Lovely article from Havi this week, one of my favourites ever from her:

Some useful guiding principles for the Book of You.

People vary.

That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.

All the biggified people on the internet shouting about how you have to write in the morning and you can’t have more than three projects and how you always have to do X to get Y?

They’re not talking about you. They’re talking about themselves. They are sharing some of the information from that big Book of Them.

In fact, lots of things vary.

Just because something is true for you right now doesn’t mean it’s always going to be true for you.

The Book of You isn’t about absolutes. It’s about taking various factors into consideration, and figuring out what you can extrapolate from what you know. And then testing.

I was especially tickled at the “That’s why it’s the Book of You and not the Book of Humanity In General That Is Also Known As The Book of All Things For All People At All Time.” Hahahaha!

Received wisdom that isn’t very wise

This has been a major theme of my explorations for the last ten years or so: disentangling what actually works for me from what I once nicknamed “Received wisdom that isn’t very wise”.

It seems to me that a lot of people don’t realise what Havi so succinctly points out. They talk, and write articles and books, as though everyone is much more similar to them than is actually the case. Sometimes they get so evangelical about their wonderful methods, you could accidentally start to wonder if you’re wrong for not being able to succeed along that route.

So then as a listener/reader, you have to do your own filtering. Does this fit? Does that fit? Does this method help, or am I in fact hindering myself by trying to do things that way when I’m not wired like that person is?

Books

A few books which I’ve found useful on the quest:

All recommended by me :-)

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After coming up with the gears metaphor, I thought I’d sketch out what the gears might be for me. I imagined them something like this:

0 Not moving. I could have called this “neutral”, but somehow that seems like the wrong word. Stuck isn’t neutral. Exhaustion isn’t neutral. Moping around being mopey and miserable isn’t neutral.

On the other hand it could be a kind of relaxed resting peacefulness - but in that case, I’m probably not stuck, and some other metaphor would apply.

1 Minimal engagement. Playing computer games or just slightly pottering about e.g. tidying up. If this is the aftermath of some intensity, then I might be “processing” in the background. (Simple computer games can be a form of meditation, I think - they occupy the surface of your mind while things happen under the surface.) If pottering about, still feeling like each new thing is a re-start - not really any momentum from one task to the next.

2 Beginning to build momentum. Tidying could still be in here as long as it’s just putting things away that have an obvious home, or straightening up. Sewing or making badges as long as the process doesn’t really take any thought. Tinkering with writing (though not the process of deciding that something’s finished - I need to be more awake for that and it would be more like 4th gear).

3 Ordinary sized tasks. Returning emails, going to the library, sorting possessions, putting a wash in. Maybe some DIY that only requires repeating what I’ve already done, with no original thought.

4 Thought and organisation. Things that require more thought and a certain amount of awakeness. E.g. interesting DIY, planning. If I’ve had a day in 4th gear, I’ll almost certainly finish the day with a nice sense of satisfaction about what I’ve accomplished - which often involves some kind of tangible result in the 3d world.

5 Tricky interface stuff. Anything involving making arrangements with people I don’t know, especially if it involves some kind of time pressure and especially if I have to actually talk to them. I often have a sense of needing to “gear up” & “get my head in order” to do that kind of thing, but sometimes if I “get on a roll” it seems easy.

6 Immersion time. Song recording, coding, or any other complex task like accounts. This is often stuff that takes a while to reload into the brain, so that fitting it into “too small” chunks of time is very inefficient, and to me tends to feel intuitively like “there’s not even any point starting”. (And “too small” varies with the task - anything from half an hour to a day might feel that way.) Often, though not always, it’s the kind of thing I can “get lost in” so that time disappears.

This 6th level isn’t necessarily any harder than 5th gear; it’s the “chunk size” which distinguishes it. It needs to be preceded by ensuring that if I do give it that much time, nothing’s going to go wrong while I wasn’t paying attention to all the other stuff. Perhaps it’s more of a turbo button than another gear.

Writing

One thing which surprised me in a good way when I thought this through is the fact that tinkering with writing comes out so low-gear for me. I lucked into a good “effort-to-satisfaction ratio” there. The point is that despite being quite easy to do, it’s also quite satisfying to me, which helps me to move up through gears. I thought “Must remember that”.

This insight was definitely part of the source of the new era of “more than one blog post a month” :-) I realised that as a rule of thumb, “if in doubt, do some writing” had a lot going for it. And around Christmas and New Year I did have a successful gearing-up on the writing front.

Different cars

What was interesting, though, was that after a week or two of that, I realised that (slightly contrary to my expectations) my writing momentum hadn’t transferred onto the DIY. I was just doing more and more writing!

I found that to get going on the DIY, I had to give that a separate gearing-up all its own: starting with a bit of tidying, then assembling the tools and resources I’d want, and only then actually embarking on the work itself.

Not definitive

Of course everyone’s list of gears would be different - and the above isn’t the definitive list of gears even for me, just an approximate sketch. And there are different ways to apply the metaphor - including, as I’ve said there, considering each field of endeavour as its own separate gear system.

But the basic metaphor seems to be working well for me so far. Regardless of specifics, I can still tell myself: “Don’t bother trying to talk yourself into tackling big things. And don’t sit around waiting for the desire to tackle them to return. Instead, get stuck into the little things within easy reach. And trust that in a while, when you’re more rested and have some little accomplishments to be satisfied with, the desire to tackle big things will return of its own accord.”

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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Sometimes I get into a sort of negative feedback loop like: “not accomplishing much, hence feel frustrated and incapable, hence no momentum / energy, hence not accomplishing much”. And I mope about.

Typical thoughts I might have in this state include “I ought to be more productive”, and “Look at these important things that aren’t even moving at all - aargh!”

Then by way of reaction, I might get a slightly exasperated urge to “go for the main things right now and stop faffing about”. Which, if I were to heed it, would launch me straight into the hardest tasks.

But in fact, it seems from experience that this is usually unrealistic for me, and trying to do it only leads to more stuckness. If I’m feeling stuck and low-energy and maybe a bit hopeless, what I’ve found usually works in fact is to start with minor pottering about and build momentum.

So e.g. rather than telling myself “Must… do… accounts…”, it might work best to tidy a small area of a room, and then think “Yay! what next?”

Gears in a car

A while back, I was talking about this on a thinking session, and I came up with a new metaphor: it’s like gears in a car.

Suppose you’re driving a car, and you try to set off in 5th gear. What’s going to happen? Probably the car will jolt, and make a noise it’s not supposed to make, and stall. And probably what won’t happen is the car goes off zooming really fast.

It’s not designed to work like that; you’re supposed to start in first gear (or maybe second, depending on vehicle and circumstances), and work up.

Remembering

And I thought: I must remember this. It’s pointless trying to make myself get all majorly active straight from a mope, when it’s so much more workable and natural to build momentum gradually. I know this, but it seems to be one of those things which is easy to forget :-)

I have more to say about this topic! But that will do as a start.

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I talked before about the idea that key team members for an event could each have apprentices, and the pros and cons of that.

In comments, Martin raised the question of whether the people volunteering to be key team members would be (a) willing and (b) able to work effectively with an apprentice. This got me thinking more about the purpose of the idea.

Part of my attraction to the idea of apprentices is that it brings future organisers up to speed, kind of “in real time and ready to go”.

But as I thought about the whole thing some more, I realised there was another issue I hadn’t consciously articulated at the time, perhaps actually more important. What’s behind the “apprentices” idea for me is at least partly the desire not to lose hard-won experience and information.

(This line of thought is actually what prompted me to write my earlier post about the art of remembering, but I thought I’d keep my general ponderings separate from this more activism-specific one.)

The written word

As I pondered Martin’s comment, I found myself thinking: connecting people “in real time” is only one way of transmitting skills and history (albeit sometimes a very effective one). What about the role of writing stuff down? I’m a fan of that too.

In a sense, writing things down is even more reliable than the apprentice idea. It means that even if the chain of handing-on is broken from person to person, someone can still retrieve an earlier “link” of the chain, from a written account.

On the other hand, it’s very easy to accidentally leave something out from a written account, or to describe something in such a way that it’s later misunderstood. So both methods have advantages, and perhaps ideally we’d always have elements of both.

BiCon-specific resources

In terms of “How to run a BiCon”, there’s a useful list of guides on bi.org. Tip of the hat to everyone who’s put work into that documentation, and I’d like to encourage people to add to it. (One v cool thing to add, if anyone can be bothered, would be an “index by role” - so that someone taking on a particular role could go straight to the bits relevant to them.)

I’m pretty sure that there’s some older UK bi-activist history which is not well known by most people. As far as BiCon’s concerned, there’s hardly anyone still around from the earliest days, and even ten years ago I don’t think people always wrote post-event reports. (Or at least, if they did, then some of those haven’t made it onto the web.)

There’s also the biconorganisers group. That’s a great example of “people as a resource”, although it’s only a minority of all people who’ve ever worked on a BiCon.

Passing it on

One possible theoretical scenario is that someone’s already documented everything you need to know to do some particular role, and the latest person just copies that method, learns nothing and adds nothing. In that case, there’s nothing new to pass on.

But where someone does learn something from experience or develop something not done before, then ideally that would be transmitted. Otherwise it’s a bit like a software branch where a cool new feature gets developed but then the branch never gets merged back into the main trunk.

