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There is a lot about the Agile project methodology way that I despise, but short term focus goals isn’t one of them.

First, I should probably introduce the agile methodology. In project management, there are multiple ways of handling how a project is run. The agile methodology focuses heavily on minor but often corrections to a project to help facilitate communication, reduce churn (when something has to be recoded due to requirement changes), and come up with more accurate short-term timelines and less focus on the long term. I won’t get into much more about the agile methodology, but the above should sum it up well.

The part I want to focus on is how this develops focus. When I was talking to my father yesterday, he asked why I am getting rid of stuff and buying less. I told this it had to do with focus. In my free time I’m interested in the following activities: martial arts, art (book binding, drawing and painting), music (playing and listening), reading, programming side projects, doing some work for work, watching some tv/movies, motorcycle riding, language study (writing blogs, learning new languages), and volunteer work. This doesn’t even take in account that I’m a graduate student and work full time. The reason I mention all this is to really illustrate the worst case of someone who has no focus and does too much.

The agile way comes to the rescue. I first had to realize that I want to become a master at some stuff and let other stuff fall back a little. To accomplish this, I am starting (actually did this in the past too) to pick a few things of my interests to focus on for one week. After the week, I want to spend a bit on Sunday morning in a mini retrospective to come up with ways of improving a bit.

To further sticking to the goals, it’s helpful to stick all the times one will do stuff on a calendar. Even when willpower is low, the calendar helps to keep things on track. It also reinforces the thought that being successful each day.

To give my week plans, I decided to focus on martial arts, language studies, and work reading/coding. My short term goal is to do this M-F with a retrospective on Sunday. If all goes well, I’d like to keep this focus a month. 3 hours each night dedicated to this isn’t much to ask.

I focused much of this writing as in what my plans were instead of the more generic what could be done because I feel this type of thing isn’t a known science and is adaptable by the individual. I would be very interested in hearing your opinions and ideas to improve this. Please use the comment area below.

On minimizing….

I’ve been asked before two big questions. The first is why do I work to minimize my possessions/needs, and the second is how does one know when it’s taken too far? My goal is to try and answer these questions in a fairly concise way. The art of minimizing is a fairly recent one. Some people who are very well off decided that life is too complex when it comes to how much we own. Furthermore, movements such as 7-habits, GTD, “zen”, and so on – they all point to a general issue we have in life. That issue, simply, is that people tend to try and cram more and more things into their life, and need ideas on how to get more done, faster. I know a number of people who enjoy this thrill of having lots of friends, being more in the limelight, and so on – in short this sort of life style makes us feel important, needed and so on. I know people who want to go to meetings and find them helpful if for nothing else likely the reason of feeling important or moving up the corporate chain.

I’m going to address the first question now – why did I bother with this? The reason started some number of years ago, and I’ll keep the story short. I used to be, and still am in many ways, a pack rat. To those who are not familiar with this term, it’s coined as someone who tends to accumulate possessions and never lets things go. It’s a sense of security to have many things, to know that if anything arises, that you’d have all you needed and wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. This sense of security is why I also gained as much weight as I did in my younger years as well. About 8 or so years ago, I was introduced to Zen Buddhism, and practiced quite a bit. After awhile, I learned it’s not what you do only in meditation that matters, but also what one does outside of the meditation room. Much of this wisdom came, in part, from Shoken (An abbot from Ryumonji Monastery). From around that point, I began to heavily question why I needed to own as much as I had, and determined in some ways what I should do about it.

Over the past year and some, I’ve spent much of my time trying to give/donate and/or sell much of my possessions. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do, but not really for the usual reasons. It wasn’t due to the fact I was inconvenienced from the less number of items, but more from looking at something and saying “Oh, I remember when I used to have fun with this…” sorta feeling. This happened a lot; but considering I haven’t seen that particular item in a number of years, it’s all the more reason why I don’t need it. I’m still working heavily on trying to get rid of other possessions I have. Random game consoles, computers, TV/couches/etc, DVDs and CDs – and so on, all are being analyzed and dealt with accordingly.

I’ve learned of some benefits I’ve gained from this way of doing things:
1. I have greater awareness of when I want something. This can be in the form of food, or whatever. In a lot of ways this drive died down a whole lot, but not in all ways (lifts ipad).
2. I am able to spend more concentrated time at home. I used to go elsewhere to concentrate, but find being at home works just as well now. I spend far less time cleaning, because I have less things to clean up after. This saves money from the coffee shop, and I really do have a much nicer work area at this point.
3. I less often come across stuff saying “I didn’t know I had this!” As I was cleaning up one area some months ago, this feeling happened a lot.
4. I spend more time on activities that matter. I have an issue where I like to do too much. I like to keep myself busy, and pride myself on not being bored. I jump around different activities like a jack rabbit. Since I removed a lot of areas that I used to do as random activities, and have further plans to remove even more – I’m spending far more time perfecting areas that I should have been doing for the past 10 years. Mostly this relates to martial arts, where at this point I’m spending a few hours a day working out/practicing.
5. I’ve learned to limit pleasure. Specifically this came in the form of video games, TV, and chatting on the net. I’ve worked at going an entire work week without Internet at home, and that’s been beneficial for me. I commonly will go a day or two without net with no issues as well.

