Game of Thrones (at last!)

Finally, only a few years after the rest of the world began to get over-excited about it, I have started watching the HBO TV series ‘Game of Thrones’, based on the books of George R.R. Martin. The first GoT book was published in 1996 and the HBO TV adaptation began airing in 2011 so I am only about 6 years behind the times. I think the first time anyone enthused about GoT to me was in 2013 when a friend visiting from Australia said how much he liked it. Since then both of my daughters have become utterly obsessed with it and are currently watching the latest series (7) as it comes out.

We started watching Series 1 together last week and have already got through to Episode 8 (of 10). It’s obviously very derivative – lots of the same ideas and themes pop up, for example, in Tolkien’s work, and there are many allusions to British history (Wars of the Roses) and geography (wild people north of The Wall) – but it is still fun. I am not a fan of the gore/violence although so far the worst scenes have been pretty short-lived and the nudity/sex is obviously gratuitous and serves little purpose in the story, but the programme isn’t actually as bad in either of these respects as I was expecting (perhaps it gets ‘worse’ over time).

With two episodes of Series 1 to go it is pretty obvious that there is a lot of fighting to pack in and I am expecting multiple key (up to now) characters to meet a sticky end before Episode 10 concludes. One of the tricky things is that there are quite a few things I want to look up in relation to the actors and influences but I don’t dare to do so because doubtless this will give away all kinds of plot details that I don’t need to know yet. I suspect that it will be necessary to watch Episode 10 immediately after watching Episode 9 – there is bound to be a dramatic cliff-hanger – so I think I am in for a GoT watching mini-binge tonight…

Incremental Progress

In the last few days I have been exploring the power of making incremental progress. Last week, I identified several long-term projects or areas of activity that I wanted to complete and, since then, I have set about making one small piece of progress on each one every day. The projects include writing an entry on this blog each work day (6 in a row not including this one), progressively sorting out my office at work and completing a short set of core exercises each work day (7 in a row). Obviously I need to keep things going for longer before I can make a proper judgement about this activity and rate my success but I feel that the early signs are promising. I feel that I have already been working on these tasks long enough to begin to feel and see progress and can catch a glimpse of how things will be when I have extended my runs up into the 10s of days.

There is really something quite alluring about the idea that if I do something for, say, just 10 minutes every weekday for a year then I will have accomplished over 40 hours of activity in a year. If I consider what I could achieve if I sat down and wrote for 40+ hours or did 40+ hours of exercise or spent 40+ hours sorting out my office (of course I don’t think I will need quite that long…) then the possibilities are enormous. Obviously, there is a limit to the type of activities that can usefully be performed in this manner – if I want to write a novel then I probably need to lengthen the time spent on writing each day (but perhaps not). Nevertheless, there seems to me to be a lot to say for the idea of making slow, steady, incremental, progress. I liken it to being the tortoise racing the hare, and idea that often pops into my head when I am out on a long run. If I remember the fable correctly, in the end the tortoise wins the race…

Come Rain or Shine

Last Wednesday I went out for a run in the rain. It was heavy rain and by the end of the run (just 30 minutes) I was throughly soaked. Yesterday morning I went out in the rain again, this time to complete just over 14 miles, and although it wasn’t raining for the whole duration I still had to suffer a good amount of the wet stuff. To make matters worse it was towards the end of the run (last 3 miles or so) when I was tired and heading uphill towards home. I also went out for a short walk yesterday evening, just to a local shop and again it was raining and I got wet.

I am trying to avoid using rainy weather as an excuse not to get out and about and especially as an excuse not to run. I want to expose myself to inclement conditions more so that they ease to be an obstacle to action. I often think that I have been incredibly lucky with the weather for all of the significant race events I have done and I know that at some point this luck will break and I will be faced with running a marathon or some such in the rain. I have decided I should prepare for that eventuality.

So, from now on I am trying to adopt the frame of mind that if I have planned to run at a particular time and the weather is poor I will still run. Moreover, I am going to try not to take too much account of the forecast weather when I plan my runs for the upcoming weeks. It can’t be a bad thing to broaden my comfort zone and after all, it’s only water.

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:

IMG_0163

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.

IMG_2990

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!