some useful descriptors for SMART I came across recently
simple specific
measurable motivating
agreed achievable
relevant realistic
timebased targeted

and while I am at it,
SWOT = strengths weaknesses opportunities threats

but I'm sure I came across an alternative version with barriers ?

Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Barriers?

my limited research on google did suggest

SOAR
http://www.ncrcrd.iastate.edu/newsletter/Vol28No3-2006/SWOT-SOAR.htm

strengths opportunities aspirations results

Tags: decision making

I have now been back at work for a week.

Various things seem to be going on, not necessarily a bad thing, that is just how things are, it simply makes writing a reasonably complete blog entry more tricky!

1 reflections on what I have done and not done since I got back from holiday

One of my thoughts on returning from my holiday, was that I need to shift over the pattern of my spending. Like everyone, my income is finite, and I want my money to work for me, rather than end up working simply to pay the bills. To that end, I would like to focus my spending on capital items, such as my house, and IT equipment, and a corresponding drop in my spending on more frivolous stuff, in particular, books, magazines, newspapers, and iTunes stuff. Too early to say, but making an explicit decision to do this, and seeing it as a choice that I have made, for positive reasons, sits comfortably with me. One big thing, like the advice to recovering alcoholics, stay out of the pub, if you don't want to drink; is that I need to find stuff to do, that is not just going round shops, seeing stuff that I want to buy.

If we can also do this as a family, it will help.

This is not just a counsel of hair shirts, and lentil porridge, I am keen to buy some new computers, and stuff that really will make a difference to us, while a lot of the impulse purchasing is just nice at the time, but quick forgotten.

Truth be told, I have at least a dozen books, that I have bought, that I have not started, and I can easily enough find more podcasts, than I have time to listen to, so I am not short of reading or listening matter. In terms of entertainment, there is always outdoors stuff like walking the dog, or even bramble picking now that the season is upon us.

In terms of big spending, I think that I have probably broken the back of spending on the garden for a while, what it needs is time to grow now, and some good attention, the house will swallow up some money, but mainly maintenance style attention in due course. Internally I should finish off a wardrobe for my wife, and I would like to put in a wood burning stove, and a revamp of the kitchen would be welcome, even if it is just putting in spot lights.

Top of my thoughts at the moment though, is getting a new computer, more detail at 4 below.

2 considering my share portfolio

Another element of making my money work better for me, is to actually build up some substantial savings behind me. I have a very modest share portfolio, which I derive considerable pleasure from. I think that we all need to be part of the wider society, this takes many forms. For example we should participate in the decisions that affect us, both in the local community and more widely. Investing substantially in shares seems perfectly consistent with this. The factors of production are after all, land labour and capital, and we would be wise to participate in all of these if we can. The idea that we all need to derive all our income purely from paid employment is after all a relatively new one, and might not be one that persists. In the times of Jane Austin, many people lived of un-earned income.

Clearly I will not build up a Warren Buffet style share portfolio in the near future, but I would like to build up what I can, on the basis, that it earns me money, I enjoy it, and it provides a cushion and flexibility for me.

Accordingly I have set up a monthly direct debit for purchasing shares, and I will try and follow my judgement on this a bit more, rather than just letting things happen.

3 being sociable

Another little change in emphasis that I was keen to introduce after my holidays, was to put more emphasis into family and friends, being more proactive in keeping in touch. Actually this is one of those things that really is not a chore, it is more a case of saying to yourself, stop working so hard and enjoy yourself! As with money, my time and attention are finite, and I should consciously decide how to use them.

Accordingly had a lunch at a local restaurant with an old colleague, seeing as I am shifting office. Life has been so manic for the last year that there has been little scope for these little diversions, but they are so enjoyable, and worthwhile on all sorts of levels, that I fully intend to have more lunching !

