March 2021 – Dan Slimmon

Last week I wrote about a system I’ve been using to manage my attention. It’s inspired by the call stack, but it presupposes no knowledge of computer science. Since I need a name for it, I’ve been calling it Impulse.

Since that post, I’ve been using Impulse more seriously. It has been super illuminating. My practices are in rapid flux at the moment, but the core workflow has more or less solidified to the following:

Each line represents a task.
A task can have child tasks, which appear above the parent task and indented.
The top line is always the thing I’m currently working on.

At first, I thought Impulse was just a to-do list flipped upside down. But now I think it’s more than that.

Making a to-do list involves writing down all the things you need to do, and committing to do all of them. There are many who find this comforting! The list represents a finite sequence of discrete steps, and once you’ve gone through all the steps, you’re done. You can relax.

For me, it’s quite the opposite. I get paralyzed thinking about all the possible activities I could potentially do that might be valuable. If I let myself, I’ll sit there for an hour just silently panicking about what should be on the list. Should I tidy up my desk today? Should I clean the bathroom? Should I put my DuoLingo on here? Should I add a task to reply to that email from my Dad? Should I add breaks? Now the list is way too long to get done before lunch. Should I cut some things? Which things are most important? Which things are most urgent? Oh shoot, I also need to get groceries today. Which means I don’t have time to… and so on. It’s exhausting and it doesn’t get me anywhere.

With Impulse, the focus is always on the top line. That’s always the thing I’m currently doing, no matter what. I don’t have to worry so much about whether everything important is on the list, or whether it’s in the right order. I can just bang away at the thing on top, abiding in faith that if I simply spend time doing things, things will get done.

Here’s another way to look at it: with Impulse, the process of choosing what to do is decoupled from the process of doing it.

This makes work much less overwhelming. When I’m working, I never need to worry about how my current task fits into the big picture, or whether I’ve skipped a step, or whether there’s something more valuable I could be doing instead. There is only one thing to do: the line at the top of the stack.

I’ve been using Impulse for a whole bunch of purposes. As a to-do list when I’m puttering around the house:

dishes
fold laundry
throw out coffee cup
fold baby laundry
clean roomba, put back
outline followup blog post on impulse

To break down a task into pieces and make it more manageable and help keep track of where I am:

        wire clipper
        new strings
        something to put under guitar neck
        tuner
    get equipment together
        loosen all strings
        cut all strings
        throw old strings away
    take off old strings
    ...
restring guitar

To keep track of things I want to follow up on later:

write widget function
    reply to RFC comments
    tidy up desk
    order thai food
review at end of day

And I use it in many other ways that are less well defined but no less intuitive.

Current implementation

Right now I’m just using Vim and Git. The stack is a text file in a Git repository, and I also maintain some buckets as auxiliary text files. Here’s a snapshot of the buckets I’m currently using:

pink: (called “pink” for historical reasons) Tasks that are ready to start, which don’t demand sustained focus, and which can probably be done in under 15 minutes. Examples: check whether there's a better time for that weekly meeting, fix dead link on website, read that Stephen Malkmus interview I saw
blue: (called “blue” for historical reasons) Tasks that are ready to start, which do require sustained focus, and which will probably take longer than 30 minutes. Examples: read RFC that Tom sent, connect anti-tip kit to bookshelf, watch latest Philosophytube video
ongoing: BIGGER projects that are currently in flight. I try to keep this limited to 2, and I’ll pull tasks from ongoing into the stack when I have time. I use ongoing to think through the next few steps of a project, and those steps are organized in the same way as the stack. Examples: write impulse followup blog post, document disaster recovery testing procedure, prepare slide show for shitposting Zoom
project: Projects that are not in flight. I pull these into ongoing as it empties out.

In addition to the files listed above, I have a few templates, which I can pull into the stack to represent tasks that I need to do repeatedly. Some of these templates are:

matins: A sequence of activities I do every morning when I sit down at my desk: personal email, work email, work slack, and planning out how I’m going to spend my day.
vespers: A sequence of (much less structured) activities I do at the end of work.
restring_guitar: The process for restringing a guitar, organized into an Impulse task. It’s a thing I do so infrequently that I always forget how to do it. So Impulse is a nice way both to save that information, and to learn the process more thoroughly.

This Vim/Git approach works… okay. There’s definitely some friction. Sometimes parent tasks get separated from their children because I’ve made a mistake moving things around. Syncing is a pain, because I have to remember to pull and commit and push. But despite these and other difficulties, I still find it super helpful to work from a stack.

The software angle

As soon as I started using Impulse consistently, I ran into the age-old problem of consensus. I have both a work laptop and a personal laptop, and I use Impulse on both. It immediately became clear that the whole thing falls apart as soon as there’s more than one stack.

