Binary Balance

I was recently reading a blog post entitled ‘How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)’ by David Tate.

The post has a lot of good advice and observations in it, relevant to my interests because working from home is something I aspire to be doing more of.

In the section on interruptions, where – referring to adjusting from the more typical office environment to working from home – David writes:

What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything.

I stopped at that sentence for a moment, because whenever I come across someone talking/writing about how they have trouble focussing – and I come across this reasonably often – it makes me wonder why I usually don’t have this problem. Read more...

Sometimes I can’t get to sleep, or perhaps more accurately I can’t get to sleep as quickly as I’d like. I’ll be thinking about some project I’m working on or what I need to do the next day. It doesn’t help that I’m pretty sure I’m more nocturnal by nature. I suspect that if the schedule of the world didn’t impose on me, I’d likely keep the circadian rhythm of a vampire.

I’ve heard of many possible approaches to victory over insomnia: nightcaps, reading, TV, exercise, etc. All of these options have – at different times – had some positive effect for me. Particularly helpful is simply making sure that I’ve consciously relaxed my body from head to toe, I find that I often retain tension in my neck or shoulders without really realising it. But in this post, I want to talk about a more specific technique, perhaps a form of meditation, that’s floated around in my head for a while now. Read more...