Fri Jul 10 22:39:04 BST 2009
I wonder why some ideas stick in the mind and others don't. Certain concepts seem immediately useful and yet in a year or so they're gone. Others seem insubstantial, and yet they resurface time and again, smoothed to a nub of pithy value. I would like to imagine that the ideas that stick are the ones that are the more profound; they have some cognitive resonance that causes the subconscious to grab a hold of them. Possibly they're the ideas that reinforce ones own preconceptions about the world.
In any case, it's always pleasurable to see an old favourite swimming back into the centre of ones mind; rather like the return of an absent friend it seems a cause for celebration. I felt that pleasure today when my old faithful the gumption trap hove into view. For those too lazy to visit the link, but yet motivated enough to read on (a niche audience, I imagine), the concept of the gumption trap comes from Robert Pirsig's novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and broadly speaking it treats "gumption" as a certain enthusiasm for an enterprise (stemming from a true perception of Quality, but you should go read the book for more on that) which spurs one on to overcome difficulty and shrug off setbacks. A gumption trap, therefore, is anything which can rob one of that enthusiasm. The canonical example Pirsig uses in Zen is the out-of-sequence-reassembly of part of a motorcycle -- the horrible realisation that you're going to have to take it all back to bits again is enough to stop you in your tracks and puts the whole project on hold until you've got your head round the idea of the thing.
I had a relatively gentle reminder of the gumption trap last weekend. I had been over to Ikea to buy an "office safe" chair for my home office now that I'm working from home a bit. As is usual in Ikea, a relatively well-defined shopping task had taken an unfeasible quantity of time. I'd spent quite some time actually locating the chair in the labyrinthine interior of Ikea Leeds, then another epoch trying to track down a member of staff to print out the special form I needed to buy it. Once that was negotiated I needed a coffee and a bun to recuperate, of course, and once that was done... well, suffice to say it took a while, but eventually I'd hauled the chair back home and was assembling it in the living room when I noticed a bit of damage to the mechanism that allows the chair's height to be adjusted. But I didn't really want to see it, given the amount of time I'd invested into getting the chair to my house, so I went right on building it up. Once I'd finished, I tried it out, and of course it was broken, and at that point there was no ignoring the fact that I'd just have to turn right around and go back to Ikea to exchange it. And there was the rest of my day gone.
I'd forgotten the concept of the gumption trap at that exact moment, but that's exactly what it was. So much so that I had to go have an sandwich and a potter in the kitchen whilst I got used to the idea of going back to Ikea. It took a while.
My more vigorous reminder of the gumption trap happened just this morning. One of the things I've been trying to develop at work recently is my accuracy at estimating how long a task will take. I'm generally in the right sort of region, but it varies a good deal, and it's something I'd like to get better at. Today I was working on a task I'd estimated would take around two and a half days, and I was struggling with a problem which I just couldn't get a handle on. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about my schedule. In the front of my mind, I was trying to get an insight into the problem, but nothing was working, and over time I was spending more time trying to persuade myself to keep working on it than I was actually working on it. Finally, I went out for a walk around lunchtime and just cleared my head. When I got back I applied a bit of science, and suddenly found the solution to my problem (for the record, different definitions of off_t in two different scopes, ouch) and my afternoon went as smoothly as a bobsled down a chute.
The irony of this is that by concentrating too hard on my schedule I probably damaged it. What I really needed was to step back and regain some gumption before coming back to the task, but it took me hours to recognise it. To some extent this may be cultural (going for a walk to fix a bug is difficult to explain to management), but it serves to illustrate the utility of the concept of the gumption trap. Lose your gumption and you're stuck -- so to a certain extent the most important thing you can do is to keep your gumption levels healthy. How I'm going to work that into my schedule is quite another matter.