Author: Tim

The Action Grid

On Monday I shared my thoughts about a a new system I had stumbled up (invented?) to become unstuck and get more things done. Now, at the end of a full week at work using it, I thought I would look back on how things have panned out and make an initial judgement on whether the system has actually helped at all.
The first thing I should note is that I don’t recall working so hard (just in case anyone important is reading this I should point out that, obviously, I always work hard). I feel tired and I am looking forward to some downtime this weekend. But I also feel satisfied that I have got a lot done, more than I would have done if I had just come to work and tried to do some stuff. I have also taken less breaks, partly because I want to save money by not buying coffee so much, partly because a lot of colleagues are not in work at the moment so I have eaten lunch on the go, but also because I have had a singular focus on wanting to make progress.

I have named my system the Action Grid. This week it has had 10 columns (projects) which I think is perhaps one or two too many. For each project I planned a next action for each day (either in advance or from one day to the next). I have made progress on all of these projects, just missing a couple of actions on a couple of projects on Monday and finding myself running out of time for three actions today, although I could probably achieve these if I hadn’t also decided to spend the last couple of hours of the week reviewing everything, catching up on email and setting things up for next week instead. Here is a picture of my Action Grid as at the middle of Friday afternoon:

Through the week I have completed quite a lot of tasks that I KNOW I would not have completed if I hadn’t been trialing my Action Grid system. I have written to two old friends, something I have been meaning to do since Christmas in one case and since last summer(!) in the other. I have finished sorting out my research-paper archive in my filing cabinets (which I started doing last summer). I have phoned the media company to cancel my Sky Movies subscription, thereby saving ~£12 per month (so if I had done this a year ago like I could have done I would be almost £150 richer…). I have made substantial progress in completing my database of Marine Science degree alumni (adding 2017, 2008, 2007 and 2006 – just 2005 and 2004 to go now). I have spent at least an hour each day working through some Matlab workshops to brush up my Matlab programming skills. I have moved forward a worthwhile amount on a couple of work (School management) projects.

I think that it was particularly useful to decide on the projects that were going to get my focus this week and to adopt a strategy of trying to nudge each of these forwards a little bit every day. Some days I made a fairly substantial step, other days I just printed a document or sent an email, but every day I moved forwards on each project. One week is not enough to judge the usefulness of this system for me, especially as this is a summer week when there are few distractions in terms of teaching sessions, meetings etc. and when the university is generally pretty quiet. But I know that in previous years I have struggled to be very productive during such weeks so this one has been quite a revelation. Suffice it to say that I will certainly be giving my Action Grid system another go next week.

Mendip Marauder 30 Miler

I just wrote quite a lengthy post describing my running of the Mendip Marauder 30 Miler ultramarathon a couple of Saturday’s back but unfortunately the post didn’t upload properly and my efforts were lost. I don’t think I have the time or energy to recreate the whole thing again so I will just record here that the run was from Wells in Somerset to Uphill beach just south of Weston-Super-Mare along and several times across the Mendip Hills ridge. It was a tough route with over 4000 feet of elevation gain (so quite a lot of walking mixed in with the running!) and I completed it in 7 hours 15 minutes – a time that I was reasonably pleased with.

It was a sunny day but fortunately there was a cool breeze which took the edge off the heat. The views were absolutely stunning, especially looking south from the Mendip Hills towards the Somerset Levels (with Glastonbury Tor and Brent Knoll visible) and the Bristol Channel coast beyond. Despite it being a very tough run, I really enjoyed the day and the peace and solitude it afforded me. I have no doubt in my mind now that running ultramarathon is simply something I have to do now…

Here are some pictures from the day…

View from above Draycott towards the Somerset Levels with Brent Knoll in the distance:

Views from the western end of the main Mendip ridge around Waverley Down and towards Crook Peak:

On Uphill Beach with the finishers’ medal:

Brahms Symphony #1

Usually I listen to podcasts or audiobooks on my walk to and from work each day. Today I decided to do something different and listen to music. I have been thinking for a long time that I really ought to listen to classical music more (I was brought up on classical music but have hardly listened to any in the last 25-30 years). Over recent days I have had a few moments when snippets of music from Brahms symphonies have popped into my head and so it seemed logical to start my walking listening with Brahms Symphony #1 in C minor. I listened via Spotify and chose this version by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bernard Haitink:

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I very much enjoyed my listening. The Brahms symphonies have always been particular favorites of mine – a great mixture of grandeur, soaring themes playful interaction between different motifs and parts of the orchestra. Music seems to me to be something close to magic. It is not at all obvious to me what it is, beyond a collection of sounds, and how it can affect us so much. It is like there is some deeper truth going on behind the scenes that we can barely glimpse but which we know is there.

