TFM Part 2: A metaphor

In my last post I pretty much let loose with the frustration of having more to do than one possibly can. I think it comes from overbooking myself and then getting hit with the house fire that triggered the move to Berkeley. I could have handled the fire, the move, starting a company, doing consulting, writing a book, speaking at conferences all summer, and staying on top of open-source CouchDB patches and tickets -- if only there'd been one less thing on the list. Yeah, right!

My metaphor for this is a computer going into swap. When you have too many programs running at once, your operating system has to use less efficient resources to keep up with it all, and as a result everything is slower, and the whole thing snowballs until the only recourse is to start dropping tasks on the floor.

Apparently if you are already doing everything at once, and then you add some more huge things to your plate, the effect is non-linear.

But that's not the metaphor I wanted to share. As I was on my morning Rollerblade excursion, I was thinking about going into swap, and what else it is like. In recording engineering and mixing, there is the constant challenge of wanting to put as much energy into a song or a sound as possible, without going over the top. If you've ever played in a band you know what it's like to have everyone with an amp, turning themselves up just a little tiny bit, every once in a while during practice. At the end of band-practice, the whole band is bashing on drums and guitars as hard as they can, and it's all lost dynamics. Better to be a little quieter and learn how to work as a unit, than get into an amplifier arms-race.

In college I spent a lot of time trying not to think about my Philosophy thesis, reading interviews with recording engineers, mostly through Tape Op, the creative music recording magazine which comes out of Portland, OR. After I graduated I interned at Jackpot! the studio run by the magazine's publisher, Larry Crane.

In one of those interviews (I wish I could remember who, but my time-budget for attribution research has been exceded) the was some sound advice (I paraphrase):

A song is like a pint of beer. You can have a pint of dark beer, or a pint of light beer, but if you try to pour more than a pint, it overflows. If you are having a Guinness, you've got to leave room for the head. And if you overfill the pint, you'll just end up with a flat, sticky mess.

The moral of the metaphor is that you have to choose. And as my experience shows, sometimes just when you've got the head foaming right up perfectly over the rim of the glass, life drops a Jäger bomb into it, and on top of everything else, you end up having to clean up a flat, sticky mess.

As far as lessons learned, I think the one I've felt is that you have to keep pushing. Just because you're in swap doesn't mean any of the stuff you care about is any less important to you than it was before. Hopefully now that we're settling into our new home, and some of my major projects are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I'll emerge with time management fucking superpowers. Either that or I'll pick up a Halo habit.