As a child I recall falling asleep staring at my night light. An array of yellow-orange light beams danced through liquid eyelids. They were the closest thing to a connection I knew. I was thinking about this as I dozed off in my son's bed the other day. I wasn't reading a book, or staring at my phone, or even thinking about anything in particular. What was it that I did when I was a child falling asleep?
This offered a stark contrast to my headspace lately on falling asleep. Often times I'd think about work, some thing I forgot about, or some concern (an infinitely renewable resource if ever one existed). That night in bed with my son I had none of those. The ruminations and frustrations - the background din of life - leave me thinking about those lightbeams.
How did I make the direct connection with light back then? Lately I feel as if it's hard to connect deeply with much of anything.
I beliege it was the minimization of channels that was the key. That enabled the removal of distraction. I notice that I actually kind of do this already, but making it explicit is helpful.
Examples in my own life include:
- Note taking with paper and pen vs. computer during meetings
- Working while minimizing audio noise with headphones (often the old-school lumberjack style, though I do love my bose noise-cancelling ones)
- Working in a dark room vs. sunlit. Often people will say they love sunlight for feeling great and etc. I have the opposite reaction. I once worked in a beautiful office right on the water in SF. I would sometimes just hole up in a dark room in order to concentrate. Maybe this is why the Russians are among the greatest novelists?
- Focused writing with a good text editor and vim (versus fancy UI-based apps).
Fewer channels are helpful to connecting with whatever is in front of us. Taken to the extreme, tough conditions ask - demand - more from us. As a result, many of us will respond with greater focus, dedication, and overall better work. Knowing this intellectually (at least for me) is a first step, but insufficient to taking advantage of this knowledge. Generating the best conditions is one of the keys to finding a way through the door to the most helpful state.
So what's one immediate takeaway I'll implement? Keeping slack open all day is a terrible idea for producing quality deep work. So I'll start there for 2024.