As I hope this will be the start of a significant amount of deliberate music listening I have decided to add a new list to this website to join my existing lists of books read, films watched, races run and football grounds visited. I don’t intended to record everything I listen to but I will try to note the music I have listened to deliberately and with full focus (so not background listening).

Watching the waters go by

On Sunday we took a walk from Long Ash near Horrabridge down to Double Waters – the aptly named confluence of the Rivers Walkham and Tavy and then back via Grenofen Bridge. At Double Waters we stopped for a while and ate a picnic lunch sitting on a rock next to the river Walkham. It was a marvelous place to watch the waters go by and to contemplate. The waters flowed rapidly past shedding eddies, creating waves in the surface and carrying a constant stream of leaves, sometimes floating sometimes submerged, but always flashing past in an instant never to be seen again – a perfect reminder of the transient nature of existence.

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Getting unstuck

Today I decided that it is time to get moving on a few things. To help me with this I wrote out a grid on my office whiteboard with a row for each day of the week and columns for each of the projects that I wanted to make progress on. I was particularly focusing on the kind of projects which have what I call ‘bad smell’ tasks associated with them. These are tasks that have been hanging around for ages with me continually thinking that I need to get them done but making little tangible progress with them. For each project I either wrote something in the task column for each day of the week (each row), essentially planning five days of tasks in advance, or else I wrote the first task in today’s row and left the remaining rows to be filled in one-by-one as the week unfolds. The columns varied from fairly complex work projects to straightforward, sometimes repetitive, activities that I am just not getting into. For example, one column was for a project to update the School Staff Site on the Digital Learning Environment (complex, tricky) whereas another was for sorting out my alphabetically-arranged collection of research papers (easy, repetitive). Other columns were used for miscellaneous ‘home’ tasks that I have been putting off (like writing an email to a couple of old friends), updating my database of LinkedIn connections with Marine Science alumni (going back year-by-year), looking into the application process for Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and re-energising this blog (hence this post!).

A key aspect of this approach is that the entry for each task/project for each day isn’t a large job. For example, today I sorted out letters K, L and M of my research paper collection, rang up Virgin Media and cancelled my subscription to Sky Cinema, saved all of the HEA Fellowship documentation ready to read (tomorrow) and spent a bit of time brushing up on my MATLAB programming skills – to give just a few examples. Each time I completed the day’s task for a project I put a big red tick in that box.

Obviously there is nothing magical about this approach, but I think it might be helpful to deliberately set out to make a little bit of deliberate daily progress on a range of tasks in this manner. I didn’t manage to make progress on all 10 of the tasks I had listed out but I managed 8 out of 10 which isn’t too shabby and have the entries ready and waiting for tomorrow, including the two which I didn’t complete today which, I guess, ought to be my starting tasks tomorrow morning.

It will be interesting to see whether this approach proves useful in helping me to get unstuck. after just one day I feel like it might but obviously with a system that is based on making small, daily, incremental steps the time to judge will be in a few weeks’ time. Watch this space!

Around the Grounds

Recently I have been getting to watch a few more Plymouth Argyle away games and so I decided it would be nice to keep a list of when and where I have been to watch professional football matches and to watch the number of grounds gradually creep upwards. To this end I have added an ‘Around the Grounds’ page to his blog – the link appears at the top of the site alongside my other lists of books read, movies watched and races run.

Deep Work

I recently finished reading Cal Newport‘s latest book ‘Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World’. I had come across Newport’s work previously via various podcasts that I listen to and had read some of his blog posts covering the same content but I found the book to be a much more satisfying and useful experience.

Cal Newport is a professor in Computer Science at Georgetown University and so, in theory, his work should share many characteristics with mine. However, he is clearly driven to pursue his research much more than I have ever been and I guess this is why he has worked so much more fiercely to develop approaches to working that build and protect time for Deep Work (which he defines as ‘professional activities performed in a state of distraction-fee concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate’).

A central tenet of Newport’s book is that just at the time when Deep Work is becoming so necessary (and valuable) it is become increasingly rare and so those who practical the skill of Deep Work are in a fantastic position to leverage their skill to reap great rewards. Amongst the things that Newport suggests are deliberately build in time to practice Deep Work, to learn to become comfortable with boredom (and so not seek distraction so readily), to quit social media (perhaps the key source of distraction in the modern world) and to ruthlessly eliminate Shallow Work.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of reading Newport’s book was that re-energised a desire to produce the kind of outputs that would likely come from Deep Work (not necessarily research papers but anything that requires a significant amount of creation in its generation). I think I had lost that to some extent.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying out some practices inspired by the book. I have been blocking out sizeable (multi-hour) chunks of time to work on the tougher kind of problems that tend to get pushed back and in these time periods I have been stealing myself against distractions as much as I can. I have generally been trying not to fill small empty spaces of time with a circuit of website or email checking. I have culled the people and accounts that I follow on Facebook and Twitter, almost to vanishing point. I have set aside regular time each day to ruthlessly attack smaller tasks, and because of this I have felt more secure at other times thatchings are not being forgotten. So far, the results have been excellent. Not only do I feel I have worked more productively and made good progress on deeper tasks, but I have also found that I have enjoyed working this way.

