Graham Chastney

If this sounds a bit rambling and off-message then it probably is, but I’m experimenting.

One of the reasons I write a blog is that I find it cathartic – it helps me to construct my thoughts, analyse them and then, if necessary, spit them out. In writing this I am expressing a set of feeling, the feelings don’t necessarily relate to real issue or problems – feelings are like that.

Today I am wound up. This particular thing has been winding me up for weeks and this thing is a document.

This document is a long very document -  160 pages and 31,000 words at the last count., that’s almost half way to being a novel. I’m currently responsible for the editing of this document.

The problem with this document is that it can never be finished. As soon as we get one version signed off there’s another set of updates ready to be incorporated. Some might regard a document like this as a good thing – I struggle to see it that way.

Every time I open it up for updates, there are a set of people ready and able to “help” us update it. I am inundated with a thousand opinions some of them specific and useful, many of them are just opinion. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting in the stocks with people to throwing rotten vegetables at me.

Although it takes a lot of words to say it, this document, in my opinion, has a very simple scope. Within this scope, it has a purpose, it’s going to make a difference to something. I struggle, massively, with doing things for which I can’t see any viable outcome. What’s the point in doing something if it’s not going to result in anything.

Having written the document I want to get on with the outcomes, I want to do something with the information that the document makes available. I want to put the document to bed and then go and build something, fix something, create something. But that’s not how it seems, I’m here, updating this document, again with few perceptible outcomes from the last time. I feel like a train on a track with no station in sight.

But why do I care? I’m being paid aren’t I? It’s just part of the job isn’t it? Someone has to do it don’t they? And that’s when the non-conformist in me comes out.  None of these answers have ever been sufficient, and why should they be. If something isn’t fulfilling its purpose – why bother doing it. We already do too many things in life because they give us “a tick in a box” so I’m not sure why I should do any more of them.

As I said at the beginning, I’m just expressing feelings here, and those feelings don’t necessarily reflect upon the reality of the situation. What I need to do is to turn these feelings around and writing them down helps to expose them to the cold light of day.

In that cold light of day I can realise things about this situation:

• I can realise that I don’t need to carry this document on my own, I don’t think I’ve actually been asked to, and even if I have, I shouldn’t.
• I can see that I need to set myself a target with a purpose attached to it. This target can give me something to aim for and give the revisions to the document something to live for.
• I can start to assess the opinions of others as another set of opportunities to be filled. If people want this document to do something different to what it’s designed for it’s because they have a need for that kind of a document.

It’s necessary to change the way I see the situation before I can make a change to the situation. That’s the point of writing it down, changing me so I can see things differently and make the necessary changes.

Discipline is such a key issue for productive work especially when there are so many distractions around. Let me give you my ultimate time wasting recipe:

1. Check your corporate email for unread items.
2. Read the first two emails by which time you should be bored
3. Wonder what is happening on Twitter.
4. Browse through the fresh set of updated. It is essential that you are following enough people to guarantee a fresh crop of tweets every time you look. This is easily done by following a number of news accounts.
5. Once bored of tweets skip over to your RSS reader to see if there are any updates. Like twitter it is vital to be following a whole stack of feeds. The syndicated and group blogs are the best for guaranteeing updates on every visit, LifeHacker and BetaNews are good examples.
6. Read posts until bored. The key is to never get to the end of your unread list ensuring that return visits result in further reading.
7. Continuing the blog theme jump over to your WordPress Dashboard. This is the first of many information sources that you are convinced give you important information each time you visit.
8. From your WordPress dashboard take particular interest in one or maybe two vital statistics justifying your next stop – Google Analytics.
9. Google Analytics will highlight some interesting searches that have reached your site – it always does. Justify to yourself a quick trip to Google Webmaster Tools for further information.
10. If there is any danger of you getting to the end of the statistics before you have successfully wasted enough of your valuable time you can also skip through the Bing Webmaster Tools and the Yahoo Webmaster tools. Three search tools are normally enough, but if you want to waste even more time other search engines are available.
11. Your next stop is your personal email – again, read a few posts but never get to the end of the unread items available.
12. Hopefully your personal email will highlight some justification for going to Facebook, but if it doesn’t just go there anyway. Don’t waste your time on applications or silly games – that would be a real waste of time. Spend time reading status updates and looking at photos of people you have never met.
13. It’s time now to graze through some of the corporate tools that you have available. Portals and dashboards provide more information than you could possible consume. This can soon be justified as work even when you are only mooching around. Justifiable time wasting is the best form.
14. The next activity that is vital to your time wasting credibility is your ability to browse around new sites. The BBC is particularly good for this there are endless possibilities in news and Sport.

