So to cut a long story short, I made the trip over to Vietnam for a few days to present on lean startup at Agile Tour Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday and then on Monday & Tuesday check out Bas Vodde’s Scrum Master Certification course.
After an entertaining Agile Tour Zichuan Xiong (Thoughtworks), Stanly Lau, Steven Mak ( both www.odd-e.com) & myself headed out into the backpacker district for some beers, it was there that after a few drinks my bag containing my laptop was stolen while I answered a call of nature. I was careless, so really I have no one to blame but myself.
The guys tried to cheer my up, but obviously I was pretty bummed about the loss and was of course turning over in my head the ramifications of the theft by trying to think if it contained any data like passwords that could cause further damage. Luckily we now live in a world of cloud computing so loosing a computer isn’t the disaster it once was, all of my files are in Dropbox, all of my work in version control. So fingers crossed, I change a few passwords and this is nothing more than a physical loss.
The next thing to enter my mind was what to replace it with, we’re not even halfway through the next beer and Zichuan is trying unsuccessfully to convince me to ditch Thinkpad+Ubuntu and get a Mac. I go to bed that evening with my thoughts split between cursing myself for being so careless and thinking about whether to go for another Thinkpad T520 or go for the smaller T420 and the merits of solid state drives.
The next morning I awoke in the hotel with a slight hangover and the realisation that I’m completely disconnected, my phone battery is dead, the charger was in the bag and obviously I don’t have my laptop. I can’t even send off a tweet to inform the world of my loss. Feeling down and somehow naked without internet access, I decide to hop on the next bus back to Phnom Penh.
Despite the negative events of the evening before, the bus trip was great. Without internet, ebooks, music or a phone I spend most of the time just staring out of the window looking at Vietnamese & Cambodian countryside which is so green, wet and stunningly beautiful this time of year. At the rest stops instead of having my head buried in my Nexus S checking my Twitter time-line I struck up conversations with other passengers on the bus and got to hear about their travels, these conversations took me back to the days when I was backpacking around this region and the freedom I felt during that period of my life. The six hour journey which I usually loath turned out to be quite pleasant and at the end of it I felt refreshed and positive.
Upon arrival at my house, after saying hello to everyone and giving them the story, my next port of call was my desktop. Almost as soon as I turned it on and looked at my near bursting inbox there was a power cut, it was if the gods were trying to tell me something. With the power out, I spent the next hour with my two year old daughter watching her unsuccessfully trying to teach the cat the same tricks the dog knows.
A disconnected day that occurred under the worst circumstances has now got me questioning the value of being over-connected. I can’t remember where I read it, but I recently heard the argument being made that knowledge acquisition in the information age is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Information is the modern day calorie, we’ve gone from a deficit to an unprecedented surplice and without self-control we risk turning this positive development into the mental equivalent of the obesity epidemic.
Laptop computers and smartphones are the facilitators; how many of us sit on the bed in the evening tapping away at a laptop instead of talking with out other halves about the days events? How many of us during family dinners have our smart-phone out under the table making sure we’re up to date with events on the other side of the globe that have no impact on our lives what so ever whilst pretending to listen to what the kids are saying about school that day? I’ve done both on more occasions than I care to admit.
So now I’m going to look at the theft of my laptop as a positive. I’m not going to replace it, I’m going to use a desktop at work and I’m going to use a desktop at home. I’m going to turn off the 3G on my phone and if I can’t find the discipline to do that I’m going to get rid of it and buy one of these Nokia bad boys for $18 (http://www.iknow.com.kh/phone/product_sale.php?productid=2222&status=New).
We’re all agile here, we all know multi-tasking when working is bad. If I understand this why do I think that it’s okay to try and multi-task between human interactions in the physical world and human interactions in the digital world? From now on I’m going to try my hardest to exercise self-control when it comes to my connectivity and consumption of information.
Sorry to hear about the laptop – I would have been furious, probably at myself more than the thieves but then that’s SE Asia for you. So easy to forget where you are.
I like the idea of disconnecting but in reality one needs so much discipline and self will to pull this off.
I’ll be interested to hear how you get on with your new Nokia!
