The Curve

Lisa Belkin, columnist for the Times, does a piece every week or so called Life's Work. Her most recent entry, entitled Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent, discusses various theories about how many hours we actually work per day, ranging anywhere from a third of our workdays, to a mere one and a half hours per day. That's good news for any of us who guilt over taking any personal time during to do anything but work, in fact some of you are going to feel somewhat vindicated by those estimates.

One of the problems with any analysis of this kind is actually defining what work is, or what can be counted as work, vs. what might not make the category of operations that lead toward satisfying the objective or task. Sometimes the task itself is so ambiguously defined that almost anything will do.

Sometimes it's not so ambiguous. For instance, I once worked at UPS loading 18 wheelers, for shipments to various ports around the Northeast. If I wasn't physically handling boxes, either stacking them in the trailer or breaking up the jams on the chutes, it would very easily be possible to say I wasn't working. When I did lawn and garden maintenance, there was the same lack of ambiguity, as well as when I was house painting. There were times, however, when I began working as my own employer, that I would stop and look at what had to be done, sometimes for a few minutes, and in a way that was work as well. I was planning, and making decisions about what to do next.

For over twenty-five years I've been working in offices, and depending on what type of job I had, just sitting and doing nothing could very well be counted as being work, because I was thinking, and as long as I was thinking about a problem I had to solve, on the job, I was still serving my employer. But who could tell if for one moment I was thinking about a system design, or politics, or poetry for that matter? It may be true that if I were only thinking about poetry for the majority of the time I sat in the office, that my performance would suffer.

That might be true and it might not. The fact is that when I did my MFA (I was still working full time), I was actually quite productive, for me. One might say that thinking about poetry as much as I was gave me an edge. It helped me see things in ways I ordinarily would not have seen them.

The thing is, the brain learns and solves problems isotropically. What that means is, that the brain might be working on several problems at the same time, some at work, some related to personal or social issues, some related to hobbies, sports activities, etc., and it will often find or form a general pattern to solve all of these issues at once. After all, in formal terms, meaning the way we process information on a cognitive level, our processes may be very similar across contexts. We create blends and blends of blends, and the source material maybe be very different in content than the context of its use. And we reuse patterns across contexts ubiquitously.

From NLP we have what is called a strategy, something I've mentioned in earlier posts. Basically, a strategy is a simplified behavioral pattern identified by a sequencing of sensory links. It is assumed that the brain, actually the entire neuro-linguistic system, utilizes its input and output channels (sensory organs) to process information. In other words, thoughts are made of visual images, sounds (including language), and feelings, either proprioceptive, tactile, or emotional, for instance. An example might be seeing a face in a crowd, comparing that face with images of faces in memory, which associates an array feelings, other memories and a name. Even NLPers admit that diagramming these events in a linear notation is an over-simplification, since there are many ways to process images and sounds, and innumerable feelings we are capable of. So they began to catalog all the various qualities each sense might have, so that one can tune a description of a strategy with more precision than three, or even five, variables allowed.

But even so, what we do with our sensory-motor equipment is difficult to track and often comprises a number of things in parallel; in fact it is rather a field-work of flows. Instead of a term like strategy, I prefer to use curve. That is because an object moving through space will travel in a single direction unless acted on by a force, either externally or internally. Something new has to come into the system. You then have a curve, rather than a straight line. Life is made up of very complex curves, or choruses of curves.

The term is actually short for Neuro-subjective/Environmental Co-extensive Confluence Curve, or NECCC.

Most important to our discussion is that a curve is the way we get things done, or resist getting things done, either at work or anywhere.

More about that at a later time.