Thought of the Day - Apathy

I am so tired, bored and apathetic at the moment that i can barely even be bothered to type. Looking back i think i often used to feel this way and the fact that it seems strange could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing. At the moment it seems like a bad thing, i need some way to break out of it, to get back to how i was. Unfortunately i don't know how so i guess i need to figure it out.

30 Day Trial - Minimalism Of Posessions - Day 0

To mark the 100th post to this blog i have decided to launch my first blogged 30-day trial.

As discussed in my Life Simplification post a while back i am looking to simplify the number and volume of possessions i have. This was brought into focus with recent interest from an Australian company in employing me, i wondered what i would take with me if i moved. Sure i could ship everything over, but it would take months on the sea and by the time it arrived i would have learned to live without it anyway. So while it seems unlikely anything will come of this situation, it does make me wonder why i have this much junk even if i am just staying in the uk.

As with the show 30 Days i am going to set some ground rules to focus my mind a little:

Rules:
1) By the end of the 30 days all of my possessions must fit in to the boot of my car (excluding furniture and possessions that are in the process of being sold but have not been collected).
2) A target income from the downsizing will be set to replace larger items with smaller but functional alternatives (eg desktop computer replaced with laptop).
3) I will update the blog with a minimum of weekly updates on progress.

End Date - Wednesday the 12th August 2008 - 30 Days Left

Thought of the Day - Life Simplification - Possessions

Something i have been thinking about for quite a while is simplifying my life, mostly in terms of possessions but partly in terms of repetitive tasks i have to do.

In terms of possessions i have an unfortunate habit of accumulating things; i might need them at some point and if i do, i want to have my own stuff. A prime example is ice skates, i haven't been ice skating in over a year and the next most recent time was like 5 years ago. But i can't bring myself to chuck out or sell my skates, the thing is i wouldn't want to go ice skating without my own skates because frankly hire skates suck. That is only the tip of the iceberg; i do the same with bikes, paintball stuff, computer stuff and hoard various other things too. The biggest problem i have is that most of my stuff is worth next to nothing if i sold it, but could be useful to me so it feels like it is worth more to me than it is to sell.

Having said the above, if i flogged all the stuff i don't really need i could probably afford to buy anything i did end up needing when i needed it. Then the problem becomes the effort required to flog all the stuff being much more than it is worth to me in terms of time. I would be happy to accept 50% less than the actual value if someone else would just take it all off my hands and sell it themselves. The problem with that is traditional 'house clearers' focus on old furniture, pictures, kitchenware etc rather than the more modern things i have.

Then the option becomes storage, but it is just such a waste that i can't justify it. Its an ongoing cost to hold on to junk that i will probably never use again, i would be better donating everything to charity and setting aside the money i would have spent on storage to buy new stuff.

So i feel like i'm stuck between a rock, a piece of steel and a hard place; selling my stuff is too much effort, giving it away just seems wrong and storing it is such a waste. What to do?

Thought of the Day - Results-Only Work Environment

99% of people are paid for their time and not their results. Which do you think is better for the company and the individual? Unsurprisingly for anyone with half a brain, the results method is better for both.

I really should have posted this when i came across the concept on Tuesday but i wanted to read the book (Why Work Sucks) first to make sure i really understood what i was talking about. The books notes will be up very shortly after this post but i wanted to offer some comentary that wouldn't have been appropriate in the notes.


Having just read the book it feels like the culmination of thoughts that i have been having in my career up until now. It really ties together; behavioural management, self-directed companies (Maverick, Open Minds etc), process improvement (Six Sigma, metrics etc) and even the more recent lifestyle design (4-Hour Work Week).

It also finally puts a name to something i have expereinced first hand, i am a morning person when it comes to work, i like getting up early and making a start on work. I tend to be in the office before everyone else (~7am), i don't take lunch or breaks and i know that after 3pm i'm not really at my best but i have to hang around until at least 5pm because it is expected, because people will call me a slacker if i don't. It doesn't matter if i don't accomplish anything in those 2 hours, as long as i am at my desk people assume i am being productive.
In my first job after grduating from university i took the approach of doing my contacted hours, i'd start early and finish early. The hour before my colleages arrived tended to be my most productive, so i thought logically it was good for the company. However it wasn't long before my boss took me aside and said that he didn't care if i was in early, he wasn't there so he didn't know if i was working or not and leaving before 5pm was showing a lack of comitment. Which sent the clear message to me that he didn't care if i worked or not, just that i was at my desk. It also prompted me to start recording my hours so that if he ever said i wasn't comitted again i could throw my regular >50 hour weeks in his face.
That conversation has stuck with me for the last 4 years and i still record my hours for the same reason. After reading the book it strikes me that it is a huge waste of time. A waste of the companies time because i do it in work time. A waste of my energy because i worry about how it might be perceived if my average hours drop below 45 despite the fact i am only contracted for 38. It also provides zero incentive to improve, if i know i have 2 hours of reduced productivity why not stretch things out to fill them time, the only outcome of working faster is getting more work to do in my least productive time.

I suspect this will be a recurring theme in this blog, so i have given it a tag "ROWE" if you want to group all of the posts together.


Idea from: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/05/21/no-schedules-no-meetings-enter-best-buys-rowe-part-1/

Thought of the Day - Job Acceptance

Something that I noted down from Go Put Your Strengths To Work by Marcus Buckingham:

Before accepting a job ask yourself 3 things:
Purpose - What is the purpose of the job? Does it fit with your values?
People - Who will you be working with? Do you think you will get on with them?
Activities - What will you actually be doing? Does it fit with your strengths?