4 considering a new computer

I had pencilled in to buy a new computer after the holiday, so it is now falling due. I have actually decided that it will be a Mac, but still to fully evolve a decision beyond that.
By process of elimination,
it will need to come in at under £1k,
the girls will get my current computer for their room, the new one will go where the current one is now
I don't have a monitor sitting around, so the mac mini is pretty pricey
I really like having a good screen size, tempted to go up to 20" from my current 17"

so that was all pointing at a new 20" imac possibly spending on some ram, and/or external hard drive for backing up

but of course the new imacs have come out, and now Leopard is due out in October.

So do I go for a new imac, with a shiny 20" screen - some folk don't like the glossy screen, and the design has not just blown me away
or do I wait till Leopard comes out

on balance tending towards waiting till Leopard comes out, but still open to alternative thoughts. I could for example be tempted by a cheap laptop which might well be the machine that I would end up using, if my wife is labouring through a mountain of college work at the main computer.

Decisions decisions.

5 work around the house

I was keen to do all sorts of things, mainly they have not been done, as between work, commuting and sundry necessaries, there is very little time left over.

Not done -
anything in the garden
sending off holiday photos to relatives

To do today -
put up new high riser bed for daughter #1

She is going to high school when school resumes, so needs somewhere to do homework, hence her bed goes up, and voila she has a desk underneath, or viola she has a string instrument underneath. Anyway I'll need to do that today.

Yesterday was largely community council stuff, meeting in the morning, and minutes and displacement activity in the afternoon.

6 changes at work

Hopefully my change in office will help, it should free up an hour of travel time per day, and as I am the worst traveller I know, this has to be good news in terms of my health and energy levels. Not only will my office be more central, handy for the galleries etc, but I no longer need to take an additional bus journey which adds to and complicates my daily commute.

Despite this I have some mixed feelings, I really like my old office, and the people I have been working with feel like friends rather than colleagues.

My stuff is all in crates, and I unpack at my new desk on Monday, but we will pop down to the old office on Friday with some bottles of wine for a celebration, I hope that our paths continue to cross, as they have all been such a pleasure and inspiration.

It is always good to work with people that believe in what they are doing, though it does make me feel the dry impatient technocrat, just wanting to get things done.

The new office looks good, and new colleagues likewise. At the moment I am looking back, thinking of old friends, and wishing they could see how well things are going now.

Tags: decision making

I know that I have already posted this week, but that was a mid-week jotting, so to keep to my usual pattern of a weekly blog ...

1 my experience with RapidWeaver
2 using GTD at work
3 making jam
4 thinking
5 anything else that occurs to me

1 my experience with RapidWeaver
over the past week I have continued to experiment with RapidWeaver and add new parts to the website. Of course, in order to add something meaningful to the website, you need to have something worth saying. Accordingly I have so far relied on existing content. My very first website was done for a college course, and was all about woodwork. I am not sure that I want to recreate it, but I would like to take some photos of the various woodwork projects that I have done, and put them onto this site with some notes about any interesting design features. I enjoy thinking about design and design solutions, and I think that I have come up with some worthwhile ideas.

It is becoming apparent to me that it is a lot more useful to spend a couple of hours working on RapidWeaver, than simply tinkering for half an hour. If you have a decent amount of time, it is possible to explore options, do a little research, and then make some decent progress. A short session, simply tends to be meaningless tweaking.

I have been using voodoopad to create my own personal wiki for various topics. I might consider either putting elements onto this website using Rapidweaver, for example I could easily enough use the blogging element to record my work in the garden.

I would appreciate a manual for the package, mostly you can get by by experimenting and tweaking, but a manual would be useful in detailing all the functionality. For example what is a permalink? That said, the vodcasts are excellent, and there are still a couple more of them that I can watch, so they might clear up some issues.

