The Tyranny of Creation

So I’m going to dump core, and whine and complain for a bit. Feel free to ignore, rebut, or burn.

I think I’ve figured out why I can’t do anything: I switch context way too often. What I mean by switching context is switching from one task to another: for instance, going from sleeping to eating, or studying to practicing, or studying to adjusting the volume on my music. Yes, that last one is a context switch: it’s fast, but it still adds overhead. I’ve complained about overhead before: a certain amount of time each day has to be devoted to things like waking up, showering, eating, and all that. And context switching is another source for overhead. Overhead is terrible, because you’re usually too occupied doing things that don’t advance the self, and you can’t focus on something more meaningful. Overhead eats up your time without leaving you anything to show, aside from “hey, I’m still alive!”

So, I’m forcing myself to switch contexts several times a day, aside from the things that one must do to keep alive, by having too many projects open at one time. I’m trying to complete hardware projects (minty preamp, useless machine, pocket oscilloscope, didj hacking, monolith, book scanner, phone glove for a partial list), study physics (Feynman lectures) and math (probability theory and abstract algebra), on top of that I’m trying to do artsy fartsy stuff (on top of writing stuff, actually putting something in the musical section of my blog, and finishing that damn animation), and I have a few software projects jiggling around in the back of my head (mathematical note taking, sane photo management, doing deep integration of twitter and wordpress) as well as a redesign of a completely inane website for an organization that I was once part of.

Whew okay, so I have all these things I want to do, and I want to do them all at once. So that means I’ve been trying to divvy up my day into partitions, and doing different things for each part. But once you consider that switching things takes overhead, then that’s the wrong strategy. If you set a few days, instead of a few hours, you should be able to drop overhead, mental and physical, and get much more out of those few days.

Part of this has to do with not sleeping so much. Part of it also has to do with streamlining my life.

Part of it also has to do with my urges. I’ve said before that I would rather the bio-hackers hurry it up and get to the point that I can re-route my libido to mostly scientific inquiry. Leaving aside that particular urge, I’m also not very happy about the urge to create. No, not that sort of creation: we’ve already disregarded that one. I’m talking about the urge to create works and realize thoughts in objects. You might not feel it, but I do: I want to create. If I don’t create something new, then I’m just taking up space and pushing the universe faster towards an entropic death, and who wants to rush that? Another way of stating it: if you’re not saying anything, than you might as well die, and if you’re not saying anything worthwhile, you might as well say nothing (with speech defined in the broadest sense: by patronizing certain restaurants, you’re saying something about your preferences with your actions).

So it feels like I need to create things, so I flit between different projects with the hope that I push them towards being done. I guess I’m hoping for a breakthrough with the least amount of effort, so that I get that high of finishing something while knowing I have projects in the pipe, because starting things is difficult too, and has it’s own overhead associated with it. But then, it’s not nearly as vicious as switching context several times a day.

In closing: if I could just break the tyranny of creating, or the tyranny of time, then I could be happier. Maybe.