I think I now understand – and understanding is a significant step forward in my journey with tension headaches.
When I started this journey I thought I was getting migraines, only to discover that what I was experiencing was not a migraine but the result of the muscles around my head going into spasm and forming a vice around my cranium.
As seems to be the case with modern medicine, the answer that I was given was medication – muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatory.
While this medication put my headaches under control they didn’t feel like a permanent solution. Anti-infammatory drugs aren’t ones you really want to plan on taking for the rest of your life. So another visit to the doctor told me that my problem was exacerbated by my poor posture and the effect that this was having on my shoulder and neck muscles.
As a veteran keyboard user I knew the problems that sitting at a desk caused, but I’d taken more than 20 years getting to this position and getting out of it wasn’t going to happen just because a GP has given me a lecture. I knew that I needed some help in retraining my body, but the GP didn’t think that physiotherapy was the answer, but didn’t have a better answer either.
So, against the GPs advice, I decided to pay for some physiotherapy and see how we got on.
After a few weeks of physiotherapy I now understand what it is that causes my headaches (and neck and should pain) and how to avoid it. I don’t think I knew what a good posture felt like before starting out on the physiotherapy and while I don’t always manage to maintain it, I now know when I’m mistreating my back, shoulder and neck. I also know what exercises improve my posture and strengthen the muscles that I am under utilising- and relax the ones that I am over utilising.
Some of the exercises are quite comical and I do feel a bit ridiculous when laid on the floor with my face in the carpet and my arms hanging off the ground to the side (strengthening my middle back muscles). Some of the neck stretching exercises look more gruesome than they feel.
The aim has been to retrain my body to do the right thing and I feel like I’m getting there now. I no longer take the anti-inflammatory medication on a daily basis and feel better for it.
It was a 20 year journey getting into the problem and I don’t expect the journey out to take a few days so I need to keep working at it.
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:
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:
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:
It’s interesting what our response to some questions are.
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.
I’m a techie I don’t mind admitting it – actually I’m quite proud of it. I can do things with technology that others marvel at.
I was recently in a meeting when someone who didn’t know I was in the room made the statement “well it must be a technical discussion you are wanting to have if you’ve invited Graham along”. There was a little bit of embarrassment when it was pointed out who the person sitting opposite them was. This person doesn’t know me so they were making a judgement on the basis of my role, but the role clearly said to them techie and the inference was not business.
There have been other situations myself and others have been in which highlight the same issue. Someone I speak to quite regularly was saying recently that one of the comments made to them in a recent interview was that they were “too techie”. Again the inference was not business.
The job that I do today requires a good deal of technical ability, but its primary purpose isn’t a technology leadership one, it’s a business understanding one. The premise of my role is that the gulf between business people and techie people is so great that they require an interpreter. In other words techies don’t speak the same language as business people.
Because my background is primarily a techie one I tend to be treated with a warm welcome by the technologists, but treated with a certain amount of suspicion by the business people.
It’s almost like some people think there is a one dimensional sliding scale with highly technical on one side and high business on the other. As a techie am I really incapable of thinking as a business person? Perhaps this goes all the way back to school where people were encouraged into the arts bucket or the sciences bucket.
Are these just age old prejudices with a new dimension? Or, do these definitions reveal some real issues? I’m not sure. What I do know, though, is that the need for edge people, or multi-dimensional people is growing all of the time, the innovators, the people who work beyond the process.
One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the brain so much was the realisation that it will be the people who have a strong right-side of the brain who will be the most valuable ones in the coming economy.
Right-brained people are strongly creative, something that transcends arts, sciences, technical or even business. I think that is will be this characteristic that will become dominant, not the field in which you choose to exercise your creativity; Einstein was creative, Monet was creative, Tim Berners-Lee is creative, Warren Buffett is creative. Or perhaps you don’t like the word creative because that sounds too arty, then how about word innovative; Malcolm Gladwell is innovative, Ted Hoff is innovative, Stephen Hawkins is innovative, Yann Arthus-Bertrand is innovative.
Anyway enough of my musing it’s time for me to go and be innovative in a cross functional, multi dimensional, business focussed, technically challenging, problem solving, situation.
One of the lessons that I am learning in my meaningful conversations is that the obvious isn’t perhaps so obvious.
Today I noticed these instructions on my deodorant. They’re obvious – aren’t they?
We all have a wealth of experience that defines how we see things, influences how we interact with things, defines our perspective and gives us the framework for what we regard as obvious.
I’ve been using spray cans most of my life, so of course it’s obvious what to do.
I’ve been driving in the UK for nearly 20 years, so of course it’s obvious that I drive on the left.
I’ve been to airports hundreds of times, so of course it’s obvious what I can, and can’t put into my hand luggage.
The amazing thing is, there are hundreds of things that are obvious to me, that are not obvious to anyone other than me.
Having discussions with people changes my framework of obviousness. It sometimes extends the things I regard as obvious and sometimes it makes me realise that I’m one of the few people that think something is obvious.
It’s only common sense after all 
.
I am struggling with a system today that is going slow. It’s nothing unusual this particular system is always slow, or at least I perceive it to be slow. In other words, it works slower that I would like it to – but worse than that, it works slower than my attention can sustain.
I’m now multi-tasking – I’m writing this in the seconds in-between this particular system responding. I’ve lost attention on my primary task, which is to interact with the slow system and I’ve moved onto a secondary task; writing this blog.
Everyone should know that multi-tasking is not the most efficient way of doing anything, but I’ve fallen into the trap and my attention has now completely gone. It happens like this:
This type of attention conflict is completely destructive to my productivity. I don’t get any of the tasks done and feel guilty for loosing focus on the things I should be doing. In many ways it would be better that the system was unavailable than running slow. I’d rather focus on one thing and be completing that than trying to do multiple things poorly but it’s just not engaging enough to keep my attention.
Working, as I do, in IT service design and management most customers primarily contract in terms of availability. The system must be available all of the time. If the impact of performance can be even more damaging than lack of availability – perhaps we are measuring the wrong thing?
Perhaps I just have a very short attention?
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin
