Author: Tim

Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues

I am quite taken by the idea of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues and, in particular, his really neat method for reminding himself of them and reviewing the extent to which he was complying with his intentions each day. I came across the idea when this article popped up in the automated feed of my Pocket app (which I use to capture interesting odds and ends from the internet).

Franklin’s 13 Virtues were: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility.

It would be hard to argue that adhering to these virtues would not be a good thing (okay, absolute chastity may not be a necessity but excessive pursuit of, or thoughts about, opportunities not to be chaste would probably be unhelpful). Understandably, the list does have something of an 18th century feel to it, but my instinct is that these things are pretty much timeless, at least up to a point.

The really neat part is how Franklin reminded himself of these virtues and kept track of his behaviour. He did this by having 13 cards, each one bearing a grid with the 13 virtues as rows and the days of the weeks as columns. Each card also had one of the virtues as its heading. He carried one card with him each week, rotating through the pack of 13 over the period of one quarter year. So each week he had a single virtue which acted as his primary focus (the one that headed the card he carried) and a simple, reminder of the whole set of 13. He reviewed the card he carried regularly and, at the end of the day, marked off in the relevant row/column his adherence to that virtue on that day. At the end of a week he had a simple visual record of how well he had lived his life in accordance with the virtues and then at the end of each quarter year he could take a longer timescale look at things.

I’d like to spend a little time mulling over the 13 virtues to decide whether any of them could be usefully replaced with other virtues, and then it would be really quite cool to print up a set of cards. I am imagining a playing or credit card size with the grid of virtues and days on one side and the single key virtue stated on the reverse, perhaps with a suitably evocative picture. Alternatively, I can imagine this as a small pdf document that is designed to be viewed on a smartphone screen (actually, it would work really nicely as an app – if only I knew how to make one!). If I had such a set of cards (or similar) I don’t know whether I would find the time to complete the review each day. I already complete a mini-journal to remind myself what I did each day (now into my fourth year) and have recently started completing a short end-of-day review pro-forma on my iPad, so having ANOTHER type of review going on is probably excessive (‘probably’? – I must surely mean ‘obviously’). But, I do like Franklin’s idea a lot – beautiful simplicity and clarity.

Edited to add that I have just discovered a series of articles about Franklin’s virtues on the Art of Manliness website. These date back to 2008 which perhaps explains why I haven’t noticed them before despite regularly visiting AoM and listening to the AoM podcast!

How Many Coffee Shops Does It Take?

Today, at work, I discovered a new coffee shop on the university campus. This one was a Costa and was located in the Students’ Union, somewhere I don’t normally go. A colleague had arranged a meeting there to discuss an upcoming module because unlike the other cafes/coffee places on campus it didn’t shut at 4pm. Unbelievably, since it is the only ‘branded’ coffee shop on campus, it turned out to be the cheapest – my Americano cost just £1.18 – presumably because the ‘student’ prices did not include VAT (Value Added Tax). This one joins six other cafes/coffee places that I can count on campus, all within a region that is just a few hundred metres across in each direction. Working roughly north to south there is: The Reservoir Cafe, Portland Square Cafe, Drakes Cafe, The Library Cafe (actually I think this one might also be branded), The Writing Cafe and Roland Levinsky Cafe. So that’s seven cafes in a tiny space, and I can’t help but be beset by a nagging feeling that I have forgotten one. It is much the same picture in the city centre and, for that matter, every other place I visit these days. It is like there is absolutely no limit to the number of cafes that a place can sustain. They pop up everywhere – there are at least another half dozen within 5 minutes walk of the university. Now I like coffee quite a lot, but honestly it is getting ridiculous. Surely they can’t all make enough money to be sustainable.

Beetroot

On Sunday evening, I was surprised to see evidence [think about it] that I was rather dehydrated. By this I don’t mean just a bit dehydrated, I mean running a Marathon dehydrated… This didn’t make sense – I had done a fairly long run on Saturday morning but nothing on Sunday and I thought I had been drinking plenty of water. Then, this morning, the evidence was even more plain, I wasn’t just Marathon level dehydrated, I was ultramarathon dehydrated. In fact, based on my limited ultramarathon experiences so far, it was even worse than that. Was there something wrong with my kidneys? More to the point, was I suffering from internal bleeding due to some rare intestinal disease? Call the doctor, fast.

