It's also the sort of thing a seven year old might come up with. I should note that my seven year-old self devised a childish budget approach which I still use to this day. It's sensationally pragmatic and useful. I hope this series will be similarly clarifying.
You'll be shocked at where this leads (in Part 3). Process disruption is mankind's greatest scourge, pound for pound, so a side benefit to dissecting this is, ho-hum, the key to happiness...not that that's what people actually want (here's what they want, and here's how they ensure it).
This is brought to you by your friendly neighborhood jazz trombonist/pianist/teacher/composer-arranger/writer/food pundit/Internet pioneer/community manager/entrepreneur/corporate sellout/karma yogi/philosopher/devoted chowhound. Longtime readers have observed that I keep an unusually gigantic number of pots simmering. So I know something about juggling processes. Catastrophic overload, too. Running Chowhound unfunded meant working seven or eight fulltime jobs concurrently for nearly a decade (unpaid). And that was far from the only time I strapped on The Red Shoes and nearly danced myself to death.
So this is very hard-won knowledge. You never want to touch bottom with this stuff. I did so you don't have to. Think of me as the Chuck Yeager of process management...with some post-accident Christopher Pike mixed in (blinking out "yes" or "no" responses via his adorable little light).
"Process" refers to projects, endeavors, and issues actively ongoing. Basically: the plates we keep spinning, small and large. Think of this as a meditation on plate-spinning.
Ok, I'll describe four levels of processes:
Demons are tiny ongoing background processes. Reminders, alarms, alerts, vigils, etc., sane and otherwise. "Background" is a holdover from the term's computer science origins. With humans, a better word might be "unconscious".
I described how demons work here - and what the unconscious is, here. For purposes of this discussion, demons are not terribly interesting, because we have, by design, little control over them. But I will share a connection I just thought of, just because it's interesting. Pardon the brief digression.
Demons are very closely associated with earworms - songs that won't stop playing in your head. Like demons, they normally run just outside immediate attention, but periodically waft into view, often to our annoyance. Occasionally demons (e.g. "Don't Be Late!/Don't Be Late!/Don't Be Late!/Don't Be Late!") burst into center stage from their backstage lair. We may even speak the words aloud to ourselves. Similarly, an ear worm may come to the front, and be externalized by, say, whistling (less so these days, because people don't whistle as much). But, normally, it plays (and plays and plays) in the dark canyons beyond immediate awareness. Always back there!
Demons, too, gurgle in the periphery, cumulatively contributing nano-stress (more on our mental superstructure of stress here). They are the electrostatic hairball underlying all other processes. They take up some space and drain some resources, but we can't help it, so we can chalk it up to overhead. Demons gonna demon.
There are other unconscious processes, some spooky-seeming. Many of the fresh ideas I offer here percolated in the back of my mind for decades. This slow-cooking process is a natural facility anyone can tap into by turning down the mental noise - the indulgent drama and ditzy yadda-yadda. Accessing subtle realms requires forswearing the adrenaline rush and "alive feeling" that comes from stress, and the self-blasting of addiction. Living loudly to avoid silence and latency sacrifices more babies than bathwater.
Demons are like viruses. Simple snippets, not fully-formed organisms. Engrained processes, by contrast, are substantial. Like demons, we don't think about them much...unless we have to! Tying shoes, brushing teeth, locking doors. That sort of thing.
Engrained processes are relatively (though not completely) safe. Having been invested with momentum, we can normally count on their continuation (I'll explain, later, why they're not completely safe.)
Workshop processes require effort and concentration. Planning a trip. Renovating a bathroom. Getting in shape. Learning French. Hobbies, quests, and also smaller bits of business requiring a burst of focused conscious effort. Workshop tasks must be stoked. Nursed. Cultivated. As I once wrote, it's
....like starting a campfire without matches. It's not the time to visualize big blazing fires. Your job is to focus on generating a precious spark. Then to coax that tiny spark into something just a bit greater. At a certain point, it has a life of its own. You don't create the fire; you only cultivate the spark, which, in turn, makes the fire.Why are workshop processes so delicate? Because:
Or maybe the wind blows it out and you must start again. No problem; with attention focused on sparks, fire's inevitable.
- they're new (i.e. not yet engrained), or...
- they're a poor match to our skill set (as skills develop, they become engrained processes), or...
- they're a poor match to our innate characteristics (so they will never become engrained, remaining workshop, requiring effort and cultivation).
For an idea of how painfully slow it is for me to write (even with 30 years of professional experience), yet how brightly patient I am with the process - eternally "workshop", never "engrained" - see this video.
Engrained processes are fun. Stuff just works, easy-peasy! But a workshop process lubricated with bright patience (or "love", if you can manage it) over time can yield miraculous results. We don't lavish care and attention on engrained processes, and care and attention are the only route to transcendent results. This explains why I do my best in realms where I have little natural aptitude. I've overcome my revulsion. I'm willing to feel like a sucky loser. And I don't need everything to always get easier. I've dropped that expectation.
An imposed process is your obstacle du jour. A fallen tree just knocked a hole in your roof! You've got the flu!
I don't need to say a word about these. You are an expert. These are our disruptions, and we hate hate hate them because they interfere with our other processes. This is the bad stuff we flail, conspire, and pray to avert, so help us, gawd, amen. Less said the better, amiright?
So that's it. That's what we can do. The demons are the demons, careening in the background. Engrained processes also normally hum along nicely. A handful of workshop processes might be in play at a given moment. Plus, because we can never get our ducks in a row - Jane cannot stop this crazy thing! - there's nearly always an imposed process or two ungraciously landed in our lap.
Every bit of this was oversimplified. But it's artful oversimplification. Most people view their stack of concurrent processes as a tangled, messy blob...and further confuse themselves by imagining they can add new ones at will, like inserting a new DVD (hence the notorious fiction of New Year's resolutions).
My drastic oversimplification was deliberate. Complexity is like a vitamin when people oversimplify, but simplicity is a lifeline for overcomplicators. A simple - even oversimple! - reframing of "process" makes life easier to manage. And processes are the very substance of living. Every living human runs multiple processes, even if only in the negative (e.g. processes of avoidance, of self-destruction, of procrastination, etc). Living never pauses. Process = Life.
Next time: pressure and paralysis! Pressure signals that we're over-burdened with processes. If we don't triage and rearrange, it can all grind into paralysis. But we can carve out space in advance to more gracefully accommodate processes.
Proceed to Part 2
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