I still have far to go though, but I am making good progress

To tackle the second question – how far is too far? This specifically came up with a coworker, when I was talking about building a PC (I have too many computers, but am thinking of settling on a PC tower and a MBP – long story). Anyways, looking at the data processing I do, he said that going the route of a PC is likely not a bad idea and would help me a lot. He brought up the idea that he knows I’m trying to minimize stuff, but when can it be taken too far?

I thought a lot about this question, both from that point, and afterwards. My initial answer was as follows: You can take it too far once it becomes uncomfortable. Upon further reflection, this isn’t entirely accurate of an answer. The reason being is that if one is comfortable, one really stops growing. This doesn’t mean the goal is to be constantly uncomfortable, but more to not be totally comfortable at the same time. This is a bit tricky because it really depends on the person for when something is taken too far. For myself, I really haven’t fully found the answer yet. I suppose, when I have enough to be happy but enough to not be distracted – that at that time it’s on the border of being taken too far. Does this mean I need that PC, and I should build it? Perhaps…but not yet, not until I finish getting rid of all but 1 of my remaining computers. When I can accomplish the idea of having just my MBP, maybe an ipod/ipod touch, and my ipad – I’ll reconsider the PC thing. I can find many ways of justifying the purchase, but in all actuality, I’ve gotten by this long without building it for now.

I hope this clarifies a bit about my position on trying to minimize my possessions. Much of my own story, I feel, is similar to what Siddhartha Gautama Buddha felt around my age some years ago when he left his life of luxury. Unlike the Buddha, I’m not really leaving a life of luxury – but instead trying to cherish fully the stuff I have and to be satisfied with that. Looking back at all this, I’m very happy to have gone this far and have much to learn.

How do people normally try to do something like losing weight, or watching less TV, or whatever? If you are like me, we set a time of saying “I’m going to start at the beginning of the week”, then set these huge goals. We work and work at them, and find out that we can’t reach the goals we set. What happens? We quit. According to wikipedia, 12% of people who make new years resolutions actually succeed.

So what’s the problem?

Very vague and overzealous goals really put a hamper on trying to accomplish anything. This is very similar to the business world (something I learned from my job), where having small achievable and trackable goals that have clear benchmarks really lead to success. So how do we proceed? In my opinion, and I’ll give my plan that I’m going for later, is to create a overall goal – say “to exercise more regularly”, or “to run 1 mile”. From there, using one’s current ability, come up with a plan to meet some benchmark (a mini one of above) in 2 weeks. Then define what you need to do to get there. After that, keep track of every day, keeping in mind that you’re getting a little closer to your goals. For the first month, keeping up on a new habit is going to be tough – so keeping accurate records and all will help.

So lets set a goal for myself. I need to be careful for myself because I have the habit of trying to set too many goals and then not achieving any of them. So I’m going to set one big goal – to lose 25 pounds. How soon do I want to do this? Lets say 3 months. So by July 1st, I want to be 25 pounds lighter. How many pounds is that per month? 8.3 (gonna round down for the first month) – so 8 through april, 9 through may, 8 through june. How many pounds is that per week? Roughly 2. My goal also by July 1st, and this follows the above one pretty closely, is to run a mile. How do I accomplish this? Since I want to keep on the same schedule as the above one, I need to first have regular exercise every day. To reach the ability to run that far, I need to be able to walk that far at least, which I can do now but need to build some strength yet. So for April I plan to be able to walk 1 hour every day (by the end of april). By the end of May I want to be able to run 1/2 a mile with no problems. By the end of June, I want to be able to run a mile. This all in list format is:

By End of April

• -8 Pounds (yeah, intentionally keeping this value kinda vague)
• Routine of walking or general exercise for 1 hour per day (6 days out of a week)

• By end of May

  • -9 pounds
  • Routine of walking or general exercise for 1 hour per day (6 days out of a week)
  • Ability to run 1/2 a mile

  By end of June

  • -9 pounds
  • Routine of walking or general exercise for 1 hour per day (6 days out of a week)
  • Ability to run a full mile 2 days out of a week