And then I remembered, or perhaps ‘twigged’ is a better word. Over the weekend I ate quite a lot of home-made beetroot and carrot coleslaw. Now, if you are not sure what the significance of that statement is then I challenge you to try it. Go and eat a load of beetroot and then sit back (literally…) and await the show…

Like A Dog Leashed To A Cart

I really love the Stoic analogy that describes a human life, and its relationship to ‘fate’, as being like the life of a dog leashed to a cart as it trundles its way along. The idea is that the dog has a certain amount of freedom to move around, explore and control what it does but this activity occurs within the constraints of the length of the dog’s leash and the relentless movement and path taken by the cart, which the dog has no control over whatsoever. Similarly, we have a certain amount of freedom to go about our business but this is all within the context and constraints of wherever fate leads us. We can never know whether the cart will turn onto a different path, enter difficult terrain, slow down or speed up or even tumble headlong over a cliff edge.

I was thinking about this analogy a lot on a long run yesterday morning. In particular, I was thinking about what we can do to increase our freedom – to increase the scope of our control over life. By definition, within this analogy, we have no control over the cart. It is tempting to think that we might be able to influence the route it takes or the speed it travels at but the whole point is that we are not driving and nothing we do has any influence on the driver. Accepting this leaves two areas for consideration. First, there is the ease and guile with which we move over the terrain around the cart. Secondly, there is the length of the leash (or its flexibility). However, on reflection, I think we have to regard the leash as being ‘owned’ by the cart and so not under our control. Thus, leading a successful life is really all about maximising your ability to move around the terrain that is within the reach of your leash, bearing in mind that all the time you are being shifted along by the cart. We have to become more agile, more skillful, more resilient, faster and have more stamina.

I also got to thinking about how the people that we share our life with are also on their own leashes, attached to their own carts. This means that we cannot assume that their carts and our cart will stay on the same path. For a time the carts may share a road, and for that period we may be able to run around on our leash with them exploring the terrain we encounter, but clearly we cannot assume that it will always be so. We may decide to trot along together and do everything that we can to maintain our connectedness but ultimately one cart may veer off the shared path and the tug of our leashes may not allow us to stay together.

It’s also interesting to think about what it means to build something over time. Within this analogy we could only build something substantial in our life if we can engineer things so that we can spend a significant amount of time in the same space. This means that we need to be fast enough to run ahead of the cart to start the building process and can keep building for as long as the cart doesn’t catch up and pull so far ahead that we are dragged away from our construction. So to build something significant we need to be able to move quickly relative to the cart (to get ahead of it) and to move around fast enough to be able to draw together the resources that we need in the limited time available to us. I guess we could also carry whatever it is that we are building with us along the journey. In that instance I think that what we would actually be doing is building ourselves or something within us (skills, attributes) that we can deploy wherever we happen to be and with or for whoever we happen to be there with.

One way or another then, this analogy points to the need for agility (which to me combines speed, skill and guile) and stamina. I think agility comes in different flavours – physical and mental. We can hone both our agility and our stamina through exercise, developing our skill and technique and becoming more aware and knowledgeable about both ourselves and of the terrain around us. Finally, we also need resilience because it is inevitable that our cart will take us away from where we think we want to be at times and if we react negatively when this happens then we will waste time and energy on regret and despondency when we feel the leash tighten and tug on us as, inevitably, we will. Far better to accept that the leash is pulling us in some direction and focus on how to make that work than to strain painfully at the leash and be dragged to that other place anyway.

[Before writing this entry I tried to look up this dog and cart analogy so that I could give it its proper attribution but it seems as though it is something that multiple Stoic philosophers wrote about. If I had looked a bit harder and a bit deeper I might have found the original source, but I could sense my leash beginning to tighten and I had to move on!]

