What are we really talking about?

The most compelling and useful things I've read about communication in the past decade come down to one thing: the ability to recognise (in the moment or on reflection) what you and the other party are really talking about and adjusting accordingly.

The biggest problems in communication that might otherwise be cooperative and fruitful usually come down to some unrecognised mismatch between the parties.

Here are some of the forms in which I've encountered this:

Feedback

Thanks for the Feedback (Stone and Heen, 2014) lays out a model for why receiving feedback can feel so affecting. There is the matter of substance -- the truth of it -- the nature of the relationship between us and the feedback giver, and our tendency to extrapolate specific feedback to be an attack on our identity. In the case of 'identity' or 'relationship' triggers, we generally end up talking or thinking not about the specific feedback that's been levelled, but about a whole relationship or something fundamental to the stories we tell about ourselves.

They also split feedback into 'appreciation', 'coaching', and 'evaluation', which also has potential for expectation mismatch. If I show you a draft of a short story asking for 'feedback' -- by which I mean supportive appreciation about what you like so I'm not discouraged -- and you give me five pages of deeply detailed notes on what's wrong (evaluation), that's not going to feel entirely harmonious. Neither is more valid than the other, but the two parties being on different pages causes Problems.

Emotional Bids

A concept I remember hearing about on a podcast years ago, but for which I don't have the reference now. They studied couples and observed that one of the key factors for longevity and mutual communication was the response to 'emotional bids' -- one party saying or doing something which had some emotional stakes to them and which merited a response. Those stakes could be very small ('I saw this cool bird on my way back from work'), but it was them 'reaching out' to the other person in some form and looking for acknowledgement.

What they found was that recognising and responding to those emotional bids correlated with a longer relationship. Those responses need not be positive or the desired response, but the recognition that the other person was reaching out was critical.

Missing those cues and not understanding that there are emotional stakes in any given interaction is major communications problem.

Beliefs/Values/Morals/Ethics

I came across this first in Facing Violence, so I'll just quote from there:

People have a hierarchy of understanding and behavior—things that drive what they do, say, and are. At the lowest level of the hierarchy are beliefs. These are simply the things you hold to be true. These are not necessarily objective truths (diamond is harder than chalk) but often subjective truths: One can believe with absolute sincerity that the world is flat or round; that God does or does not exist; that people are basically good or basically selfish. Beliefs are our internal assumptions about the world and they lay the foundation for everything we do and say.

The next level up is values. Of all the things that we believe, some are more important than others. If you believe that God only allows prayer for healing and you believe that your child will die without an operation, which choice do you make? If you believe that politeness is critical to society but also believe that a certain individual only responds to anger, what do you do? You can see values in actions far more easily than in words. Beliefs and values, generally, are very deeply planted and not conscious at all. Morals derive from values and are your vague gut-level feelings about what is right and wrong. All of the things that you “just know are wrong” without being able to explain why constitute your morals. Ethics are your personal code, the general rules that you make up for yourself to try to put your morals into words. ... The ethics level is the most conscious, which lends to reasoned discourse, but it is also the least personal. An argument at the ethics level is not perceived as an attack on identity. An argument at the belief level, however, is very much an attack on identity. Arguing religion or politics, according to research, stimulates the emotional, not the logical parts of the brain. Telling someone one of their beliefs is wrong is telling them that they are stupid. It will be perceived as a personal attack.

...

You cannot successfully argue (or even really understand) from a higher level than the core disbelief. If someone disagrees with you at the belief level, you cannot convince him or her at any higher level. If you can explain yourself from a deeper level you are far more likely to get the other person to comprehend your point of view.

Facing Violence (Miller 2011)

Again, we see the same themes: stakes of emotion and identity that, when not understood by either party, lead to problems.

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What's interesting to me is that I've encountered each of these at long remove from one another, over a decade or so. But they all echo the same theme, and, I realise now, are fundamental to my definition and understand of emotional intelligence. The ability to recognise these dynamics and to shift your thought and speech and action to address what we really talking about is paramount.

