Thoughts about lawn mowing

Three things I want to say about this:

First – it goes against my No Crap Policy (NCP) but then again, there is my “Make Wife Happy” policy to consider as well.  There is a theory called the total utility of happiness which says that you should do whatever maximises the happiness of the whole system.  So if it makes me only a little unhappy to have to mow the lawn, but makes her very happy, then I should do it. Otherwise I would be being selfish. (Conversely things which I really hate and which only make her a little happier should not be done – otherwise SHE would be being selfish).

Second – mowing the lawn may be urgent (getting long, almost too long to mow, and rain coming soon) but it’s not important (spending time mowing isn’t one of my life goals).  The fact that it HAS to be done doesn’t make it important.  So because it’s not important my objective is to spend the minimum time on it.  An example of something that is the reverse, i.e. important but not urgent, is phoning my mum for a chat.  Let’s suppose I usually spend 45 minutes on the lawn and 10 minutes on my phone chat with my mum, this is not ideal as the less important thing, the lawn, is getting more time.  But that’s unavoidable as it HAS to be be done and is a longish job.  But if I could reduce it to only 35 minutes by efficient methods (or reduced quality) then I could have 20 minutes with my mum, and that’s the essence of time management: identify what’s really important rather than just the junk that has to be done, and maximise the time you spend on the important things. So it’s not about absolute time spent, it’s about squeezing the less important things in order to maximise the more important ones.

Third – I should get the most happiness from everything, even the unimportant things, perhaps by making them fun.  I could listen to my favourite music through loud headphones as I dance my way around the lawn, or use my (usually bad) personality drivers to advantage – use the Be Perfect driver to enjoy doing a really nice job, and use the Hurry Up driver to try finding the most efficient mowing pattern so there is minimal double cutting and easy turns at the end (e.g do rows 1 and 4, 2 then 5, 3 then 6, because doing 123456 means turns that are too sharp…etc!).

… and that’s what I’m thinking about today!

CC

 

PS – Lawn mowing fits perfectly with my 5 options for unimportant tasks:

1 – say no to it (rejected in this case for reasons given above)

2 – negotiate (maybe get something back for it or avoid something else instead?)

3 – delegate it (pay kids or a gardener)

4 – more efficient systems (e.g. good mower, good mowing pattern)

5 – do it less well (less often, less carefully)

Hmm, maybe I need to add “Make it fun” as a sixth option….

 

First World Problems

This is a hilarious thread that’s been going on Twitter for a while now, you just search for the firstworldproblems and there are some really funny ones.  Here are some of my recent favourites:

• I was looking for a song on YouTube but could only find a live version.
• I want to go to sleep, but I don’t want to miss the complimentary breakfast.
• I only got 1 dipping sauce with my 20 nuggets and had to ration it like it was WWII.
• One pillow is too low, two pillows are too high
• I got a free work phone from work. But it’s only for work purposes, so now I have to carry two phones
• bags with loads of pockets are great until you unzip one and are like ‘omg, i’ve not seen that for six months’
• I can’t hear the TV when I’m eating crunchy snacks.
• Just sent myself a text from one phone to another to remind myself of something
• Sometimes I get mildly upset when I can’t tell how much salt is coming out of the salt shaker. Too much? Too little?
• The string of my tea bag broke
• My favourite song came on just as I reached my destination so I had to drive around the block twice.
• I just ate a fantastic jelly bean, but I put it into my mouth without looking at it so I don’t know what colour it is.

• “I don’t have enough hangers for all the clothes I own”

• “I really have to pee but I’m too lazy to get up”

• “I want pizza but I have to eat that chicken in the fridge before it goes bad”

• “I just tried to pet my black lab in the dark and ended up jamming two fingers up his nose”

• I accidentally pumped too much hand sanitizer into my hand
• My kindle is being replaced and in the meantime I have to read actual books like some African school child
• Ordering a small pizza then afterwards wishing you’d got a medium/large
• One of my pistachio shells was completely sealed shut.

