In-Between Moments

            In this thing we call life, we’ve come to have an expectation of ourselves that we must use our time as efficiently as possible. The motivation for this varies from person to person – some feel they don’t have enough time to do everything they want or need to do, others don’t want to risk being bored – but regardless of their reasons, society backs up this idea that we should always be doing something. So we keep ourselves constantly in “go” mode, forgetting that some of the best or most productive moments are the in-between ones.

            This idea that we have to constantly be accomplishing something is drilled into us from the moment we’re introduced into the school system. Throughout the years of training, our time for ourselves gradually gets shorter, while the work hours get longer – not to mention an increased workload of homework. It’s all about productivity and efficiency. Then we hit the workforce, and it’s the same thing – productivity, efficiency, and hardly a moment for ourselves.

            Yet, looking back, aren’t the most memorable moments the ones that happened in between classes or work tasks?

            This hyper-efficiency has overflowed into our entertainment world as well. There are formulas for every form of entertainment designed to give the consumer the most enthralling experience – to the point where even our enjoyable activities have become exhausting. And in that entertainment, what parts do we enjoy the most? It isn’t the plot twist we knew was in there, revealed at the most dramatic moment – if it was, we’d have long since become bored of the same stories being told over and over. It’s the in-between bits; the interactions between the characters; the parts that make this story unique.

            I think our society has gotten hold of an idea that people who aren’t fully occupied will cause trouble – an old idea that has some truth to it, if only because people who are bored are looking for something – anything – to do. Yet, at the same time, at least an equal number of people cause trouble because they feel trapped in their own lives and are trying to break free, making the solution of keeping people occupied very flawed. Instead of keeping people out of trouble, we’ve developed a system that people to the limits of their endurance. And since not all people are the same, some are able to rise above the system and laude it, while others are broken by it.

            As if that system wasn’t enough, we’ve taken each of those pieces of our lives and made them as efficient as possible – at work, because time is money, and at home, because we have so little time left over for ourselves. We’ve gotten really good at being efficient, to the point where those gaps in the middle get smaller and smaller... Those gaps where we used to have little quality moments with friends or family. Or, perhaps, when we could catch up on something we’d fallen behind on – now, if we fall behind, we often have to stay behind.

            The worst part is that by becoming so efficient, by shutting out those in-between moments, we’re actually losing productivity. For people working intellectual projects, they’re losing the ability to let their minds work on problems in the background. How often have you figured something out only after you stopped working on it? Again, I can only speak for myself, but I find that happens several times a week. As for people with more physical jobs, being exhausted all the time makes them work slower and more prone to mistakes.

            We try to blame these problems on sleep and to fix them with caffeine, but it never seems to work – because, what we really need is to allow ourselves more time to ourselves where we aren’t constantly pushing to get things done. We need to allow ourselves those moments where our bodies and minds can regroup between tasks.

            Those little in-between moments aren’t just enjoyable; they’re healthy and, contrary to common beliefs, they increase productivity and efficiency by making us more capable. They’re what make the difference between a perpetual cycle for working so that we can work some more, and working to fund a life worth living.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Balanced Learning

            As I’ve been progressing through learning to code, I’ve been working my way through a lot of tutorials. The trouble with tutorials is that, while they’re great for showing you how to do certain things, a lot of your time is spent following along and just copying the work you’re already being shown. Yes, you’re usually being told why you’re doing each of the steps, but when your goal is learning, how do you know if you’re actually retaining that information?

            It’s a challenging prospect, especially if you pick things up fairly quickly, to figure out if you’re actually learning. Being self-taught, there (usually) aren’t any tests to take, so I have to find a way to measure my own success. So, the first method I came up with for proving to myself I was actually learning was to skip ahead of the tutorial. I’d pause in the middle of an instruction to finish writing the code the way I though it should be – it was very rewarding when I got it right, and when it was wrong I felt I’d learned more – because I now had a comparison of two different ways of approaching a problem, and that gave me more information than simply being told how to do it right.

            More recently, I moved on to playing with designing some of my own projects. This is very challenging because, unlike tutorials, there’s nothing there to teach the right way to do things, and unlike with proper tests, there’s no way of knowing if you even have the skills to accomplish what you want. I knew this going in, but I found one additional unexpected challenge – my own desire to learn.

            The important thing to know about programming is that there is a lot of code that has already been written – either built into the language, or that other people have written for their own projects. Just about anything you want to do, someone has either done, or has done something similar enough that you can make minor changes to their code to make it work.

            But, I want to learn and prove to myself that I can figure out how to solve the problems on my own. Yet, there’s no reason I should re-invent the wheel, especially when it’s already built into the language, just so I can say I did it. On the other hand, it’s an excellent exercise for testing my capabilities.

            In the end, it comes down to finding a balance between using what’s available and writing my own functionalities. The important part, after all, is getting the code effectively and efficiently written – and it’s just as important to learn how to look up code for things I don’t know how to do as it is to learn how to do it myself.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.