Thoughts on Übergeek Immersion
This post has been a long time in the making, both in my head, and now in type. Many people have written about this subject before, and certainly many people will after me, so this is just my take on things and from my point of view. Take is for what it’s worth.
I suffer from what I have best seen defined as N.A.D.D. If you have not read this article, please do so now. (Command + Click the link) I’ll wait.
That’s Rands’ way of putting things, and it is what resonates most with me. It describes how I can’t sit still on a computer. There are a thousand different things I could be doing, therefore I must do all of them. And the only way to be remotely successful at doing everything is to multitask – do many things simultaneously. This behavior comes in many forms – I browse the mobile version of bloglines on my iPhone with the latest album blaring when I ride the bus for instance – but manifests itself most strikingly when I sit down with my computer at any given point.
When I open my computer, I have e-mail, a feed reader, my IDE, tomorrow’s presentation, and at least a half-dozen browser tabs open on any range of completely different topics. I’m at the point where I read both Digg and Slashdot daily, peruse Engadget and TechCrunch and even Valleywag on occassion. I’m subscribed to over 100 feeds – all of which ping me when they’re updated. Not to mention AIM, which I’ve been known to live on for days at a time. It’s information overload. And more and more I’m finding out that none of it matters.
Or, I should say, very little of it matters. I was tipped off with my trip to Seattle a few weekends ago. We left on Thursday night and didn’t return until the wee hours of the following Monday morning – a full 3 days away from home – and I didn’t take my laptop. I limited myself to just checking email on my friend’s iMac once per day, something most would consider “normal”. I wanted to see if the world would keep spinning if I left it alone for a few days.
It did.
When I returned, I had nearly a thousand unread items in my feed reader, pages of digg to catch up on, and scores of forum posts to read and comment on. It was overwhelming to say the least. What I did haunts me to this day: I pressed “mark all as read”. I didn’t open a single one of them. Nope, not a one.
I went to class on Monday, as usual, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I didn’t miss out on any random conversation before class, nor did anyone laugh at me for not knowing that Samsung’s new ZX-8000 had spy pictures leaked in Japan. I didn’t know that Kottke had posted linked a New York Times article about a restaurant owner being sued over his tomato soup and how ridiculous the world is. I had no idea. And I was strangely comfortable with it.
I thought about it some, and checked a few things out. I realized that I have a choice in the world I live in. One is a world of A-List bloggers that keep up with the latest Web trends, already talk about Web 4.0, and link to each other with articles from other A-List bloggers until nobody remembers where shit came from anymore. There’s nothing bad about this all-digital world, and I would love to be in it if I had the time. But that’s the most precious resource to this group – time. If you aren’t in the first 10 comments, you might as well pack up and go home. If you link to something half a day late, you’re toast. If you think you have a scoop only to find out that Michael Arrington has had beta access for a month and a half, you fail.
There’s something I found out about these people that live. This Lifestyle is their full time job. They literally get paid to live The Lifestyle. From Gruber to Kottke to Arrington to CmdrTaco, it’s the life they live, and we reap the benefits as consumers and they reap the benefits for doing us their respected service. I had the pleasure of spending some time with Anil “LOLCats and Goatse” Dash, who turned out to be an incredibly nice and down to earth guy, but he is just plugged in. He can’t get away from it, or he’d almost be doing a disservice to his cultish following. It sucks you in, this life does, and it’s incredibly hard to escape.
Enter Me.
I’m a 4th year (going on 5) Computer Science student who doesn’t really care about school more than just graduating and moving on. I’m not an A-List blogger, but I keep up with and read the best of them. I’ve been beta tester on some cool Web Two Dot Oh apps, and had a gmail invite before they hit eBay. My problem is that I don’t have a niche yet. I am a self-proclaimed Jack of All Trades, Master of None. I “sorta-kinda” know a lot of things – most of the major scripting languages, some database stuff, some sysadmin stuff, some embedded systems programming, a bit about hardware; I know how the internet works, and how to make a browser do a bit of DOM magic; I also keep up with all the internet memes. I know all the references in the Internet People YouTube Montage. So where do I fit in? My problem is that I’m not plugged into any of these things, I just know enough to get me by. I can’t focus on any one thing for some reason, and my guess is that it’s for fear of “wasting time”.
In this world of N.A.D.D. it doesn’t take any time at all to check a blog. I find myself skimming the long posts because they take too long to read, or I keep marking them unread until I just say fuck it and move on with my life – if the author can’t say something in 2 skimmable paragraphs then it is not worth my time. I browse slashdot at +4 or +5 because anything else just doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that “I’m not wasting time if I check my feeds”, because I can get through them in 2 minutes anyway. Of course it’s only because I just checked them 5 minutes ago, and only one of them has updated.
Where does this leave me?
I’ve been incredibly unproductive for the last few months. I can’t seem to finish anything, and I can’t focus on school or work or even my own blog (which has been on a near two-month hiatus). I put this all together in my Software Engineering class when my teacher mentioned a thing called Flow.
Flow. It’s a mental state that you’ve experienced before. It happens when you line up a shot in golf. You feel it when you drive fast in the rain and your tires slip, putting you in that hyper-aware mental state. Or, in the context of my class, you experience it when you are coding a big project. You are in the zone completely. You know what variables are instantiated in what scope and exactly what they’re doing and why. Every function is in your own human RAM, callable at a moments notice when you need it. You feel Flow. It’s a mental state that is difficult to achieve, and perhaps more difficult to obtain. It can take hours at a time to get to that state, but a single second to snap out of it. It can be the ring of a telephone or the bleep of an email notification that snaps you out of it, but it’s complete programmer’s bliss while you’ve got it.
The problem with The Lifestyle is that it doesn’t require Flow to maintain it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You live in 15 second blurbs. You read a page while you have 3 more loading in the background because you don’t have time to wait around watching the page take form as the data is transferred from the remote servers. All this is happening, of course, while you’re debugging that 5-line script you are writing – any longer, of course, would require a train of thought that lasts longer than half a minute. When your email beeps, you command-tab-command-1 it, grok it, take action, and move on in mere seconds. The Lifestyle Becomes your Flow. If you can’t use quicksilver to eject a disk image (after calculating the number of milliseconds saved over using expose to view the desktop, select the image, and command-e it) then perhaps you don’t understand where I’m coming from.
So what now? I’m addicted…
Turns out, it’s a choice. Ask anyone who’s had a company-wide productivity meeting. Set a time – once an hour or twice a day perhaps – to check your email is what they say. Same thing with your feed reader. If you can’t read through all of them in one block of time once a day, then perhaps you have too many. Categorize them into “Must Read” down to “Only read on a Lazy Sunday”. Don’t even visit Digg. Unsubscribe from Engadget – you will thank me later. You have to realize that Life will go on whether you are caught up in the details or not.
My grandpa used to let the phone ring (there was no answering machine) while he was watching Wheel of Fortune, lest anyone interrupt his TV time. “If it’s important”, he used to say, “they’ll call back”. It’s true. If the news is really that important, it’ll find you, I promise.
Even as I write this, I had to close out everything else. I turned off my wi-fi, and migrated to one Space. I’m even writing in a plain text editor because anything else has too many buttons. As it is, I’m in the window of a coffee shop and am distracted enough by people watching.
So I have to ask, did you skim this article? Was it “tl;dr”, or did you go through it line by line? I’m not offended either way, but take a look around, seriously… how many apps you you have open right now? :P
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