Of course the moral is that we should be grateful for how lucky we are and not let the small stuff upset us – and almost everything in our lives is small stuff!

Why I don’t care about my birthday

It’s my birthday on Sunday and people are very kindly offering to do special things on that date.

But

a) I don’t really want to think about age and the inevitable corollary of how little time I have left,

b) it’s just an arbitrary date really – every day I’m a day older (Engineer speaking!)

but the biggest thing is

c) – I don’t want my birthday to be special, I want EVERY day to be special. I want every Sunday, at least, to involve doing things I like doing, with the people I like seeing.  If I had to wait a year for that then something wouldn’t be right.  And I don’t think I’m that far off that point, so I don’t want this Sunday to be any different.     Scrooge? Lucky? Deluded? You decide!

 

PS – What AM I going to do on Sunday? I hear you ask…   Walk the dog on the beach, go and see some bands playing at The Sloop in the afternoon, have a curry in the evening. My idea of a great day!

Our kids’ careers

Is the world changing, or was it always like this and I’m just looking at it from a different (older!) angle?  That’s what we all wonder as we look at increasing crime (or not?), unsafe streets for our children to play in (or not?), kids spend their whole time playing violent computer games these days (or not) and watch too much TV instead of interacting with other humans, the press is rubbish, TV is all dumbed down, schools are dumbed down – if you read the Daily Mail you can really start believing this rubbish!

Though I think I do believe that careers are changing….

It seems to me that the top end careers are still there – doctors etc, and the bottom end careers (Argos stock room, pizza delivery) are still there, but there aren’t as many ways to bridge the gap.  The middle jobs have become a thin point, a constriction, rather than the fat bit where most people were.  Maybe the demise of manufacturing has partly caused this, and the delaying of management, and computerisation and the internet’s effect of automating jobs that are routine (many bank functions, travel agents etc).

But for whatever reason I do fear for the future of my kids and most of their friends, who are currently doing unnecessary degrees (50% of the population!) and therefore expecting to do interesting and well paid jobs.

Their holiday jobs and in some cases first job after Uni have been menial and boring, and I just can’t see how they can bridge the gap to where the interesting and well paid jobs are.  The days of management trainee schemes are long gone.

Will there be a crash as all these kids realise that they are doomed to a life of boring work and bad pay? …and if only they’d trained as a plumber or a hairdresser and got a trade – but to do even that requires several years of minimal pay.  Welcome to the real world as it is now – much harsher than when we fell lazily out of university straight into cushy milk-round management jobs.

Tell me I’m wrong about this!

 

CC

Will Money make you happy?

I think we all know the answer…

Forget all thoughts of trying to get more money or getting material things of any kind in order to be happier.  Time spent on this will just be wasted, and may just make you less happy.  For example:

• Celebrities – often rich, often deeply unhappy
• People who win the lottery are often less happy afterwards (although we all think we would be different in this situation)
• A friend of mine who sold his company for four million pounds and then wondered what to do.  After a bit of lazing around and then world travelling he got bored – he ended up starting up another company!
• Another friend of mine who is very well paid but never at home, and when he is at home he has to spend lots of time and money keeping his house, garden, tennis court and swimming pool all working
•  Yourself – when you’d had pay rises in the past, has it made any difference, or did you forget about it quite quickly and then somehow spend the extra money without noticing?

If 10% of your happiness comes from material possessions and 90% comes from relationships with others (do you think this is true?  I do) then the logical conclusion is that money is likely to improve the 10% but is probably going to reduce the 90% – not a good exchange!

Will money really reduce the 90% of your happiness that comes from relationships?  Well this is frequently the case in those who win the lottery, who lose their friends when they become rich.  And certainly it seems to be a problem for celebrities.  But what about just a little more money?