  I think these goals are pretty achievable, and this is pretty narrow down on where I want to get to. Personally I’m building plans to measure by the week, and then measure food intake, keeping track of my exercise, and so on – every day. This is a bit of a chore, and will add some overhead every day, but if I keep it simple, and keep a listing of foods I like and their calories/fat, then over time this process will get easier and easier. The beginning is always hard, here’s where the fun begins though

Virtualization may be a term some reading this may not know about – so I should start there So what is virtualization? Virtualization in the sense of what I’m talking about here is the ability run an entire operating system, more or less, within an application. Why would anyone want to do this? Well, I’ll get to that soon

How do many people develop right now? The diagram below hopefully will illustrate it somewhat:

Many people take their base machine, install all these services on it, and develop right on it. Is this an OK solution? Of course – I mean if people feel comfortable with it then that’s OK – but in my opinion is it the best option? Definitely not.

why?

Virtualization allows you to abstract the services you’re using for that specific purpose. If you’re developing web applications, you may want apache, postgresql, and other services installed to test your web apps. Do you only do web app development on that machine you’re using? My guess is no. No one spends 100% of their time on the computer doing one single thing. For example, for myself, I spend maybe 40-50% of my off hours developing whereas the rest of my time is spent listening to music, browsing web sites, and so on. Why do I want to run postgresql all the time? Why do I want my test environment running all the time? The answer to all that is that I don’t want it run all the time. I really would rather have my development environment available when I need it, but turn it off when I don’t. This allows me to reduce the total number of wasted resources which would normally end up being used (unless I created scripts to kill services when not needed – I have done that in the past). Furthermore, from a security standpoint, less services accessible from the internet the better. So running all your experimental stuff in a virtual machine, without as much worry over security, is a nice peace of heart thing.

So with that giant bit of why to do this, what do I propose one uses instead for development?

What’s different about this? On my host machine, on my macbook pro in this case, I have absolutely nothing checked in my sharing tab – nothing This makes my machine a tad bit more secure overall than before. So what about the virtual machine you might be asking – what about its security? Well, my fine friend, basically if you set your virtual machine to use NAT, it gets an IP address from your host machine. Why use NAT? The reason I use it is because I’m only accessing the virtual machine from my macbook pro, I don’t want it accessed from outside it. Furthermore it can access the net when it needs and when I’m doing development, I don’t actually need the net for anything. Cool huh.

To summarize the benefits and negatives of virtual machines:

Benefits:

• Abstraction of the entire development environment – much more control
• Easier to update many packages (from a mac perspective, ports and fink aren’t always reliable)
• Considerably more secure than trying to secure all these services while running on your host machine
• Overall CPU cycles and memory use could be improved, this assumes you keep the virtual machine off sometimes.
• Backups are extremely simple. Want to install something risky but afraid of messing up the system? Copy the entire virtual machine file, then run the code
• VMWare (and I’m sure others by now) have great integration with the host machine. Shared folders, to keep the code accessible on the host machine (say if you want to use textmate, but test in the VM).

Negatives:

• Slightly more disk usage space. You have the overhead of the virtual machine. My test vm is roughly 2.5Gb right now and has everything I need installed – it can get larger and larger depending on what you use it with.
• Memory use while the VM is on can be high – you will need the RAM to do this. I have 2Gb of RAM in my machine, and have roughly 500Mb either free/inactive with my virtual machine on. It has 512Mb of RAM dedicated to itself. Ram is pretty cheap, though, so having some won’t hurt much I’m sure
• sshing to test stuff may feel awkward at first. This is only if you use linux, but I do – and have shared keys all over to make sure I can log in without a password, and have scripts that run here and there that help ease the problem of virtual machine integration. Overall, this is a very weak point for me, as I rarely have problems with the integration given what I’m doing

I hope this gives a brief overview of virtual machines and what they are capable of. There are many projects out there that virtualize including VMWare (for all operating systems – my personal favorite), Parallels (for the mac), and VirtualBox (available for most operating systems – free). There are others too, you can find them through google. While I’m a huge fan of VWWare (especially their fusion product for the mac), I’d try VirtualBox with whatever you want first to see how you like it before switching over to VMWare if you so desired.

Zen habits is a nice blog that I like to frequent, and recently they posted a really nice article here:

I read this, and I felt this really chimed in for myself. I have the upmost respect for monks, and while I am not one, I do like to spend a weekend when possible at the Ryumonji Monastery in Iowa.

1. Do one thing at a time: This is really important to being with less stress. To illustrate what happens here is when I’m cleaning my home. I usually dislike cleaning, and when I’m cleaning I think of everything else but the cleaning of my home. I think about the computer, about people I’d rather be talking to, or the book I’d rather read, or the practice of the piano or the trumpet…the list goes on. I think about those things, and frequently visit the computer – and to do what? not clean. I’m too busy doing multiple things and cleaning isn’t done as much..so I waste more time, and cleaning takes longer and I just hate it that much more. The key is really to do one thing, and only one thing at a time.