He suggests that the the top is the least important, getting more important as you go down. I would agree, if you don't like what you are doing day to day you would have to be working with some very special people or have a very strong purpose before it would be bearable. On the other hand if you love what you are actually doing the other two are easy to put up with if they aren't right.

Thought of the Day - Reliance On Google

I am starting to get a bit worried about how much i rely on Google:

Search - Just about every search i do is through Google, i don't remember the last time i did a search on a competitors site and the only regular time i don't search in Google is when i know what i'm looking for will be in Wikipedia and i start there.
Gmail - for the last 5 years all my personal e-mail has been through Gmail, in one way it is great because i have a great search tool to sift through so much information, in another way Google has a lot of personal information and what happens if i ever lose access to it.
Gchat - Chat from within Gmail with my friends with Gmail accounts.
iGoogle - Customized homepage that aggregates mail notifications, various news sites and various links i use frequently.
Blogger - Hosts this blog.
Google Analytics - Used to track traffic through various websites (including this blog).
Google Checkout - Used instead of paypal on some occasions.

More recently i have started using:
Google Bookmarks - Currently i have dozens of tabs open in 3 Firefox windows, most of which i don't look at on anything approaching a regular basis but don't want to close incase i lose or forget them. I also have various bookmark and favourites lists on different computers none of which are linked. I also have various backups of my bookmarks that never quite made it between computer upgrades.
Google Web History - Cataloguing all of my web viewing activity at home, useful if i forget to bookmark something or wonder how much time i waste online.


So what happens if Google ever; become evil, start charging for some of the products, disappear, are hacked, withdraw certain services etc etc? Frankly i'm kinda screwed. In one way it is great to have everything aggregated in one place, but in terms of risk mitigation it does feel like i have all of my eggs in one basket.

Thought of the Day - Electronic Minimalism

Really random thought, but one of the best things about the electronic age is that you can dramatically reduce your number of physical possessions while still retaining the benefits of having them. Do you really need all of those CD's or can you rip them and keep them all on an iPod or portable Hard Drive. Heck maybe you can even upload them somewhere so that you have zero space requirement and can access them everywhere. The same goes for films, books and many other things. You could probably compress all of the 'media' you have onto a single removable hard drive, hook it up to a network and you can access it worldwide or take it with you.

But while it may be minimalistic physically it is the opposite of minimalism mentally. If anything because of the reduced space requirements it encourages us to keep everything all the time. Personally i keep a lot of things (both physical and electronic) 'just in case' but it is much easier to justify the electronic, it doesn't take up any space and hey it might come in handy in the future. The sad fact is that electronic clutter is probably even worse than physical. Just because you have everything stored doesn't mean that you will be able to find what you are looking for, think of all of the disparate locations; CD-R's, DVD-R's, hard drives, online services etc. None of them are linked and unless you are very sad (and create a database of all of you files) there isn't a way to search them all at once. Worse still is the volatility of most of the above, the dye in CD-R's and DVD-R's fades over time rendering the discs useless, hard drives fail, websites shut down or change their terms of use all the time. Not to mention file types and connections that rapidly become obsolete. Combine all of that together and even if you can find where something should be you still might not have access to it.

Real minimalism should be physical and mental, shedding everything you don't need on a regular basis and getting rid of things once you have consumed them.

Thought of the Day - TV and Social Surplus

I read an article today which argued that television represents 'social surplus', an abundance of time that people don't know what to do with. It suggests that it is like a security blanket that we need to hold on to because of the pace of change in society. Lastly it argues that this security blanket is needed only for a generation, then uses are found for the surplus and society as a whole reaps the benefits. I have a few questions: Of most global importance; is TV too addictive for people to give up and put the time to better use? This would result in a brain-dead society as is portrayed so vividly in Mike Judges excellent Idiocracy. Of most relevance to me, as i watch more TV than anyone else i know; what could i be doing instead of watching TV?

According to www.myepisodes.com in the last 3 years i have wasted; 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 9 hours and 45 minutes watching TV shows. I should note that is only counting the TV i care enough about to track, the real number is probably a good bit higher. As a comparison, that is probably round about the amount of overtime i have worked in various jobs in the same time period, but still it is not an inconsequential amount of time. We're talking about 1 month per year (~9%), including sleeping (~42%) and working (~23%). That means that 75% of my time is spent doing things that aren't really that exciting. I wish i could say i filled the remaining 25% with bungee jumping and dog sledding across Alaska but in reality most of it is probably filled looking at random stuff on the internet.

I initially went into this post wondering what i should replace my television watching with, but in reality i could keep it more or less constant and still have an abundance of time to be doing other things. The question from a paragraph above still remains though; what could i be doing instead? Something that adds value to me (learning, travelling, working out), adds value to the community (voluntary work) or adds value to the world (creating something new).

I don't have a shortage of things that i could be doing (improving my web design skills, learning a foreign language, selling my excess possessions on e-bay etc etc), i just can't think of something that i have enough motivation to do properly. I suppose the first step in any change is an awareness that you want to make the change, now i just need to work out what to change too.

Idea From: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

Thought of the Day - Immobilization

What would you do if you were immobilized in a hospital bed for 6 months? Go slowly insane? Get lots of audio books? Do some deep thinking?

I don't know why but was wondering what i would do if i was hospitalized, at first i thought "great i could catch up on reading" but then i wondered what i would do if i either physically or mentally couldn't read, what would i do? Depressing yes, but also instructive, you would have to come up with a really creative solution to stop yourself going totally insane...

Thought of the Day - Fear

"What you fear doing most is normally what you most need to do."

Strange maxim but probably true, from making a difficult phone call to deciding what career to take all of these things are highly important but very scary.

So what do i fear most?