I’ve tried information diets before and always slowly got back into bad habits. I’m hoping that removing the laptop and phone will be the equivalent of making sure there’s no bad food in cupboard when on a diet.
Chris, so sorry that this happened. Vietnam has way too many thieves and they do prey on tourists. I’ve left my bag lying around in public often and luckily haven’t had anything stolen yet, but it’s a false sense of security. I’m not sure I would react the same way (celebrating!) if it does happen — I get upset already when I lose Chrome tabs to a crash.
Sorry that we didn’t talk more than 5 minutes while you were here as I would have loved to catch up. Keep us updated on how going mobile-less works out.
Im the guy who has been robbed on his very 1st visit to Cambodia. Lost my ASUS 1000HE, my Sony K700i and some money, but the local maffia was pretty kind actually and very humane, because gave me back my credit cards and passport. Luckily I had a backup iBook, so I still could work and enjoy the *wonderful* Phnom Penh Barcamp. I wasn’t sad long either and I got to learn that my wife really cares about me, because the 1st thing she said after reading my story in SMS, was she is happy I wasn’t hurt.
The bottom line is, Cambodia is such a sweet place, where even the maffia is very kind, happy and funny. Definitely a great place to visit, just play by the rules and help them to get out of this state where they are kinda forced to steal. They are great people!
Regarding info overload, I love the mental obesity analogy; I haven’t thought of it like that before.
However, just as with body overweight, there are 2 components which contribute to weight. Fat and muscle mass. Reading short messages, like twitter and facebook is more like fat, because I have the impression, that their info-value per consumption-time ratio is significantly lower, than articles’ and books’.
But what if you can grow your “mental weight”, by growing your muscles instead of your fat pillows?
The same way there are a multitude of different exercises for growing your muscles, there are tons of techniques for the brain too.
We all know how important focus is, but it’s hard to put the various techniques into practice, since you might just not like them. For example since I couldn’t easily play squash in Singapore, I gave up on having exercise, not counting a little cycling, because I hate swimming, although that would have been easy to do.
So what can you do to improve your focus?
One thing is the pomodoro technique, just don’t apply it too rigidly; adjust the pomos to your capabilities.
Lock out possible distractions.
#1 was Skype for me. But I was receiving really important messages thru it all the time, since I used it for work too… So I created another Skype account for work only. But you still want your private account receive messages, which u read later, but dont want to be notified about them right?
Well, create another local user on your computer too and login to your work Skype account from there.
Do the same with your email accounts.
#2 distraction was the curiosity of my own fucking mind, which has derailed my thoughts aaaaall the time.
So I learnt about ADD (or officially ADHD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder ). It’s labeled as bullshit by many, based on past bad events, but the hard fact is, since Im taking Concerta against it, Im like a fucking Superman compared to my former self. It helps me to stay super focused, which I could only do at nights before, when I was in complete deprivation from The Real World.
Since Concerta (aka Ritalin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylphenidate ) has tamed my thoughts, I get lost less amongst options, I can make decisions easier and faster, I get more things DONE during the day aaaaand !!!! as a result I feel no guilt at nite, thinking “I havent done enough today yet, so I should stay awake and work a little bit more”.
This approach is bullshit. The consequence of less sleep is causing ADHD symptoms even in ppl who doesn’t have this trait, so practically not sleeping enough just sucks ADHD ppl into an evil loop… Meds helped me to break out of it in no time.
#3 distraction is the constant pressure of undone chores. payments, money transfers, fixing bicycle, finishing reading books, etc etc.
The remedy to this an *extremely simple* “todo list”, not like GTD “bullshit”, which need “a lot of” upfront thinking and organization steps.
This todo list is fine tuned to get around humans’ psychological barriers. It’s developed AND thoroughly tested in the past 3-4yrs only. Instructions for an earlier version is here http://www.markforster.net/blog/2009/9/5/preliminary-instructions-for-autofocus-v-4.html
But sign up to the guy’s forum, so you can receive the instructions of his so called “Final Version” of this system with examples.
It works extremely great!
Thanks for the feedback Tomas, welcome to the blog.
I still haven’t gotten around to trying Rebol!