Flow: How I deal with overwhelm
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010This topic came up in last weeks TummelVision and Jay Rosen asked me to say more about flow, so I'm posting this piece I originally wrote for the blog at Encyclopedia Brittanica
I find that the information age is making me more focussed. But it’s an inside job as my epigram implies.
Pain and failure have always been great teachers.
I’ve been living with massive amounts of information coming at me since I began working on the web in its earliest days. I’m a performer, an extrovert and a fairly geeky person. I love stimulation and ideas and people. My mind loves to flow between different ideas. So for me the increase in stuff to do and the mode of surfing was nothing but a lot of fun for a long time. I even did my talk show at SXSWInteractive one year on Continuous Partial Attention where many geeks talked about the joy of more information (although one PhD student said he did all his best work in the shower because it was the only place he couldn’t touch his electronic devices).
At that same conference, I stumbled into the gift of organization and information overload.
I remember the moment looking at my Sidekick, standing outside the Iron Cactus, trying to follow the earliest tweets and figure out how to meet up with people. Overwhelmed by great events, people I wanted to see and hunger, I just gave up. Instead of scheduling more get togethers, or trying to master things I decided to go with the flow. I went into the Iron Cactus, sat down at a table of geeks, some of whom I recognized, and ordered a burrito. This is the kind of thing I was used to doing “on vacation” and it turned into a nice flow of events that felt as easy and fun as “vacation” generally does.
I just enjoyed hanging out with the people next to me, who turned out to be Doug Sarine and Nick Douglas.
Doug and Nick ended up becoming friends. I’ve learned a lot from Doug about performing and web video (he’s the co-creator of Ask A Ninja) and had a lot of fun riffing with with Nick, who, among other friendly things, helped me punch up a funny Prop 8 video I did and included me in his book Twitter Wit. I mention these things not The info flow will only move faster. And if you don’t want to serve it but have it serve you, then you need to have a compass and you need to read it.to show how cool any of us is (we’re all dorks believe me). I just want to show the nice chain of events that can come from listening to your compass and embracing the flow and not attempting to manage your life by dropping anchors.
The key element of this was my decision to be at the taco place. I did that because I intend to what I wanted to do at that moment. I wanted to sit down. I was hungry. It sounds like a small and obvious thing but when we focus on schedules and time management systems and try to plan everything we can easily forget we are hungry. According to Linda Stone’s work on email apnea we can forget to breathe. My first web gig was part of Apple’s first webcast team in 1996. After my first regular 4 months on email, I found that I often missed lunch. I missed the gym. I forgot I was hungry.
You don’t need information technology to be that disconnected from yourself. You can do it with magazines, drinking, grad school, QVC, socializing or anxiety about your children. You can use anything to forget yourself.
Every time I’m in pain or overwhelmed I eventually let go. I would just deal with what is right in front of me and try something different to make things better. And how do you know they’re better? They feel better. Clearer.
Information flow and multitasking led to back pain which led me to yoga. It led to a Repetitive Stress Injury which led to acupuncture and regular laptop breaks. It led to treating my first Net phone like a security blanket which led me to learn and practice body awareness.
Having many projects led to lots of continual thinking which led to meditation. Twitter and the real-time web we now have led to the flow becoming literal before my eyes, which led to communicating more succinctly and answering my messages right away and immediately.
I recently realized I’ve been mentally hoarding information, my ideas and intentions most of my life. But I don’t need information in my head anymore that is searchable. I don’t need to file information anymore that is searchable.
All general information is now searchable and the more digital your life is the more searchable that is too. I recently let go of a lot of the strings my mental fingers having been holding down. Ideas I hoped I’d one day write or might need to remember or make into something. There was just too much. I couldn’t do it anymore. The creative process and performing have shown me that what really matters, especially what’s personal and what I feel, will come up in the moment I am truly ready to engage it.
I’m sure I’ll overload and overwhelm again. And I may forget about the giving up thing too, until it remains the only option. Pain is really reliable. And the more conscious we become that our well-being and connection with each other is what we want technology to serve, the more we’ll be able to design technology and business serve these real needs.
This overload, overwhelm, give up and start right here process isn’t unique to the information era but I’m hopeful it does happen more often. Things are sped up and more visible. The pain will happen more often and when it does, I know I have to “give up” and do something different. Perhaps you do too or you wouldn’t be reading this blog post on multitasking.
Life has always been a flow of things. People have always had lots of thoughts going on. They’re just now getting externalized and dropped into twitter or facebook or a blog so that you can see them and search them. Information technology does let us search, which is how I now deal with all of the documents on my computer and my email. I gave up. I stopped filing documents and organizing. I just have one folder. I let go and now I just search for what I need. But I can’t find what I need unless I know what I need. That is not an information era question, it’s as old as we are.
The info flow will only move faster. And if you don’t want to serve it but have it serve you, then you need to have a compass and you need to read it. And that isn’t about thinking at all.
So bring it on information flow. Because the faster the river of information flows the more obvious it becomes that trying to control it makes no sense at all. Technology may finally return us to ourselves.
