All too much?

The charity, Mind, is running a campaign on mental health at work.

It’s offering resources to help employees manage stress at work. Mind emphasises the need to recognise when you are feeling and stress and your ability to take action about it, however small. In most jobs, one has some autonomy to manage things without reference to anyone else; making the most of this gives you some sense of control and helps you to stop feeling the victim of other people’s demands. There’s some good advice on how to do this:

• Develop good relationships with colleagues so that you can build up a network of support.
• Talk to someone you trust, at work or outside, about what upsets you or makes you feel stressed. This is not a sign of weakness, it’s taking responsibility for your wellbeing.
• Treat colleagues with the respect and consideration you want from them.
• Communicate if you need help.
• Be assertive – say no if you can’t take on extra demands.
• Be realistic – you don’t have to be perfect all the time.
• Write a list of what needs to be done; it only takes a few minutes and can help you to prioritise, focus and get things in perspective. It can also feel satisfying to tick items off once they have been done.
• If everything starts to feel overwhelming, take a deep breath. Try and get away from your desk or situation for a few minutes – get a drink or go to the toilet.
• Try and take a walk or get some fresh air during the day – exercise and daylight are beneficial to mental as well as physical health.
• Make sure you drink enough water and that you eat during the day to maintain your energy levels.
• Learn some relaxation techniques.
• Work regular hours and take the breaks and holidays you’re entitled to. If things are getting too much, book a day off or a long weekend.
• Try not to work long hours or take work home with you. This may be all right in the short term, if the work has a specific purpose and is clearly defined – a team effort to complete an urgent project may be very satisfying – however, working longer hours does not generally lead to better results.
• Maintain a healthy work-life balance – nurture your outside relationships, interests, and the abilities your job does not use.

The more impressive aspect of the campaign though is the call on employers to recognise their duty of care to employees with respect to mental health. This is an obligation on all employers, big or small, under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1984. Yet, as Mind says:

“Mental health is still a taboo subject, with employers and employees feeling scared and confused about confronting the issue. As a result, millions of workers are putting on a ‘brave face’, hiding the fact they are experiencing distress. Work-related mental ill health costs the UK economy up to £26 billion every year through lost working days, staff turnover and lower productivity.”

Mind offers resources for employees to help them ensure they’re promoting the wellbeing of staff and it makes clear that it’s in companies own interests to get this right:

“If your work environment and relationships aren’t right you’ll struggle to recruit and retain good staff. Creating the right environment and supportive relationships between staff will prevent your staff from experiencing work-related mental health problems and help your organisation to thrive.
• Make sure that work environments are suitable for the task. Noise, temperature and light levels can all have a big impact on wellbeing. Could space dividers, quiet spaces or music improve your workplace?
• Manage workloads among your staff. Make sure that no one is expected to deliver more than what they are capable of.
• Train managers to identify risks, recognise mental ill health and support their staff.
• For staff working in isolation, ensure there are clear and regular lines of communication.”

It’s a duty of care, but it also makes good business sense.

Image courtesy Bhernandez.

This week I’ve been refreshing my GTD system: reviewing my horizons of focus, tidying up my project lists, and emptying my collection baskets.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, perhaps it’s time you were inculcated to the cult of Getting Things Done – a book on how to organise yourself and manage all the stuff in your life with the minimum of stress.

Getting Things Done, by David Allen, must be one of the most blogged about of books so I hesitate to add to the cacophony. But, since I find myself recommending it to clients with increasing frequency, I feel a need to explain its particular appeal to me.

David Allen’s great achievement in my opinion was to notice the kind of things we tend to do all the time, when trying to process and get through the cascade of responsibilities that we all face, and order them into a set of routines which, if adhered to, remove much of the friction around being productive. Instead of prescribing a time management system which tries to slot your work into rigid structures of prioritisation, GTD – as it’s known to its friends – offers a more natural, fluid process of keeping track of your commitments and following your energy in deciding what needs to be done.

It’s difficult to do justice to the elegance of the approach in a single blog post so let me confine myself to some of the elements that I find particularly helpful.

A trusted system for collecting your commitments. Instead of relying on your memory, and writing things down in diverse places, GTD encourages you to have a single system that you can use wherever you are for capturing your thoughts, action points, to-dos and so on. This can be as simple as a notebook or a pile of index cards which you can toss into an in-tray, or it can be more sophisticated like an app on your phone that syncs to the web or your computer. The key is to have always on hand the tools which will enable you to note down something you need to do and get the note to a single, consistent destination. Typically, we carry a lot this stuff around in our heads. But there’s only so much that your mind can hold at any one time and the things we have to do recede from grasp. If you can trust that all the stuff that you accumulate through the course of a day will end up in a place where you can later work out what to do with it, you free your mind from having to remember everything and your ‘psychic RAM’, as Allen describes it, can be put to better use.

Workflow for keeping your inbox clear. Don’t treat your inbox as a to-do list in which things that need your attention accumulate. If you do, you will constantly have to filter through stuff that has been sitting there for some time and new items that need your attention. So your mind will be constantly processing what to do with each item. David Allen offers a process for clearing your inbox methodically. You go through each item and give it your attention only once – deciding whether to delete it, file it or take action. If the item is actionable, your options boil down to three choices: deal with it straight away, if it can be done in two minutes; delegate it; or defer it.

