Finite Attention Span

Contents packaged separately

I have written before about social networking and online identity and how the nature of friendship is more ambiguous and confusing these days.

In a related vein, Penelope Trunk writes about tailoring your online identity to the medium of expression. 

I get this. I can relate to it. When I used to post to the social networking site, I wrote about social things (what I'd been doing, what I was wearing, things I'd found interesting or funny, etc). For the most part, this sort of content did indeed serve to reinforce social cohesion (or to distance people who didn't share my interests, which I suppose is the corollary).

Occasionally, I would step outside that comfort-zone and write something meaty, perhaps a rant, or a bit of political commentary. Admittedly, some of those posts fell entirely flat. But in the rest, something else happened: a comments bloodbath ensued. (If you ever want to try this yourself, I suggest posting to a public forum about speed cameras. I don't think it even matters what your position is.) 

It took me a long time to realise how excruciatingly uncomfortable I was about those discussions (I'm being diplomatic here by not calling them arguments). I'm not allergic to discussion per se - but what grated was that normally this was a friendly, casual, social forum, yet when you dropped a few hot-button keywords, suddenly it was feeding time in the piranha tank. The medium was out of sync with the message, and I didn't like it at all.

There are, in point of fact, great tracts of social networking sites (including that particular site) where critical discussion flourishes, often side by side with ordinary social networking. But it didn't work for me (Evidently, because here I am, blogging my stuff out into the void. And blogging is totally a transitive verb. Hush.) Apparently, like Penelope, I prefer my world compartmentalised. 

(Afterthought: if blogs habitually permitted threaded comments, I wonder whether people would behave more like they do on social networking sites.)

Parenthood

A while back, prompted by Serious Bunny, I identified a possible direction for future research. I sat on it for a while, then discussed it with some colleagues, most of whom were hugely receptive and offered positive and constructive commentary, and one of whom actually wanted to get involved himself.

I got a little implementation done, but then, as usually happens, my idea was overshadowed by work and the usual distractions offered by life.

But after a while, empowered by GTD and a newfound identity at work, I started to get itchy again about implementing my idea. And over the course of the following couple of weeks, everything just seemed to fall into place.

I booked myself onto a workshop that told me how to apply for money, and the insubstantial mountain of unknown and threatening possibilities materialised into a surprisingly small molehill.

Then I had a conversation with a senior colleague who, to my enormous surprise, counselled me to apply for the next funding deadline.

The week of the deadline. I went to see a guy who knows about these things to discuss how I should pitch my bid. I ended up showing him my idea (not something I had planned to do), and he LOVED it. I mean, he loved it so much that he invited me to present it at a workshop next year, and he wanted to rope me into other stuff besides.

And then, the day before sitting down to write the bid, a student I didn't know (our classes are huge) came up to me and said "by the way, I just wanted to let you know that I really, really liked what you did" [the limited implementation of my idea, several weeks previously], and told me how much it had helped her.

So I sat down to write the bid. It took me four days, because for some reason I had a few thousand words that I needed to get off my chest first, about what I was going to do and why it was all going to be so brilliant. None of it even remotely fitted into the tiny 250 word summary spaces on the bidding form, but out it all came, anyway.

And then I did what all anxious would-be parents do: I waited.

A couple of months later, to my immense joy, my funding was confirmed :)

This had all happened within a really short space of time, and now, suddenly I had a baby, and it was all I could think about and just about the most exciting thing ever. My baby. I wrote it. Me.

Except that, once the initial endorphin-rush fades, it's terrifying! There's someone lurking around every corner, waiting to steal my baby. Don't look at me like that; you know they're out there. I live in fear that someone's going to gazump me before I can publish.

I'm a nervous wreck. Note to self: don't have kids.

Relatively healthy chocolate orange cake

I've recently subscribed to the RSS feed for Fat Free Vegan, which has glorious photography and achievable but interesting recipes that I might not otherwise ever try. I am not vegan, by the way — the closest description would probably be pescetarian. But most of the food I cook and eat is vegetarian, and a lot of that in turn is vegan.

Full disclosure: I only found the blog by chance, and I can't even remember what I was looking for when I got there. But there I was, browsing the most popular recipes, when I was hit right between the eyes by Susan's chocolate orange cake.

O.M.G: fat-free chocolate cake. Sweet tooth nirvana.

