Adventures in home working

I am still on a journey of discovery to try and “find what I love doing”,  I am fairly content in my work, find it interesting and challenging, but I don’t feel I make a difference, at home I spend most of the time with my family – which is great – but very internal focused.  I would like both work and home life to change over time to be more community centred and to feel that I am giving something back to the world and that I live in a more natural and sustainable way.  My relatively poor health is currently the excuse I hide behind that stops me taking the risk associated with change.

I do however continue to be on the lookout for advise in this area and I recently cam across these two articles, one by Steve Jobs – You’ve got to find what you love and the other my Dave Pollard ‘Business’ Advice for Young Adults (and Their Parents & Teachers).  Check them out if you ever think about your work or worry about how you are preparing your kids to help them make good choices about their future work choices.

In this post I talked about my approach to time management.  Graham has this great story on his site that illustrates the same approach but much more eloquently!

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He asked the students if the jar was full.They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly, and the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full; they agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognise that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things: your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favourite passions, things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter–like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else: The small stuff.”

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just filler.”

One of the students raised his hand and enquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”

In this post I talked about my approach to time management.  Graham has this great story on his site that illustrates the same approach but much more eloquently!

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He asked the students if the jar was full.They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly, and the pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full; they agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognise that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things: your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favourite passions, things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter–like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else: The small stuff.”

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just filler.”

One of the students raised his hand and enquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”

On Saturday I started to pull up all of the strawberry plants that had rooted from runners last year.  I ended up with several hundred plants in a big heap.  I decided that it would be a good idea to give them away, but my wife though tno one would be interested.  I took this as a bit of a challenge,  I am one of those people who likes to think the best of others (which is an extension of having a positive outlook) my wife in contrast always expects things to go wrong and tends to distrust those she doesn’t know.  Anyway I bagged the plants up – 15 plants to a bag – and to make the challenge more interesting decided to give the plants away but allow for donations.

My eldest daughter, Stephie, made a lovely sign and we put the 15 bags of plants in a big plastic container on the path outside the house.  The sign read – Free Strawberries – and was nicely illustrated.  Next to the container was a small wooden bowl which I put a little loose change in; to get things going.  After three days all 15 bags have gone, we collected about £5 in donations and so far as I can tell, none of the donated money was removed.

I thought it was a pretty good illustration of my view on life:

• I gave something away which made me feel good
• I provided the opportunity for donation, but no obligation, and most people donated
• At least 15 people appreciated the gesture, so that made them feel good
• No one stole any of the money, or took an unfair number of plants, (the bags went roughly 1 at a time), so I feel better about my neighbourhood
• Hopefully people will enjoy the crop for years to come
• Hopefully a few more people will stop and chat as the year progresses
• Maybe others will do the same with other plants and spare produce and community spirit will improve, we will see

We give a lot to charity and to charity shops, but this tiny experiment was a much more direct way of engaging with the community and redistributing excess.  It was also interesting to see the effect on the kids who were fascinated by the whole process, and it was all I could do to stop them from perching at the front of the house and becoming market sales girls, not because of the money but because of the enjoyable banter they engaged in on a fine spring day.

I am being bombarded by information and initiatives that relate to thinking from all directions.  I thought it would be interesting to list the main ones and try and identify the many different perspectives.

Structure and rigour.  It all started with David Pollard’s structured problem solving process, which although not a perfect fit for me was an interesting insight into how formal and rigorous the process could be.

Quick and intuitive.  Then I read reviews of books that discussed rapid decision making, I have not explored them further but they support my gut feeling that my intuition is a valuable skill that I should nurture.  I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but am good at remembering relationships. I have specifically avoided learning memory improvement techniques because I worry that whilst I will be better at remembering names my intuition and innovation will suffer.

Innovation.  I came across a blog entry on types of innovation, quickly followed by one of my colleagues sending me a presentation, which led to me exploring innovation processes, in particular TRIZ and some of the tools that support it. 

Mind maps.  I then had the opportunity to use Mind Maps to help me brainstorm and structure the early lifecycle phase of a project, and interesting this linked me back to using TRIZ with Mind Maps, and David Pollard and his experiments with Mind Maps.

Blogs.  I have always thought that blogs are a great way to help provide other people to get an insight into your thinking processes, so I liked the fact that a few people were discussing them for use in that way.  Probably the best of example of this in action is the way that Kim Cameron developed his Laws of Identity.  This page documents the laws and links to the blog sections that helped to evolve each law.

Intelligence and thinking.  Then I got a nasty shock whilst reading The happiness Purpose, where de Bono shows how intelligent people may not actually be very good thinkers because they tend to rapidly come to a conclusion and then use their intelligence to defend it.  Now my IQ is only 135 so I may not fall into that trap, but it’s worth watching out for and certainly worth making sure I follow a process, this blog entry shows there are quite a few processes to choose from.

