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Over the last few months I’ve successfully shifted about half my play and work life to a process-dominant model as opposed to project- or habit-dominant. It’s like the difference between flowing highway driving and stop-go city traffic in a gridlock.
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Pros: - Getting more done - Self-propelled flow instead of external-event-driven - Bigger activities naturally getting chunked to move - Higher “bandwidth” overall - Small-brain feel - Way higher parallel processing - Lower context-switching costs - World as serverless server
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Cons: - If it isn’t part of a “registered” process, it’s hard to do - Interrupts are more disorienting - Tiring due to net higher switching costs* - Only works with a social loop so far - Tunnel vision, flow inertia - Low global situation awareness; ant-brain * Jevon’s paradox
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A problem I anticipate if I add too many more threads is 1-step-forward/2-steps-back syndrome due to increasing mean-time-between-touches. Writing 900 words in 3x300 chunks separated by weeks causes state decay. This may need a trick where related threads braid around each other.
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Process-first playflow is unnatural for me. I am used to long periods of idleness punctuated by heroic heavy lifts. This mode is more like an endless slow-paced marathon, with heightened vigilance around “correct form” in the sense of using correct technique in sports.
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This whole approach feels like a factory or fast-food prep behavior mode, except applied to messy information work with very low external environment scaffolding. Like a river but without a channel to flow in. The channel is inside the flow almost. Elan vital ftw.
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I don’t have many projects any more. The process state is a stimulus I respond to, which transforms the state, making it the stimulus for the next time I visit the process. Prioritization gets simplified down to process switching. Hard part is casting something into process form
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This is the most important thing I learned in art/design grad school. How to construct, maintain, and improve a process that reliably (if gradually) produces finished creative work. Before that I only knew how to do it as an on-deadline emergency.
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