2. Do it slowly and deliberately: I wouldn’t really agree with this in that things should be done slowly, in that it should be done with mindfulness on the the task currently being done. This follows with their next point, Do it completely, but really I’d say both of these are one point. Do it as slow as necessary, but the speed doesn’t matter – what matters is where your mind is at during the task. Don’t go too slow just because this says so…but don’t speed through it and be sloppy either. Balance is key.

3. Do less: This is something I really try to work on, and really this is more saying be realistic than anything else. What do I mean? For myself, I routinely spend time creating a huge list of things I want to get done – and I get done with roughly half of them, and that’s rushing through it. It’s nice to set goals high, but to set goals realistically is probably a better option than setting really high goals and not meeting them. This builds a lot of self esteem

4. Put space between things: Anyone familiar with the 7-habits of highly effective people will understand the importance of this. Basically we have stimulus produces action – and the space in between these two is the planning and the free will portion of the equation. The key is really to give time to really think about the task, instead of just jumping right into things. The point on the article isn’t described this way, but this is another area where I disagree with what they are saying. Having actions close together is fine, but the space between the stimulus and the action is way more important.

5. Develop rituals: I’m reminded a bit about how people are effective in anything, when looking at this point. How do people learn how to do something, and be good at it? How do people lose weight, learn to play the piano, learn to drive, learn to speak another language? It comes from constant repetition to really learn something. You can work out really hard one day, and not work out for 5 more days and be less close to a goal of less weight, than if you worked out all 5 days for 1/5th of the time and intensity. Setting a time for doing things, a block of time, is the way things can get done – and be on the “radar”. This doesn’t mean have an absolute perfect schedule, that’s impossible. What this does mean, though, is say from 6 to 6:30 PM I plan to work out. Put it on the calendar. Does this mean you’ll work out every day? Of course not, what it does mean, though, is when 6:00 comes around and if you’re paying attention, it has a better likelihood of being completed. I think this is really important, and something I personally need to work on more and more. This follows their point, Designate time for certain things, which is #7

6. Devote time to sitting: People don’t necessarily need to meditate here to really get this part working. As the author of the article writes, she uses running as a way. Personally, I like meditation, but I also enjoy reading and also listening to music. So…where this comes down to is dedicating time, every day, for just YOU. If you’re married, have kids, doesn’t matter – a good half hour is something that’ll really refresh your soul to speak. During this half hour, you should pick an activity that you enjoy doing – but isn’t related to other people. I discourage the use of television, or video games for this because both are really a waste of time. For myself, I enjoy picking a listing of classical songs, and playing them during “my time”. I do nothing else, only listening to the music – so no computer, no reading, just listening to the music. It really helps, and I’m sure it’d help out a lot of people if you give it a chance.

7. Smile and serve others: I encourage everyone to volunteer some of your time. Personally, I work at a food pantry in North Liberty. While I feel that some take advantage of the pantry, I can feel also that some are being really helped by going there. Giving a bit of one’s time to others is a fantastic way of seeing the world in a new light. I don’t know how really to explain this – but one becomes a little less greedy and self centered when helping others.

8. Make cleaning and cooking become meditation: While at Ryumonji, I heard about a monk who cleaned. I don’t recall the entire story, but basically a new monk came and was didn’t pay that much attention to the monk who cleaned, because he didn’t do his sitting meditation like the others did. He, and probably a lot like him, feel that meditation is only when sitting down – and that the “wise monks” come from those who are in seated meditation. He learned, though, that this monk who was cleaning and cooking was greater than the others in wisdom and knowledge. He was disregarded because of what he did, but was really great. The morale of this story really is that meditation isn’t only at the cushion. Meditation is something that should always be taken with you – cleaning, cooking, typing up a blog message, listening to music, whatever.

9. Think about what is necessary and Live simply: This is one of my hardest things to overcome. I am a gadget freak to a very large degree. I have 3 computers, television, ipod and headphone setup, ebook reader, lots of books, video games, and so on. Much of these items were purchased before I really took up the study of zen, but I think it’s really important to try and see an item but say – “Is this really necessary?” I have a really hard time doing this, and it’s something I constantly need to remind myself of, but I think it’s also pretty important to do. Does this mean not to give yourself “fun stuff”? Of course not. What this means is try not to overindulge as much.

/I have a lot to learn too when it comes to how to better live and to live with less. This article really struck a cord with me/ because it speaks so strongly of what I should and shouldn’t do. There’s a lot to learn from monks. I encourage people to read the original article, hopefully everyone can pick up a little something from there