gets, the more janky it feels to copy whole sections from the top and paste them on the bottom when cycling through projects. That, in and of itself, is adding a little bit of friction to this process.

I think it may be time for a proper app for this, which I’ve threatened to work on before.

So I mentioned a post or two ago how joining this developers group was kind of out of character for me. And I wanted to dig into that a little bit more.

However, rather than just rehash my unease with formalized groups gathered around a specific interest, I thought I’d write up a list of rules for myself. (And just myself; I’m certainly not trying to dictate protocol here. I like having personal rules.)

Some of these things I don’t really have trouble with anyway, but there are some bad habits I’m afraid of slipping into here.

• Get to know everybody. Talk to everyone regularly. Speaking from experience, it’s easy to just find a few people I can connect with, declare myself done with this whole icebreaking thing, and shy away from other members of the group. In many ways, it’s most important to interact with people I can’t connect with at first.
• Get involved. Not that I’ve really sensed it in this particular group, but I don’t want to go in with the mindset that there’s this big organizer/participant dichotomy. I’d like to share whatever knowledge I have in workshops and help organize things where I can (not that I have much experience doing that right now).
• …but remember there’s a world outside the group. I’ve been obsessing over figuring out how to contribute to the group, but I have to remember that my whole goal of getting something out there while keeping my sanity, marriage and other friendships at a higher priority is still as important to me as ever. Whatever time I spend on preparing workshop materials or helping with/participating in events should come out of my pet project time budget, not anywhere else.
• Remember that other people have lives, too. I want to encourage others when there’s something they’re excited about working on, but I don’t want to pressure anybody to work more on their stuff or attend more meetings. I want to express my excitement about my own experiences to people outside the group, but not come off like I’m recruiting or evangelizing anything.
• Don’t let things like game jams become an end unto themselves. Sure, the game jam was great fun, but I can’t lose track of my long-term projects, or let frequent busy weekends interfere with my weekdays at work-work. I also don’t want to slip into the habit of producing things at game jams that have any kind of by-developers-for-developers feel. (Which my first game jam entry sort of had; next time I do a jam, I actually think it would be an interesting challenge to decide on a hypothetical target audience while figuring out my approach to the theme.)

As Marie and prepare for a short New Years’ vacation that I’m looking at with equal amounts of excitement and worry, I find myself thinking a bit about identity. So have some random thoughts (which may be a little navel gazey, but hopefully not too much).

* * *

Part of tech support is calming people down. I did a little bit of this for a while, and from what I hear, I was fairly good at working with cranky customers.

Not that I had any training, mind you; I just made people calmer by virtue of being me. There’s nothing particularly amazing about that; we all, just by virtue of being who we are, make the people around us behave a little differently.

So I think of humanity in general as calm and reasonable. Because whenever I see people, I see my own calm reflected in them.

I kind of wonder about people who make people around them cranky. I’ve certainly met those people, and in all likelihood they don’t realize they make the people around then cranky; in all likelihood they don’t realize people, in general, are more noble than their own point of view would suggest.

* * *

I haven’t been in a few years, but part of why I like going to TypeCon is, I like the person I am when I’m at TypeCon. I’m a little more outgoing, a little more excitable.

I’d like Marie to meet this person, but getting that to happen would be problematic. When I’m around Marie I tend to let myself fade into the background, though I’m working on that.

* * *

Going to a meeting of the Cleveland Game Developers tonight for the first time, and I’m a bit nervous about that. Historically, I tend to become easily confused when I’m around other programmers — strangely enough, I see most I’ve met as somewhat alien and difficult to connect to.

But I like the idea of being accountable to a group of other game developers — apparently part of every meeting is project updates from the members.

I’m very curious what the group is like, and how I’m going to come across to them.

It’s been a while since I babbled about managing myself, so have a random thought.

The concept of egolessness comes up a lot in martial arts. I never quite hit it during my brief dabbling in Judo, but I often lose my sense of self while programming or illustrating.

It can all sound a bit hand wavey I suppose, but to put it in more practical terms, I suppose losing a sense of self is simply a loss of desire (yeah, it’s very Buddhist). The desire to impress; to learn; to meet a promised due date or fulfill a specific expectation.

I do my best work when I stop caring about getting work done. If I’m too excited about the work, it’s easy to get overconfident or impatient to get more work done. (Which, sadly, happened at work-work today.) Which is not to say that I do my best work on projects I hate; hate is a form of caring, a form of emotional attachment, a burning desire not to do something.

So I’m wondering tonight if this concept of mastery and happiness through egolessness also applies to managing one’s responsibilities on a higher, more abstract level.

I’ve mentioned a few times before how I’m most productive when I rapidly cycle through pet projects. Part of the benefit of this is just to make sure I don’t lose track of any of my projects; I frequently waste depressing gobs of valuable time reacquainting myself with things I’ve backburnered. But also, I think this strategy is helpful in that it removes me — it removes desire — from the process of deciding what to work on. Since it’s a predetermined cycle, I always know what I will be working on next. I won’t procrastinate on things I’m afraid won’t go anywhere. I won’t implement quick, poorly conceived ideas because I’m excited about moving something forward.

Removing desire makes the work about the work — not about me.

So I should really start keeping an eye on how excited I am to be working — because if I’ve got too much motivation, it’s probably time to take a break.