ia play

A while back I read The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t

Back then I was in daily contact with someone who could have been the inspiration for Sutton’s book. Some of you will have had your ears bent about that delightful situation.

I’m far luckier in my working environment these days. My current boss and colleagues are all pretty much universally supportive, considerate and rational.

Occasionally I still encounter less pleasant folks but they are mostly at arms length which makes them far easier to deal with.  My most recent encounter sent me back to my book shelves to read Sutton’s book.

The book makes a distinction between people who demean others and people who are constructively argumentative and challenging.  Sutton describes two tests for spotting the former:

• Test One: Does the ‘target’ feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energised, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
• Test Two: Is the venom aimed at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

Sutton argues that the bullies cause obvious damage to their immediate targets but they also damage bystanders, themselves and the organisation.

There’s a good section in the book called “Teach People How to Fight”.

I’ve been struck that through bullying these individuals can control what people do but they can’t control what people keep from them. No-one is going to voluntarily help them out.  People will let them shoot themselves in the foot.

The main memory of my school’s careers advice was an interaction that went something like this:

“You appear to be rather good at science…have you thought about being a scientist? No? How about a science teacher?”

I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting that there were hundreds of thousands of jobs out there that don’t appear in Happy Families.

And the range of generic professions suggested seemed to be based on what subject you were better than your peers at. Enjoyment didn’t come into it.

I was very good at physics and I even found the lessons moderately enjoyable.  But left to my own devices, physics didn’t particularly feature in the way I spent my time (barring a bookish interest in astronomy).

I played with my dog, went swimming, spent a lot of time on the swings, read heaps on books, wrote stories, sketched, painted, cooked, drew maps of fantasy places, drew plans for imaginary buildings and gardens, and made models of buildings and towns.

That stuff made me happy (and it still sounds pretty good today).

Reading that list, it does sound like architecture (the proper kind) would have been a sensible direction. At 15 I did a stint of work experience at an architects practice and I had great fun clambering around building sites and drawing up plans.

The architect got me to draw up a plan for my dream house.  He had a look at how I was getting on and suggested I should be more ambitious because:

“this is the last chance you’ll have to design a house that you actually like”

And that was the end of my career as an architect.

At the heart of his comment was a real problem with careers advice. Even if we can direct children to learn crafts that they will enjoy that doesn’t ensure they will enjoy the day-to-day realities of their work.

I’ve been reading extracts of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy, once worked writing abstracts for an academic journal service and now runs a motorcycle repair shop. His book, which began as an article in the New Atlantis, champions the virtues of using your hands to make and repair things.

He tells some fairly depressing tales of cubicle life:

“The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever….

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this…

The good life comes in a variety of forms.”

via The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.

This rings true for people who are clearly in one camp or another, and probably explains my diary nightmare:

“There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

via Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

IAs are a bit of both, so I have a diary cluttered with lots of ‘short’ decision making meetings but I also need to carve out half day (at least) chunks so I can actually design or write stuff. The real GTD challenge for me is keeping my design work going in weeks where I only have scattered time here and there.

Later this month will be a London event I feel like I can get involved in (unlike the G20 protests…what was it they wanted again?)

Slow Down London is a ten day festival that sets out to encourage Londoners to  improve their lives by slowing down to do things well.

Also coincidently discovered Academic Earth this week, kind of Ted talks but with guaranteed PhDs. In Paul Bloom’s lecture “The Good Life” he refers to two solutions to the hedonistic treadmill: keep doing different things or just get off the treadmill.

The Slow Down folks want to get off.

1. Sleep alot
Cats enjoy just lying around. They wallow in laziness. Our two positively scorn me when I rush around getting ready for work. If sleeping is getting boring, then find an exciting new place to sleep. Grumpy Cat challenges herself to squeeze through ever tigher gaps to get into prime sleeping spots.

2. Entertainment can be cheap
Noisy Cat likes elastic bands. Alot. Shop-bought toys don’t hold his attention anywhere near as long.

3. Luxury is simple
Radiators provide cats with obvious joy. In summer sunshine does the same. Best not to discuss their feelings about warm bird guts.

4. Be cute and someone else will feed you
I’m not sure this is something you should try and emulate but both our two fuzzballs were once strays. They hit the jackpot when they sucked up to me, winning a warm house, an easily manipulated lady of the house, no kids, no dogs, and a home where alot of home butchery goes on.

They have to put up with occasional humilating fussing from the humans but mostly the cats seem to have the better deal. They even seem to love their super-cheap cat food, known in our house as kitty-crack.

“The School of Life is a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life.

We offer evening and weekend courses, holidays to unexpected locations, stigma-free psychotherapy, secular sermons, conversation meals, a floating faculty of experts and a new kind of literary consultancy service called bibliotherapy.

Our faculty is made up of some of the brightest thinkers and artists at work today. They include Alain de Botton, Geoff Dyer, Susan Elderkin, Tom Hodgkinson, Brett Khar, Robert Macfarlane and Martin Parr.

We are based in a small but spectacular shop on Marchmont Street, a thriving and bohemian part of central London. We’ve organised the shop as a chemist for the mind, a place where you can try out a variety of cultural solutions to everyday ailments. We sell books, artworks, courses, holidays and therapeutic services.”

‘A floating faculty of experts’ generates lovely images. More from The School Of Life.

Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson follows up How to be Idle with How to be Free in which he exhorts us to live simpler lives, get off the capitalist hamster wheel and indulge in a bit of anarchism. Jolly medieval peasants seem to feature a lot. As reviewers have pointed out, he does seem to forget an awful lot of the nasty bits about the medieval period.

And for Hodgkinson, governments are responsible for wars and taxes but he conveniently ignores the NHS (which is the bit that vexes me about all this self-sufficiency stuff…. I’d still quite like having highly trained medical staff around and I don’t think they want to be paid in turnips or with a nice tune on the ukelele).

I felt compelled to follow this up with Medieval Lives by Terry Jones, which evened things out a bit with a healthy dose of corruption, pestilance and violence.

This cheesecake is one of those all day baking exploits. It is very easy (apart from the flipping at the end which really requires two pairs of hands) but you have to make sponge cake, bake, mix up the cherry layer, make crumb topping, make cheese layer, put it all together, bake, bring to room temp, refridgerate for hours, flip, remove foil, eat.

I made it more complicated by using fresh cherries so there was the extra painful step of stoning cherries. It took me all day and a lovely day it was too. So what if I got nothing else done?

The resulting creation is huge and PW will be able to feed off it for days, sparing him last week’s fate of eating a whole box of muesli.

And yes, we did eat some for breakfast.

“Whenever I conduct workshops with any group, I ask people how free they feel and to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 100. The responses are usually about the same whether I am talking to people in a correctional facility or at a workplace. I have learned firsthand that some people feel free while behind bars (and use their time in a positive way), yet others feel “locked up” while living in society.”

Why Leisure Matters in a Busy World in the New York Times