Didn’t get home last night until 2am and decided in my state of inebriation that it was important to read another 40 pages of Richard Herring’s collection of blog posts, Bye Bye Balham. Had been quite looking forward to a lie in, perhaps being gently kissed into consciousness by my wife with a coffee at around 11am, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, I was awoken at 8am by what sounded to me like an empty can rolling along the ground. I silently cursed the feckless Glaswegians who treat their city with such contempt.
Luckily, I didn’t feel too awful and so rubbed the sleep out my eye, turned the bedside lamp on and read a few more pages from Herring’s book. Despite having read it all the first time around, it was a surprisingly exciting read — especially now that it contains footnotes and introductions that reveal what was going on in the background (even if I was nearly sick when he talks about getting his penis was amputated). It makes me want to write a blog post every day without exception. Indeed, when put on the spot last night regarding my new year’s resolution I said I would do exactly that. Herring shows how even the smallest incident can become comedic grist for the blogging mill. Which brings me back to the can.
It wasn’t especially annoying, rolling in the wind, just strange. I didn’t quite understand how it had failed to find some can contentment in its torrid existence. Perhaps it wasn’t a can at all, perhaps the hotel next door were rolling the laundry out on a contraption made out of cans. As soon as this absurd element of doubt hit me, I knew I would have to go and have a look, if only to scowl and roll my eyes. Don’t be stupid, I thought, it’s not worth it — get some sleep!
The trouble with the rolling can is that its grating little tinkle is so erratic. Just when you think it has found rest, a gust of wind comes round to take it out to play. And once you are tuned in, it is impossible to tune out when you hear its hollow urban melody.
Surely I couldn’t go down from the fourth floor in my jim-jams and put it in the bin. Surely I couldn’t.
Problem: How can I have a good GTD system when my work and home life are so separate?
Earlier this month I began to feel incredibly overwhelmed. I had a load of projects on the go, I was buying a house, learning to drive, trying to keep a social life and generally feeling incredibly ineffective. My GTD system, on Tracks, was full of stale items and it was taking me too much time to update. Something had to be done – if I was ever going to get something done. I decided that I’d have to start again and put my system back together bit by bit.
Since I have been working 9-5 in an office, my system has been ruptured down the middle – work on one side, home on the other. All my project support material was on my Voodoopad (VP) at home, completely inaccessible to my work PC. It became clear to me that if I was going to have a completely water-tight system I would have to join the system together, it was costing me too much mental ram cursing at myself for not being able to look at my VP.
Thankfully, online apps are rapidly maturing. The Google suite was my first stop and is the perfect place for collaborative documents, but it doesn’t have wiki functionality and I can’t wait for jotspot. So I turned to Zoho, whose wiki is pretty good. You can set it to be private – which is essential for me – and fairly quickly link between pages (though, alas, no VP-style auto-linking).
Tracks — or at least my version — currently lacks support for ticklers, it is a pain to edit/create projects, no inbox, and the interface is somewhat overwhelming. Far better, in my opinion, is Vitalist, which is where I’ve moved all my next actions and ticklers.
This kind of technological assistance is all very well, but it is worthless if you don’t also review your principles and processes — your project management requirements, your daily processes and your daily/weekly reviews. For me, this meant having a long hard think about the nature of life.
Life is made up of projects and processes. Projects are finite, processes carry on indefinitely. Processes include: doing GTD, weekly shopping, cleaning, keeping on top of finances, going to work, setting targets and such like. For all of these things, GTD has the weekly review. The weekly review identifies anything that needs to be done in these areas on a weekly basis. Used in combination with a calendar (which allows for regular items like the review and cleaning and shopping to be placed on your hard landscape), you can more or less get away without thinking about them at all!
Projects are self-contained entities. They are begun for a purpose and they have a specific outcome. They can be as small as a few actions or as big as a hundred sub-projects. Indeed, reducing project size is one major way of increasing the amount of things that one gets done. Allowing for clarity and focus. In Project Management terms, projects are constrained by time, scope and money. I wish I had know about all this when I was working freelance.
