Lines of Drift
Your patterns aren't just yours.
We live out the patterns we design daily.
You have an incredible herculean reserve of spirit within you.
But it has variable strength… and motivation.
When the chips are down - most of us can flip a switch and do more than we normally can do.
That’s important.
And useful.
And emphatically not the way to win a daily knife fight with the firmament of progress.
At least, not sustainably
(for me)
Lines of Drift
Natural lines of drift are an orienteering concept.
They are the routes, places, and pockets of physical space that people (and other animals) tend to take when traversing a piece of terrain.
If you’re on foot and crossing a mountainous valley, trails often form on the ridgelines and the valley floor, but not as often on the sides of the mountains.
Why?
It’s usually just a lot easier to walk along a ridgeline or flat valley floor vs the side of a mountain!
In our daily machinations, a natural line of drift might be so obviously the path of least resistance that it turns into a desire path
(you’ve seen these before)
In the military, understanding an area’s natural lines of drift is crucial.
If you have to make camp overnight, the last place you want to fall asleep is right next to the only water source in the area.
But if you are setting an ambush…
That’s the perfect spot!
Ergo we study the inputs to natural lines of drift.
Areas with consistent water or food.
Canalizing brush (like extra dense or prickly af shrubs).
Significant obstacles like bridges and cliffs.
And we use that knowledge to make informed judgements about where to travel and rest and ambush.
Natural Lines of Focus Drift
I get pissed at myself for getting distracted during my workday.
Sometimes it helps me get on track, but mostly it just makes me distract and annoyed instead of resolving either emotional state.
So I spent some time studying my natural lines of (focus) drift.
Every time I caught myself on an “off track” activity, I catalogued it in a physical notebook - primarily to stave off further distraction.
As of this writing, there are 3 mega-trends across my distractive impulses.
The distraction usually starts in-the-middle-of-focused-activity when a notification, page, email, or something else designed by a team tries to derail my deliberate actions.
The most distracting things tend to lock me into some sort of subsequent content stream.
I’m most likely to get distracted when I have an unstructured block of time, are working towards an abstract goal, or am feeling some sort of active discomfort (hunger, tired, cranky, sad, etc).
Miserere Nobis
None of those trends are particularly surprising, but that’s probably why this whole thing is insidious.
In a very real way, we’re fighting for control over our lives literally every single day.
And while “control” is a word absolutely fraught with nuance; the intentionality of how we spend our time matters a lot to me.
If I’m gonna watch a 42 minute long video about the origins and evolution of City Pop, it’s gonna be because I chose to watch it god damn it
Not just because some bored staff engineer is hacking my dopamine loops.
So I’m adjusting some things.
I have categorized some activities as “high risk” during my workday - things like picking up my phone, opening my Farcaster feed, changing my YouTube soundtrack, checking my tabs, and touching anything that creates a new attack surface for my attention
I’ve reset my morning routine to be completely predefined a la habit stacking
I’m using a physical notebook for my workouts and moving my phone out of reach while waiting between sets
I am attempting to start every work block with a concrete task tied to a metric (ie. post this single essay) - organized by 2 hour chunks
I am continuing to record the distractive moments + my emotional state at the time of distraction
Parts will fail. Parts will work.
Persistence is part and parcel of progress.
Stay tuned for proof 🫡
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