Most people could probably think of something they learnt while doing some task or craft, which if a friend said “Any tips?”, they’d immediately want to pass on. Blogs are full of that kind of conversation! And yet in many situations, by the time the new person’s asking the question, the person who could give the best tips from experience isn’t there to give their answers. (I’m thinking of e.g. DIY-ing in a new house, and you have to make a hole in the plasterwork just to see what kind of beam was put in.)

I imagine many people could also think of their own example of some innovation that’s only happened once so far, but would be just as useful/good (or better) on a subsequent outing.

Why do people reinvent the wheel?

I should acknowledge somewhere here that “reinventing the wheel” has more than one cause.

Sometimes it’s a pragmatic solution to re-start more-or-less from scratch, despite having some degree of access to the “previous wheel”. And sometimes people feel a compelling desire to be creative, and little or no desire to learn from what’s already known, in which case they’ll ignore the “previous wheel” on principle.

But sometimes it is some kind of break or weakness in the chain of passing-on.

Maybe someone doesn’t realise that the wheel has been invented before. Or they know (or assume vaguely) that it probably was - but they don’t have enough details to make the information of practical use.

Or sometimes, the information is all there - but written down in such a way that it would take hours to trawl through for the few nuggets of relevance, rather than offering a “This is what you‘ll want to know” in relatively accessible form.

Transmission skills and habits

Handing things on is partly a matter of skill - e.g. how good someone is at explaining, &/or how good someone else is at eliciting information. (I.m.e. the biconorganisers list shows its value most when someone asks a specific question of the group.)

It’s also a matter of attitude, habits and preferences.

Some people are much more prone than others to hang on to the job that they’re doing and not delegate and not tell anyone else what’s going on. Then, even after the event is all over, no-one else really knows how they did it. It’s a kind of “black box effect”. No-one else knows what went on inside the black box to produce the result!

And when a project’s over, some people enjoy writing up how it went and what they learned, whereas others (once they’ve had a rest) are much keener just to get on with the next thing.

Thinking ahead

Aside from those factors, there’s also a kind of possible thinking-ahead at the design stage to the constraints of future transmission, which may influence even what you choose to develop in the first place.

I’m thinking of my attempt to set down the format of the Fitting & Misfitting workshops for other people to use. Handing it over was much harder than I thought at first it might be. I ended up concluding that perhaps I needed to actually invent simpler things if I wanted them ever to be used later by other people.

Investment, payback, time and energy

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for glorious one-offs. Even ephemeral phenomena do lay foundations for the future if they nurture people. Food is an obvious example!

But I’m also interested in what you might call the payback-timescale spectrum. To what degree does our work have a longer life and longer value than the one event coming up next, and whatever people take away from that?

E.g. on the one hand I’m thinking of various one-off workshop sessions I’ve run at BiCon. I’m not saying they weren’t valuable at the time, and most likely there are still echoes of those experiences for some people into today.

On the other hand I’m thinking of the BiCon 2005 info booklet, another thing I worked on. That’s had a much more tangible afterlife (so far), in that other subsequent BiCons have reused parts of the text.

It reminds me a bit of planting a tree. You do the work once and the tree persists over time (well, if it’s a tree, it doesn’t just persist, it usually grows).

In the long run, everything is interim and we’re all dead. But some things hang around a lot more than other things.

Given that activism energy isn’t unlimited, I wonder if it might sometimes even be a luxury or a mistake to bother developing stuff which can’t be passed on, because the long-term payback is so much less.

Of course not every kind of work is amenable to becoming a metaphorical tree. Some is more like food or cleaning. But I feel protective of people’s energy - everyone’s, not just mine - and very averse to wasting it. So I don’t want to miss the opportunities to conserve and concentrate value, where they do exist.

Criteria for matching people to jobs

Returning briefly to Martin’s comment, and what I think about that now:

If there’s only one person who wants to do a job, and they don’t want to help anyone else learn it for the future, then so be it. It’s better to have that than to not have anyone who wants to do the job.

But if there’s a choice, then one valid criterion for “best person for the job” is what investment they’d be willing and able to make “as they go”, towards building for the long term. And helping to hand on a legacy of skills and memories is one aspect of that.

Team archivist

Writing this, it occurs to me that event teams might consider offering a role of “team archivist”. That person could take the lead on writing the event report, encourage other people to write up their experiences of different roles, and maybe even interview team members who didn’t like (or didn’t have time for) writing things up themselves.

I don’t mean like they should document everything - but even a short “What did you learn that you’d want to tell the next person?” could be incredibly useful sometimes.

That would be one simple way of “fixing” more of the recently-acquired value so that it doesn’t melt away again (like the ratchet metaphor).

It reminds me a bit of what Jen often does already in editing Bi Community News - “Any chance of a write-up?” (of an interesting-sounding event that someone’s going to or involved with.) It would differ in that BCN isn’t embedded within a particular team, and isn’t especially focused on eliciting the “how to do this specific cool &/or useful thing again” genre of information.

I don’t suppose that’s such a new idea that it’s never been done before, but I’ve not seen it made an official team role on any team I’ve been part of. Anyone done anything else similar? and if so, how did it work out?

Here, have an index…
Information as activist resource
The written word
BiCon-specific resources
Passing it on
Why do people reinvent the wheel?
Transmission skills and habits
Thinking ahead
Investment, payback, time and energy
Criteria for matching people to jobs
Team archivist

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

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I have to say that if you’ve got no need or inclination to run some nice reminder-popup software, you can safely skip this post :-)

Note: I’m running Linux, and if I understand correctly, Remind is also available for Macs but not Windows.

I thought this little adventure was worth a write-up, because I’ve done a couple of things which I didn’t discover already-spelt-out on the web - things which took some trial and error to work out, but were surprisingly straightforward in the end. So maybe this’ll give someone else a shortcut to some nice results with their new toy :-)

Some back-story

I like software that helps me keep track of what I’m doing. I have a diary on a Psion 3mx, which travels with me, and a home-made PHP/MySQL things-to-do list program which runs in a browser window on my PC. And for the last year or two I’ve been using MyChores to send myself emails for date-specific stuff like putting the bins out. But there was a missing ingredient: I wanted something to give me a popup window on the computer at certain days and times.

The proximal motivation for this was when I realised that I’d missed my favourite swimming session through being absorbed in writing something on the computer. Bother!

Before that, I’d already been thinking it would be v cool if at about 8pm on certain days of the week, my computer suggested that I go and put a wash in the washing machine. You see, i.m.o. the greenest/cheapest/best time to run a wash is in the last few hours of cheap overnight electricity. (Or, second choice, the earlier hours of the cheap electricity - but the earlier in the night it runs, the longer the wash is sitting damp in the machine before it gets hung up to dry.) So ideally you want it to start about 4am. And we have an old but good washing machine which has a timer you can set to 4, 8 or 12 hours’ delay. So if you put in a wash at about 8pm or 8.30, you can use the 8 hour timer and it works out just nicely.

Now I could have set alarms for either of those things in my Psion diary. But then the Psion might be in another room and just run its battery down bing-bonging to itself. (In fact I very rarely use it for alarms at all.) Or I might be out somewhere else, in which case I’m not likely to go swimming or put in a wash. And besides, I don’t want “Put a wash in” cluttering up my Psion diary page. No, a popup on my PC screen was what I wanted.

That’s not to say I would always see the popup. I wouldn’t rely on this method for anything which absolutely had to happen at a certain time. The computer might not even be switched on.

But on the whole, that’s probably more a feature than a bug, for the kinds of things I’m using it for - because if I’m at the computer (rather than, say, on the phone, or indeed not even in my house at all), it’s also fairly likely that I can interrupt what I’m doing long enough to do the suggested activity. And if not, of course I can just ignore the suggestion.

I do spend quite a lot of time reading or writing at my lovely quiet PC, though. And, perhaps more important, writing on the computer is my most likely way to lose track of time. If I were doing almost anything else, I’d be quite likely just to remember to go swimming :-)

So I had a look around online and Remind did seem like just the job.

Here’s a nice intro from David F Skoll, the writer of Remind, which gives an overview of the kind of things it can do. (Incidentally, that includes some things I’ve not talked about here at all, because I currently have no plans to use them - e.g. making calendar printouts. Apparently it can even draw moons onto your calendars!)

I’m running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and it turned out that Synaptic Package Manager had Remind in it, so I didn’t have to do anything tricky to install it. I think I did have to create an empty .reminders file myself (as a text file in the Home directory). That’s the default file for your reminders - but you can have others, as we shall see.

Setting reminders

Using the instruction “remind” at a terminal worked first time. It told me I didn’t have any reminders :-)

There’s a front end called tkremind. I put a couple of things in there to try it out.

Instead of using tkremind, though, I quickly found myself wanting to do things with Remind’s text syntax. Tkremind is pretty, but there seem to be some fairly simple things it can’t do, as well as lots more ingenious power which it doesn’t reveal.

I used gedit to get into the .reminders file. I found the basic syntax pretty sensible and easy to figure out. Here for example is my “put a wash in” reminder:

REM Mon Tue Fri Sat AT 20:00 MSG Good time to put in a wash.

I shan’t give you a detailed run-down of the reminder syntax, because there are plenty of other articles already talking about that aspect. For instance, here’s one, including some Mac tips. Here’s a Remind Cookbook page, full of snippets. And here’s the very comprehensive manual page for Remind, with lots of options and clever bits.

I also put in my favourite swimming sessions, and some day-specific ones like “check current account has enough in it to cover credit card bill”. And just to play with the thing, I added a couple of countdowns to particular dates. (More below on the “countdown” bit.) So far so good!