2 using GTD at work
after initial enthusiasm for GTD, truth be told, it fell by the wayside at work, through simple pressures of too much firefighting, and not enough time. Basically the section probably needs three people to run properly, and I have been trying to run it single handed. There have been, and will be a lot of changes, so a purely mechanistic project management approach would have been ineffective. The GTD lists simply ended up being lists where stuff got dumped, never to be seen again, but I was finding it difficult to actually track progress across a variety of strands. I have had to focus on the higher level work lately, so this means more strands of work, but they are slower moving, whereas the lower level work tends to be a small number of fast moving strands of work.

Well, I suppose I am split, in strategic mode, I have a lot of slow moving work strands, in operational mode, I have a few fast moving work strands.

Anyway, the pace of work has slackened off slightly, so I have tried to organise myself better. My old approach with GTD, and the one I use at home, is a single jotter, with a page per work strand, and a list of work to do on each. I have amended my work process to

• a single word file
• with a numbered list in word format
• with collapsible items
• each workstrand is a numbered item - descriptive title sorted alphabetically, so all meetings are - meeting - blogs Liaison , meeting - quarterly audit
• with actions as subtopics, next action and not much more
• with narrative as body text - for example what has this working group agreed,

this seems a useful way of killing two birds with one stone, it tracks what stage everything is at, and it gives me a ready prompt list for what to do, for example it is a single list of everything I have promised to do, so if there is a meeting coming up, it is easy enough to see what I promised to do, and what was agreed last time.

being able to collapse all, and expand all, means that I can drill down, or see all, as is most appropriate.
The ability to embed and link in documents is a little constrained, but overall this seems a pretty workable solution.
Because the listing is so useful, I tend to keep it open all the time, and add, or delete items from it constantly. This encourages me to use it, and keep it upto date.

Time will tell whether this is the solution, or merely an artifact of having slightly more time on my hands!

3 making jam
we seem to be living in a monsoon climate, so yesterday, although not without rain, was relatively speaking, a day of sun. We made the best of the day, by heading off to a local fruit farm, where they were selling off punnets of strawberries cheap. I think that with the weather they have been down on visitors, so they were grateful for people coming to take some off them off their hands. The joy and terror of soft fruits is that they go from money to mush almost immediately. I suppose we could have done a bit of fruit picking ourselves, but the weather was still pretty iffy. Anyway took a wander round the local market town, which was clean out of granulated sugar. Obviously everyone is thinking the same as us. They have a soft fruit festival next week, which might be worth a trip.

My wife has now started on the mountain of strawberries and has done three double batches of jam, making 38 jars of strawberry jam. [22lbs of jam]

Alarmingly this still leaves a not inconsiderable mountain of strawberries to process, and turn to jam. Then she will start on a few punnets of gooseberry jam that we also bought.

Of course my garden is a veritable fruit spot, with blackcurrent, rhubarb, loganberry, flowering quince, strawberry, redcurrent, blueberry, cranberry and gooseberry, though none yet in particularly large jam making quantities, also five apple trees, and one damson. Then of course there are countless herbs, with dill and fennel being particularly decorative. I am currently trying to grow wormwood from seed, so with luck I will have some wormwood bushes in due course.

I managed a quick cut of the lawn with yesterday's okay-ish weather.

Today actually looks pretty good, so I will try and do half and half, half a day in the garden, half a day tackling the various paper work that accumulates.

4 thinking
thinking can be split up into two processes
understanding - our understanding is only ever partial, simply based on a few prominent variables. That is why society's understanding seems to shift, and hindsight is always so informative. We do our best to evaluate which are the prominent variables, but we can be wrong.
decision making - which is a specific process that is worth considering in detail.

5 and this week, nothing much else occured to me as I wrote this, so here ends this blog.

Tags: gtd, webpage, decision making

Mopping up random thoughts -

Ideas Machine - despite the best of intentions, I simply cannot keep up with all the various thoughts and ideas that I have, and struggle to jot down the roughest of notes for them all. Accordingly I am now accepting, that there is an element of natural selection, and the best of my ideas will fight their way onto paper, or blog, and the weaker will perish. Fortunately there does seem to be a near infinite supply of them., and the weakest are doubtless pretty feeble.