Movie Watch

With a daughter at university studying Film you would think that I might watch a lot of them and it’s certainly true that my movie watching has increased many-fold in recent years driven in part by her interest and recommendations. I’ve been keeping a list of the films I have watched for a few years now – here: Film list. But last year my film watching declined markedly and partly I would put this down to her absence. I had a bit of a flurry of activity in the summer when she was home but still only managed to see 12 films between January and November inclusive. That all changed in December, actually quite late on in December, when she came home from university. Just two days later I was watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi and that was followed rapidly by the excellent The Florida Project and then a host of other films over the holiday period. Things have continued in similar vain through January since she went back to university with six films bagged already including tonight’s viewing of Beauty and the Beast [not my choice – my elder daughter loves it]. I even have tickets booked for three films at the Arts Centre in February – Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Darkest Hour and The Post. It seems that this year is going to be big year of film watching for me. In fact I might even finally get to watch The Shawshank Redemption…

Listening to Music

I have a problem. I pay out money every month (to the music-streaming service Spotify) so that I can listen to (more or less) whatever music I want whenever I want because I love the idea of listening to music but when it comes to it, I almost never do so. Consequently, not only am I not doing something that I think I want to do but I am paying money (approximately £120 per year) for the pleasure of not doing it! Why? And what is the solution?

The obvious thing for me to do is to cancel my Spotify subscription and save myself some money. I could still listen to a wide range of music (CDs, CDs saved as mp3 files, online radio, free Spotify with adverts etc.) but obviously I wouldn’t be able to listen to almost anything at anytime (assuming I had downloaded tracks to my phone say). This latter point makes me resist cancelling because I feel that it reduces the chance that I will listen to music. But that is crazy: I already listen to music approximately 0% of the time so I cannot really reduce that even further. What I really mean is that if I cancel my Spotify subscription I feel that it will reduce the chance that I will somehow change my behaviour and start listening to music. This means that I am paying for the privilege of being able to dump on myself more effectively for not doing something I supposedly want to do.

All of which leaves me looking towards other resolutions which, clearly, have to involve me listening to music. It really is simple – I have to answer one question: Do I want to listen to music? And if my answer to that question is ‘yes’, and I think it is, then I have to make some decisions about when and where and how I will do this. I could listen on my way to and from work – but I already use that time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks and I don’t want to lose that. I could listen to music at home – but I think the opportunities to do this are pretty limited because i) other people are around and would probably not want to listen to the same things that I would, ii) I would probably be doing other stuff and moving around at the same time and so wouldn’t really be able to listen properly and iii) I don’t want to be hooked up to headphones all the time. I could listen to music at work in my office – but I think that maybe I would find it hard to concentrate properly if I was actively trying to listen to music at the same time. Added to this, I find I struggle a bit to decide what I want to listen. All of which means I am a bit stuck.

To try to resolve all of this (and if you are reading this you are probably really struggling to get your head around how someone can turn something so simple into something so utterly complicated) I am going to experiment a bit. I am going to try putting on Classic FM at work just to get used to the idea of having ‘noise’ going on as I work. Initially, I will probably only do this when I am not engaged in deeper work that requires high levels of focus. By choosing online radio I remove the need to decide what to listen to (apart from choosing the station of course) which helps to solve one of the associated issues.

The curious thing is that I used to listen to music all of the time, but I suppose back then all of my ‘space’ was my own and although I thought I was busy all the time probably I wasn’t and music was something that helped to fill the world around me. I’ve had Classic FM on as I have been typing this and quite enjoyed having a layer of sound there in the background although I could hardly tell you what pieces have been played (Rossini’s ‘The Silken Ladder’ Overture [?] was one and some music from Jurassic Park films was also on earlier I think, music from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ is on now). So far so good. I will try to remember to report back on my progress at some point in the not too distant future, and for now Spotify will continue to receive my money, just in case this flicker of aural inspiration catches light into a full-blown fire again.

Timetabling Mania

The academic year structure here in Plymouth is such that there are two teaching Semesters, one that runs from the start of the year in September through to the end of January (12 weeks before Christmas/New Year and 3 weeks after) and then a second one that runs from roughly the beginning of February through to May with a break over Easter. This means that currently we are towards the end of Semester One with a new set of modules due to start in Semester Two in just over a week’s time.