Things I do to enable focused work

Things I do to enable focused work:

• Shut the door
• Noise cancelling headphones
• Turn off my computer's clock display + set an alarm instead. (This isn't always the right call if pacing out your work over the time available is important, but for extended periods of work, it helps me get lost in it.)
• All devices and channels off-noise
• Make sure I'm adequately provisioned with tea and water (though not so much I need to pee every ten minutes)
• We have a smart doorbell. I have deeply mixed feelings about it, but it has been fantastic for my focus -- the principle thing that used to keep me from being able to get lost in work was expecting a package and knowing that I might miss the doorbell with headphones on. (In practice, this never happened -- but either leaving the headphones off or being vigilant to any slight noise I heard through them wasn't productive.) This sends notifications right to me that punch through Do Not Disturb and I'm not afraid of missing.

Time Models

Last week, I moved back into a full-time, in-house role. I left my last such job in 2018 (before I actually moved into games/was writing and designing full time). This has meant an interesting shift in my working practices.

When I was freelance, I managed to structure my time to maximise 'deep work' -- being able focus really intensely on a thing for an extended period. I used to use Pomodoros -- sequenced 25-minute chunks -- but now find these too short unless I'm having an attention crisis.

Now, 60 or 90 minutes at a stretch is good, interspersed with slightly longer breaks. I developed a routine designed to maximise the number of these I could get in a single day, and found that to be extremely efficient. I never measured it, but my intuition is that I could achieve in one of those spans at least as much as a 50% longer chunk of less focused time, and with much greater consistency and enjoyment.

Now, that whole structure was based on a few factors specific to my working reality, including:

• Not requiring frequent real-time collaboration
• Limited number of meetings
• Steady backlog of larger creative tasks that benefit from deep work
• Material circumstances permitting a proverbial (and literal) 'closed door' approach

It's also... quite tiring. Periods where I ran that schedule five days a week were exhausting and not what I'd consider sustainable. Three or four days a week with the other days structured differently were the sweet spot for me.

Shifting back to being an employee, I'm not expecting that to work out precisely the same way. My responsibilities are different, I'll need to do more collaboration, and it's just straightforwardly different working in a company. BUT my previous approach was so effective and valuable that I don't intend to discard it altogether, either.

Here's where I've landed so far. I expect this to evolve over time.

• Recognise the different roles deep and lossy working time play. One is not strictly superior to the other; it depends on the task, role, and material circumstances.
• Be explicit about what sort of 'time mode' you're in
• Accept that you can't plan this as far in advance as you like. BUT still make it a proactive decision to avoid being wishy-washy. When I'm assembling my schedule at the start of each day, I decide which mode I'm in, and plan accordingly.
• Right now, I've got three working modes:
  • Deep. Much like my old schedule -- go offline and work intensively for planned spans, and check in outside of them.
  • Lossy. More fragmented. Task- and context-switching are still undesirable, but flexibility and ongoing communication are prioritised over singular tasks.
  • Hybrid. The day is split half deep, half lossy. Recognise the switch and roll with it.

On Microblogging

A collision of a few different threads all hitting at once:

1) My newsletter limps along; I find it hard to make the time to turn out something I'm happy with. (Specifically: my energy and focus on a particular idea are almost always directly mismatched with the time available I have where I try to make myself write letters.)
2) During the pandemic in particular, I've spent too much time in conversation with myself and not enough with other people. This leads to too many open mental loops and is not good for my brain more generally.
3) Warren Ellis has been ticking over his Morning Computer updates again. Whatever your view of him, I've always found his practices and intentionality interesting and informative.
4) I came across these 15 rules for blogging, the structure of which resonated with me.
5) Twitter was already a Bad Place, but it's not getting any better anytime soon.

Which leads me to this: a microblog. Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.

There's an image that's stuck with me from years ago: A street on which I used to live had a sort of mini-fair where all the shops and cafés set up outside on the street for the day. It gave the strange sense that the shops had been everted -- that someone had opened up the doors and shaken them out onto the street. Tables, little ovens, bar furniture that really shouldn't be seen in daylight.

Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image.

This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else, though I'm just arrogant enough to think that there will be something that somebody finds worth reading in each of these.