Clawing back into the zone

For those of us who seem to work best “in the zone”, I don’t think we place enough emphasis on the effect our lifestyle choices can have on our work ethic.

I quit smoking two weeks ago, and I also stopped drinking caffeine before noon. Ever since, I’ve had trouble getting back into the “zone” where I used to thrive.

My work was starting to suffer.

Finally, late last week, I took a step I was dreading: I just stopped trying to code. It felt like a defeat, like I’d given too much credence to my previous lifestyle choices and allowed them to determine when I could or couldn’t effectively work.

I had to stop trying to find the excitement to work, and let the excitement find me.

The caffeine decision was less about health more about productivity. Turns out that drinking a jolt of caffeine in the morning causes an early afternoon crash … who knew? Now I just drink caffeine in the early afternoon so the crash comes after I’ve stopped working 😜

In some respects, I feel like I just needed to get out of my own head and let go of the “old way” of getting in the zone. I had to stop trying to find the excitement to work, and let the excitement find me.

The good news is that the excitement slowly started to creep back in over the weekend. Following my friend John Blackbourn’s lead, I started an Ideas repo on GitHub.

The concept is simple: document ideas you don’t have time to work on now, but want to write down out in the open so you can maybe work on them later. And if somebody else decides to come along and “take” an idea and run with it, that’s OK too!

Ultimately I wrote a few things down. Ideas for things like I’d like to learn, an old project I’d like to revive, a framework I’d like to explore. There’s only four ideas in there so far, but I feel like that’s a pretty good start.

I even took one of the ideas and pitched it to the Plugin-A-Palooza contest hosted the last few years by WordCamp Orange County. If that gets accepted, that might be just the fire I need to take it somewhere I always wanted to – delivery deadlines have a way of inspiring movement.

So here I am, two weeks out and still finding my way back “into the zone”. I don’t how well this is going to go, but I do feel like I’m on the right track.

It helps that I have a support network in family and friends, as well as in my WordPress family and with my awesome coworkers at Sandhills Development.

I’ll likely need some encouraging and understanding along the way, but I know that these recent choices are directly related to my health and wellness, so it’s worth the initial bumps along the way.

Featured photo by Doug Wilsen, and used with permission under CC.

Gutenberg first impressions … written in Gutenberg

Hmm. A "storytelling" angle. Is all new content written in Gutenberg considered a "story"?

* What about magic formatting, perhaps as a bulleted list?
Nope, apparently not.

It's kind of interesting how every time I hit enter, I effectively create a new block, whereas I guess experience suggests it should just be another paragraph in the same block. Maybe shift+enter will prevent that?

Nope. Hmm, OK.

I do kind of like how backspacing out of a thought effectively deletes the block and moves you back to the previous one. That seems intuitive. Having to double click on icons for previous blocks because they aren't currently the ones with focus isn't.

OK, so I've clicked out of the blocks and now there's a bunch of stuff in the sidebar. I get it, it's very much an indicator of "distraction free writing" but the transition is kind of jarring. Flash on, flash off.

Wonder what the difference is between naturally typing a new "paragraph", thereby getting a new block, and clicking this + symbol does?

Oh, apparently text is the default. Maybe the gear icon for each block that currently does nothing gives options to change the block type? Bug probably.
Oh, so it seems like you actually can hit enter inside a block and remain in there, but it only works sometimes and you can't space the text more than a single break apart without triggering a new block.

Somebody mentioned in another post that the drop cap doesn't seem to work.
I got it to work once (somehow) but now can't. Definitely a little buggy.

Anyhoo, part II will cover non-text blocks and part III sidebar settings that flash on flash off.

OK, actually, I'm just going to inject one quick thing here … if what are effectively post settings only show when you select out of a block, maybe the button that toggles the sidebar (that holds block settings when a block is focused, and post settings the rest of the time) should say Block Settings when a block is focused.