One of my roles as Deputy Head of School is to be the School Timetabling Coordinator. This basically means that I have to sit in between the academics planning and teaching modules and the Central Timetabling Unit (CTU) who schedule them. Every communication with the CTU is supposed to go through me which is basically a way of restricting the ability of academics to moan and grumble at the CTU and puts the onus on me to filter requests for changes to the timetable, push academics to find ‘local’ solutions and, at times, moderate the language they have used when making timetabling requests/demands…

I have only been doing this timetabling role for about a year but it is apparent that timetabling work comes to a head at a few specific times of year. There is a huge flurry of activity towards the end of February when academics have to complete ‘Module Delivery Sheets’ detailing what sessions they want/need for their modules in the following year (so at least 6 months ahead), followed immediately by a huge amount of work for me to review, check and approve all of these requests. Then there is another burst of activity in the summer when there is a two week period for checking the draft Semester One timetable followed not long afterwards by a similar period for the Semester Two timetable. At that point, say mid-September, everything is supposed to be set for the year and the assumption made is that nothing will change from then onwards. In fact, it is not simply an assumption. Rather, there is now an INSTRUCTION that nothing can be changed without various levels of approval, sometimes from pretty senior people in the university.

I mention this today because in the last couple of days I have suddenly been hit with a plethora of timetable change requests from my colleagues to process. Some of these are completely straightforward but others are really quite incredibly complex and I have a not insignificant amount of work to do to try to work out the best tactics to use to ensure that the request makes its way smoothly through the CTU. Almost all of the requested changes could have been highlighted weeks if not months ago which is the thing that makes all of this sudden activity really rather frustrating. My day today has been completely hijacked by this work. It is as if (some of) my colleagues have awoken from a trance to realise with a jolt that they need to think about what they are doing in a week’s time, despite having known about and been able to think about these things for ages and ages. In truth, of course, they are busy people, but as someone who likes to know that there are no nasty shocks around the corner I do find it hard to comprehend how anyone could work in this manner.

Today, timetabling mania has been particularly bad. I am hoping that tomorrow and, indeed, next week, will not see a repeat. I cannot really afford to lose more time to this. My timetable doesn’t permit it.

Running Into An Idea

After yesterday’s failed attempts to get out running, if they can even be called attempts that is, I absolutely nailed it today. I managed to leave work a little early after a day of five meetings and got myself straight out onto the streets. I seem to have adopted a new favourite route, and this was the one I followed today, a 7.2 mile loop around Mannamead, Peverell and into Central Park before heading home. It was one of those runs where everything feels really comfortable and just clicks. Very enjoyable.

But what made today’s run particularly enjoyable was that as well as feeling physically nourishing it served as a vehicle for some really creative thinking. I am not going to go into details here (yet) but for no particularly good reason and completely unexpectedly I found myself struck by an idea about some research that I could get involved with at work that, for once, grabbed my attention and filled me with an surprising amount of excitement. I spent pretty much the whole run thinking through the merits of the idea that involves me doing stuff that I am not especially good at and which would certainly put me out of my comfort zone but, nevertheless, just felt right. It was a slightly weird fusion of physical effort and mental creation which is, perhaps, the best experience that running can provide.

I got back into the house and, as I had decided while on the run, immediately sent an email to a colleague to make sure that I didn’t sit on the idea and talk myself out of following it up. And when I say ‘immediately’ I really do mean immediately – while my heart rate was still over 100bpm and the sweat dripped off my forehead. Sometimes, there really is no time like the present.

It’s Only Water And Air

This morning I got up at 7am as usual and immediately did my Tuesday morning exercise routine. I was expecting to hear rain lashing against the windows and wind howling around the house (as per forecast) but as I completed the routine I realised that there was no sound from outside and, in fact, the morning was remarkably still and dry. The thought immediately struck me that I should make the most of the better-than-expected weather and go out for a short run, even though my plan was to run when I got home from work. It seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, what with high wind and heavy showers forecast for later and, indeed, most of tomorrow. I got as far as starting to look out my running kit but then made the mistake of looking out of a window at the front of the house towards the south-west – the direction the weather almost always approaches us from. What I saw stopped me in my tracks. The sky was a solid dark grey colour and appeared to be fit to burst. I didn’t like the look of it at all and made an almost instant coward’s decision to ditch the idea of a run and go and have breakfast instead. This decision seemed to be a wise one as the sound of rain hitting the window began almost immediately.