Clearly the money might allow you to afford to do some sociable/fun things, but there are disadvantages as well:

• Some relationships have nothing to do with money – wherever you are, whatever you can afford, the friendship is the same.  The money has no effect;  but…
• the time and stress involved in earning the extra money takes its toll on your social life
• higher paid jobs tend to be less secure
• you get “addicted” to the money and have to keep earning it in order to keep up the lifestyle to which you’ve become accustomed; maybe wanting “just a bit more” and never quite being satisfied, however much you have
• upkeep of your expensive lifestyle takes time and effort – a bigger garden, an extra car, more parts of your house to maintain and repair, it’s all more complicated
• will the extra money change you in some way that will adversely affect your relationship?
• jealousy or competitiveness – will the money change the way your friends see you in some way that will adversely affect your relationship?

Conclusion:

Don’t assume that more money will fix it for you.  Ask yourself why you want the money – what will you spend it on?  Will this really make you happier?  Will there be a down-side to whatever you want to get with the money? (e.g. big house needing more maintenance).  How will it affect your relationships? What price will you need to pay in order to get the money, (e.g. longer working hours) and will it be worth paying?

Consider working shorter hours, saying no to travel or things you don’t believe in, even if this means a little less money now or in the future.

Make learning, and interesting work, and doing work that you believe in, a higher priority.

Maybe you won’t miss the money, and you’ll be happier too.

Onwards and upwards!

CC

Optimism about training

Pessimists never get disappointed, and they are perhaps more likely to make contingency plans, but even so, I just can’t BE one!   Every day must be so depressing for them…

Here’s an example – my views on training, my livelihood:   As the world falls apart economically (allegedly), people say that “Training is always the first thing to be cut”, but….

1 – Even if your customers halve their training budgets, you just mustn’t be in the bottom half – and if you ARE in the bottom half you might as well pack up and go home anyway.   (I think this applies to any business, not just training).

2 – There are always some sectors growing. In the past the Public sector have been fine, but now it’s reversed and as the Public Sector takes a dip the private sector is on the up. And even parts of the private sector do well in recessions, for example if people don’t move they do their houses up, etc.

3 – If people are cutting costs they need Project Management to help with the cost reduction projects (if you change anything it’s a project) and Time Management to do more with fewer people.

4 – If you’re getting rid of people, particularly with voluntary redundancy where the gaps appear at random in your structure, that means moving the existing ones to cover new areas, and doing more with fewer people – which is bound to mean training of the ones you are keeping.

5 – When the good times return there tends to be a pent up demand to for training – many times I have had customers put all training on hold for a year and then come back with twice as much. People have to be trained eventually. (Unless you’re going to pay them 20k and then not ever spend the £300 you need to make them effective).

6 – If there are gaps in my diary I use them for selling (neworking, doing free talks, getting back in touch with dormant customers, making more of an effort to follow up leads, pitching for business I wouldn’t normally have time to pitch for, etc) and also more time developing new products, courses, iPhone apps, making youtube videos, etc which will also lead to more work in the future. So there is a self-correcting mechanism there.

7 – In the past I’ve sometimes been a bit too busy, so a bit more time with my family, as the politicians say, might be good for me. Happiness is about time rather thaan money, so maybe a reduction in work would be good for me!

… There speaks a true optimist!

CC

The Management Potato applied to the band

I know you like stories about management ideas applied to real life, here’s one:

You may remember the idea of the Management Potato, where if you criticise people their ‘Potato of Performance’ just gets smaller until it becomes a prune, but if you build them up you can get a pumpkin…

Well, even if you know about the theory, it still happens, and I can feel it happening to me in the band – and there’s not much I can do about it.

It started when I made some posters for us to give to pubs, and our guitarist and band leader, who is a very talented artist but too busy to make any posters, said “Oh well, I suppose they’ll do until we get some proper ones”. So I don’t think I’ll bother with making a version 2…
Next I got us a gig at a pub that turned out to be less than brilliant, and the comment was (translated for spam filter suitability) “This is a rubbish gig you’ve got us Chris!” It took several visits and a few phone calls to get that gig, they’re always a pain to get, and so I think I’ll not bother with getting gigs any more.
Our previous bass player used to bring song ideas along, but they were nearly always rejected out of hand by the leader, and although I think I’ve got some really good ones I don’t think I’ll risk it.
I had been planning to get a back-drop printed, and I’ve got a good idea for a design, but I know what he’ll say, so I think I don’t do it.

