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 Would Like To Know More as 'long periods of idleness punctuated by heroic heavy lifts' is where i get stuck often on multiple fronts!
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Define an incremental unit of work for the activity that can be done in a small chunk of time (as small as you need) with mediocre energy levels. You may need to redefine the activity itself and change your goals a bit.
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"long periods of idleness punctuated by heroic heavy lifts" sound very familiar...
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