Making it pop up

Then came the more tricky part. How could I make it do popups?

Remind doesn’t generate the popup windows itself - it calls on another program to make them. So the first question was what program I’d call on to do that.

The Remind FAQ suggested gxmessage, and somewhere else I saw a mention of xmessage.

Xmessage was already installed, so I tried that first. And it worked - but I didn’t like how the windows came out. There seemed to be no way to set the font size, and the default on my system was uncomfortably tiny to read.

(Font size bother seems to have been a recurring theme for me with Hardy Heron - by default it’s been giving me some odd mixes of little and large, clearly not the same settings as Feisty which I had before. Various preference-tinkering was required on other apps to compensate. So I imagine other people might find the xmessage default was perfectly fine for them.)

On the other hand, in gxmessage you can set not only the font size, but the font and background colours. So immediately I was thinking oh, I could have my swimming reminders coming up in blue, and the household ones in dark red, and so on…

Gxmessage turned out to be in Synaptic Package Manager as well, albeit under its pseudonym of gmessage. So, like Remind, it was a matter of a few clicks to install.

What pops up when

Next there was the question of what popups to have when. I didn’t just want all of them blobbing on top of each other in separate windows as soon as the program ran - which is one result you can get ;-)

What I wanted was

I realised that one way to elicit these different behaviours was to have more than one reminder file, and instruct Remind differently when it works with each of them.

(You can use a RUN command in Remind to call another program at a certain time. So that may be another way to do what I’m about to describe - I’m not sure. But I was wary of getting into a tangle with gmessage’s options if I tried it that way.)

I’ll spare you a step by step account of my experiments. Instead I’ll skip ahead to describing what it’s doing now and how it’s doing it.

Multiple reminders in one popup window

To get today’s non-timed messages all into one window which appears at startup, what I did was:

That instruction takes everything from the .reminders-today file which would have been written to the terminal that day, and pipes it to gmessage instead.

The options before the “pipe” belong to remind, and the options after the “pipe” belong to gmessage.

It’s the “-file -” option which tells gmessage to use incoming input rather than a pre-determined message. You can also see various options I chose from the gmessage manual page, just to get my popups looking how I want them.

-buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" does a nice thing: it means the OK button already “has focus”, so you can just hit the Return key to make the popup go away.

Strictly speaking, Remind’s -q option is redundant here. It tells remind not to queue timed messages, but in fact it’s fundamental to my setup that I haven’t put any timed messages into this file in the first place. Instead they’re in separate ones.

Different colours and different times

Now, what about my time-specific swimming reminders popping up in blue writing, later on in the day? Here’s what I did:

Note the different shape of the remind instruction. Instead of piping the whole batch of reminders into gmessage in one go (as they would have appeared in the terminal), it uses the -k flag of Remind to send each reminder individually to gmessage. The %s is where Remind hands the text over to gmessage. (If I’d used this command to process the “today” reminders, each reminder would have been a separate popup, regardless of any timing instruction.)

-a belongs to Remind, and tells it not to display the day’s timed reminders when it first boots, only to queue them for their set times.

-fg belongs to gmessage, and sets the foreground colour, i.e. font colour. So yes - I’ve selected a lovely sky-blue font for this batch of popups :-)

Making it run automatically

My next challenge was to launch Remind automatically, rather than by opening a terminal and putting in something at the command line.

I wanted it to launch on startup. Some of the information I’d found had me poking around looking at .xinitrc and other arcane places. But then I discovered that was unnecessary in Ubuntu. Instead, I needed to go to System > Preferences > Sessions. It has an “Add” button whereby you can add something to the Startup Programs list.

The first thing I tried was to put the command line instruction directly into the “Command” field of the “Add” dialogue. But it turned out the startup process didn’t like that.

What worked instead was to enclose it in a shell script, and call the filename of the script.

(In this context, a shell script is a command or series of commands which you might have written to the command line in a terminal window, but put in a text file instead.)

Using a shell script made sense to me anyway, as I wanted to launch Remind several times, and this way, I could have all the several commands batched together in one file.

A possible script:

#!/bin/bash

remind -q ~/.reminders-today | gxmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#579" -bg white -wrap -title "Today's reminders" -file -

remind -a '-kgmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#46f" -bg white -wrap -title "Swimming" %s &' ~/.reminders-swimming

remind -a '-kgmessage -buttons "OK:1" -default "OK" -center -font "serif 16" -fg "#a33" -bg white -wrap -title "Household" %s &' ~/.reminders-household

I saved one similar to that as reminders.sh, then put “/home/jennifer/reminders.sh” into the “command” field for adding a startup program. (I can’t remember now if it definitely needed the full path or if I was just being on the safe side.)

Note the two separate calls for “household” and “swimming”, and their different titles and font colours used by gmessage. You can see from this that the way I’m making my popups have different colours is simply by having a separate invocation of Remind to process each file, with a different colour-setting flag for gmessage in each invocation.

Edited to add: Aimee suggested I add a screenshot of one of my popups, so here it is:

Thoughts so far

In one way, this method might seem a bit clunky. There may well have been more elegant ways of doing something similar, which I just don’t know about.

On the other hand, one nice effect of it is to keep the .reminder files nicely uncluttered - and they’re the ones I’m most likely to be altering over time. As it is, I can easily add more swimming reminders or household reminders, or change them, without needing to touch (or even look at) the shell script with the gmessage options. And I find it reasonably intuitive to have reminders batched by theme, so I don’t mind the tiny overhead of potentially needing to open different files when I’m updating them.

If I wanted yet another colour for timed popups - for a different reminder-theme - then I’d just have to make one more file and add one more very similar line to the shell script.

So overall I’m pretty happy with the setup so far, and I think Remind has certainly lived up to its reputation for flexibility.

Thanks and tip of the hat to David Skoll for writing such a cool thing, and likewise to Timothy Musson for gmessage! And thanks to everyone else who’s gone before and written theirs up.

Bonus bit: Weeks and days countdown

I said I wouldn’t repeat the details of how to set up your clever Remind syntax, which has been well documented elsewhere. But here’s one bit which I hadn’t seen elsewhere on the web.

A couple of places gave snippets for doing a countdown to a particular date, either in days or rounded to the nearest week. I decided I wanted a variation on that - a countdown in the format “X weeks Y days”.

Remind has various functions built in, and also lets you set your own using the fset command. (I could have made my snippet a lot shorter, following the example of the existing countdown ones, but I spread it out for clarity of variable-names, so I could see what I was doing.)

Here’s what I came up with:

# weeks/days countdown

# (note integers only, no decimal points, so no need to round the /7)

fset _all_days() trigdate()-today()

fset _whole_weeks() (_all_days()/7)

fset _odd_days() (_all_days()-(_whole_weeks()*7))

fset _weekplural() plural(_whole_weeks())

fset _dayplural() plural(_odd_days())

REM 1 January +30 MSG [_whole_weeks()] week[_weekplural()] [_odd_days()] day[_dayplural()] to New Year’s Day

The +30 is the number of days in advance of your “special date” that the reminder will run.

Note that some of the brackets may be redundant, but are there to be “on the safe side”.

Hope some of that proves useful to someone.

Here, have an index…
Remind + Ubuntu + Gmessage
Some back-story
Setting reminders
Making it pop up
What pops up when
Multiple reminders in one popup window
Different colours and different times
Making it run automatically
Thoughts so far
Bonus bit: Weeks and days countdown

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

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I was thinking about the ways that information gets lost. Sometimes it gets handed on and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets written down and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people forget, and sometimes they remember till they die, but then they die.

Histories and skills

There’s a story that because so many builders died in the second world war, some of the previously-common knowledge about how traditional UK brick houses are “supposed to work” was lost with them. So some of the houses built in the 50s and 60s had problems, and lots of the houses built pre-war aren’t being maintained optimally.

[E.g. my house has some damp at the back, which is probably because (a) someone's put down a concrete back yard and it doesn't slope away from the house sufficiently, and (b) it's now got rendering over some of the brick, so the brick can't "breathe" as well as it would have originally. 100 years ago when it was new, it would have had blue brick paving sloping away from the walls, taking the water quickly away from the house, and it wouldn't have had the rendering. Whoever made those changes probably had no idea that they were interfering with the house's functional integrity. Some practical info on this subject, for anyone who's interested.]

I’ve heard it said that queer activists are particularly prone to not knowing their own history, sometimes attributed to the fact that each new generation of queer people is mostly born to non-queer parents.

Or take the example of NHS midwives and breech birth (where the baby comes out bottom-first or feet-first rather than headfirst). As more and more breech babies are born by Caesarian surgery, so midwives get less and less opportunity to learn from the older midwives who know how to manage a natural breech birth safely.

Come to that, NHS midwives nowadays have less and less opportunity to see any birth without some kind of intervention, even if the intervention is as seemingly minor as “internally examining” the labouring woman. (An experienced old-style midwife will usually be able to tell from observing the woman roughly “how far on” she is.) The art of “not interfering unless necessary”, and the observational skills which support it, are still kept alive by some radical woman-centred midwives, but I don’t get the impression that their knowledge is highly valued within the NHS.

From me now to me later

On the other hand, the handing-on of information doesn’t have to be from one generation to another or even from one person to another. It could be from the me of now to the me of later. Sometimes I have an insight but then after a while I forget it again, and then later I have the same insight again and think “Hang on! I knew that! how did I forget?”

Either way, the question is: how do you capture that information - ideas, insights, experience, skills - and make it available for later?