So basically I don’t really do anything now, apart from the minimum, which is to turn up and play. Don’t get me wrong, I love the music, and the band is great, but it needs people to do more than play, and that’s just not happening any more. I guess everyone else feels the same as I do!

Conclusion:

a) Am I too sensitive? Should I persevere for the good of the band? Maybe, but it wears you down after a while (the above were shortened for clarity, it’s been a long relentless process), so however tough you are your potato gets diminished eventually. Mine has taken about 5 years to reach a prune…

b) What should the leader have done, given that maybe my posters weren’t very professional and the gig I got was a bad one? The answer is to think “Posters – At least he’s done this much, which is more than anyone else, and much better than nothing” and say “Brilliant, thanks Chris!”. Gig – “Don’t worry about the gig not working out, there’s no way to tell until you get there on the night, and your next one will probably be a great one”. And yes, he should have agreed to play one of the bass player’s songs, even if it wasn’t our best number. I expect John Lennon’s first song wasn’t as good as Imagine!

c) Parallels with work – anyone who suggests ideas or does work beyond the minimum needs to be noticed and encouraged, however small their efforts appear and however tough and experienced you might think they are. The oak tree has to start as an acorn, at which point it is easily trampled!

Onwards and upwards!

CC

PS – Don’t try and help me solve the band’s problems, I’ll be alright! – the point of this email is to get you to ask yourself if you are nibbling away at someone else’s potato without realising….?

Junk Calls are no more

I joined the TPS a while ago and that did pretty well for a while, but foreign companies (nice people from India and horrible machine calls from the USA) don’t care about the TPS. http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ Also, surveys are exempt, so you get “A quick survey about windows” rather than “Wanna buy some windows?”

So for a bit I have been using some fun techniques, like

- asking them questions back, like their name, middle name, date of birth, what sort of chair are they sitting on, what sort of pants are they wearing, – the questions getting gradually weirder until they hang up
- asking them if I could have their number so I can call them back, and then ‘when are they having dinner, so I can do it then?’
- asking them out on a date because their voice sounds really nice
- saying “Hang on a minute, I’ll just get a pen” and then never coming back
- screaming suddenly very loudly into the headset (actually I’ve never done this one, and the trouble with all these is that I feel a bit sorry for the person, after all they’re only doing a job, and a difficult one at that)
- this one made me laugh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw9ZbjSvdxs Background noise just as you give them your credit card number
- Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.
- Tell them that all business goes through your agent, and hand the phone to your five year old child.
- Tell them you are hard of hearing and that they need to speak up…louder…louder…louder!
- If they start out with, “How are you today?”,say “I’m so glad you asked, because no one these days seems to care, and I have all these problems…………”
- Cry out in surprise, “Helen, is that you? I’ve been hoping you’d call! How is the family?” When they insist they are not Helen, tell them to stop joking. This works especially well if the telemarketer is really MALE.
- Just keep saying “Hello?”, “Hello?”, “is anybody there…hello?” This really frustrates them as they can see there is no way to begin their potentially lucrative sales call!

anyway, I’ve got the answer now, thanks to my brother who saw it on dragon’s den – it’s the trueCall box!

You plug it in in between your phone and your phone’s wall socket and off it goes! Callers have to give their name (silent calls get blocked before it even lets your phone ring at all) and then your phone rings and you get a message saying “I have….”Dave”.(in his voice!)… on the line for you, do you want to take the call?” and then you can either take it as a one off, take it and star him no next time he gets straight through, or you can send it to answerphone and listen while they leave a message, or block him so next time it doesn’t even ring, he just gets a message saying “You’ve been blocked, don’t call again”. And even with answerphone messages you can star them or block them for when they next call. So the good people only get your “Who are you?” message once, and the bad guys have no chance of getting through. I love it!

You can import your phone book into it as well (via website) so they all get starred, but I’m not that organised so I’m just doing it as we go along.

You need caller ID on your phone line, but with Virgin that’s free, and I think it’s free with BT as well, so not a problem.

