2/13/13

planning and logistics

I had a thought about a theory about why planning and logistics are so hard for me..

I want my mind to be clear. I like to not be worried about stuff. It is easier to think that way.

When I have something planned, it spawns a process in my brain that keeps pinging my brain saying "hey, remember about that thing that is planned".

You'd think I could just write it down to get rid of that pining, and if I write it down, and it's long in the future, the pinging mostly goes away, but it is replaced with "hey, remember to keep checking your calendar thing, because there's stuff on it in the future."

And the more stuff I have going on, the more pinging there is, with processing saying "hey remember about this" and "hey remember about that".

Each ping is like an interrupt, in the CPU sense. It pulls my brain out of the current thought process, and puts it, if only for a short time, in this other process to remember about some thing, and there's context switching costs and such.

Stuff that's pending consumes a disproportionate amount of CPU time in my brain, compared to the actual size of the tasks involved that are pending. For instance, if there is a 30 minute meeting coming up 3 days from now, it will consume much much more than 30 minutes of CPU time effectively making sure that I remember to be at the specific time and place of the meeting.

If it was not my responsibility to remember stuff to do.. If that planning was done by someone else.. If I had someone to say "think about X until further notice"..

But then again I want to be in control. I've tried planning out a bunch of stuff to do, and I just can't convince my brain to be satisfied with all those decisions when it comes time to do them. My brain might want to think about something else.. and if someone else was telling me what to think about, I'm pretty sure I would second guess it every time.

Perhaps one solution is a time for planned stuff, and a time for nothing to be planned.. something like "Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are for scheduled stuff. If you want to meet, I can meet one of those three days. Otherwise, you can still ping me and see if I'm free, but you can't plan anything with me."

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