the irony of ubiquitous communication and listening

a few weeks ago, thich nhat hanh was on one of my favorite podcasts, on being. he dropped this brilliant thought:

“We live in a time when we have a very sophisticated means for communication, but communication has become very difficult between individuals and groups of people. A father cannot talk to a son, mother cannot talk to a daughter, and Israelis cannot talk to Palestinians, and Hindus cannot talk to Muslims. And that is why we have war, we have violence. That is why restoring communication is the basic work for peace, and our political and our spiritual leaders have to focus their energy on this matter.”

my paraphrase: the irony of today’s ago is that that though communication is now easier and global, we are finding it increasingly difficult to talk across difference.*

unfortunately, it’s all to clear to me why this is the trend and getting worse.

today’s world is increasingly full of designed experiences. for many reasons (obviously including capitalism and greed, but others, too) many of those experiences are designed to drive consumption. this dates way back to the consumerization of american society after the world wars (think mad men days) and probably before that, too.

of course, that’s not to say that your local city planner designed your town’s main street to be a gauntlet of advertisements and product placements. but every window, bus stop wall, vehicle, flyer, and person in a brightly colored vest flagging you down is trying to grab your attention.

and that’s not even including the internet.

and then add on to that the fact almost everyone now carries the world (the internet) in our hands via our smartphones. apps and websites are literally designed to focus your attention on specific information or locations (example: do you know why notifications on all your apps are red?). and often those things are pointers to a purchase.

so, it’s pretty clear to me that the water we swim in conspires, maybe unintentionally, to distract us. this makes it nearly impossible to listen well. the distractions themselves don’t make us not listen (though that happens, t00). they just keep us from being aware that listening is an active practice and a skill that can be developed.

one thing i like to do is every so often is walk down the street on the way to somewhere and just listen. no podcast, no headphones, no calling my mom, just listening the world around me. the individual walks are rarely anything spectacular, but over time, i’ve noticed paterns about different parts of town. there’s some super interesting differences between downtown, newbury street, dudley square, and central square.

agh. i’m over time. real quick, though: given the reality of an increasingly distracted world, i intentionally direct my energy towards a couple activities:

1. creating environments, spaces, and relationships where real, active listening happens
2. doing projects and living in ways that connect. this fits into two categories: either connecting people more to themselves or to others

i do this because my understanding of entropy (based on convos with my friend jonathan about shannon entropy and information theory) tells me that the only way to work against strong “natural” forces, is to specifically apply energy in the other direction.

*my thinking about difference has been strongly influenced by ceasar mcdowell and john a. powell.

on doing one “thing” per night

so another personal practice i’ve developed is only committing to one event/engagement per evening.

in different phases of life, i’ve found myself setting up so many social engagements with people. it was the most intense in grad school, but it’s happened in other phases, too. all too often a weeknight would look like this: after class or work, i would have drinks with a friend during happy hour; then i’d leave and meet up with a different friend for dinner; sometimes i’d even meet up with a third friend to see a movie or work on a project or something.

hanging out with that many people does keep my social network intact and growing. over time, i’ve realized that even though my network developed well, i was exhausting myself in the process. not only did i have to coordinate and be strategic about when to meet who where (because trekking all over the city takes time and energy). i also had to explain what’s happening in my life to 2-3 three people. as always, what i told to who was dependent on the person, the length of our friendship, and more. however, i started to notice that the 2nd and 3rd time i explained to someone how i was doing, i truncated the situation because i was just tired of explaining it again. of course censorship is necessary, but that type of censorship doesn’t serve to build strong relationships.

so, i found that if i just commit to one social engagement per night i’m not exhausted (physically, emotionally, or interpersonally), and i’m more better able to show up for people i do meet up with.*

since i’ve taken on this practice, people and friends of mine have started to realize that when i commit to hanging with them, it’s for real. and an (unfortunately) irony that i’ve noticed is that sometimes they can’t show up as fully as i do because they have something else to run off to.

there’s no judgment here, but i definitely prefer my situation. sure, i meet up with fewer people, but i definitely would rather have a small number of deep relationships than a large number of shallow ones. of course, it’s not an either or with relationships, but still… the number of people i know who feel like they don’t enough have close/deep relationships is astounding… (maybe i’ll write about that soon).

* to me, showing up means paying attention, listening well, sharing meaningfully at meaningful/appropriate moments, and taking in action when necessary. in our increasingly distracted world, it’s surprising how few people know how to show up for each other. 

the more that’s on your plate, the more brittle your time is

one of my favorite adages is “less is more.” i’ve learned over time, mostly by exercising my “no” muscle i’ve learned that the less i have going on, the better i tend to do at all of it. of course, there are exceptions to this, but i’ll get to that later. but first, the basic explanation of how this works:

if you have 10 projects going, when you’re working on one, you’re probably not working on the others. and no matter how efficient you are, every project will take some amount of time. so the more projects, the more time you’re using. but that’s not where the real insight is.

the real insight is that the more projects and processes you have running simultaneously, the more “brittle” your time is for several reasons.