So the biggest challenge I can foresee in building a software implementation of Impulse is distributed consensus. I have some ideas about how to handle it, which may one day come to take the form of an eventually consistent object store built on top of Git. But I think I need to ignore the consensus problem for now.

Instead, I’ll try to hone a super streamlined ncurses-based UI for a single, in-memory Impulse instance:

--- Moving the Cursor

j ↓     move cursor down
k ↑     move cursor up
h ←     move cursor to parent
l →     move cursor to child
t       move cursor to top

--- Moving tasks

J ⇧↓    move task down (among its siblings)
K ⇧↑    move task up (among its siblings)
H ⇧←    move task left (make it a child of the task that's currently its grandparent)
L ⇧→    move task right (make it a child of the sibling directly above it)

--- Changing tasks

c       add child task(s)
s       add sibling task(s)
d       delete task
Enter   edit task name

--- Etc.

?       help (this message)

This should keep me busy for a while. Then I’ll see where I’m at.

I have ADHD and anxiety. They interact, and it’s impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.

I can focus on a task, but if I get distracted, it’s often very hard to bring myself back to whatever I was doing. The cost of “context switching” – rebuilding the mental edifice of what I was doing and why and what I was going to do next – is exceptionally high for me. Sometimes the context switching is so cumbersome that I get distracted again before it’s done. Depending on the degree of anxiety bouncing around in my brain, this cycle may just repeat until I run out of day.

So there’s that, and then there’s also this: I’m mostly in technical leadership roles these days. I spend a lot of time in meetings and Slack threads and emails, which means I don’t get much heads-down time in a given week. And what heads-down time I do get is often split up into hours here and half hours there. Plus I have a kid now, which, while wonderful and great, is another way that my calendar gets all chopped up.

In a given week, then, if I want to accomplish any significant effort that requires focus (usually writing, research, or coding), I need to minimize the cost of context switching. To this end I’ve lately been using a system inspired by the call stack. (Note: I say “inspired” because it is not a direct analog of the call stack; please don’t expect it to be.)

Suppose I’m coding. I open my text editor to write code, but I also open another text editor to an empty file, visible on the same monitor. I call this empty document the stack. Whatever the thing is that I need to do, I write it in the stack:

implement widget feature

Implementing the widget feature is a multi-step process, though, so I need to create a few children of the implement widget feature task:

	write definition and doc string for widget function
	write widget test
	implement widget function such that it passes tests
implement widget feature

Children of a task appear above the task and indented. The three lines above implement widget feature are its children.

When working with this stack system, the top item on the stack is always the thing I’m currently doing. So, in the example at hand, I’m currently working on the task write definition and doc string for widget function.

But maybe, when I get to work writing the doc string for the widget function, I remember that I saw a good blog post about how to design functions like this. Maybe I want to reread that blog post before I commit to an interface. That’s fine! I can push (add at the top) a line for that:

		reread that blog post i saw
	write definition and doc string for widget function
	write widget test
	implement widget function such that it passes tests
implement widget feature

Now the top item in the stack is reread that blog post i saw. So I load up the post and start reading.

Of course, after I’ve read a few paragraphs, I see a Slack notification that I need to attend to: an alert about API latency. Normally, I would go deal with that, and by the time I got back to my terminal I’d have to rebuild all my context. But with this stack system, I can just add an interrupt: a task that temporarily steals the top slot. Like so:

deal with API latency alert
		reread that blog post i saw
	write definition and doc string for widget function
	write widget test
	implement widget function such that it passes tests
implement widget feature

As always, the thing I’m currently doing occupies the top line in the stack. So now I’ll hang out in Slack and Datadog for a while, digging into this alert. That may involve adding children of the deal with API latency alert task, or it may not, depending on how much I need to hold in my head. But let’s say it doesn’t – my teammate says she’s on it, and she doesn’t need help.

So I come back to the stack and pop that task off it. By “pop” I just mean delete the line. Since my current task is always the topmost line in the stack, I always delete (pop) the top line. Now I’m back to the widget work:

		reread that blog post i saw
	write definition and doc string for widget function
	write widget test
	implement widget function such that it passes tests
implement widget feature

I don’t have to worry about remembering what I was in the middle of. The top line is reread that blog post i saw, so I can immediately jump back into that. When I’m done, I pop that task and move on to whatever’s now on top. And so on and so on, popping lines as I finish them, adding lines as I think of followup tasks or feel the need to break down tasks by adding children.

I’ve started a Github project called impulse to elaborate on this idea, but so far the README for impulse is entirely aspirational.

Anyway, that’s my stack system. If you have context switching difficulties like me, try it out! It’s cool.

Dan Slimmon

Month: March 2021

Takeaways: managing attention with stacks

Current implementation

The software angle

Managing attention with stacks