Perspectives.  Then in discussions at work around architecture I found myself amazed that I needed to defend the concept of having different people in the team to represent different perspectives of the solution, eg usability and supportability.  This got be thinking about the whole topic of taking different perspectives when thinking about a problem which led me to The Six Thinking Hats, which I was surprised to find my kids had been taught at school.  This led me to de Bono’s other book on Lateral Thinking

Happiness.  I am undertaking a mini study on happiness, this study so far has taught me one major lesson, happiness depends more on the way you think than any other factor.  If you look for things that are wrong, compare yourself to others and see success in terms of material things rather than experiences then you are going down the wrong road.  I have a category of my blog on this topic.

Concepts.  Last month I needed to understand a whole new subject area, Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture, so I decided to map the relationships of the WS* specifications using a concept map, here is an example.  This helped tremendously.

Communication.  Then one of my friends pointed me to a web site called beyond bullets all about the challenges of communications with presentations, in particular PowerPoint,  now this site promotes the idea of story telling, I happen to think mind maps and concept maps have their place as well, but its worth a read.

Horizon.  Finally last week I watched a disturbing episode of Horizon on cold fusion.  In this episode it became clear to me the terror that must be felt by any scientist with a new idea that challenges mainstream thinking in an area of science where funding and ego are issues.  The ferocity with which work, which may actually represent significant process, was torn to shreds by those with vested interests, eg funding or ego, was staggering.  It was clear that such reactions stifle creativity, what happened to the idea of “not fearing failure”, and “treating failure as a learning opportunity”, certainly not a philosophy shared by scientific researchers!

I am currently changing my approach to spending money, in the most obvious, (in hindsight) way.

First I did an audit of how I spend my time, then I looked at how much I could improve my level of enjoyment or productivity by investing money in support of each activity.  I also looked for new activities that I could add to my life if I spent some money.

I ended up with a fairly simple list in order of Return On Investment.   Without going into all of the details here are a few of the outcomes:

- I have sold a whole load of old gadgets on eBay, because I only used them for a couple of hours a month

- I reaffirmed my decision not to spend any money on cars for a long time,  my current car get used for about an hour a week, although my wife uses her’s more, so we won’t be investing in a second car when hers gives up in a few years time.

- I invested in some great walking gear and swimming gear because that’s an activity I do every day and I want to maximise my enjoyment and minimise the opportunity for excuses

- I cancelled a load of magazine subscriptions, because I can read the same stuff on my Tablet

- I felt happy at all the personal money I invested in my work computing environment, because I use it for 4-6 hours a day and this provides by far the greatest ROI.

- I am considering upgrading my TC1000 to a TC1100 off eBay because I use it for about 1.5 hours a day which aside from TV is probably my second most important activity, that can be improved.  (now that I have GPRS)

- Next years bonus is going on upgrading the TV, because we spend about 2 hours a day watching TV

- Debbie and I go out a lot more on our own, because time alone is very precious when you have 4 kids!

- We give more to charity because the return on charity investment is hundreds of times greater than the ROI we get investing in ourselves!

I wrote a short article yesterday about how my SwimMP3 player has transformed the way I swim.  In this article I will provide a better review of the device itself.

First off it looks quite strange, you get lots of looks whilst swimming.  If you like to chat to people then it’s a good ice breaker!

It has 128MB of memory, which is reasonable for music, if you set it to random then most people won’t get bored even if they swim every day.  If like me you listen to talk shows, conferences etc then 128MB is more than enough, in fact the way I use it I tend to load it up with just 2 * 30 minute MP3 files, less than 30MB, why 2, just in case I don’t fancy the the content of the first one and need an alternative.  Each day I just delete the talks I have listened to and download another.

My main source of talks right now is IT Conversations

I find that lots of the things I want to listen to are too long for my swims, so I split them into 20-30 minute sessions depending on how long I want to swim that day.  I use Cool MP3 Splitter for this.

With a couple of clicks, and in a couple of seconds, you go from:

Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity.mp3

to:

Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-001.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-002.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-003.mp3
Open Source Code – Managing the Opportunity-004.mp3

So how does this thing work.  Well you wear it just like a pair of goggles, it comes with goggles, but you can fit it to your own.  The MP3 player itself is at the back of your head and its easy to reach and locate the controls.  Two pads rest on your cheek bones and the vibrations reach your ear through the vibration in the cheek bones.  The quality is OK, not fantastic.  Even with ear plugs you can still hear the splashing of the water as you swim, especially with front crawl or butterfly. But set of max volume I find I can follow 95% of a well recorded talk and music of course especially rock, is no problem.  I have found that if the speaker is quiet, or the recording is not very clear then its a bit of a struggle to make out very word, (and there is no way to got back if you miss a bit).  Another quirk is that the volume is higher when your head is under water, so if you are doing breaststroke you need to get used to the fact that with each stroke there is a slight volume variation as your head rises and falls.