But even then, I wasn't satisfied — I am, evidently, very hard to please. Serious Bunny and I generally stick to a low g.i. diet; more about that another time. So I made some modifications ...

Instead of a 50/50 mix of unbleached and whole wheat flour, I used all spelt flour.
I substituted Splenda for the sugar.
I substituted our usual dairy fat-free yoghurt for the soy yoghurt, since that's what we had in the house ;)

For the chocolate and orange icing, I made a 60/40 mix of Splenda and cornflour instead of using powdered sugar. Since there isn't all that much powdered sugar in the icing, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I figured, hell, let's make this as low-g.i. as possible. It actually worked out pretty well: the orange icing dried a little powdery in a couple of places, and it didn't have that nice glazed look that real icing has, but it didn't look half bad, either.

And as for the proof of the pudding being in the eating ... it tasted really good! (despite my having put too much salt in: I only made half the quantity of batter but for some reason forgot to divide by two for the salt. However, 1 tsp struck me as an awful lot of salt, so I went a bit light on that. Good job). Serious Bunny, for whom I have not cooked many cakes, was impressed.

(As an aside, this was my first time using Splenda - previously we've used Canderel, but I noticed some Splenda in the shop the other day and thought I'd give it a go. Good thing: being made of sucralose, it's much more robust to the effects of baking than Canderel (made with aspartame), which tends to lose a lot of its sweetness when cooked. So I will be buying Splenda again.)

It was a good day. Kudos and thanks to Susan over at Fat Free Vegan for the recipe! And if you think this cake doesn't sound exotic enough for you, check out this prizewinning chocolate cake, made with spinach and zucchini :)

Sliding down the intimacy gradient with my pants on fire

The Guardian recently published a provocative (swingeing, even) profile of the politics of the owners of FaceBook.

I don't want to join it. Most of my friends are on it, but I have other ways of staying in touch with the ones who matter.

I've been playing the "online identity" game since about 1993, in a variety of guises and via a variety of online media. But it's only now that I am starting to understand why it's not really what I want or need.

I am very lucky - my early years of being online and being naive about leaving an identity trail took place in much gentler times, such that if you google either form of my name these days, you would have to have known me fifteen years ago to join the dots in order to make the connection with a hobby that might be perceived as lacking in cool (Although you only have to look at the rise of nerd chic to realise that since then, being dorky has become much more socially acceptable anyway). But still. Some of the things I did online then would almost certainly get me sacked today.

A few years ago, I set up home on a large social networking site (not Facebook), initially to keep up with a friend who blogged there - though of course, I got sucked in and started writing for myself. Looking back on my writing there, most of my posts were about "look at me! love me!". Some of them were about "help me, please?" A few were "You really should click on this link", and those were probably the only ones of real value to others. Not that being a diarist is all about value for others - a lot of it is surely about working through a thing to acquire perspective - but so much of what passes for communication on social networking sites seems to be about feeding one's own ego.

I don't regret my time spent on that site, because I met many interesting people -though retained relatively few - some of whom have become good friends. I learned lots by watching other people interacting in a relatively safe space. In particular, I learned quite a lot (mostly constructive) about arguing - I don't function all that well in verbal debates, but when I get to see them written down, I can appreciate the subtleties a lot better, and I learn more.

So nothing about my social networking existence was bad, excluding a couple of fallings-out with people to whom I was not close anyway (though it's amazing how much online drama can feel like real drama). The most you could say is that I probably sacrificed quality for quantity: keeping up with over 100 people, most of whom you don't know at all except for what they write about, can be pretty superficial.

And then work got very busy, and I started writing fiction in the cracks of spare time left over (though that's a story for another day), and I just sort of stopped existing in the social networking sense. I hung on, by other means, to those friends who were important to me, and let the rest slide.

And that was fine.

I don't really feel bad about it at all, except perhaps the vague guilt of "have I left behind people who mind being left behind?" But then, if it was such a one-way street, it probably wasn't really friendship anyway.

And that's the thing - it's getting increasingly hard to tell who one's friends are, because, in the realm of social networking sites, friendship is achieved at the click of a button. We bypass the natural, slow progression of the intimacy gradient. And that's incredibly dissatisfying and somehow false, because friendship, real friendship, is something that builds up over time, rather than achieving perfect, warts-and-all communion with a stranger's life for several months, before falling out with them over some minor but intractable point of contention. We are making more friends, but conflating the amount of 'face time' with intimacy; and then, when things go wrong, there isn't sufficient depth, that mutual bond of shared experience, to hold things together.