Dynamic and static Quality

In Lila, the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig describes what he calls Dynamic and static Quality.

To give a tiny bit of context to the following quote, what he means by “static quality” is something like: traditions, rituals, rules, documentation and so on.

Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

Somewhere, I’m pretty sure he uses the metaphor of a ratchet to describe the working-together of static and dynamic - dynamic new development as the turning, static the holding steady so it doesn’t turn back. But can’t find that quote now. (Every now and again, I wish I could use a search engine on a paper book, and this is one of those times - I could do a search on “ratchet” and I bet that bit would come up. Unless of course he used a different word.)

(As an aside: I highly recommend both books. They are stories, but full of ideas that go beyond the stories.)

Branching

Another metaphor I’m thinking of - this one more relevant to communities or organisations evolving over time - is the one of “branching” software. Some existing software is developed in two or more initially-incompatible directions, and the code bases may or may not ever be merged again.

I was thinking at first that the “branching” analogy was meant to be with tree branches. But then the metaphorical parallel would have to include sometimes merging two tree branches back together.

I’m not sure that’d be impossible - I think it would be a bit similar to the grafting of fruit tree branches onto root stock - but at any rate it’s hardly a common sight.

Closer might be a canal splitting into two different channels, or a railway with different branch lines, which may or may not rejoin further along.

Or, in the case of merging software, perhaps a yet better metaphor would be a piece of weaving - since an important part of rejoining the weave would be to decide which pieces of yarn to weave where, which is a bit like the art of deciding which code to keep.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes different people continue a chain of ideas in two or more different directions, and they don’t reconnect further down. Then, sometimes you get one side continuing to develop and be handed on, whereas the other channel peters out into a dead end (like some kind of silted-up backwater). So for example with software, a version which is no longer maintained might contain a cool feature, which the main trunk had never developed.

There are parallels to this in activism, I think. A project ends, a group stops meeting, people move away, and sometimes the experience and knowledge along that branch is lost.

Retrieval of insights

For myself, I do write things down. I’ve usually got things stuck on my wall, and a few key files on my Psion which I re-read every now and again. But writing has limitations.

One is that retrieving an insight from something I’ve written down relies on re-reading it at the appropriate time. And I’ve written a lot of stuff down :-)

Another is that it seems to be easier to document practical stuff than emotional findings.

The ideas I lose tend to be not so much the kind like “Oooh! Wouldn’t it be cool to do this!” but more the kind similar to “If you are feeling mopey, here are some probable reasons why, and here are some ways which may work for getting unmopified”.

One of the things which works best for me is having thinking sessions, as invented by Nancy Kline and described in her extremely marvellous book Time to Think.

Thinking sessions seem to provide an environment where I’m better than usual at retrieving useful stuff from memory. It’s not quite just remembering it, though, either. Accessing a thought during a thinking session is more like recreating it. Re-finding it on a bit of paper doesn’t necessarily have the same emotional resonance.

Writing for remembering

A lot of my ideas for future blog posts (and a few of the existing ones) are in the category of “I want to remember this - maybe if I write it down here I’ll make it a bit bigger in my landscape!”

Some of the more recent posts haven’t been that kind. There’s always some thinking involved in writing them, but at heart they’ve been more motivated by “I have some thoughts that I want to tell to other people”.

But I like the idea that over time this blog could become a sort of documentation of “what works for me”, that I could consult for my own benefit in future.

Here, have an index…
The art of remembering
Histories and skills
From me now to me later
Dynamic and static Quality
Branching
Retrieval of insights
Writing for remembering

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

I’ve been thinking about this since last year when I first ran into the “Children at BiCon” question, and I wrote much of this article back in May… but it seems like an especially timely subject at the moment, because of the number of people thinking and talking about aspects of volunteering for bi community stuff.

E.g. at the little bit of BiCon 2008 I was there for, and in the blog comments since, there’s been a striking amount of talk about how “BiCon is made of people”, and celebration of how many people had contributed. BiCon 2008 had the most encouraging page for volunteering at BiCon I’ve ever seen. And I’ve already talked over some of the stuff in this article (a few months ago) with Martin who’s head of the 2009 team (who should get some credit for encouraging me to post this, though no blame for any ideas which fall with a dull thud :-) ).

That’s not to imply that 2009 will be following these suggestions, but it did seem about time to stick my blueprints and thought-experiments out there for general debate and grabbing if wanted.

Basically I’m going to talk about some ideas for event organisation, which I think would make event teams a more nurturing environment for new talent (and indeed for everyone).

I don’t mean to say that they’re all my own ideas - some of them have been discussed numerous times in the past in connection with BiCon, and some have already been done. But there are some new ones, as well as some which haven’t yet been fully implemented. And even if they were all old ideas, it can still be useful sometimes to sketch out how lots of different things could potentially go together.

Background

For the non-BiCon-goers, I should explain that BiCon is run by a different team every year. Twenty years ago, the teams were usually drawn from within or near the same town that the event would be held in, but nowadays that’s not necessarily the case. And, more likely than not, nowadays, the nucleus of a BiCon team will include some people who have been on a BiCon team before - though still not always.

Team size and structure

A major factor in the workability of a team is the structure set up for managing remits and lines of communication. By that, I mean both the theoretical model and the software support. I agree that if we just suddenly had a 30-person team and tried to manage it via one LiveJournal plus email, no-one would ever want to do it again :-)

But I don’t necessarily agree (with what seems to be a common view around BiCon over recent years) that having more than 6 to 12 people on a team is inevitably going to resemble the proverbial “herding cats”.

What I want to try to describe is a model whereby i.m.o. a team could have 20 to 40+ members and not resemble “herding cats”.

I can imagine some people reading the description of it and saying things like “That’ll never work - it’s much too complicated”. But its (relative) complexity only needs to be evident to the person or people setting up the structure, and to a lesser degree managing it. The people claiming a role have a different experience. If it’s done right, their experience is of walking into a clearly defined space and being able to play within it. They don’t have to worry about how that was accomplished or is being maintained.

With regard to that initial setup, there’s an element of “it’s easy for me to say”, me being a process geek and happy with complexity :-) But I’m sure I’m not the only person around with these skills and tendencies. And, as I say, they’re not needed from everyone on the team.

So, having said that, here are some thoughts I have about how I would operate if I had the necessary influence over a (BiCon or similar) team of volunteers.

Jigsaw

One of the metaphors I’m thinking of is of creating a kind of slightly unconventional jigsaw puzzle.

All the pieces fit together to make a whole, without anyone having a jigsaw piece that’s uncongenial to them or bigger than they want. There’s no presupposition that all the pieces must be the same size. The divisions between pieces might or might not follow past tradition.

There would be a place in this team for almost anyone who wanted to play, using a partly-hierarchical structure to divide the jigsaw into different areas of responsibility and different degrees of importance.

All the main roles would have apprentice roles alongside, to help develop the “next generation” of activists.

If I were constructing a BiCon team, I wouldn’t take on other ongoing roles such as venue-hunting or setting prices. I would choose team-mates in the first place whom I could trust to do a good job on those. My role would be something like “People and process manager”.

Initially, my intention would be on matching roles to people, including a degree of designing roles to suit particular people more exactly.

As the team got going, my attention would be on whether everyone was fulfilled and happy and had what they needed in terms of resources and cooperation in order to keep up with their timeline.

Not reinventing the wheel

Part of the jigsaw would be to develop as much as possible the idea (which has already been discussed a few times) of multi-year ongoing role allocations, i.e. those which continue from one event to the next.

I gather that one of the most-debated-in-the-past ongoing plans is now about to go ahead - a legal entity to hold BiCon money from year to year. I’ll leave that idea to one side here, although it is related.

Some other areas which could well be owned by an ongoing team or teams include:

• Web site content management system.

• Web site back end database for bookings, and front end interface.

• Financial spreadsheets which could be emptied and re-used for the following year, designed to be either integrated with the bookings system or as compatible as possible with it.

• Web site back end database for workshop session offers, interface (possibly similar to this), and mail-merge-esque ability to extract and print out workshop info in different formats (such as David M did for BiCon 2003 - also described briefly on that link).

• Database for publicity avenues (I say database rather than just “list” for mail-merge ease).

• Web site back end database for offers of help with publicity, and front end interface.

• Communication software of some kind for the team - more on this below.

The people taking ownership of these areas would ideally commit to some years of that role, and would pace themselves (taking small enough chunks of commitment) not to burn out before that time was up.

This structure would not only save significant time and energy for incoming teams, but would increase the chances of learning from anything that didn’t work one year and building in improvements before the next.

Some BiCon teams might want to do things differently, and there wouldn’t be a rule that they had to take advantage of the available resources - but over time, if most teams did use and develop the passed-on software, info and expertise, I’d expect the inherited software collection gradually to reach a level of usefulness hard to equal “off the shelf”.

As yet, I haven’t noticed any disadvantages of this idea, and in fact there have been some rather more concrete discussions about some of the angles over this past year, so I get the impression it is beginning to happen.

I suspect that the main reason it hasn’t been developed more for BiCon already is “not being in the habit” from the days before the Net - when BiCon teams were much more likely to be based on geography and were much more isolated from the rest of the community during the year.

It does require some investment of time up front, as well, though. Let’s face it, the “quick and dirty” solution is often to “reinvent the wheel”, using whichever bit of software is most familiar and most handy at the time.

Categories of people and their roles

On the one-event team, my team-mates would not be limited to my friends or even to people I know, but there would be a sort of sliding scale of task importance matched to people’s experience and track record.

