I was talking about "frame of mind" over on Coffee Shops Network (CSN), suggesting "detective mindset" as a good one, not too judgemental or prejudicial, open to findings. Omnitriangulating.
Somewhat continuing, in the vein of "disciplines", I've been keen to marry personal scheduling and prioritizing, with insights into the generic importance of scheduling more generally, an excuse to foray into operations research, which, through computer science, has become systems science or something like that (design science in some cliques).
Here's an exercise: roam through your current habitat noticing tasks you might realistically undertake, tasks you're even tempted to do right now (while you're thinking about them), but the point here is to enqueue.
Make a list and report back. No side tracking. Let the candidate tasks pile up as you take inventory of your domicile or PWS (personal workspace, GST jargon (general systems theory)) but don't engage in doing any of them during this exercise.
An advantage of the above exercise is you may engage in it as a meta exercise i.e. instead of physically roaming through your home, you imagine doing so, and even so, come up with some thoughts about tasks, such as doing dishes, vacuuming, baking a cake, walking the dog... (fade into a cloud of memes colored by some ethnicity fusion). It's that much easier not to engage in imagined housework, when you're kicked back on a jet plane to Hawaii or somewhere.
A payoff is not to get you slaving away on a bunch of tasks (although you might be in the mood to tackle a few, or you had them enqueued anyway, with or without some stupid exercise), but rather to engage the conceptual machinery, the contextualizing grammar, around data structures, such as bag, queue, stack, tree, network.
Bag: just throw the things into it, with unique handles or addresses (hash table)
Queue: line up, first come first serve, FIFO
Stack: stack up, last in first out (LIFO)
Tree: store in cul de sacs addressed by forks in the road (binary or more)
Network: a directed graph, polyvertex ball, wireframe, may contain cycles
We don't need all the details or implementations right at this juncture (e.g. a bag may be implemented as a tree), but rather an appreciation of context: that of simultaneously developing computer and logistical literacy, in association with mundane thoughts about cleaning house or whatever.
Connect the day dreamy world of up close logistics with some abstract topic you might encounter in some cryptic notation, in this case parallel programming, multi-tasking. But then we're just talking about taking out the garbage.