I'm not against this kind of networking on principle: actually, I wonder if having more of this kind of interaction might foster a degree of emotional literacy that might otherwise have been lacking in at least some people's lives (mine included). But I think I've decided that, right now, at least, it's not for me.

Postscript: I can't quite say why I wanted to do this, but a few weeks ago, I went back and locked all my old journal posts so that only I could read them. Not sure what that's about, but it feels good.

Extenuating circumstances

The other week there, we had our twice-yearly review of students' special circumstances, prior to the exam boards.

Everyone always says that students have it easy, that they don't know they're born and it wasn't like this when I was at uni and all the rest of it. And generally, I'd say that they do have a much easier time of it now in some ways - the university's systems are made very clear and transparent to them, much more so than they were to me. Coursework now counts for a substantial chunk of most degree courses, which it didn't on mine - we had to complete and write up a final-year project, then the rest was dealt with in eight three-hour exams taken over 11 days! (I therefore tend towards the unsympathetic when students complain that they have four three-hour exams over three weeks).

But my god, I don't remember as an undergraduate hearing about the sorts of problems that I encounter when reviewing our students' situations. Aside from the usual illnesses and breakages and unfortunate circumstances involving lost luggage or cars that had course notes in them, there are some desperate circumstances. Caring for sick parents. Divorce. Pregnancy and miscarriage. Suicide attempts (witnessed and actual). Murder (witnessed and actual). Family affected by shootings. Breast cancer and mastectomy. Chemotherapy. Domestic violence (as witness and victim). Forced house arrest and arranged marriage abroad.

My students are almost uniformly lovely, and to know that such terrible things are happening to them is absolutely heartbreaking.

Customer service: you're doing it wrong

Item A:

We stopped into a service station on the way home from visiting friends. It was cold and we just wanted something to drink, so we went into the Little Chef (not, admittedly, a gastronomic centre). They were advertising Aero hot chocolate - thick, bubbly and something else [probably indulgent], went the copy. We ordered one each.

When the hot chocolate arrived, it was watery, thin, not all that hot, and had lumps of powder still undissolved. It tasted lousy - weak and watery, a million miles away from the lush drink advertised on the menu. Serious Bunny and I looked at each other.

"I don't want to drink this."

"I don't either."

"I'm going to send it back. Do you mind?" Because getting into this kind of conversation, in Britain, can be non-trivial.

"No, go on."

Five minutes later we finally managed to attract some attention.

"Excuse me - this isn't as advertised. It's really weak and there are lumps in it and it tastes awful."

"Uh ... The machine's broken, so we have to do it by hand."

"Well ... it needs about this much more powder in it."

"I can go and put some more in it if you like."

"No thanks. Really. We'll leave it."

Item B

Wales, two or three years ago. We've stopped, with the parents in tow, to look around. Llangollen's a little town and the parking costs about 45 pence for two hours. Bless :)

We decide to get a coffee. We find a cafe that advertises various coffees, including lattes, which cost about £2.50. That's about the outside of what I'll pay for a latte, but okay - screw it, we're on holiday, you know?

When the lattes arrive, they have evidently been mixed straight from a packet with water from the kettle. What's wrong with this picture?

We just don't get it in this country. If you can't deliver the product you're advertising, you shouldn't be selling it. You certainly shouldn't be selling a vastly inferior product for the same amount of money. And I'm sure it's our fault, too - there's something in the British psyche that's just allergic to complaining. But complain we must, because being ripped off is not okay. You only have to travel to, say, North America, to work out that good customer service is not rocket science.

Item C

When I am running the country, it will be mandatory for anyone working in a supermarket to be trained in how to pack customers' bags if this is something their job requires them to do.

Putting all the really heavy items into one bag and all the lightweight items into another = FAIL. Putting objects in with no regard for what's squashable/stackable/fragile = FAIL. Failing to consider item size when packing the bag = FAIL.

I googled to try and find interesting (and preferably factual) things relating to the crapness of British customer service, but the internets failed me. I should probably complain to someone :P

Getting Things Done - a tale of two systems

A couple of months ago, a friend very kindly lent me Getting Things Done. I read the first third of it - the theoretical part - on the way to work one morning and, serendipitously, had a free day at work in which to implement it. (This almost never happens.) I didn't follow it to the letter, because I've been doing my job for five years now and I know what works and what doesn't. But I held onto the key principles.

