It's 2am in the morning. You haven't done much the entire day because you couldn't focus. You need sleep. You /know/ you need sleep. Instead of calling it a night, however, you decide to click on "just one more" youtube link to see if it's interesting. Another 2 hours pass before you finally drop dead on your bed. Sounds familiar?
It's been a hectic week in the office. Nobody on the team has left work before 8pm. More than once today, you have inadvertently dozed off in front of your computer monitor. Your body urges you to go home as soon as you can to get some rest. At the end of the night, however, you end up chugging beer at the bar with a few friends. Sounds familiar?
It's a strange phenomenon: our brain can convince us to doze off and it can convince us that we're tired, but it can't convince us to take the rest we need. Instead, short term rewards (i.e a funny youtube video or a night out) lure us away, as if the short term rewards are the only way to justify the painful day.
For some of us, the results are minor: we have one or two of these "bad days" once in a while, but we take the necessary breaks over the weekend and recover to full strength. For others, results are detrimental: a lack of sleep leads to an unproductive day, an unproductive day leads to a longer day in office, a longer day in office leads to a lack of sleep, and a death spiral conspires.
There's an euphemism for this ongoing death spiral: "Work hard; play hard." The term is predominant at certain academic institutions, long-hour industries, and work-intensive cultures (e.g Hong Kong, Tokyo). The connotation of the term is excellent: accomplish a lot, play a lot, and neglect the boring stuff (i.e sleep).
But what exactly does such a life style accomplish?
On the surface, "work hard, play hard" points to a productive life. Yet, from personal experience, I've never met too many accomplished people who literally works hard and plays hard. One doesn't hear Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs partying away every weekend. The people who uses the attractive phrase are often university representatives or HR recruiters. Yet I've never once hear an accomplished student or office worker boasting the "work hard, play hard" culture at their school or company.
Looking through the surface, one realizes that the lifestyle is not so intuitive. A person only has so much energy. Work requires energy, play requires energy, and sleep replenishes energy. Where does one find the energy to be productive (i.e work) if one neglects replenishing energy in the first place? In another words, how does one work effectively the day after getting hammered?
So maybe the point of "work hard, play hard" isn't to optimize for productivity. Perhaps it optimizes for "a good time." Our brains, after all, don't seek productivity as much as contentment or "happiness." Yet this doesn't seem to make sense either. Ask a person during a party how they feel and they'll probably say "GOOOooooood~", but ask them anywhere else - at home hung over or at work sleep deprived - and they most definitely would not say they're happy. Neither Japan nor Hong Kong ranks high on the Life Satisfaction Index.
Hence my question: why don't our brains prompt us to rest more assertively? Is this just a case of short term rewards outweighing long term rewards? Surely though, sleep is more immediately gratifying than "potential fun?"
Speaking of sleep - I should really head to sleep myself... just let me close off these IM convos...
It's been well over a month since I've written. I doubt anyone actually missed my writing; still, I want to keep writing for the sake of improving my writing.
It has also been two weeks since 7 Cubed Project ended. Various people have asked me about it, but I have been quite brief with my responses. Describing a week long experience is difficult. Where should I begin? Where should I end? Would the questioner even understand?
Nevertheless, I wish to put my thoughts down on paper - even if the thoughts are incoherent and disorganized. This post is dedicated to that crazy week.
Why? Why would you do such a thing?
7 Cubed Project was a completely voluntary project. Nobody coerced us; nobody invited us. Ross Robinson and Gareth Macleod came up to me after class one day and we engaged in the following conversation:
Gareth: We want a Hackathon. Me: Cool. G: It'd span 7 days. M: Cool. How do you want to get the people? Just UWaterloo? UofT? G: ...no, we just need a few people... ideally 7. M: I don't understand. G: 7 people, 7 hacks, 7 days M: That's crazy. G: That's the point. M: ...you're right.
Why anyone would lock themselves in a room with 6 other nerds for 7 days is a fair question to ask. I think Mark Zuckerberg puts it best:
We're hackers; we like building things. We're entrepreneurs; we like building the whims of our minds. We're talented people (save me, I guess); we enjoy working with other talented people.
Sense of Purpose
In a way, the week was quite repetitive: I woke up at 7:30am every morning, bused down to Kitchener, and hacked away in an office space until 10:00pm. Was it exhausting? Of course! Was it hard to get up? Yes! Was it difficult to get the day going? Not at all! Once I got past the "I don't want to wake up." phrase, the day was all drive and adrenaline I enjoy having a sense of purpose; I think most people enjoy the same. However, not everyone is lucky enough to know what drives them; I'm glad I've affirmed my interests and I hope I can continue pursuing them.
Brainstorming
The first half-hour of each day was spent in postmortems. To me, Nothing was more important: it's okay to fail... it's not okay to not know why we failed.
The next hour and more was allocated for brainstorming. Everyone pitched an idea they had and everyone voted based on feasibility, "fun-ness", and impact. Looking back, I wish we had more time in brainstorming to allow for idea development. We had plenty of ideas, but never the time and energy to improve them.