(There would also be a requirement to have internet access for the main roles.)

I’ll talk here about the categories I have in mind.

Primary team / key accountable people

First we have what I’ll call the primary team, or key accountable people.

(The term “core team” would also have made literal sense, but that’s already in use around BiCon, meaning something like “People who get to see behind the scenes on the team’s online journal etc”. That isn’t the meaning I intend here.)

These are people with past experience of the event and demonstrable competence, who will take on key roles.

It’s likely that most of the people in this category would be on the team by invitation.

My rule-of-thumb definition of the primary team is that if everyone else dropped out, this subset could in theory run a decent event by themselves.

(Of course, that would be a waste of the opportunity for other people to work alongside them and learn from them, so I would have no intention of it ever happening.)

Apprentices

Ideally, each primary team person would have an apprentice working alongside them. In order to be given the job, the apprentice would likely have past experience demonstrating reliability and some kind of competence. (Plus, in the special case of roles that involve handling money, we’d want them to have been around the community for a while and have “something to lose” here if they used it to go to the Bahamas.) But they probably wouldn’t ever have done this particular job around this particular event before.

An important part of the job of the primary team person would be to develop as far as possible the degree to which the apprentice knows the territory.

For some roles (such as BiCon’s bookings manager or session coordinator), where there’s quite a lot of routine work, a rule of thumb would be that the apprentice handles all the routine aspects of the role, while the accountable person deals with problems and tricky cases. (I’m using the term “accountable person” for someone responsible for the outcome of a particular area.)

For other roles, there are significant parts of the job which would be hard to share (e.g. liaising with the venue, if the venue people prefer to have only one contact), and the apprentice would be more likely simply to shadow the accountable person closely. E.g. they would go to the same meetings (if any), be copied in to emails, and (if not using conference calling) be sent notes of what was agreed on phone calls.

All the apprentices would take part in the online discussion area for the main team.

In the theoretical best case, the apprentice structure would mean that every year, a complete new set of people emerged ready to do the key jobs. In practice, that wouldn’t happen - e.g. some apprentices would probably decide afterwards that they didn’t fancy repeating the job, or didn’t fancy taking on the responsibility of being the accountable person. But even just a small percentage of apprentices emerging ready to do the accountable job in future would make a big difference year on year.

Aside from the benefits in building capacity, this structure would also mean that if an accountable person needed to drop out - e.g. through illness - someone else would already know most of what had gone on so far. (I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the apprentice would step up to take control in that case. That would depend on various factors, starting with whether they actually wanted to at all. But at least they could help the new person to get up to speed.)

There might be cases in which two equally experienced people preferred to job-share - either with equal responsibility, or one the accountable person and the other a deputy. But I’d still aim to have an apprentice as well, to maximise the handing-on of knowledge.

Advisors

Thirdly we have advisors.

These would be people invited onto the team because of knowledge they have, but who aren’t accountable for particular things being done. E.g.

• someone with a disability not already represented on the team

• a single parent

• people from diverse cultural/ethnic backgrounds

• someone over 60, or over 70.

Again, these people would be included in the core team’s online discussions. Their only job would be to keep an eye on the rest of us and head us off from bloopers made through obliviousness.

(For BiCon, we would also call at times upon the biconorganisers group, i.e. past BiCon organisers, another group with particular experience and wisdom.)

Special mission people

Then we have what I might call “special mission people“.

The beauty of this category is that it allows for some of the most experienced people to contribute small amounts of time.

What most of the “missions” would have in common would be to develop things which don’t exist yet.

For instance, I might invite someone to develop one particular piece of writing or artwork, or to get in touch with one particular organisation to build links with them. Anyone who came along with a new idea like “I was thinking this year I might… ?” could go into this category too (if their idea didn’t already fit into existing structures - e.g. as a workshop session).

Everyone with this kind of remit would count as “accountable people”, but they wouldn’t be part of the primary team (inasmuch as the event could still survive without their work), and they might choose not to have an apprentice either (especially if their job had a creative, make-it-up-as-you-go-along nature).

Depending on what their special mission was, they might or might not need to be closely networked in to the rest of the team. But the team would at least know of their existence and their mission.

Contributors

Contributors form the category most expandable as more people come along. They needn’t be part of the team’s main communication structure; their main relationships would be with the accountable person and apprentice for the area in which they were contributing.

One existing example of the “contributors” model in use at BiCon is workshop sessions. Someone who offers to run a session doesn’t need to keep track of other developments; they just need to be in touch with the sessions coordinator (and/or apprentice).

Another example is the reception team and “gophers” during the event. Those jobs are among the ones easiest to manage when the contributors don’t have internet access.

Almost infinite numbers of people could make a tiny contribution in terms of distributing flyers, with the coordinator of that area keeping track of who’s covering what, and hence minimising duplication of effort.

Sub-leaders

We can introduce other layers of hierarchical/delegation structure if we like, for areas which seem to warrant it.

Some conferences have had separate organisers for different themes/strands of their workshop programme; I wouldn’t be averse to that idea. The key accountable person would then manage each of the strand coordinators. There might be a “miscellaneous themes” organiser too, to be the equivalent of “strand organiser” for offers not fitting a particular strand. Or the key accountable person could choose to delegate just one or two strands while keeping the rest themself.

Another example would be to divide up the entertainments remit so that the ents coordinator (who’s a key accountable person and part of the primary team) delegates to three or four different accountable people the three or four different nights of BiCon.

This has the happy effect that during BiCon, the person with most to manage on each night’s ents has the other nights off.

The ents coordinator’s job would be to ensure that the different nights were varied and compatible, and to organise obtaining shared resources such as a PA system.

The ents coordinator would certainly have an apprentice (shadowing, and e.g. perhaps taking on liaison with the PA hire company); the one-night organisers could well also each have an apprentice or second-in-command.

A similar kind of structure could be mapped onto publicity. There’s room for a huge number of people to take on a small share of that work.

The first delegation-split could be e.g. to a radio outreach person, one or more printed-media outreach people, a postering/flyers coordinator and an interviews coordinator. Then the interviews coordinator would manage a team of willing interviewees available for either radio or magazines, and the postering/flyers coordinator would coordinate the distribution of our publicity materials all over the country.

But where would we get all these people?

I’ve named a lot of roles there, so I can imagine people reading this and thinking “But where would we get all these people?”

If you’re thinking that, you’re missing one of my main points - arguably the main point. The point of creating this more complex structure is to make available smaller roles, which are more accessible to people who don’t have the time / energy / inclination for BiCon to eat their life. The idea is to bring enough new people into action for the “energy shortage” concern to disappear.

For example, you don’t have to have different people doing each night of the ents, and an apprentice talking to the PA company. You can have one person doing all of it if you like.

But is it going to be easier to find one person who can afford to give that much time, or the four or five who could give a smaller amount?

My thesis is the latter will be easier to find. If I’m wrong about that, well then, “as you were” :-)

(My list of suggested roles for the BiCon children strand should be seen in this light too. I did say that it was possible for one person to do them all, but some people seem to have missed that point, hence comments about “doubling team size”. Obviously, under this model I don’t think it would be a bad thing to double the team size! But the children strand would still only be a small proportion of the overall workload. How many people it’s divided among is a matter of team organising style.)

People not to have on the team

The only people I’d turn down completely and not have on the team would be those who were unwilling or unable to align with the organisation of the team.

E.g. obviously I don’t want someone who’s so oblivious to the general consensus that they’d go shopping on the event’s behalf and buy a load of stuff which no-one else had agreed. (Not that I could stop people doing that by not having them on the team, actually. But at least it would be a bit clearer to them that it was un-called-for.)

Including people of no track record

People with no track record wouldn’t be picked for the main roles, but I’d be unlikely to turn them away either. There’s plenty of room for them all within the “contributors” category.

Flyering in one’s local area is one place where we can safely offer a job to more or less anyone. There’s always more room for work on spreading the word; and as we shan’t manage to cover everywhere anyway, there will be venues where it’s arguably not that significant if someone doesn’t do what they said they would.

In the case of BiCon, there are also jobs which can be scheduled far enough in advance that if one person doesn’t deliver, there’s time to take the job back and give it to someone else - a low-risk gamble. One example would be the early creation of new artwork.

Necessary skills: Creative slicing

One of the key skills in creating a jigsaw like this is deciding where to cut around the pieces (or, to put it another way, working out which tasks can reasonably be stuck together to create one person’s role).

This is partly about discerning the logical divisions and connections among tasks.

For instance, the people doing the budget are connected to the ents coordinator - but only in that they need to agree an overall budget for ents. Otherwise, those are readily separable jobs.

Before even beginning to look for people to be on the team, I would put time into developing a catalogue of ingredients, identifying all the job components which have previously been done by anyone in any role, and how they interlink. I wouldn’t attempt to do this alone, but would run it past people who’d actually done various BiCon roles in the past, asking them “Tell me everything you actually did”, and then “Was there anything more you would have done if you’d had time?”

Another underlying skill is of eliciting from people what they really enjoy doing. This would probably be quite easy if so many of us hadn’t been socialised to think it was our duty to “take the rough with the smooth” in these matters. “You mean I could have a job consisting only of the bits I enjoy? Surely some mistake?”

All these tiny job components would be described by outcome, time commitment and relevant skills, and people would be invited to express interest in them.

I could imagine a workshop at a BiCon, where all the jobs would be on paper stuck round the room, and people could go round putting their names on any they’d be up for doing, with a star for any they specially wanted.

