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| In the sun I built a shed for my sister. The instructions were to be followed step by step, without omission, according to the reviews. An 80 year old woman reviewer stated that it took her only half an hour to make. I had my end goal in mind. |
What was interesting of this process is that I started off with this mantra stuck in my head of not skipping steps, or keeping to the instructions verbatim.
Where does the urge or need to skip steps come from? Surely the “concept” builders have done this more time than me. There is always a time (perhaps even best at the start with a brief read through) where you must skip pages just to get a sense of what you are doing. I suppose some of it is the urge to complete quickly, and with finite human time.
What I realized was that my insistence of following the steps directly was more difficult than if I expanded my work on building the shed, to understand why I was doing what I was doing. For example, in the instructions for the door there’s precise diagramming and hints for orientation. I was attempting to look at abstract features of the pieces (all with strange abbreviated names like DRH/DBR) to guide me.
What made this easier was thinking my broadly, and saying this is a door, and it will swing open and this segment must connect to this hole by its very nature. I was looking more at the function of the shed, rather than abstract, ordered pieces. You’d think that simple, rote and a bit thoughtless following of the rules as written directly would be enough. Perhaps it is in certain builds, but when I encountered ambiguity or vagueness in my interpretation of the instructions, the solution was to reach out and interrogate the function of the shed feature.
Chairs/Ottomon
I went over again to make a chair and I ended up with this vaguely non-euclidean chair. It looked like a chair that MC Escher would have made, with the top being inverted and the left and right arm swapped and upside down. I had complete difficulty because of the instructions. When I looked at the photograph of what I was building, it took 5 minutes.
In the edit space, I actually created 1.5 to 2 chairs, and ended up with one.
Scanning Text
When encountering a challenging section of text, I’ve noticed that my behavior is often to begin to skim. I’ll glaze over a sentence. Even as an avid reader, I’ll find a paragraph that I’ve read completely impenetrable after “reading” it (there are environmental factors here too.)
This seems a counter-intuitive action, because you would think that to really absorb you’d have to pore over every single word. I don’t think I have an optimized form of thought or reading, but if I had to understand what I’m naturally doing here it might be that my process is
- encounter challenge
- do a rough, exploratory skim to see if a non-linear parse further elucidates.
- attempt to return to the start with context.
- attempt slower, more precise read of original text.