Anyway, in an attempt to simply record some of the, a rather random entry today, which will at least mop up some ideas.

Doors can be made of anything - you tend to simply buy a wooden door, but logically, as long as the material complies with certain physical characteristics, you could use virtually anything, what about bright plastic, doors with lights in them, rubber doors, metal doors, doors made out of clothes, doors made out of chicken wire stuffed with crushed aluminium cans, etc etc.

Wall ornament, attach a wire between two points on your wall, either a firm wire that you bend to shape, so that it catches interesting shadows, and projects them on the wall, particularly powerful when you have candle light, or a taut wire, with a little buggy device that moves alone it, the crawler device is battery powered and includes flashing lights, maybe not something for your house, but worth a shot for a nightclub or coffee bar.

Getting Things Done - book and stationery package, sell the book and supporting stationery, ie filing cabinet, and dymo tape labeller together, you certainly buy more stationery after you have read the book, so worthwhile for stationers to consider selling it, or booksellers selling some stationery to support it.

Washing machine tubs - these are made of stainless steel and can be obtained from scrap yards, ideal plant containers, I like the ideal of planting up fennel or florence fennel in them. Ditto dill.

Gabions - I am keen to put some gabions in my garden, basically wire structures filled with rubble, they would however probably be the mother of all slug traps!

Save documents - why do we have to consciously save, surely the reasoning for this goes back to the computing dark ages. A computer nowadays is perfectly capable of saving every key stroke as you make it. Simply amend the programmes to work that way. Whoever is the first to do it, never lose a document again, would be hugely popular. Bill, Steve, can you sort this out please.

Explicitly examine decision making - it is useful to consciously examine how you arrive at decisions. Look at pretty much every decision, why did I decide to do this now, why not that, why this way, why not do so and so too. It quickly becomes apparent that you are superb at juggling vast numbers of variables, incomplete information and uncertainty in a very intuitive way that you simply could not programme for. In real life you do not have perfect answers, simply good enough answers, and there is always an opportunity cost, if you do this, you are not doing that, if you phone your mum, you are not washing the dishes, if you walk the dog, you are not mowing the lawn.

Start from where you are - there is no point getting guilty about where you are starting from. You have done well to get here, simply figure out the most productive way forward. A better career would probably have meant a worse social life, so where you are now is probably the best place for you to be, focus on where you want to go, and how to get there.

I joined the Civil Service to indulge my love of stationery.

People say that share investment is complicated, it is not. You only have three decisions to make
what to buy
when to buy it
when to sell it

Think about those, and think of sensible reasons, and you should do okay.

People say that prioritisation is complicated, it is not. You only have three decisions to make
what to do
when to start
when to stop

the worrying and feeling guilty about what you are not doing won’t help.

Adopting a “Getting Things Done” methodology will not increase your productivity by more than a few percentage points, but it will reduce your worry and guilt levels hugely.

We really do not need extra ways of feeling guilty about what we are not doing.

Don’t waste your money on bad tools, scratchy annoying biro, just chuck it. Get a nice pen that you enjoy using. I never even bother looking at cheap woodwork tools. If they don’t work properly, I don’t have enough time, that I can waste it using stuff that I do not enjoy using. Get a decent computer you enjoy using. Why skimp on stuff that will just depress you.

It is perfectly legitimate to do something, simply because not having it done is depressing you. Do the stuff under your nose that depresses you most.

People are phenomenal about making decisions, they do it all the time, any explicit system is pretty feeble in comparison. Trust your own judgement more, it is far better than you give it credit for.

Finally, I am writing this in Market Felt format, which just feels wonderful for jotting down rough ideas. Change your font, change your outlook on what you are writing. However just ensure that you use one that kerns properly, so you are not driving yourself mad trying to figure out whether you put in one space, no space, or two spaces.

Tags: gtd, decision making