2024-06-17: Sleep, Walking, Wrong
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
Not Sleep-Working
When doing a lot of Europe-facing work in the 2010s, I developed an ability to wake up to an alarm at 3AM, participate fully and vocally in a 15 person voice call for 3 hours, agree to do a bunch of action items, and then go back to sleep — only to wake up later with no memory at all of anything I had said or agreed to do. Liz saw me do this a couple of times, and said it was a little eery, like someone sleep-workng.
Anyway, I led a strategy meeting with the Social Impact team at 9AM today after a rough night, and was gripped beforehand with a fear that I would do exactly this. It was like Dr Jekyll sitting waiting for Mr Hyde to take over. But as it turned out, the fear itself kept me awake and alert, I think it was useful, and thank god I remember it all.
One thing that came out of it was Kaitlin Donovan 🄽 ‘s idea that we should categorise our partners as cohorts, rather than in domains (ie not in Human RIghts, Education, etc camps, but orgs that work well together or compliment each other). This kind of blew my mind, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. I do struggle to keep all our partners in my head at one time, even when awake. I always feel like I need to visualise them in some way, and I am cruelly aware that they never seem to stay in the categories we’ve given them when I picture them. Would this make more sense? I should sleep on it.
Fifteen Parallel Conversations
I’ve mentioned this before, but there are some days where I feel like I have some overall zeitgeisty, gestalty, omniscient sense of the ecosystem, which is probably entirely artificial and wrong, but comes from a rhythm of jumping between multiple disparate threads on Slack, Signal, etc, that — as opposed to all other days, when it just becomes a multi-tasking avoidant mess. It means that I am getting multiple viewpoints, often about recurring topics things. Hilariously today about three of those conversations were with the same person (hi @Peter Rabbitson!), but that was ok, we were talking about different things, to which he was being quite consistent. So maybe I am now developing a three-dimensional model of Peter.
Thinking about:
Walking
I had a bit of health scare this weekend — I was diagnosed pre-diabetic a while back, I spontaneously bought a glucose testing kit in the Castro Walgreens this weekend, and then realised ohhh damn my blood sugar should not be this high, and then was like ohhh maybe that’s what all fatigue, and strange aches, and brainfog have been recently, and ohhh no, I guess I haven’t been keeping on top of this as much as I should. Anyway, doctor’s visit in my future, don’t worry, I’m telling everyone, why am I telling you this, Filecoin fan? Am I violating my own HIPAA here? Whatever: my confused point here is that I threw myself back into long walks, and I gotta say, future me, walking is great. I listened to Christine Lemmer-Webber 🄽 and Dan Finlay 🄽 ‘s recent youtube talk, and felt smart and awake and healthy. Now I just have to keep it up!
Link du jour:
- Cunningham’s Law - "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.”