To keep on top of projects, it helps to have natural processes of reviewing that will allow you do keep on top of things. For me, this means to make sure that before leaving work I do a daily review. A fast mindsweep, making sure there are next actions for each active project and that I have processed all inbox/notebook items. This should take a maximum of 1/2 hour, but the benefits are massive. Without daily processing, the mental crud can soon build up. Sure, you don’t want to be spending all your time updating the system, but if the system is lagging and belching out problems, this half an hour is nothing. Without clear goals and next actions you are susceptible to procrastination and bad habit. It will save time in the long run.
Even more important in the weekly review is where I identify the projects that are active for the forthcoming week. Put everything else into folders, check everything, make sure that the next actions are correctly worded, with proper verbs etc. Doing my checklist:
* Clear mind of nagging thoughts * Ensure that goals are up to date * Review each active Project: * Project still has value? * Project still on course? * Are next actions defined? * Review pending projects list: does anything need to become active for next week? * make sure there are outcomes listed * Check that filing folder is in order and up to date * Check that calendar is up to date (check last week) * Process all email * Go through the List for things coming up this week * Are there any calls/letters etc to make? * Update finances * Process all notes and pieces of paper * Update Computer * Are there any errands I need to make? * Make out shopping list * Check that current actions are up to date
Once that’s done, one is absolutely raring to go. No entropy, no procrastination, just pure productivity.
I have, as an experiment in living, given up reading. Since Sunday, I haven’t consumed any books, blogs, news sites, feeds, wikipedia pages, or magazines. The only words I allow myself are emails, work-related documents, and my own writing. As you can imagine, I have done a lot of writing these last few days. Wringham suggested that I extend the experiment from a week to a year and write a book about it, but I doubt that many people would be interested. The truth is that hardly anyone reads these days. Indeed, the closest most of the people at my gym come to reading is a quick glance at the backpages of The Sun.
The only aspect that makes it at all notable is that I am a reading addict, the kind of person who takes a book into the toilet even if I’m only going for a piss, the kind of idiot who can’t go five minutes without seeing if something exciting has happened somewhere in the world. Life, for the reading addict, is elsewhere. Your internal voice becomes a cacophony or other people’s irritating locutions.
Since giving up reading, I have been able to think my own thoughts, to work things out for myself rather than being reliant on wikipedia or google. My appetite for ‘great’ literature has increased. Whereas previously I was sated by blog gruel, I now fancy getting my teeth into King Lear or Montaigne once the experiment is over.
Last night, as a kind of methadone fix to relieve my need for the written word, I went to Discombobulate at the CCA, where published and unpublished writers congregate in order that they might feel wanted in a world of non-readers. I enjoyed myself but, like a heroin addict, longed for the real thing.
Yesterday morning I decided to act as if I were a proper photographer and employ the rule of thirds in all my photos. According to the rule of thirds, to make an image visually arresting you should frame the object so that it is located where the lines of the nine-square grid intersect. For some reason there is more artistic tension there than there is if you frame the object in the centre of the viewfinder.
I had long known of the rule of thirds but not to the extent of doing anything about it. It was only after having read the Internetsdairy guide on the subject that it began to make sense.
Business gurus often recommend increasing advertising budgets in times of recession — those who cut back are likely to see their market share reduced not only in the short-term, but also when the recession lifts. Nevertheless, firms that would like to save money, might want to take advice from the tyre man in Shawfield Industrial Estate who has been littering the area with his homemade signs.
They begin around five hundred yards away with simple capitalisation and an arrow.
Then continue with some vertical type, in dramatic red.
Worried that the word ‘TYRES’ with an arrow isn’t quite enough, our man becomes more descriptive.
Tip 1: always make your sign bigger than the road sign!