The MP3 player functions themselves are VERY basic. On, off, pause, random, next track, previous track.  If you listen to music thats not too bad but if you listen to a 30 minute talk, then basically you can start it and stop it but that’s it.  You also need to take care with pause – which is achieved by pressing next and previous track buttons together – because a few times I have failed to pause and instead done a next/previous.  This means you have to listen to say 15 minutes of talk all over again as their is no fast forward!

The battery life is claimed to be 4 hours and it charges through the USB connection, not many people will find this a limitation!  There is some PC software with the player, Music Match, but I have not tried it yet (and don’t expect to).  The player just appears as a Drive in explorer and I drag and drop files to it.  The USB cable is yet another unique type to add to my collection – sigh!

It only supports MP3 format, which is a bit of a pain if you have all of your music in WMA as I do, but there are plenty of batch converters around and with Windows Media Player 10 you can switch the default to MP3.  Note if you use Windows 2003 Server like me you have to wait for SP1 to get Windows Media Player v10!

There is no display on the device, so you have to find the track you want using next and previous, and no concept of playlists etc.  For music I device my mood then just download a folder of songs for the day and set to random.  For talks as I said before I just download 2 maybe three so next and previous navigation is no problem.

Although the manufacturers claim ear plugs are optional, I don’t agree, unless you have your own silent pool and swim breast stroke only then its unlikely you will be happy with the level of background noise.  I tried the molded plugs that were supplied with the player first, they fitted really snugly, but I found they leaked slightly but suppressed the sound well.  Then I tried foam plugs and these were leak-proof and suppressed the sound just as well so I use these now.  One set lasts about 20 swims if you dry them off on your towel each time and leave them for a couple of days to dry.  Just a tip – buy them off the Internet in bulk, not two a a time from the Chemist, they are about 50 times cheaper!

Overall summary – very expensive – but in my case it has resulted in me swimming longer, more regularly and being more productive.  I think it payed back in about a month!

I have recently restarted swimming.  It’s a great way to keep fit and it really helps ease my aching muscles and joints, but it’s really boring!  I recently found the solution though.  I purchased a waterproof MP3 player, that looks like this:

and it works by bone conduction of sound. When the device is placed on any bones of the skull (i.e. the cheek bones or the mastoid tip) it leads to vibration of the fluid in the inner ear. Thus I can enjoy clarity of sound with the SwiMP3 device that was never before possible.  Jon mentions it in his blog as well.

At first I thought I would use it mainly for music, but then I discovered the IT Conversations web site, which is chock full of really interesting downloadable talks, many of which are so relevant to my job that I can make a valid claim to be doing research while I am swimming!

I found a slight glitch in that there is no way to bookmark the point you get upto in a talk and restart at that point the next day, so for longer mp3′s I have had to split them into 20 – 30 minute segments, and after trying quite a few splitters I finally chose Cool MP3 Splitter mainly because it’s the only one that worked without admin priv on Windows 2003 Server, and it was really simple and cheap and fast.

All in all a great contribution to work life balance, and a great talking point as well!!  Oh one final tip, I find foam ear plugs much better than the fancy molded versions that are supplied and if you buy them off the web in bulk they are really cheap, great of your wife snores as well!

After a good swim,  I often sit by the pool (there’s a great chill out area) watching the kids play while I continue working on my Tablet PC, which is great at night when they put the lights down (too dark to read otherwise) and of course I can continue listening to talks on the tablet as well while I read cached web pages or do document reviews!

I continue to be amazed by Dave Pollard and how he manages to provide us with such thought provoking insights into How To Save The World on a daily basis.  To give you a glimpse of his motivation look at the following snip, and then read his bio.

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did

This is a great book to read in the bath just before you go to sleep, very thought provoking but with each thought served up in bite sized chunks.

The book is essentially 50 or so extracts from other books, papers or speeches on the subject of money.  It really is a facinating, if disturbing, read. 

It covers the following topics:

Metal money – all about the origins of money

Money information – all about the virtualisation of money

Measuring money – probably the best chapter – all about the lack of a link between money and happiness and value

Dept money – all about the scary levels of debt in the world

Mad money – stories of the ‘great’ crashes and why/how they happened

DIY money – money alternatives

Spiritual money – other ways to think about money.

I ordered this book from the library, but ended up buying myself a copy it was that good.