Conscious Savings

A habit is a choice made normal.

What do you do when you have a flash of insight, something that seems brilliant and possibly game changing for yourself or portions of the world at large.

Below is a quick outline of my process for taking an idea and turning it into a project. The following process is designed to be completed in chunks, based on how much time you have available. While I’ve found that insights for writing an article or a similar creative function work best when I jump on them right away, often the time from insight to deployment can be weeks or months if the idea grows large enough. Also the ideas below are not rigid rules of any type, and aren’t going to help you beyond setting up organizational scaffolding.

• Start out dreaming up the biggest idea you can, any extra function, feature, aspect, piece, anything and everything related. Jot it down, andif your mind mapping all the better since you can see how it fits together.
• Find the core, what does everything else come out from? This might have changed from your initial flash of insight as you expanded the idea.
• Review each idea that branches from the core and ask how does this add? Would something be missing if it wasn’t there?
• Prioritize, how important is the idea in full. How important is each branch. Measure importance however is easiest for you, 1-X for each branch, and how many other ideas at large you have under active development.
• Turn each piece into action steps which you could perform to transform your idea into reality. Call XYZ about … write email to…, research how to X…
• Observe how your internal state has shifted towards greater or lesser clarity, and repeat and modify as desired.

It’s your fault.
If you want to change something.
No matter what happened, no matter how, why anything, accept that it is your fault.

Until you are responsible how can you change it?

Nagging and screaming may work for children some of the time, but who wants to be at the mercy of someone else to be responsible your own life?

Once you have accepted reponsibility, then you can begin to figure out how things ended up the way they did and change circumstances accordingly. Whether it is a change in attitude, tonality, word choice, physical action, diet, or one of thousands of other factors, you have the ability to change your own circumstances.

But not until you accept.

It’s your fault!

Yesterday I started to feel myself coming down with a cold so I decided to kick it out quick with a fast. At the end of the day I decided why not keep it going for a few days and turn this into a deep cleanse.

My juice fast recipe for the day:

• Carrot
• Apple
• Celery

I tend to use this juice fast recipe as a base since when combined properly it forms a complete protein and allows for extending fasting. The proper mix is 2 parts carrot : 2 parts celery : 1 part apple. If you are not an experience juicer then I don’t recommend jumping right into that mix as the saltiness of the celery is a bit much to handle. That said if you add some celery to your fresh pressed carrot and apple juice then you will be gaining some complete proteins and allow your body to maintain it self while your cleanse.

My method is fairly simple, I ran 3 pounds of carrots, 2 pounds of apples and 2 pounds of celery through a Champion Juicer to make roughly 3 quarts of juice. I will drink this throughout the day along with water and store bought not-from-concentrate Orange Juice anytime that I feel hungry.

Having my juice pre-pressed this way makes it much easier to avoid the temptation to indulge and break my fasting since all I have to do is pour a glass rather than go through the process of making juice each time I feel hungry. Aiding
The orange juice being is also there to aid in my will power in case I seek something sweeter, being pasteurized it contains significantly less nutrients than my what I pressed this morning though it does make for a nice change.

Find a quiet space, and imagine a room where there are 2 chairs and invite yourself 5 years from now to join you and have a conversation, ask any questions that you are unsure of and observe the differences between yourself now and the projection
then dismiss your future self, switch chairs and chat with yourself 5 years ago

inspired a great number of internal shifts without any other effort, been encouraging to realize that I have all the knowhow to accomplish most anything I want, just a matter of applying myself – largely through (re)building habits

How about you? What habits would make a difference between where you are now and where you see yourself in 5 years?
While logically working on the biggest change the great fulcrum that will change everything is tempting it can easily become a distraction to prevent you from getting started on making changes. If you don’t have a clear answer then pick 1 thing and get started, after a few days (5 seems to be the critical number) momentum will start to carry you forward.

– Thank you Steve Pavlina for the inspiration of the technique

PS. Yes this is grammatically terrible, this is a 1st draft which is a habit I will continue for several posts at least as I develop the habit of writing to this blog more often.

walked in with intent of writing aboutsat down to computer and saw djano admin – computer wholesaleswitched to idea about building the solar school a private network with all their computers with help from kids as work exchange for partial enrollment
the order of events that lead from me sitting down and writing about an idea, to losing it and running on a quick tangent that is productive though not on centerit would seem that my mind is due for a thorough sweeping of ideas that I feel obligation tofor that nagging feeling that I need to do something besides what I am currently doingstate switch, the distraction is set and I feel good about what I just did today but what the heck was it that I did?I set out to get this done, it was part of the plan then I missed it,
this is part of the learning process, yet what are the options?sweep the floor, clear the air, now I am off to do so
I stop to drink water, I notice that my desk is full so I play tetris for a moment,and descide that it is ok that I lost that thought, the intent was to write and so I have
it seems that this place will serve well to capture many small ideas and random memes that I run across,once the habit is better set I would imagine there will be content of much greater value

What are you trying to build?

Where are you’re time and ther resouces going?
Are you building a team? career? brand? portal? dream? nightmare?
For who?

What are you building?
What are you creating right now?
Does this differ from what you want to be building?

What do you want to build?
Is it the very essence of what you are building now?
Why not?
What is stopping you?
Only myself.

Is this what you want to be building?
Are you proud of what you have created?
What will you do with it now?
What are you trying to build?

For approximately 1 month I attempted to sleep for 2 hours per day 30 minutes at a time spaced out over the course of a day. The results became somewhat interesting:

The first week I was amazed at how much I could accomplish with all the extra time and noticed minimal drawbacks. This was the period I had the most doubts about, as I was told that the first week is a transition phase when your body will begin to switch to a 30 minute REM cycle.

