(Full disclosure: I cheated the second trip, for one day — just to send an email to L to see if she could please select seats for me on international flights. But no other reading / writing online of any kind.)

I told him that upon returning, I was able to continue with that flow, for the most part.

We should clarify, that by offline we really mean minimal surfing. Not cutting out email, meaningful IM conversations, staying in touch with people, but more the extraneous barrage of content available to an idle mind.

So I thought I would try to write up what I noticed, and the aftermath of this for me. Your own applicability may vary.

• Idle Cycles: Google Reader

For me, anytime I want to take a break, or I find myself with no immediate action to take, I load up Google Reader. I rarely “surf” anymore, and much of my inbound content comes that way. It’s easier to break open greader for a short stint, because you can cut it off at a 5-minute or 10-minute mark abruptly without feeling rude.

The task in the Idle state is perhaps the go-to for me that leads to extraneous information. The first thing when going offline is to reprogram that state. Email is a natural one to shift to, since we find ourselves with an incessant need to check. Few, if any of us, receive emails that are ultra urgent. And I mean even work emails. It’s taken me a long time to realize that (thank you, Big Company), but finally I know that few emails I get are truly both urgent and important. That’s different from the backlog of emails I need to reply to, which is great. But it’s easy to get lost in ambiguous direction.

So then what?

• The List

I come back to the idea of The List. Either you have a list of things that you need to do, and you can start taking tasks off the top. Or you go to the list, and add to it, reorganize it, categorize, whatever. Detailing and maintaining this list will help you start reducing your Idle cycles, and getting more stuff done. For me, this might be anything from moving PDFs of papers I want to read into Dropbox, searching for information about topics I want to learn about and then Instapapering them for later, or even just loading up Instapaper and working through some of the backlog. In some sense, it’s still extraneous information, but for myself I’ve found myself curating Google Reader into Instapaper, and then never actually finding time to follow up. Now I have that time.

The biggest difference in doing this is realizing how much information day-to-day can be completely eschewed. I marked 1000+ Techcrunch articles as read in one fell swoop, and it’s unclear to me if I’ll miss any of them. The part of my brain that whispers that I ought to know everything about everything is hushed into calmness.

There’s probably more, but that’s it for now.

1. Realizing that I use a lot of non-english-dictionary words in the course of general conversation, whether imported or derived from other languages or through liberal expression of poetic license.

2. More frustration than benefit, opposed to on iOS where usually the corrections are welcome.

L
yo yo yo
hello?
are we live

Ryan
yeah

L
hello
hello
can you hear me

Ryan
yup
can you hear me

L
yay

– snippet of an IM transcript.

“You would expect artists and content owners to support SOPA, and you would expect the people who would be caught in legal dragnets to oppose it. The interesting people are the crossovers: The parties who take the “wrong” side of the issue. And indeed, many creators do just that, publicly arguing against SOPA even though it is specifically aimed at protecting their financial interests. But at the risk of being unkind, a lot of people become artists because they aren’t good at things like math and legal analysis. When I want an opinion on the Constitution, or economics, I rarely consult an artist.

Bottom line: The crossovers aren’t persuasive.”

– http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/sopa

As I mentioned, I want to follow Patrick’s book summaries with my own attempt, in the Ryan-style, and see if they’re valuable. I already do this somewhat on goodreads, but they’re very brief usually.

I read Pattern Recognition in an afternoon during college almost a decade ago. With that, Gibson had brought his language into the near-present day, intermixing already-real and about-to-be-real which for me made me read it as if he had pulled back a thin veneer of coating on the reality that I know, explaining some inner clockworks of society and people mixing that I take for granted. It was around the same time that I learned about the Pantone color projections and the like, understanding the notion of design and marketing and aesthetics all being connected intrinsically and out of necessity when planning multimillion dollar budgets.

Theories about the Illuminati, only applied to every day modern consumer culture.

Zero History closes out the Bigend trilogy, wrapping it all up nicely. It read very well as a sequel, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it to you unless you’ve read the first two. The main thread (pun not intended) for the book was the relationship between men’s streetwear and military uniform fashion. When the connection is made, it clicks – I can see it clearly in non-dressy wear immediately.

It was entertaining, and again, felt more revealing than prescient, into areas of our society that I wouldn’t otherwise think much about.

At some point, Bigend was explaining that there’s a large demographic that finds the idea that they might be mistaken for being [ex-]soldiers on the street, and that being embedded in their consciousness, and something clicked in my own head.

The book was a fantastic conclusion to the trilogy, starting with familiar characters, and building from there.

This time it’s a little different, maybe. I have been writing, but not publicly. I’ve said before and pointed to Paul Graham’s essay on how Writing is Thinking, but what’s the difference between private and public writing?

At some level, private writing allows you to have conversations with yourself that you might not have with anyone else. At another level, it feels like these conversations may not always be the most productive, at least as far as I’m concerned. I know that when I force myself to hold myself accountable to some outside public as it were – even if just someone personally – the quality and rigor with which I examine my thoughts increases by an order of magnitude. Or two.

So what has been happening? I am back in Dubai for a bit. Going into the desert (I always get that and dessert confused…) for a month in order to seek an oasis of sorts. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive, but in some ways it’s a reprieve from mental stagnation. Dubai this time is explicitly non-productive, with the intent of allowing some percolation, fermentation, and other time-delay-activated processes of mind. In this attempt, it has been mostly successful so far, internally. Privately. There’s been a lot of reading, a lot of playing videogames, a lot of conversations, a lot of swimming, and a lot of time with family. There has also been a significant amount of pause, disconnection, and reflection at a level I had never experienced before, which I found absolutely wholesome.

Patrick made the case that there ought to be more crit in our day to day, and he posts great little blurblets after he ransacks a book. I will try to do something similar for a time, maybe in burst mode at first, to digest quickly some of the recent backlog, and then as they come along. It’ll get me back to writing publicly if nothing else.

if (I can work and be productive): work
else if(blah blah): and so on
else: sleep.

I have an in-flight / traveling ritual that is similar. Flights are some of my most productive time. I hated my first couple of flights with seat-back entertainment screens (JetBlue and similar), because it’s so easy to be distracted by the neighbors, or the seats ahead.

It’s another story when you’re burning out on fumes, like I was this trip. Preparing ahead, I had some videos and books ready to rock: an iTunes rental of Urbanized, and the latest Funday Monday of Day9′s. In the end, I turned to the in-flight entertainment system, to accompany the profuse offering of Air France’s baguettes.

I used to love the SIFF in Seattle — for several weeks, our social schedule would be planned around it. And if you know me, I don’t often watch movies, unless I personally am super excited for one, and especially not outside the comfort of my home television / computer. With my friend back home, we’ve been steadily going through our back catalogue: either watching things we both have been meaning to watch, or sharing movies that we each personally really rather like. But a lot of that is selected from the compendium of history, and mainly Amero-centric.

So on international flights (especially on the A380 ) I like to peruse the selection of foreign films. Really, I could do the same on Netflix, and still pull up a wealth of offerings, but I think it’s the state of in-flight displacement, the transitory trajectory that lets me relax the need to constantly work and enjoy a movie. I caught Princess Toyotomi on the way here. Delightful!

I don’t understand what’s so funny.

It’s a short, tidy decorator to denote mild negative venting, and conveying the lack of need for any real sympathy.

By virtue of having this definition, non-wah wah wah venting can indicate a real desire for solidarity.