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Vaporlock

··1132 words·6 mins
Thoughts Writing
Author
Moulting Penguin
Table of Contents

Vaporlock – it’s not just for breakfast anymore
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Vaporlock just sounds so. . . cool? Wait, what?

Of course, I use the term to describe something other than what it means (you can click the link to see the Wikipedia entry for it). I hear other terms for it all the time. Like brain freeze, analysis paralysis, option overload . . . I don’t like ’em as much.

Sometimes this occurs when you’re trying to figure out which toothpaste to buy. Sometimes it’s when you’re looking at a menu and there are too many really attractive options. Generally, when presented with options, we get overloaded. But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, though the indecision is the same (more or less).

Sometimes it’s not so much as options as. . . something else. Obligation? Work? Time? I don’t know. Not exactly.

We’ve all heard of Yak Shaving. There’s that excellent clip of Hal fixing a light bulb.

But Yak Shaving isn’t quite right. That’s because it generally ends somewhere.

What I’m thinking of is more like Age-Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Not because there’s anything really age-related about it, but because of what she says at the end.

At work, they often talk about not using how “busy” someone is as a metric of their value, but rather their “impact”. To me that’s just kinda splitting hairs, but their point is that just because you’re busy all day long doesn’t mean you’re busy doing the right thing (by “right” I mean “something that makes a substantive difference”). Consider: You could go outside right now, and dig a hole. Then fill it in. Rinse and repeat. Tada! You’re busy. What have you accomplished? My point is that you want to get shit done, not just keep busy.

A digression
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(I’m king of the digressions. I learned it from Ma. . .)

When “modern” computer OSes (by modern, I mean one that has a virtual memory subsystem, and can “swap” memory to “disk”), run low on memory (physical RAM, I mean) they put a page of memory on disk (be it SSD or spinning rust), free up the page of memory, and move on. If a process comes along and tries to access that page of memory, well, the OS says “hold my beer” and puts the process on hold while it reads the page of memory from disk and puts it back into RAM. What happens if there’s no free RAM to put the page of memory in? It selects a different page in memory to stuff onto disk, and then reads the original page from disk, and puts that in the page in RAM that it just “evicted”.

Works great! Sometimes.

Pretty clearly, if RAM is full, and processes are being paged out1, if the system is busy (not just using too much memory), then processes will compete to use RAM, and each process, when it’s that processes turn to run, will have to wait for their pages of RAM to be restored from disk. Now, when a page needs to be restored from disk, and RAM is full, that means a page has to be written to disk, then another page read from disk. Considering that RAM is orders of magnitude2 faster than disk, this means that 1 glopflick to access will take 1 flicknop instead3. Because of this, the OS will be spending almost all its time reading and writing to the disk. Like, super busy. But just like digging holes, it ain’t accomplishing a hole lot4. We call this state “thrashing”.

What’s thrashing got to do with vaporlock?
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So consider this for a moment: You’re not an idiot. And you start to see a pattern emerge:

  • You start to do something (Task A)
  • You realize you either have to do something else to complete Task A, or you realize Task B needs to be done.
  • You start to do something (Task B)
  • You realize you either have to do something else to complete Task B, or you realize Task C needs to be done.
  • You start to do something (Task C)
  • You start to do something (Task Z)
  • You realize you either have to do something else to complete Task . . . wait, what was doing?

And keep in mind this is simplified. Every day there’s new things to do, and you have competing priorities, and deadlines, and, and, and. There’s always more, more, more.

Of course, if your tasks come in at the rate of X, and you finish them at the rate of Y, and X > Y, that means unless X-Y tasks just evaporate, you’re going to be buried for ever in tasks.

Welcome to Adulting.

Of course, you can’t just not do tasks. But you know you’re not going to finish them all. So you make lists to make sure you don’t forget what you need to do. And then you sort the lists as you try and prioritize the work. And for the more discrete tasks, with definite deadlines5, you maybe focus on them and get them done. But the tasks that are more ambiguous? Maybe don’t have a definite due date? Maybe will just make your life easier? That takes more than an hour or two? You work on the task for some period of time, until it just doesn’t seem to make progress, or something becomes more important, or you just get bored with it. And then it’s on to the next task, except the old task is still there, weighing on you.

Faced with this, guess what you do? If you don’t have something pressing to work on, you either sublimate6, or you just give up for the time being.

And that is vaporlock. You don’t know what to work on, you know whatever you choose to do will likely make no progress, or at least nothing substantial. So what do you do? Well, when you don’t have some sort of thing like writing about how you can’t bring yourself to do anything, you just sit there and stare at the TV.7


  1. “Swapping” is the old-school version of that, but this isn’t a computer history class. ↩︎

  2. How many orders of magnitude depend on SSD/rust and a host of other things I’m not bothering to mention. ↩︎

  3. Where a “flicknop” is orders of magnitude bigger than a “glopflick”. :-) ↩︎

  4. See what I did there? Also, I just like using these footnote things I recently learned how to do in Hugo. ↩︎

  5. I’m avoiding taxes right now by writing this. But I can pretty much guarantee I’ll get them done before April 15. ↩︎

  6. Like I’m doing now. ↩︎

  7. True to form, I wrote this 6 months ago. Nothing has changed, so I figure I should just post it and move on. ↩︎