If you are in danger of having to do some real work, by getting to the end of the list, you can, at any point, return to the top of the list.

If you have followed the guidelines correctly there should always be something to do.

Also, remember that you can carry on these same distractions when away from the office by use of a SmartPhone or other such device. Location should not be an inhibitor.

Following this recipe should ensure that you always look busy and avoid unnecessary activities that may result in something being produced. Alternatively, you could just redefine these activities as work and then you will have completed everything there is to complete.

Working through this kind of distraction reaction process is what I’m sure many people do and will do, but it isn’t good for you, or for your brain. Being able to cope with the lure of these attention giving sirens will be a defining feature of the future workforce.

Interruptions have a massive negative impact on productivity. You might think that you can easily switch from one place to another but you can’t. every time you switch you have a period of time when you are not being productive at doing what you are doing.

With this in mind there are many time management and activity management philosophies around that help you to focus on the important things and to drive out the interruptions. Most of the time I would agree, but today is one of those days that is an exception.

Today the important things are the interruptions. There are a set of people who are working away on things and they need help doing it, they don’t know when they need help so they need to be able to interrupt.

That leaves me with the challenge of staying productive between the interrupts.

I don’t want to start anything significant because I’ll just spend all day being frustrated.

I can’t sit around waiting for the interrupts because I’m likely to fall asleep and then miss the interrupts.

I don’t want to go and look for the interruptions because that would interrupt the people doing the productive work.

So what do i do?

It’s a dilemma.

I’m up-to-date on my email.

I’m up-to-date on my feeds.

I’m up-to-date on my twitter.

I almost wish that i was behind on my administration.

Interesting questions, interesting responses:

• £50 today or £60 in a month?
• £350 in 12 months or £360 pounds in 13 months?

It’s interesting what our response to some questions are.

• You have a ticket to the theatre which cost £20 and a £20 note in your pocket. When you get to the theatre you have lost the ticket. Do you buy another ticket?
• You have two £20 notes in your pocket. When you get tot the theatre you have lost one of the £20 notes. Do you buy a ticket to the theatre?

Your first reaction to these questions and your considered response might be significantly different. The problem with estimating the value is that we use very strange (complex) logic.

I spend a lot of time helping people to change there business by bringing extra value to the way that they do things. These changes normally involve IT, because that’s my area of expertise, but not always. Understanding and agreeing what the value of any particular activity is can be quite a stressful exercise, particularly when it comes to the decision to spend money.

The values that people place on things has always fascinated and frustrated me. Surprisingly few decisions are based cold hard economics. The value is often much more subjective, or so it appears to me. Perhaps I’m just not seeing the complicated value judgement that they are making. Perhaps my value judgement is missing important elements.

I don’t have any answers here, I’m just making an observation, but I’m not the only one that sees the paradox. Dan Gilbert does a much better job of explaining than I do.

If you ever want to extend your thinking TED is a really good place to start.

How inquisitive are you?

Today’s quote to think about: “If you tell the average man there are 278,805,732,168 stars in the universe, he will believe you. But if a sign says Wet Paint he has to make a personnel investigation.”

I used to work in a restaurant and the same thing applied, if you told people the plates were hot, they would always have to touch them just to find out.

But how often are we completely the other way around? How many times do we take something as fact just because the person telling us spoke with authority? I have played a game a few times where I have embellished a truth and told it to a few people as fact. I’ve then sat back and waited to see how long it would take for the embellishment to come back to me. It normally only take a few days.

I’ve been in many problem solving situations where we would have fixed things a lot earlier if we hadn’t taken as fact the things that people told us.