But that rain really didn’t amount to much and only 5-10 minutes later the skies had lightened. I found myself instantly regretting my decision to take advantage of the unexpected weather window and, shortly afterwards, I trudged off to work in the dry, not too cold and with hardly a drop of rain falling. I was disappointed, and rapidly convinced myself that I had made a bad decision, that the weather would obviously be horrible later on AND tomorrow which would mean I probably wouldn’t run on either day which would then make it really hard for me to hit 25 miles this week (my informal target) since I would only run about 5 miles on Thursday night (hopefully), probably run nothing on Friday (I rarely run on Fridays), maybe run 14 or so miles on Saturday (because at the moment I can’t really run more) and then almost definitely run nothing on Sunday (there really is horrible weather forecast for Sunday at the moment)… you probably get the idea! It was disappointing and annoying – I had made the wrong decision just because of a little bit of rain and now my new running target was in tatters.

As it turns out, at the moment (it is now 4:20pm and I will head home from work at about 5pm) the sky, at least that part of it that I can see from my office window, is mostly clear. There is a layer of cloud on the eastern horizon but it doesn’t look threatening. And whilst it probably IS windier out there than it seems in here, it does feel like the 40+ mile per hour winds that were forecast haven’t come out to play. So, unless there is a nasty shock lurking out to the west (which I can’t see at the moment) or a rapid change in conditions, I ought to be able to get home and get out for a few miles without too much trauma.

That ‘wrong’ decision that I made and which disappointed me so much this morning might just turn out to have been a perfectly good decision after all.

On the other hand, I’ve just looked out again and the sky is now filled with heavy grey clouds and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it rains soon. Decisions, decisions. I suppose that my experience this morning really ought to have taught me that it is better, and simpler, to just go out and run and not give a damn about a bit of rain or a bit of wind. After all, it’s only water and air.

Tactics for Tiredness

I woke up this morning, Monday morning, with that feeling of ‘oh, here we go again’ and a fairly deep-set tiredness. The latter probably isn’t surprising as yesterday I ran 7.2 miles and then walked about 5.5 miles so I deserve to feel a bit tired, but I think it was more a result of having had a heavily planned and highly productive week last week which I carried on, albeit to a lesser extent, over the weekend. I oscillate between thinking that it is better to fill every scrap of time with some kind of activity and leaving plenty of space for recovery. Somehow, I am not convinced that the former makes me feel more tired or the latter more refreshed because inaction often leads to a sense of lethargy and missed opportunity and action often leads of a burst of extra energy. But I did feel tired this morning and knowing that I want to keep trying to push forwards with my heavily scheduled working days I decided that it would be sensible to do something to try to build in a bit of extra slack/rest. Out of this came my plan for this evening…

On Monday and Tuesday nights the TV series Silent Witness (forensic pathology drama) started up a new series last week. It is a series which I can watch but don’t particularly enjoy, whereas my wife and elder daughter (who is at home at the moment) do both like it – so what tends to happen is that we record it and then they try to squeeze watching it into ‘spare’ time in the day. On the other hand, there are some TV series on at the moment that I quite enjoy (e.g. Hunted) but my wife doesn’t like so much which makes it difficult for me to watch them, and there is also usually some decent football on Monday nights (although tonight it is Manchester United so perhaps decent isn’t the right word). Consequently, tonight and tomorrow night I plan to get myself to bed at 9pm when Silent Witness comes on, and watch either the football (tonight) or Hunted on catch-up (tomorrow) on my iPad, switching off at 10pm to pick up a book and read. This plan should give me a bit of extra-lazy rest time and has the added bonus of getting me to bed early so that I might actually read for a bit, as I have developed a bad habit of getting stuck downstairs (e.g. watching the news headlines at 10pm) and not making it to bed with much time left to read. The exact detail of this plan isn’t really so important. What I like about it though is that I am deliberately opting to take a positive step towards rest/relaxation rather than either watching something I don’t really want to watch or being generally inactive in an entirely passive way. I’m not sure I have really managed to capture my thoughts very well in this post – man decides to go to bed early and watch TV isn’t exactly a profound revelation – but I know what I am trying to express and, in any case, I am rather looking forward to my little bit of lazy space-time.