1. in order to make time to do everything, you’re going to have to be rigorous with your scheduling. and this, of course, works only when you schedule the exact amount of time to work on each thing at the you have the energy to do that type of work. if you underestimate anything, you’re thrown off.
2. the more things you’re doing, likely the more meetings you need to attend. even freelancers or self-employed folks have meetings with clients, delivery meetings, etc. so more projects means less time you get to structure yourself which is less flexibility.
3. an unfortunate side effect of 1 & 2 is that your open blocks of time ideate disappear. hopping from project to project is counter to creativity [old post link]

having a schedule that isn’t totally flexible isn’t a bad thing at all. diminishing flexibility is necessary to do work in today’s work (for the most part), but i believe everyone needs to have a balance of self-controlled time and time you can’t structure yourself. once you pass that point, you become increasingly unproductive and your workload blocks the work itself from getting done.

analogy: good soup needs to simmer in order for the flavors to meld (input info and reorganize it in your brain in meaningful ways to spit out later), the more soups you try to make on a single stovetop, the worse each one gets.

yikes. outta time. will elaborate later.

productivity tip: box yourself into back to back meetings

this is a little trick i learned from paul graham’s post: maker’s schedule vs manager’s schedule. i reference this post atdt. it’s been incredibly helpful, though it does have its limits.

the trick is very simple: if you have one meeting already scheduled on a day and another comes up, schedule it the minimum amount of time before the next meeting so that it can’t run long. example: i already have a meeting at 3p, but someone else wants to meet me that same day. if i know that 2nd meeting needs about 60 minutes, i will schedule it for 145p and let the person know that i need to be at 3p meeting.

this works for me for a bunch of reasons:

impromptu meetings are almost never planned well. minimizing the time they take out of my schedule is critical. not being planned well doesn’t mean it won’t go well, but there is a strong correlation in my experience.

stacking meetings also allows me to optimize my “heavy-thinking” time while still doing the meetings i need to. i started doing this in grad school. i would cram my meetings all onto the same days as my classes so that i had long chunks of free time to write my thesis. this can also be thought about through the maker time vs manager time frame. i know that, at least for me, the more maker time (long, uninterrupted blocks of time) i have, the better i feel. making progress makes me feel productive and feeling productive feels great. meetings, for better or worse, rarely feel productive. even the best ones don’t and i think that’s ok. working in meetings is somewhat futile i think because most “work” can’t actually be done in meetings.

so what are the limits?

well, for one, some meetings run long because they actually need to. sometimes a group gets into a flow around something. in that circumstance, breaking the flow can be less net productive than continuing to go and rearranging the commitments the group didn’t deliver on. if you’ve boxed yourself in, you create the danger of not giving something the time it needs.

another limit is that if you need follow up time from the first meeting or prep time for the next meeting, stacked meetings hinder that.

ok. that’s all i got for me. stacking meetings is a great strategy for keep your schedule clear. but only to a point.

ps - over time, i’ve developed a really good intuition of which types of meetings have a tendency to run long or need prep time and so i can stack accordingly.

can we evolve altruism?

in my last post about altruism, i ended on the idea of evolving altruism, but i didn’t really map out, logically, how or why that could happen. hopefully this connects a few more dots.

one point i didn’t make in that post was one problem i see with altruism that i’ve learned from working in nonprofits. when there is no excess, altruistic giving evaporates. because altruistic gifts theoretically have no value to the giver, when times get hard, people stop doing things that aren’t valuable to them.

so this leads to my conversation with last week with kate talking about altruism and self-interest. where we landed, which is where i almost always land, is that we are all connected and the more we can surface that reality, the better off we all will be.

now, some people would say that selfishness is what makes collective systems break. in fact, capitalism is based on the idea that people are rational actors and systems need to be designed to optimize choices of individuals to create the most good. selfishness is what is believed to make all of nash’s theory irrelevant (if cooperation allows all parties to be better off, why do people not cooperate? selfishness - see the prisoner’s dilemma).

self-interest will likely forever be part of humanity. and it’s not even really a bad thing (i don’t think). so the trick is to figure out how to make self-interest good for the collective.

and i think the way to do that is to make it obvious that what’s good for self is also good for society. in reality, this is pretty obvious if one took a moment to think about how the ecosystem and planet works. however, we’ve got lots of (mostly constructed and systemic) barriers to that realization.

so how do we expand/evolve self-interest so that people’s acting in their own interest is also good for the well-being of others (and the planet)?

who knows, but we should figure it out. and probably soon.

ps - although i don’t know the answer, i like rory sutherland’s approach to problem-solving. i’ll be exploring along that pathway if anyone wants to join me…

pps - the idea that what’s good for others is also good for you is basically what every major religion has been preaching for forever. #thereisnothingnewunderthesun