There are a lot of books about ‘productivity’ out there and I have read a fair few, but I sense that Newport’s Deep Work is one that will likely make a lasting impact in my life.

Stumblings #2

Here are five more random things I thought I would write about:

1) ‘Follow Your Curiosity’
There’s a slightly odd website that I browse fairly regularly called ‘The Art of Manliness‘ which describes itself as ‘a blog about growing up well, aimed at men and their unique challenges and interests’. Some of the blog posts are interesting and fun – about fitness, personal effectiveness etc. – and some are just downright odd – like one on how to survive falling through the ice (such as might happen if you are out ice fishing on a frozen lake somewhere – as you do…). I’ve started listening to the AoM podcast and in one recent episode (AoM podcast #95 ‘Follow Your Curiosity’ with Brian Koppelman) I was struck by two particular things. First, I liked the idea that in life you should not seek to follow your passion, but, rather, you should follow your curiosity. Secondly, I liked a comment that was expressed along the line of ‘Don’t be bound by the assumptions you made yesterday. You can change them’.

2) Frank Chimero and his new newsletter
I keep track of the internet writings of a few particular creative types. In each case, at some point, I have stumbled upon something they wrote that struck a chord in my head and, as a result, added them to my list of people to keep an eye on for more snippets of interest, wisdom and inspiration. On this list is a designer called Frank Chimero. I don’t remember now what it was that he wrote to catch my eye, but since then he’s posted more material that I have enjoyed and so I have continue to follow him. Somehow I have managed to get to sign up for his new weekly email newsletter ‘Frank’s Findings’ – oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a link to this on his website but you can get to see it at tinyletter.com. It has only been running for three weeks but already there has been a great mix of quirky content that I have enjoyed browsing (and if I am honest, it helped to inspire me to start these Stumblings posts on this blog).

3) Am I a scientist?
Although I work as an academic and am, nominally, some kind of marine scientist, it is fair to say that for much of my career I have focussed almost entirely on teaching, management, student recruitment and course leadership. This has meant that the extent to which I have been involved in scientific research in my field of expertise has been pretty limited at times. Sometimes this doesn’t really bother me, but at other times it leaves me with a feeling that I am not a proper academic and don’t have any very strong link to my subject area. Things have improved a bit recently, thanks largely to prompting and support from a particular colleague. A short while back I kind of sat up one day and asked myself the question ‘Am I a scientist?’. The answer was a sort of yes and a sort of no. I ought to be and, nominally, I am, but the thought struck me that if I am actually a scientist then some days I need to go to work and just be a scientist and not try to be a scientist at the same time as being all the other things my job demands me to be. The result was the idea that I would try to have ‘science days’ when I can go to work and ignore all of the other demands on me (like emails from students, requests for help from colleagues) and just be a scientist. I tried it once and it worked brilliantly. I tried it a second time and something really urgent cropped up that wrecked my plan. I suppose the jury is out on whether this little piece of sleight of mind works or not, but I suspect it might and I am going to try to keep hold of the idea.

4) Boyhood
I went to see the film Boyhood in the summer with my younger daughter and it totally blew me away. It is the best film I have ever seen and I came out of the cinema thinking I could (and wanted to) watch it again and again. I am not going to go into detail here. I just want to report that I loved this film; I loved the message, the acting, some of the music, the idea behind it, the fact that the writer/director Richard Linklatter thinks the way he does. I loved everything about it. I mention it here because it has just come out on DVD and I watched it again. It’s still brilliant. I still love everything about it. If you haven’t seen it, get hold of a copy and watch it. If, after watching it, you say something like ‘oh but nothing happened’ (as one person I know did) then all I can say is …, well, actually I don’t think I can put what I would say to you on a public forum!

5) Kurt Wallander/Henning Mankell
I like reading crime fiction but it is quite a while since I read one of Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels. I started reading ‘The Man Who Smiled’ recently (I think this is the fourth Wallander novel) and it’s simply great. It’s so nice to slip straight back into a character and get completely hooked by a story.