My lizard brain flow state

embarrassing but true

Me again!

☠️ “How’s the book going?”

Over the weekend I hit a mini-deadline: finished a rough draft of “part 1” (of maybe.. 3.5 parts?). I wrote 28,000 words, then promptly patted myself on the back. I felt like I got a lot done until I remembered that 80% of those words will be discarded and rewritten, probably several times.

Usually when I’m writing, I’ll write a few sentences, then stop and think, then tweak or rewrite them. Not this time. I had already outlined where I wanted to go, so all that was left was straight-ahead trudging, and I honestly didn’t have time to stop and make the sentences better. Forward momentum was already very tenuous. Any small distraction might have derailed me completely.

I thought a lot about this lemon:

It’s from a video in which, for two minutes, a shy but valiant lemon rolls downhill along a curb. Its path is clear, but progress is fragile. Small piles of leaves almost bump it off course. At the end of the video, the lemon stops rolling. I won’t think about that part too much.

---

Recent highlights from the past two weeks:

• stood too long at standing desk; knees started to ache. sat too long instead of standing; conscience started to ache

• decided to ignore all “how to write” advice about starting at 9am and instead embrace a noon-10pm schedule

Was distracted by:

• reading “how to write” advice blog posts

• finding in my interview notes that someone referenced a scene from the movie Pretty in Pink, then spending 40 minutes trying to see if that scene exists on youtube. conclusion: it doesn’t, but Duckie’s wardrobe has aged well

---

✅ Review it with Huet: an embarrassing productivity app

Since February, I’ve been living with a secret: Centered.

It’s a fancy to-do list app that lives on your desktop. When you click to start a task, a syrupy male voice says, “Let’s flow.” A chime dings. The app starts playing smooth, featureless music.

If you switch over to an app or website that it deems off-task (Twitter, Slack, texts, etc.), the voice reappears. It has a British accent. “I sense a disturbance in the force,” the voice says. If you ignore it, it keeps pestering you. “Are you still on task? We think your focus may have shifted.”* It’s very annoying, so you go back to Google docs. Now the voice is relaxed and cheerful. “Welcome back to flow,” it chirps.

When you mark a task as complete, the music stops and you hear, “Nice work!” And then, the kicker: it plays a short animation of words and a lotus flower icon. Example: “At the chime, let yourself feel gratitude for the work you did.” A pause, then: Ding!

another example. the first half says: “Reward yourself”

I actively dislike so many things about this app. It capitalizes the words “Flow,” “Gratitude” and “Task” as though they are the names of gods. It is selling productivity porn. Within this app, our highest calling is completing Tasks. Every day, I am served a different video with cheesy animations about productivity, set against drone footage of waterfalls and snow-blanketed aspen forests. Listening to its music is like listening to the color beige. I am embarrassed by how much time I have spent with it in my ears.

But the thing I hate most about it is how well it works on me.

The opening bell chimes, and my brain salivates. When I hear the music, I sit up straight. When the app catches me getting distracted, I switch back to work (usually). When I finish a Task and, as instructed, I take a moment to feel Gratitude for the work I did, I …. feel great. I begin my next Task, renewed.

It’s mortifying, honestly. I guess I’m not a complex human but just a calculator in a flesh balloon. Ellen’s brain plus chimes plus bland music equals Completed Tasks. An app has groomed me to feel profound satisfaction at a chime.wav file.

i cringe but my lizard brain goes “yeahhhh”

Fine print: The app is pretty buggy, and it’s not free. It’s also in the process of turning into Centered 2.0, which seems more complicated than 1.0 and less of what I want. So this is really not a recommendation, as the version I like is apparently going away at the end of this year. But if you are curious, you can download the old version here.

* I also tried Caveday for a month and it was pretty ineffective because I signed in to the work sessions and then … didn’t do work because nothing was beeping at or chiding me when I strayed.

---

☎️ Let me know if you

have music you love working to, and tell me why you like it. ideally no words. i will accept incomprehensible-to-me words (e.g., foreign languages, very mumbly singers)

---

🚪 Thanks for reading, and goodbye to you, and also goodbye to tomato season

surprise: a horizontally cut heirloom tomato