Tip 2: two signs are better than one.
Alas, one sign has now fallen down.
No bother, there’s always more where that came from.
Obviously becoming more sophisticated, our man here jazzes things up with a red border.
When I finally get to the hallowed destination, I can barely see anything because of the low winter sun.
But, then, yes! I reach my goal and . . . it’s closed.
Four nights a week, I go to Gorbals gym and partake of my favourite winter indulgence: reading articles in the sauna. Rather than read on a screen at work, I print them off and read Theodore Dalrymple or Will Self or the New Yorker or whoever whilst being broiled at 100 degrees Centigrade.
I started reading because I find it difficult to understand the dialect of Glaswegian spoken by my fellow saunagoers. Also, the conversation tends to veer towards football or philosophy, both of which tend to bring out strong opinions and are thus not conducive to the kind of relaxation I like. Quite how much of the articles that I absorb is debatable, but I enjoy letting the words wash over me so who cares.
Of late there has been a fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works, and a loquacious Glaswegian in my jacuzzi. At first, I indulged him, he was a bit different to most, being curious and seemingly open to ideas. He intrigued me with his tales of a courtship gone wrong (the relationship foundered over the fact that she was into social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook, whereas he found them incomprehensible). Then I let him engage me in conversation about conspiracy theories. Now I have to endure him spouting on about David Icke, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati and all sorts of fanciful connections. According to this guy, we are all living in a matrix, universal love is at the centre of everything, it is the Illuminati who are orchestrating all the world’s wars. Human stupidity doesn’t come into it, apparently.
Like the chap at work who is into conspiracy theories, their eyes light up when they mention David Icke, because David Icke tells them that by listening to him and opening their minds to his mixture of outrageous facts and outrageous fiction, they understand reality better than 99.9% of the sheeple on the planet. Everyone likes to feel a bit superior, don’t they?
With this in mind, I decided to watch one of David Icke’s videos — no mean feat given that it clocks in at around 2 1/2 hours. He is a good speaker who flatters his audience, comparable perhaps to Hitler (to whom he often compares modern politicians) in the beer cellars of Berlin. The indisputable facts that he comes out with — that America sold weapons to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 80s and that there is a secretive Bilderberger group who don’t receive nearly as much media attention as it should — are important. However, when he follows this up with ideas about the Queen being a 7 foot humanoid lizard, one starts to lose sympathy.
Whilst everyone else in the office is bemoaning the fact that the internet proxies have been turned off, I am secretly rejoicing. Humanity — and by humanity I mean Neil Scott — is incapable of denying itself the pleasures of distraction. The threat of discipline, the occasional glance at my screen by a superior, none of this is enough to prevent me from typing ‘gmail’ or ‘facebook’ into my browser. So I am glad that WebSense keeps asking me whether what I am browsing is work-related and blocks those things of which it doesn’t approve. It is an aid to mindfulness, like one of those Zen Buddhists who thwacks you on back with bamboo if you look like you are about to fall asleep.
Perhaps some people have amazing self-control, like the children who were able to resist the marshmallow, but unfortunately I appear to need some external authority, a super-ego figure, to avoid drifting when confronted by things I don’t find immediately engaging.
In the past, people have meditated on God as a way of keeping them good. Nowadays, people are as likely to use Justin.tv to get that sense of being watched by others.
Of course, most people hate the idea of Justin.tv, in the same way as even very religious people would hate the idea that God is interested in them picking their nose, but you can see why awareness of such a lifestreaming service might help you to remain more self-conscious of your bad habits and less likely to indulge in them. Unless you’re Leslie Grantham.
One of the best arguments in Bill McKibben’s anti-progress book Enough is that creating genetically enhanced human beings would increase the amount of boredom they experience because to really flow you need to have adequate challenges. If everything was too easy you’d quickly get bored and boredom equals self-consciousness. Only by divesting oneself of one’s egotism can you really flow.