This process worked fine at the beginning of the week. By the end of each session, we always came up with an idea that excited everyone. As the days passed, however, the better ideas were exhausted and we were left with ones that only excited us individually. This is why we split up to mini-projects in the last day.
While we're on the topic of brainstorming, let me establish the following: brainstorming is tough. The naive approach is to walk into a room and expect ideas to have sex. This approach is similar to me walking into a bar expecting someone to have sex with me.
In my opinion, brainstorming comes down to two things:
let all hell break lose...
...while maintaing focus on the problem
Everyone knows how to say "think outside of the box" but nobody actually does it. Thinking outside of the box requires getting outside of the box, and that means getting oneself and others uncomfortable. It means throwing ideas out there are absolutely ridiculous and farfetched. From personal experience, the best ideas come after something suggests a farce like, "Hah, maybe we can like... get Justin Bieber to sing 'Baby' at our product promotion event, hah!" If people are laughing rather than ridiculing in a brainstorming session, then we have a decent atmosphere. After all, humour is nothing but strange ideas clashing against mundane ones and that is what we want.
The best brainstorming comes from a relaxed environment where the even the dumbest ideas have a shot at getting laid. This is not easy! It takes a significant amount of self-constraint to keep a destructive mouth from opening when listening to silly, imperfect ideas; the more perfectionist and critical one is, the more likely one is going to scream, "BUT...!" Once a "but" comes out, the speaker is under attacked; all chances of sex goes to zero. More importantly, participants now feel they must have a perfect idea before presenting one; this defeats the purpose of brainstorming! The point is to create a cute little baby together - not deliver a perfect baby on one's own.
This is why people are encouraged to separate "brainstorming" from "idea evaluation." - just one of many suggestions that have been preached for years but never done in practice.
Let all hell break lose, but don't get side tracked. A trick I learned this term from my HCI course is to say the word "rathole" every time a discussion goes awry. Someone needs to be a buzz-kill; I didn't mind being the one.
Coordination
We had seven people splitting up projects that weren't meant for seven people.
We knew that entering the week, so we came up with ideas of tackling the problem before hand. One idea was to split into pairs, pair program initially, and split up the work into finer grains when appropriate. For part of the week, this worked brilliantly. For other parts of the week, we were plagued with communication and task granularity problems.
I used to be a big fan of Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, and all those other "exciting" programming techniques. As I have matured as a developer, however, I've come to believe that none of the techniques are one-size-fit-all caps. Simply put, if the engineer at hand knows exactly what he is doing, draconian policies to pair him with another engineer or rules to mandate "tests first and code later" will only waste time and effort.
Are there times when PP and TDD are useful? Yes - if the task is ambiguous, difficult, or prone to errors. Under these circumstances, pairing is probably a good option. Otherwise, it's time to lose the training wheels.
Egos Clashing
Someone suggested that we would get extremely sick of each other after a week. No one wanted to see glasses broken or monitors smashed, but everyone enjoyed imagining the possibilities that seven nerds would break into a fight.
Fortunately, we didn't come close to anything like that.
At worst, some of us were annoyed at a lack of progress or a series of communication breakdowns. Were egos damaged? Possibly. Did anyone cry? Doubtful. (actually, Gareth might have wept in he hallways after a certain Android 3rd party plugin wouldn't work the way it should...)
Perhaps we just weren't the types of people that blow off steam by lambasting each other. Perhaps the short project maintained our focus and kept us from blaming each other.
Most failing projects have a period when the ship is sinking and people resort to pointing fingers. Our projects failed, too, but they usually sank in no more than two hours. The seven of us had enough self-composure to eat, pack, sleep, and come back the next day anew.
Internet
The internet is a strange beast. On one hand, there were people who encouraged and supported us ardently. On the other hand, a bunch of people spent the week trashing our projects and ideas - trolls!
I feel sorry for trolls sometimes. It saddens me that there are people on this planet so insecure about their own accomplishments they'd go around the internet anonymously attacking people. It makes me wonder if one of our projects should've been a hotline for trolls: "dial 1800-TROLLS today to troll whoever is on the other side of the line!"
The best troll we had was an anon who entered our Justin.TV chat room to question "the point of it all." It began with benign statements like, "I understand what they're doing... I just don't understand WHY they're doing it..."
Later, a friend of ours engaged in a conversation with him (bad idea!) and the chat quickly degenerated to:
"They [the 7 of us] are ruining society by not attending lectures!"
The internet is not evil by any means, but the personalities that shine through the crowd are too extreme. It'd be nice if there was a way to more accurately deduce public sentiments. I know more than one company attempting to generate marketing data from "voices of the internets" (i.e Twitter, forum comments, etc.), but I wonder if the results will be what one desires. We certainly don't believe the guy down the street shouting "Obama is Muslim!" to be representative of the general public. What is a tweet but a shout from down the street?
Conclusion
I don't have a grand conclusion here. As forewarned, this piece was merely a disorganized thought-dump for a chaotic week. 7 Cubed Project was a blast. I learned a lot.