This would be reviewed after BiCon with the key accountable people, to customise their own roles and to share out the rest of the jobs. It would remain as a directory of people who were interested in contributing to that BiCon.

A similar list could appear on the web site during the year or more running up to BiCon, along with forms for expressing interest.

The final ingredient is to set up communications between people in connected roles.

Intra-team communication software

For the team’s internal communications, the software I’m imagining is a bulletin board/forum such as vBulletin or the forum component of Drupal. I haven’t gone into detail on which specific package would be best, but ideally, this - like the main BiCon site - would fall within the remit of a multi-year not-reinventing-the-wheel team. So we’d want to pick a package with a long term future, ideally fairly widely used.

The forum would be set up beforehand so that each subteam had its own area. This would facilitate keeping the different conversations separate, and not swamping people with things they don’t really need to know about. People could look in areas they weren’t directly concerned with, but they needn’t; and in general it wouldn’t be considered “the done thing” to stick in one’s 2p on other subteams’ threads.

Compared to a blog format such as LiveJournal, a forum/bulletin layout is more suitable both for the separation of subteams and because (unlike blog articles), forum conversations slide away down the main viewing page only when they’ve stopped.

Compared to email, it’s better for later reference, and also takes care of threading (which not everyone’s email software does well). Some forum software also supports sending email copies of messages under certain circumstances.

If the package included calendar facilities (which e.g. vB and Drupal do), we might take advantage of those to display the timelines.

For some people, using it would mean a new learning curve. But that kind of software is pretty common across the Net, so there would be a reasonable number of people reasonably familiar with the idea of it to start with.

Timelines and reporting back

Each key accountable person would customise their own job description and draft a proposed timeline for the run-up to the event.

The timelines would be visible at least to other team members, and we’d probably specially invite the biconorganisers group to cast an eye over them too.

These timelines wouldn’t be set in stone, but would be used as a framework by which to check how we were doing and flag up areas which needed attention.

I’m imagining that every now and again we would have a round of “how’s it going” reports on the online team space.

The deputy or apprentice “People and process manager” would have the job of noticing anyone who seemed to have disappeared, or anything missing from the conversation (such as a forgotten milestone from the timeline).

The process manager (me in my imagination, or whoever else was in that role) would then actively find out what was happening - whether that person needed more help or more resources, or whether in fact they needed to be replaced and gently given the boot, to prevent unnecessary martyrdom :-)

In the cases where a key accountable person was managing a sub-team, they and their deputy or apprentice would also have the job of checking in with their sub-team people about progress. Again, it would probably be the deputy’s job to look out for people “disappearing” or obviously having trouble.

In between “reporting rounds”, it would also be part of my job to provide a listening ear for anyone who was having problems. I.e. they needn’t wait till report time to get in touch individually and say “Here’s a problem I’m having”. And I wouldn’t necessarily wait till report time to check in with people and say “Give me some stories - how are things with you? Is there anything we could invent to make things easier or more enjoyable for you? Is there anything going on at the moment that you’re finding annoying?”

I would probably try to have that kind of conversation at least once with everyone working on the event, or at least with everyone except some of the “contributors”.

Necessary skills: a keen eye for process

The second “necessary skill” that I’d name for the process & people manager is (not surprisingly) a keen eye for process, in particular for communication. You need someone who will take a proactive role in shaping the communications of the team, in particular watching over which people need to be in which conversations and which don’t. Otherwise, the number of people on the online team area could potentially make conversations too slow and/or prone to going off-topic.

It might be necessary sometimes to say something like “OK, we know that not everyone agrees on this, but in order to move on, we’re going to proceed in such-a-way”. I would envisage that most times the accountable person for a particular area would have final say about how things are done.

Similarly, it might be necessary sometimes to rein people in back to their own areas of responsibility, or back on topic.

Necessary skills: compassionate ruthlessness

Part of taking the risk of having less-experienced, less-well-known people on the team is that it probably increases the chances of at some point having to boot someone off. Whoever’s in charge needs to accept that responsibility.

On the other hand, some booting-off is made necessary by people over-extending themselves, and I suspect this is possibly less likely when the jigsaw pieces have been well set up in the first place, and there’s an abundance of people queueing up to be on the team. So maybe it all works out about even in the long run.

A similar kind of ruthlessness may be needed sometimes in managing the process of communication (as described above).

Investment and risks

I’m not denying that in the initial setup, and in many ways during the process too, it would be more work to manage a team in this way than to stick with the smaller team of BiCon tradition. But I also think the added work would be well worthwhile. It would be an investment, and i.m.o. not even a very risky one.

You start with a team that could run the event anyway. So the event isn’t at risk.

Each key accountable person trades off {some time spent explaining} against {some time not having to do routine jobs}. Unless we’ve picked the wrong person to be apprentice, that trade should come out at least even in terms of time and energy.

Picking the wrong person as apprentice is a genuine risk, but the downside is probably only some trouble for the key accountable person. (Compare that to the downside if we’d given that “wrong person” their first chance as key accountable person for the area.) And the upside is potentially substantial.

Having more people potentially makes the conversations harder to manage, but also builds in spare capacity to cushion against unforeseen events and the (predictable) high-demand times just before the event and as it starts.

But in any case, there’s a sense in which it isn’t just about “which way is easier for that particular event”. It’s about each team deciding: is their intention purely to run an event, or is their intention to run the event and nurture the skills and experience which will be needed for future similar events? And if the latter, what are the most effective/efficient ways of accomplishing that aim?

Questions

In terms of responses to this article, what I’m most interested in is

1. Why would this not work, according to you?

2. Why would you not want to do it even if it did work?

3. Related suggestions - what else might go along with all this, &/or complement it, &/or be an even better idea?

Agreement and appreciation are also very welcome of course :-)

Here, have an index:
Not herding cats: big team job design
Background
Team size and structure
Jigsaw
Not reinventing the wheel
Categories of people and their roles
Primary team / key accountable people
Apprentices
Advisors
Special mission people
Contributors
Sub-leaders
But where would we get all these people?
People not to have on the team
Including people of no track record
Necessary skills: Creative slicing
Intra-team communication software
Timelines and reporting back
Necessary skills: a keen eye for process
Necessary skills: compassionate ruthlessness
Investment and risks
Questions

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2008. All rights reserved.

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This is another article angled towards the UK out-bi community, but which may also be of interest to other people.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my post about children at BiCon, or to the related thread on LiveJournal.

In this post, I want to pick up on a related theme which was evident in some of the responses, which might be summarised as: “But we can barely manage to run BiCon as it is!”

Anyone with this kind of scarcity concern is going to be rightfully cautious of any suggestion that might increase the organising team’s workload. So I want to talk now about the subject of activism energy supplies, especially the question of where new activists come from and how. (I know I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about this recently, and I look forward to hearing what comes back from BiCon 2008 on the subject.)

Limiting factors

One limitation to the number of “active activists” around any event is caused by people feeling that the event itself isn’t for them.

I’m sure there’s an element of this at play around BiCon, BiFest etc. But I think it would be overly hasty to lay any apparent organiser shortage entirely at that door. Even within the categories of people that those events currently serve well, there are some obstacles to organiser recruitment. For instance:

1. some people who would happily join in don’t realise that their help might be needed;
2. some people who would happily join in don’t have the impression that they’re qualified to contribute; and
3. some people who would like to do a small amount are getting offered a large amount or nothing.

These are at least partly matters of awareness, public perception, structures and management skills.

D.I.Y. vs the professional look

softfruit recently raised a question about perceptions of the BiCon organiser role:

It has me reflecting on the way we try to professionalise the image of bicon to people who’ve never been, as along with BCN it’s one of the few faces the community has. But under the gloss, it’s more like a bunch of mates clubbing together to hire a really big holiday cottage for a weekend away together than like a Pride event.

One thing that struck me about that comment is that I could think of two different meanings which might come under the heading of “Being professional”.

Firstly, I think there’s a kind of competence which is about people being well taken care of. One hopes that people will be at that reliable level in their professional capacities (though in reality they aren’t always), but of course it isn’t necessarily linked with being paid.

Secondly, “Professional” often also implies a separation of roles. The idea is that you leave the “personal you” at home when you go to work. That might be expressed via “work clothes”, and will almost certainly involve “things you don’t talk about with certain people”. And in terms of a company or organisation, there will be a “party line” about how the organisation presents itself to the world. Behind the scenes, it might not look like that.

As an activist I do aspire to be competent and to take care of people, and I’d be surprised if any of my peers didn’t share that aim.

It’s the necessity to present a façade which I think is more up for question. If we do need a façade, I think it’s only at certain times and places. If it goes so far that “ordinary people” can’t imagine themselves as co-organisers with us, then clearly it’s not serving the community well.

(This also connects up with the question of the expectations laid on organisers, and how much or little they get appreciated, as recently pointed out by Sanjibabes and others - see especially ajva’s comment and the responses to it.)

It’s whom you know

Not long ago, someone I consider to be a pretty experienced activist in other fields, and who’s been to BiCon a couple of times, said to me something like: “I’ve never really understood how you get to be on a BiCon organisers’ team. Is it just about ‘who you know’?”

I didn’t reply at the time (the conversation moved on in other directions). But afterwards, I thought about it a lot. And I’d have to concede that at the moment, i.m.e. the answer is basically “yes”.

Contrary data points would be very interesting, inasmuch as presumably they would indicate other “routes in”.