After I'd created my GTD system, I read the rest of the book, including the second part, about implementation, and discovered that I'd more or less got it right. This is testament to the brilliant clarity of the theoretical section of the book, and the simple workflow diagram that encapsulates the whole system - if we lived in a just universe, at this point I'd have had to re-do everything.

Since then, I've had an extraordinarily busy time at work, and whatever my good intentions, I'm not sure that I would have sustained my momentum were it not for GTD. I used to drop the ball occasionally; although nearly everything was recoverable, it probably made me less efficient; and I'm pretty certain it made me look less efficient. Now I have a clear list of things that are to be done, and another list of things that I am waiting to hear back from people about. So far, very little has fallen through the cracks, and the confidence that I get from this alone is worth ten or even a hundred times the price of the book. It's surprisingly empowering to be the person who has the time and wherewithal to chase things up, rather than being chased oneself.

While GTD has self-evidently succeeded for me at work, I'm struggling to implement it at home. I have a home filing system, and aside from a "to be filed" pile that I have at least stopped adding to, it's in good shape. But I find that when I come home, I don't want to look at a list of stuff to do. I want to dork out online or browse and reply to email. I'm not really using my "Next Actions" or "Waiting For" email folders and I'm still living out of my inbox (though it's much, much smaller than it used to be).

The message is clear: home is somewhere I want to slack, not be productive.

(I have elected not to integrate my GTD systems for home and work. There are various reasons for this, most of which involve technology, but some of it is simply about not wanting to look at work-related things when I am not working. On days when I work from home, I use the work stuff.)

What I do achieve at home is largely a product of two sentences in the book (I paraphrase):

There is no point in having the same thought more than once, unless you really like having that thought

and

If something is going to take less than two minutes and needs doing, just do it.

These were the things that stuck with me on my first readthrough of the book, and to me, they are gold-dust (though I suspect that everyone takes away something different, depending on their preoccupations and needs). The flat is much tidier these days, which leaves my brain feeling a lot more peaceful.

That, in essence, is the point of the book. Empty your head of the noisy stuff and concentrate on being happy. It works - and I challenge you to get better value from a tenner.

Before asking people for something, ask yourself if you have met their needs.

Today I was listening to a colleague discussing some lessons he'd learned from research. The one that jumped out at me was a meeting with some college instructors, at which lunch had been provided to sweeten their involvement in a project - but the food provided hadn't been great (greasy junk food, basically - crisps and sausage rolls and so on) and had cost £200. The people who actually attended the lunch had thought it was a terrible waste of limited resources - they would have been much happier if that money could have been spent on a pub lunch for each of them (and then they could have eaten something they actually wanted). And it set my colleague's project back by the simple act of eroding goodwill. He said that it actually put that part of the project behind, relative to project partners at other institutions.

And it's easy to cast judgement on a bunch of teachers for being picky about what they got given to eat (because hey, at least it was free, right?), but actually, it does matter a great deal to people that you spend money appropriately; resources in education are notoriously scarce. And regardless of your budget, it's important to show colleagues that the work you're doing together - their involvement and their opinions - matters to you.

This made me think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The meeting my colleague described was pitched somewhere towards the top of Maslow's pyramid: it dealt with some higher-order, conceptual issues which assumed that people's needs were being met at the lower levels. But if you don't address the the fundamentals - the things that form the base of the pyramid - then what people will remember about a meeting or workshop is the stuff that impacts on those basics: that they were freezing cold or the food was awful or that something was wasteful or inappropriate. You need to satisfy all those needs at the base of the pyramid before you can start addressing the higher issues and still expect to have people's complete attention and respect.

Now that you have me here, what are you going to do with me?

I don't have a manifesto.

I was going to begin by saying that this blog is anti-manifesto, but maybe that's pushing it too far. I believe in, among other things, correct grammar and punctuation, free speech, paying more taxes to support welfare, a united Europe, not eating meat, kindness to all things, really good coffee, self-determination and self-improvement. But this blog isn't going to be about any one of those things in particular.

Rather, I want this to be a space in which I can react to my environment. I figure this is going to be one part knee-jerk response to one part considered essay, but let's see how that works out. Of course, since "my environment" includes the internet, there's no excuse for lacking in content or substance.