DRMacIver's Notebook
Sources, Sinks, and Flows
Sources, Sinks, and Flows
This is going to be a very computer flavoured self help post.
Here, for you, is a very useful general organising principle, which is that there is stuff, and there are things that operate on stuffThose things, can themselves, be stuff, although usually at any given level of representation it’s not helpful to consider them as part of the stuff being operated on.:
- Sources are where stuff comes from.
- Sinks are where stuff goes to.
- Flows are what guide stuff between sources to sinks.
Often there are different types of stuff. For example, you can view my process for cleaning the kitchen through this lens, and two types of stuff here are clean dishesWhich further subdivide into wet clean dishes and dry clean dishes, but that’s mostly not relevant for the process which stops at the point where they’re left for air drying. and dirty dishes. The sink is, appropriately, a sink for dirty dishes, but it is a source for clean dishes. One flow in this system is the process of washing up by which dirty dishs go into the sink and clean dishes come out.I’m being a bit imprecise about all of this. I recommend not worrying about it.. There are plenty others - e.g. there are sources of dirty dishes on the dining room table, which flow to sinks (not usually the literal sink) in the kitchen, from which they flow through to one of various sinks for dirty dishes (literal sink or dishwasher) until they come out clean, from where they flow to one of various sinks for clean dishes (a place where they can sit to air dry).
Often when systems don’t work it’s due to badly designed flows.
For example: I talked in Necessity creates possibility about my new writing habit of writing down ideas when they occur to me, and then using that to figure out how to write about.That habit has broken down a bit and needs tinkering. I didn’t, it turns out, have a good system for what happens when the list fills up. What was happening there is that I had good sources of ideas to write about (they come to me when e.g. in the shower, on a walk, doing the dishes, talking to someone), but there was no reliable flow directing them to the sink for ideas to write about (the actual process of writing). Introducing a written list creates a reliable flow by means of adding a persistent queue to the process rather than just having them fall into the sink of forgetting.
Sometimes the problem is that there are very good flows, but they direct your sources to sinks you don’t want them to go. e.g. I find drifting often plays out this way. If I block myself from the internet, suddenly all the attention that was flowing into the “idly scrolling” sink stops vanishing down an infinite black hole of distraction and I just start spontaneously doing stuff.
And sometimes the problem is that there aren’t any sinks that you want things to go into, and as a result the source gets stifled.
Part of what I’m pointing at with the “means and ends” thing in Why do you do things? is that sometimes you need to create outlets that don’t exist. A sink that it feels actually worthwhile for your source to flow into. Like… imagine having all of these shower thoughts and conversations and so on and not writing about them? I bet most of you don’t have to imagine very hard.
One easy fix I have access to is creating discord channels. I suddenly got much better at remembering my dreams when we created a #dreams channel to report dreams intoI’ve lost the habit of this. I should get back into it. I’ve created an #anecdotes channel for similar stories about our lives to see if that helps here.NB neither of these channels are publicly accessible to people immediately joining the discord.
In general it seems to me that there’s something unhealthy about getting stuck, and that if you have a regular source of stuff being produced, it needs an outlet to go somewhere. If you don’t find somewhere good for it to go, it will probably go somewhere bad instead, and that seems like a problem worth solving.