As they say on the gadget show, Great Tech!

details at www.truecall.co.uk though cheaper to buy it from DS Telecom where it is £86

It’s been on the gadget show as well – http://fwd.channel5.com/gadget-show/videos/news/news-tru-call

My favourite dog videos on youtube

Guilty dog – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ISzf2pryI
Dog tease – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGeKSiCQkPw
Skate boarding dog – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0
Dancing Merengue Dog – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc9xq-TVyHI
Bicycling dog conga line – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu4rk0a962U
Dancing Chihuahua – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTAPgrjPZ4w

I can’t put them in order – it’s like choosing between your children!

CC

PS – also good: static electricity dog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO-phqmyqdY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

and the skipping dogs http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rWPWrR-94NY#

 

Life expectancy after retirement

I sent this out as a tip last week, and, as I expected, got lots of replies!

The main themes of the replies seem to be

a) “What if you don’t retire at 65 but keep on working?” – I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that keeping working does keep you alive longer, but if you eventually retire at, say 75, then you probably don’t last long after that

b) “What about other professions?” Yes, this would be great, because the difficulty is how do you assess how stressed a job is? – If anyone has any links to websites which have life expectancy after retirement sorted by profession, I’d love to know. Someone told me that only 30% of Naval Chief Petty Officers make it to the retirement age of 55! But is this really true? Come on all you actuaries out there – what have you got??

c) “Is it all just an urban myth?” – I was sent one link to a site claiming this, saying that Boeing have condemned it all as a myth, but the site was less credible than the original one that mentioned the Boeing stats, so who knows? Certainly there is lots of anecdotal evidence of people living to old ages but also of people keeping over just after retiring…

and here’s another site that looks very authoritative – I think the data looks as if it really is true!  http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa/coe/gutub/english_misc/retire1.htm

d) “Is the data skewed in some way, like richer people can afford to retire earlier and are already likely to be healthier?” – again, I have no way of knowing. If anyone has more info I’d love to hear from them

e) “Can we have the link to the Guardian article?” I wish I could find this! i have searched the Grauniad website to no avail. I do wonder whether information on life expectancy is taken down from the net, as the government don’t want us to know that we won’t draw most of our pensions, work is all there is, “behave and you’ll have a nice retirement” is all a myth etc. Also, the money men who run the annuity schemes don’t want us to know the real odds and how much we are paying them for how little we’ll probably get. Just a paranoid theory of mine!

—————————————————

anyway, here is my original post:

Possibly a depressing one this week, but then again, you need to know!

Key facts: (and these apply only from people retiring from stressful jobs):

For people retired at the age of 50, their average life span is 86;
whereas for people retired at the age of 65, their average life span is only 66.8.

For every year one works beyond age 55, one loses 2 years of life span on average.

The Boeing experience is that employees retiring at age of 65 receive pension checks for only 18 months, on average, prior to death. Similarly, the Lockheed experience is that employees retiring at age of 65 receive pension checks for only 17 months, on average, prior to death. I have heard the same figures for UK teachers (the article was in the Guardian, so it must be true…)

http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/age-65-rule/10264-life-span-vs-retirement-age.html

retire die left

49.9…….86………36.1
51.2…….85.3…….34.1
52.5…….84.6…….32.1
53.8…….83.9…….30.1
55.1…….83.2…….28.1
56.4…….82.5…….26.1
57.2…….81.4…….24.2
58.3…….80………21.7
59.2…….78.5…….19.3
60.1…….76.8…….16.7
61………74.5…….13.5
62.1…….71.8…….9.7
63.1…….69.3…….6.2
64.1…….67.9…….3.8
65.2…….66.8…….1.6

See also http://www.buzzle.com/articles/retirement-age-and-life-expectancy.html

The moral is that if you’re able to retire early, even if the financial deal isn’t great, take it!

So if you’d rather be in denial then sorry I told you about this, but I do hope it helps you make informed decisions – apart from anything, to avoid stress if you can (…if only!)

Onwards and Outwards

CC