Travisse Essays

Summoning the ‘tism

Intro

Something Mikey does quite well that I've never seen is spending time and attention to whipping up his mind into a creative state. He does things like follow his interest, letting his mind wander, gives himself a lot of room and free time and so on, in order to come up with more eureka moments.

I've seen the effects first hand and he actually does come to some good stuff. Simply thinking more is something I hadn't considered but it seems to be powerful and something I should do more of - especially for the high priority things in my life.

This essay explores how I can personally do this and benefit.

How This Looks for Me

First 3 Hours of the Day

I can summon the 'tism in the first 1-3 hours after waking up. That is freaking gold hour for me. I can be creative, think broad and deep and synthesize a lot of information. I'm not even sure how to take advantage of it best other than that it seems to work and I've gotten great results.

When I try and get housekeeping stuff done first it kills me. Zaps my ability to summon 'tism for the rest of the day. Not task switching or swallowing a frog if I want to summon the creative Travisse.

Narrow My Stimulation

Being at work in the open office makes this part harder to focus. Being locked in the booth or the airplane or just at home with nothing going on helps a lot. I literally need blinders.

When in Doubt - Fly

Flying in airplanes are insanely productive for me. It's not lack of access to internet (that annoys me), I think it's just the narrowing of the scope of things I could potentially do. I'm not tempted to go talk to someone, thinking about what someone thinks, I'm generally not expected in Slack, or to clean up my house. It's just pure thought time.

Writing

If I want to summon clear thinking I find that writing down and making solid any thought results in all thoughts being more clear. It's especially useful in the form of essays because it gives you something you can reference and use later - like tools to make your other tools.

Don't Get Done Tasks that only take a few minutes

There's a commonly stated bit of common sense from people talking about task management that if it takes you as long to write something down as just do the thing you should just do it.

I think that is actually terrible advice for maybe busy people everywhere but at least for me working in product.

The problem is that there are usually so many of these low-hanging fruit things that if you do that you will:

  1. End up doing it for your whole morning
  2. Context switch like crazy and fry your brain. The act of writing down the to do item is actually way less severe for context switching than doing the thing is. This is also because your estimate of how long it will take is almost always wrong as well.

Load Context & Mood

Another thing learned from Mikey is moodboarding really intentionally at the beginning of a meeting. This can sound like hippy-dippy design nonsense but it's actually practical: it helps you load up context. If you're context switching a lot, context is easily lost and the tenuous relationship of many principles and goals is boiled down to the lowest common denominator. You're not inspired and probably forgot a lot of the reasons you were doing the thing.

By purposely moodboarding and reviewing tenets and goals you load up all the variables in your mind and often feel more inspired, more able to act, and so on.

I'm experimenting with how to do this better - a lot of it is just remembering to do it before a meeting.

The Flipside of Momentum

The ironic flipside to all this is that I can also get energy when I get momentum. For example if I go sit down in my underwear first thing in the morning and do one thing I don't want to do, and then the next thing, and so on I will get in a task completion groove.

Takeaway is that it may make good sense to think if I need momentum or clarity/creativity. If I need to momentum I should just get into the nastiest thing I can immediately after waking. If I need creativity, I need to treat myself a little more nicely.

Not Working After 10:15-ish

I've noticed my productivity plummets after 10:15 at night. Unless I'm deep in flow state I think I'd benefit from pretty much always winding down after that and trying to be disciplined enough to go to bed and start earlier in the morning.

Recharging

Another important aspect of this is recharging effectively. This is somewhat critical as I'm working on bishopric, side projects and Boostly at the same time and need intense creativity and energy for each. What have I noticed about what is effective for recharging me and what isn't?

  1. Temple - seems to work pretty well to clear my mind.
  2. Artistic high-quality shows and especially visually pleasing shows. Like when I watched James Bond or that weird Netflix show with Jonah Hill.
  3. Sometimes a concentrated blast of Twitter kind of works but it's really hard to control and not overdo it.

What doesn't do it?

  1. Long twitter
  2. Long instagram

Calming the Mind

A big part of me feeling at peace is knowing that I don't have something bad coming toward me - is the future ok. This probably means I have anxiety. Anyway, knowing that I haven't taken off more than I can chew and that chances are pretty likely that I succeed is very, very important for my mind to be calm and to feel ok.

One way I can do this is just giving scheduled time for things in the future. For example if I have side project stuff I just punt it for tonight in my calendar.

Response Time

Another time and focus suck is responding to things quickly. However it is high value to be known for quick responses. I should probably think through my personal SLA's for responses:

  1. Side projects - same day, usually not during work unless there is downtime and I'm already distracted.
  2. Bishopric - within a couple of hours - moving things forward and not blocking is important and it usually doesn't totally remove my focus - it's in a different category for me.
  3. Boostly - very quickly
  4. Steph - very quickly.
  5. Anyone else - same day.

Workouts

If I haven’t worked out in greater than 5 days I start being grumpy, having difficulty sleeping and other negatives. It’s very important to clear thinking, good eating, and so on that I am up to date on working out.

Side note on this is that I’ve been surprised how little I can do and still make gains.