I’m reminded of an anecdote which Starhawk tells in ‘Truth or dare’:

When the Reclaiming Collective began, we were influenced by the style of organizing we had learned in civil disobedience groups. We envisioned a large collective, open to anyone, composed of smaller work groups that we jokingly called cells.

After a couple of years, however, we noticed that nobody seemed to be joining the collective. When we questioned likely prospects, we found out that they didn’t know how to join. Although we imagined ourselves to be open, in reality we had become a tight group of friends that newcomers found intimidating. Because, in theory, no one belonged or didn’t belong to the collective, no one could figure out how to get into it.

(I found it quite striking that almost every commenter on the Children at BiCon LJ thread was someone I’ve known for at least a few years - even though it was on the BiCon LJ, which must include a lot of readers who first went to BiCon in 2006 or 2007 and whom I’ve never met. I don’t mean I know all the commenters in the “close-knit group of friends” sense, but certainly no less than “We’ve been in workshop sessions together” or “I’ve heard you speak”, if not “We’ve chatted in 3d”.

Most were of relatively mature BiCon-going vintage - several easily 10 years or more - and there was no-one I’d think of as a “newcomer”.

To me, this tends to bear out the idea that in the present climate, the average new BiCon-goer isn’t quick to form a view of themself as an owner or equal leader of the event.)

Skills as obstacles

Of course, whether people do or don’t hear about activism opportunities is partly just down to the kind of chat that happens naturally among friends. If your friends are running BiCon, you’re going to hear about it.

But I think with the bigger events, there’s also quite a bit of deliberately only inviting people one knows well; and there’s a logic to that caution, with teams as they’re currently structured. With most BiCon teams of recent history, especially the smaller ones, there are few or no roles available which could be taken by an inexperienced person. And you can’t afford to have someone on your team who’s going to take on an important role and do it wrong.

The following story, also from “Truth or Dare”, touches on that as well as on perceptions:

… as a group matures it becomes harder for new people to enter. Like a climax forest, in which dense shade prevents new seedlings from taking root, the skills, experience, and sense of community in an established group may intimidate newcomers.

As an example, in doing nonviolent civil disobedience, we found that as a core of experienced blockaders developed, newcomers experienced less of an immediate sense of empowerment from the actions. During the Diablo blockade of ‘81, few people had blockaded before. Consensus, solidarity, meeting facilitation, all called forth new skills and generated a great sense of experimentation. The group’s ideology - that we were all equal, that everyone should rotate responsibility for aspects of the group’s functioning such as facilitating meetings or talking to the media - had a basis in reality, for the gaps in our levels of skill were not very great.

Four years later, I participated in a much smaller action at Livermore. Half the people were new, half experienced. Some had been through dozens of actions at that same place. The tone and feeling of the action were very different. For any problems that came up, we could draw on a backing of previous experience. When specific skills were needed, such as that of facilitating large groups, some of us were there who had practiced them hundreds of times. Newcomers felt a little like outsiders.

At Diablo, power-with, influence developed freely and spontaneously out of the group. If someone turned out to be great at facilitating meetings, we all felt empowered because that person represented the possibility that anyone could do the same. Four years later, when the same person was much more highly skilled, newcomers felt disempowered: “I couldn’t do that - it requires lots of practice - I’d better let the expert do it”. And, of course, their attitude reflected a new reality, for reaching a level of skill and experience equal to that of someone who’d been facilitating meetings for the past four years would, in fact, take time and practice. The group had more to lose by letting someone new attempt facilitation, because now the gap in skills was much greater.

…

We most successfully planned for succession by setting up trainings in skills we had learned and teaching strategies we had developed. Also helpful was having a variety of levels upon which people could practice. A new facilitator might start out in an affinity group meeting of ten people, later attempt to facilitate a cluster (a group of affinity groups) of thirty, and finally feel confident to try facilitating a spokescouncil of a hundred or so.

A group is an entity, a being in and of itself. A group that stays together over time develops a culture of its own, a shared history, a style of relating, unspoken rules, in-jokes. That culture can be very powerful, but from the outside can be hard to penetrate. It becomes a de facto boundary - often one that is invisible to those inside.

To be sustainable, a group must understand, anticipate, and plan for its own needs to change over time.

In drawing a parallel with that anecdote, I don’t mean to imply that someone necessarily has to have gained their relevant skills from running that same event before. Yes, there is expertise specific to any event which has a history (e.g. awareness of past traditions which influence people’s expectations); but there’s also lots that all similar events have in common, so that people may have gained relevant skills through paid work or other activism.

What I mean is more that for any job where specific skills are needed, whoever’s putting the team together needs to know and trust that you have those skills. So that constraint still tends to favour people in their existing friendship/co-activism network.

Directory

Some people have been thinking about and working on a volunteering directory for the UK bi community. This would be one way of helping to link people with jobs that would suit them. Last I heard, this project was only in its early stages, but I think it’s an excellent idea.

Job design

What I’m thinking about too is the art of how jobs are designed as a project’s being set up. Each possible job needs to be matched with its person in terms of both skill level and time commitment, as well as preference.

Allowing people to develop their skills via similar tasks at different scales, as Starhawk said, is an aspect of this.

I think it might also imply subdividing jobs sometimes. It may seem easier to have only one person doing all of a job (or even several jobs all at once), but in the long run it means (a) they’re probably somewhat more likely to get bored or exhausted, and (b) no-one else gets to know how to do it. So that has a down side too.

I do have more detailed ideas about this, but I think they’ll have to wait for a sequel.

Underlying philosophy

Meanwhile, I want to say something about my beliefs about activism and about people.

People want to do cool stuff

It’s pretty much axiomatic with me that people enjoy doing cool stuff. People get satisfaction from seeing something happen in the world as a result of their actions, and from exercising their creativity. And even very dull tasks can become enjoyable when done cooperatively in friendly company.

E.g. some people actively enjoy cooking; I prefer creative results that last longer than a meal or two, but I’ll happily potter about loading or unloading the dishwasher, chatting or listening to something on my MP3 player. Some people will happily stuff envelopes but don’t want the responsibility of deciding what’s going in them; for others, it’s the other way around. (I don’t object to either of those jobs, as long as I’ve got people to talk to during the envelope-stuffing.)

In my experience, for pretty much any task in a project such as BiCon, there’s someone who’ll actually enjoy it. (In the world as a whole, this is not true; there’s lots of work which is horrible to do, whose only redeeming feature is that it pays some amount of money. But I don’t think any of those jobs is part of organising the typical UK bi event.)

It follows that any time I see someone martyring themselves by taking on stuff that they’re not really enjoying, I think “Wasted opportunity!”

Starhawk again:

Martyrdom is no model for an ecological society. Sustainability teaches us to cultivate an ecological laziness - getting the most results for the least energy expended, not by depleting scarce resources but by intelligently observing and joining with the larger patterns around us.

Yes, there are occasionally times when the chips are down and whoever’s available ends up mucking in to make the situation work, out of a commitment to producing the result, whether they enjoy the process or not. But that to me is a last resort, and I always want to know what was missed in the earlier stages such that it came to that.

(And if, ultimately, we’ve managed to create activism roles that no-one in the whole world wants to do, then I’d have to wonder why we don’t just stop doing it that way and create something else instead. There’s so much that needs doing in the world, why not pick something we can enjoy?)

Not everyone, not all the time

Of course I don’t mean that everyone, all the time, has spare activism energy. Some people are “fully booked” with what they’ve already taken on. And some people need all their available energy just to get through the day (though I think a taste of activism enhances any life, if you can possibly fit it in, even in tiny amounts).

But (at least here in the UK in 2008), there are also plenty of people searching for something worthwhile to fill some spare time, or for an interesting new challenge. It’s just a question of casting the net wide enough to find them.

What people don’t want

Here are some things that people don’t want:

• To take on a job of apparent size x, only to find that it was really a job of size 2x, 4x or 10x and proceeds to eat their life.
• To be drawn to a job which they would find enjoyable, but discover that in order to get the enjoyable part, they also have to take on a significant amount of other stuff which is of no interest to them.
• To have either less support/cooperation from others than they need, or more overlooking/interference than they want.
• To feel unappreciated.

People who have either too much of a load or too little satisfaction are the ones who get burnt out.

The next generation

Even when people are thoroughly enjoying themselves and teams are basically functioning well, lives change and people move on. So the time to nurture the next generation is before they’re needed to step up and take the lead.

In a BCN some time last year (can’t lay my hands on it right now), Paul Crowley quotes Pat Califia as saying something along the lines of “Every activist’s first job is to replace themself”.

I’m not saying we aren’t already doing that at all. If you’re reading this about to go to BiCon 2008 (or indeed at BiCon), and you recognise yourself in some of the above description of not quite knowing how to get stuck in or whether your help would be welcome, then I commend unto you the session on “Volunteering in the bi community”.

(And if I look at my own history, then in retrospect I think my account of the first Fitting & Misfitting workshop partly served that purpose, though it’s not exactly how I was thinking of it at the time. Writing that up for other people seemed the natural thing to do, but that’s partly because I just have naturally low thresholds for both wastefulness and boredom :-) )

What I’m thinking is more that to whatever degree we’ve been doing it up till now, we could do more of it if we paid more attention to it.

Activism energy supplies
Limiting factors
D.I.Y. vs the professional look
It’s whom you know
Skills as obstacles
Directory
Job design
Underlying philosophy
People want to do cool stuff
Not everyone, not all the time
What people don’t want
The next generation

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2008. All rights reserved.