The 2nd week I began to notice my mind felt foggy if I space out nap too long, and began to establish a pattern. I chose 5:30-6 and 1:30-2 am and pm as my nap times and continued to see very high gains. I began to meditate and do yoga multiple times per day often before and after a nap to increase the net rest. It was near day 11 that I began to dream during my nap times and noticed a boost in my overall energy for several days. This is also the time when I felt a shift in my brain, the area near my pineal gland (very forefront of your brain in between your eyes and above the brow) began to feel warmer drawing focus to my frontal lobe. My overall character began to shift including significantly more creative energy, trying new behaviors became a fun game. Oddly enough during this period my memory became sharper during the late morning and early afternoon, not a general shift though things I felt were important remain crystal clear to this day. I am unsure of how this related to the change in my frontal lobe though I feel there is a correlation.

During week 3 I began to get sloppy in taking my scheduled naps, and began to notice a decline in my mental clarity. While once my attention was engaged this was minimal, switching my focus involved a short delay, my overall awareness also began to decline, rather easy to ignore as the decline was quite minor though over time increasing steadily.

By week 4 my frontal lobe felt quite hot without end, my theory is that switching sleeping patterns as often as I was by not following my scheduled routine closely. During this time I was able to hallucinate at will, staring at any objects with texture my mind would form patterns until shapes emerged, if I held my attention the shapes would respond to my intent and seem to dance, flat objects seemed to have tremendous depth in these states.

This was accompanied with a noticeable delay in time required to shift my attention. I began to revert to a more introverted state spending more time writing code at a computer and less time with people. Part of this was due to the increased work load I had taken and partially because  holding my focus still, seemed both easier and more efficient.

During week 5 I began to sleep longer periods during my afternoon nap, by this time I had all the classic signs of sleep deprivation. While I had not truly planned out how I would handle polyphasic sleep from the beginning I had considered it a short term method of accomplishing a greater work load without the need to sacrifice time with my family.

I chose to force myself to keep the shorter daylight naps and adopted what became a 2-5 hour sleep cycle in the early-mid morning. At this point I largely stopped using any type of alarm clock and felt my mental clarity return. After a few weeks of these longer periods of sleep my frontal lobe no longer felt significantly warmer though a tipping point was reached, and I now find access to greater creative output and adoption/implementation of new ideas.

Over time I have become significantly less structured in my sleeping patterns, though I do continue to take 2-4 short naps per day with a 2-5 hour sleep cycle at night/morning.

This post was inspired by a chat with another programmer I have been working rather grueling hours with for a couple of weeks now; having noticed that I regularly send out email at 3:30am with testing reports he asked:

jonathan: so, what exactly is your sleep schedule?

Alvin: I like to take lots of short naps and sleep a little in the early morning, a few hours anyway

jonathan: do you just have really short sleep cycles?

Alvin: not anymore, if I stopped having that longer rest period I would though that lead to burnout
more of a lieing down quiet meditation, often I’ll stretch or roll a ball/socket under my foot [reflexology reasons] for a few minutes before I lay down, the relaxation acts as a recharge

At this point I feel that my cycles are quite sustainable, I do not use an alarm clock though I do have a young daughter that occasionally acts as on. If I add it up I would say that I average 4-5 hours per 24 sleeping and find that significant enough to maintain a high level of mental clarity and physical alertness.

The greatest advantage I find to this style is the increased quiet time that I am alert. I work from home, having large blocks of time when I am the only one awake allows for blocks of intense concentration on a daily basis. For anyone who is a fan of GTD you likely recognize the power of having several blocks of uninterrupted time on a daily basis.

I will write more on this topic, came up with a title for a moment “Polyphasic Sleeping Raw Foodist Entrepreneur”. Say that 5 times fast.

I’ve been having a hard time deciding what to do with this site, I’ve committed myself to write atleast 1 article of quality each week. For the time being I’ve decided to use it as an online journal. Take a few minutes to jot down what I’m up to and explore ideas.

General current inventory, I’m writing this at 6am EST in Deland, Florida. I have been awake for the past 2 hours having gone for a walk and begun my morning smoothie. I slept for 3 hours last night, took 3 naps yesterday. Begun to enjoy a shift in my brain from switching to a regularly broken sleeping schedule. Hehe, I broke my sleep, on purpose to. It’s called polyphasic sleep you can look it up on WikiPedia and find it used by a variety of people throughout history. A few public figures have written about it, I have based my model upon one I found with Buckminster Fuller; 30 minutes every 6 hours.

This is tuesday morning my 15th day adapting to this pattern. I began on December 21st, 2008. The appeal was simple, more time, and more specifically more quiet time. Something that is often rare in my home based office.  My daughter, Liona is about to turn 1 year old, since she has been born I have found myself waking up earlier, eating  raw plants and now polyphasic sleep in order to increase my waking time to get things done. Funny to say as this has been more of a recent set of adaptations that continue a lifelong journey or self discovery and self improvement. Self is a funny word, to some it means a physical body, to others a brain, a mind, a mind body symbiote, a collection of cells conducting electricity (whatever that is), an interconnected web of energy(whatever that is) vibrating at different rates making up a matrix of experience and imagination? Pure Love? Light? a whirling balance of light and dark dancing for infinite? (I’m adding question marks to all the 2nd round after web)

You’ve just witnessed a mind walk, there will likely be many of these for a fair amount of time as I clear stuff out of my mental storage space. Some will be edited some I will leave in place to show the train of thought that went into a set of ideas.

I’m beginning to edit my writing, writing half sentances and deleting them so I will save this and continue on my day. There will be more to come, for now it’s time to ground and enjoy a release of stress from my nervous system.