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Today’s theme is some specific factors which have tempted me to overreach or overload myself.

I don’t think the catalogue of temptations will be the same for everyone as for me. But I do think that if I describe my ones, they will be usefully familiar to some other people too :-)

Some kinds of overload come from the universe throwing stuff at you - like the illness of a relative, or a work colleague leaving, or your house being flooded, or just a constellation of minor bits of entropy all happening in close succession. I don’t mean those.

What I’m talking about here is an overload you had some hand in creating for yourself. I mean those times when you “somehow can’t resist” taking on something else. (Generic “you” - not assuming that you personally are susceptible to this phenomenon :-) )

Ooh, a cool thing!

One main category of temptation for me is things which sound like they’d be cool. “Ooh, a cool thing!” or “Opportunities like this don’t come along every day“, or even “This one is too good to miss!”

Taking on one of these is not necessarily a mistake. It might be highly rewarding and a very good use of my time.

However, there are at least two mistakes waiting to be made here.

1. It’s only partly a cool thing, and it’s partly a tedious thing, and the ratio is not favourable.
2. It is indeed a cool thing, but it’s a side-track for me, and it takes attention and time away from other cool things which are more important.

Up my metaphorical sleeve, I have some further metaphors for this variety, which I’m saving for another day.

It would make sense…

The other main temptation for me is the idea that “it would make sense” for me to do something.

Or it might not happen

One version of this is “If I don’t do this good thing, nobody else will, and it won’t happen“. Having identified this as a very hooky hook, I’ve got better at unhooking myself from it. “Yep, it won’t happen. Too bad. Them’s the breaks. C’est la vie.”

Some people would suggest answering this kind of temptation with “No-one is irreplaceable”. But the fact is that sometimes, if you walk away, you won’t be replaced, and the idea or project will run aground for lack of your contribution.

So I find that a sounder basis for standing firm against this temptation is remembering all the other potential good things which aren’t happening either. I mean, why get hung up on this one? The world is full of wonderful projects which never got done!

Making the team work

The “… it won’t happen at all” is a particular case of a more generic thing about “the good of everyone”. I think a lot of people get talked into things on the grounds that it would make some collective project work. “We need a treasurer, and nobody else wants to do it.” “Someone has to do this complicated errand, and you’re the only person who’s free that day.” Slurp, slurp, the sound of the quicksand of temptation.

I find this line of reasoning is particularly hooky when it latches onto some skill or resource that I demonstrably have which not everyone has.

For some people, the main hook in that might be flattery - “… but you’re so good at that!”

For me, I think it tends to be more about privilege - “I had the privilege of an education that gave me these skills [subtext: so don't I have a duty to use them (here)?]” “Some people simply couldn’t make time for this job, and I could if I chose to [subtext: so oughtn't I?].”

I’m not saying there’s nothing to be said for “Do the job that’s at hand”. And of course I’m not saying that a desire to see a collective project work is an invalid motive for doing anything.

I’m saying that your contribution to the world doesn’t necessarily have to be this one, just because you could and it was there.

Some wise words from Howard Thurman:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

He didn’t say “Don’t ask yourself what makes you come alive. Wait till someone else comes up with a job for you which no-one else wanted to do, and then go do that.”

Or take it from the Buddha:

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.”

Perceptions

Another angle from which to investigate the same phenomenon is via the NLP concept of “Perceptual positions”. “First position” is being in touch with your own wishes and thoughts and feelings; “Second position” is imagining and empathising with another person’s reality; and “Third position” is an observer’s perception of the two (or more) of you, including how you interact.

(A while ago, I read a book where the author also suggested the concept of fourth and fifth positions. If I recall correctly, one of them was imagining how the situation might evolve over time, and the other was the background of the rest of the world - e.g. social rules, distribution of resources, etc. I thought that was useful. But I don’t remember now what book that was. Another version has fifth position as a “Universal position”, which for some people evidently has a religious or spiritual meaning. But anyway, at least those first three seem to be generally agreed on.)

I would say that it’s one of my strengths to perceive and imagine from positions other than “first”. Systems thinking seems to come natural to me (a.k.a. “seeing the big picture”).

But there’s a pitfall in having that natural inclination: sometimes it’s at the expense of remembering to check in with myself. Then I might come to the conclusion that, looking at the situation as a whole, it “obviously makes sense” for me to take on a particular task. Only later do I realise “Hang on a minute - I had no desire to do this at all!” But hey, it “obviously made sense” for me to do it. Hmmm.

Selfishness

I think a common strand running through all that area of “It would make sense…” and/or “For the good of everyone…” is a lack of clarity - for me, obviously, but I think in the whole of western culture as well - about what might be the most healthy and most ethical relationship between (a) one’s own wants and needs, and (b) those of other people.

I think the concept of “selfishness” probably deserves a whole article of its own in the fullness of time. But for now I’ll just refer to the often-made point that if you’re not taking good care of yourself, it’s unlikely that you’re doing your best work for other people either.

Adding to the catalogue

I think those are the main ones for me. But please feel free to add to the catalogue if you can identify some temptations of your own :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2008. All rights reserved.

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One of the areas I want to write about on this blog is “Taking on too much”, and its unsurprising result, “Having too much to do”. This is a subject I’ve had many occasions to ponder :-)

I’ve more to say later about specific factors which have tempted me to overreach myself, but here to be going on with is a thing I invented in January 2006.

I was pondering the undeniable fact that, if you want to shrink your workload/overload, then

1. you’ve got to stop doing some things (either by finishing them, or just by stopping at some other point), and
2. at the same time you’ve got to refrain from taking even more on than you finish or stop.

What I realised is that some “Yes I’ll do that” decisions (or newly invented ideas/tasks) have much greater effect than others in increased time demands. And conversely, different types of “polishing something off” have greatly varying ability to shrink the workload.

In a moment of inspiration, I thought of inventing a thing a bit like the Beaufort Scale for wind speed, to assist me in thinking this through.

Unlike wind speed, it’s not really a one-dimensional variable, so the order I’ve put them in has a few points of “subjective judgement call”. But essentially, the aim is to identify the most worthwhile “wins” on the “stopping doing things” front, and the potentially most expensive temptations on the “starting new things” front.

The examples here are based on the ones I wrote down for myself, so they’re biased towards the kinds of things I personally might be doing. If you want to adapt it for yourself, you’d probably want to come up with your own examples.

Here’s the list. Lower numbers are workload-shrinkers, higher numbers are workload-increasers.

The “Starty Stoppy Scale”

1. Stop an ongoing commitment which would otherwise take more attention later.

   E.g. bowing gracefully out of some team, group or committee.

2. Give away or recycle a possession which I don’t really need any more.

   E.g. giving something away via Freecycle (or one of its equivalents).

   E.g. recycling/shredding/binning papers.

3. Work towards finishing a task.

   E.g. finishing a piece of writing.

   E.g. giving someone a piece of information I’d promised them.

4. Reorganise or neatly store something which would otherwise be getting in my way or otherwise taking my time and/or attention.

   E.g. going through a pile of papers and putting away the ones I’m keeping.

   E.g. sorting my browser bookmarks.

   E.g. creating a workable place to store some homeless possession(s).

5. Improve my local environment, in a way which has no significant implications for the outside world and only minor implications for my future workload.

   E.g. tidy my desk.

   E.g. put batteries on to charge.

6. Start something or do something, but it doesn’t matter if I never do any more on it after this burst of inspiration plays out, so the only cost is the time of that moment.

   E.g. starting a piece of writing, but nobody knows, and if it stays unfinished, it’ll just stay on the computer somewhere.

   E.g. research something which I might or might not want to buy or do at some point.

   E.g. playing a solo game such as a computer game or puzzle, or filling in a crossword.

7. Start something which will require some dealing with later.

   E.g. acquiring a possession.

   E.g. undertaking to do something later.

   E.g. emailing someone and starting a conversation which may (or will) continue later.

8. Start a substantial task, which will need a lot of work to be completed and will hang around until it’s done.

   E.g. some big DIY thing.

9. Start a substantial task, which will need a lot of work to be completed and must be done either within a particular timescale or for other people who are counting on it (but which, like the previous type, does at least have an inherent ending).

   E.g. undertaking to lead a workshop.

   E.g. being on a team to run some kind of event.

   E.g. taking on building a web site for someone.

10. Embark on a potentially endless series of commitments, which will require a type-1 extrication to stop. (”Set a plate spinning”.)

    E.g. joining a committee.

    E.g. joining a group, especially if there’s an expectation that you’ll participate regularly.

    E.g. taking on the future maintenance & development of a web site or email list.

    E.g. starting certain kinds of (personal) relationship.

How it worked for me in practice

You could call this a kind of consciousness-raiser rather than a set of rules. I wasn’t saying to myself “Never take on any of the more workload-adding ones” - the idea was simply to be more aware of the future implications when I was deciding what to do.

Not long after inventing this, I did resign from a couple of groups where I didn’t feel I’d contributed much. But no doubt there is more mileage for me in the principle yet - maybe posting it here will remind me to think of it more often :-)

I realised later that this also puts an interesting slant on things like doing puzzles on the computer. I don’t think those are necessarily always a waste of time anyway, because sometimes they’re more like a meditation, where my mind is processing something more substantial at the same time as playing them. But if and when they are a waste of time, at least they only waste the time you actually spend on them. They don’t sign away future time as well, like some kinds of sidetracks do.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2007. All rights reserved.

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