Organise your stuff into projects and next actions. Having processed your inbox, you end up with a pile of stuff that is actionable. You need to turn this from a bunch of stuff that demands your attention in some vague way into defined projects and actions which make it clear what you need to do next. David Allen is refreshingly uncomplicated about this. An action is the next thing you need to do on a task to move it forward and a project is any task that requires more than one action to complete it. The important thing about an action is to write it as an instruction that makes clear what you have to do so that, when it comes to the doing, you don’t have to think about what the task requires of you – e.g. Call the garage to arrange a car service (and for this to be a next action, you’ll need to know the number of the garage, otherwise the next action is: Find the phone number for the garage). Often we fail to make progress with a task because we haven’t recognised that it’s a project and not an action. The solution is to think about the outcome you want to achieve and then work back to what is the very next thing you need to do to move you towards that outcome.

Weekly review. To my mind, this is one of the most valuable aspects of GTD and the one that can feel the hardest to justify in the heat of the moment. This is about making a weekly commitment to yourself to go through your lists of projects and actions so as to review progress and anticipate what needs to be done in the week ahead. This can take a good two hours to do well and there’s a great temptation to skip it. But time spent up front getting on top of your workload and ensuring that you understand what to do is more than repaid in the effectiveness by which you operate subsequently. If you don’t carve out a weekly period to review your commitments, you’ll end up doing this iteratively on the fly anyway.

Mindful approach to doing. David Allen recommends that you organise all your actions into lists for different contexts – phone calls to make, things you have to do on the computer, errands for when you’re out and about, and so on. You then refer to these to work out what you need to do depending on the context in which you find yourself. I have to say that I don’t gain a great deal by filtering my actions by context, perhaps because my contexts are not very varied. I tend to focus much more on what I want to get done today across a variety of contexts. The bigger point though is to be guided by where your energy lies. At some point in the day, you may not feel like doing a lot of thinking work but may be attracted to rattling through a few phone calls. You need to be able to use your system quickly to find the tasks that correspond to what you have the energy, will and resources to accomplish in the moment.

Distilled down, Getting Things Done is about doing in a disciplined way the things you need to do in any event to keep on top of your workload. If you don’t acquire the disciplines, you still end up doing having to go through the same thought processes about how to approach your work but you’ll do this in a piecemeal way that absorbs more of your mental capacity.

The great thing is that it’s not an all-or-nothing edifice that is hard to integrate into your life. You can make a difference to your effectiveness by adopting any one of these practices. As you embed it, it begins to free you up to achieve more; then you can build on this by taking on another aspect of the GTD approach. Ultimately, as you get more competent at dealing with your immediate commitments and responsibilities, you find your mind begins to shift to the bigger, more long-term questions about what you’re doing with your life.

Beware, this thing has existential implications.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Available from Amazon

Image courtesy koalazymonkey

Compelling reading on either platform

A couple of weeks ago in The Observer, John Naughton reviewed the state of battle between Apple and Microsoft and revisited Umberto Eco’s 1994 analogy with the Catholic and Protestant religions. Eco saw the Apple Mac as “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step” while he said the PC “allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation”.

Naughton argued the continuing relevance of the analogy. But I think the more interesting contest at the moment is that between Apple and Google. It’s a contest at which I’ve been enjoying a ringside seat in recent weeks, as I renewed my contract with T-Mobile and upgraded to their Google Android-powered G1 phone while my wife ditched her nine-year-old Sony Ericsson and signed up for the iPhone. The fast-growing market for 3G touchphones is the frontline of the consumer technology battle.

The motivations for our respective choices are instructive to explore. My wife contemplated the iPhone as a self-standing device. She was drawn to its drop-dead good looks and its intuitive ease of use. She liked the idea of a device which could serve as her diary and address book as well as her phone, but she wasn’t excited by the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities nor did she give much attention to the issues about syncing the phone to her computer (a PC).

I started from the presumption that I wanted a device that would fit my multi-platform life. For the past year, I have been working primarily on an Ubuntu-Linux computer, but also use the PC, and recently acquired an Asus netbook for when I’m out and about. The glue which integrates these various machines into a productive system is the cloud – more specifically, a suite of internet products which store my data online so that I can access it from any device.

I considered an iPhone but was drawn to the Google phone because it seemed specifically designed as the kind of internet appliance that would support my modus operandi. Since much of my life was already committed to Google products, setting up the G1 was a dream. Simply inputting my Google credentials the first time I switched on the phone was enough to populate it with all my diary appointments and contacts.

The iPhone, by contrast, demanded precisely the “difficult personal decisions” and “subtle hermeneutics” that Eco had ascribed to the Microsoft experience. There’s no simple, over-the-air approach to managing data between different devices. Apple offer their own cloud-based products such as calendar, contacts and email. But these come at a hefty annual price, are clunky compared with Google’s products, and lock you into Apple’s ‘me.com’email address. For the PC, the iPhone syncs with Microsoft Outlook but only by plugging in the device to the computer thereby foregoing the grab-and-go appeal of a 3G phone which automatically updates itself with the appointments you’ve added to your calendar before running out to a meeting. Ultimately, we found a way to sync the iPhone over the air with Google Calendar and Contacts using a product called NuevaSync so, barring a few occasional hiccups, it behaves pretty much like a Google phone.

For sheer joy, though, the iPhone wins hands down. It identifies your location with unnerving precision in a matter of seconds which is great if you’re out and about and need to pull up a map to find your way somewhere. It is pleasing to the eye and to handle, sports elegant icons and offers a host of additional applications which you can install and which just work. The G1 steps up with all the style of a 1970s trimphone and it’s too early yet for an attractive ecology of applications to be available. In time, though, I would expect the Google Android platform to pull ahead in relation to applications. For the great strength of Android is that it is an open source operating system, indeed a variant of Linux. This means that anyone can design software for Android phones and get their products to market, whereas Apple inserts itself between the development community and end users.

A final thought concerns how Google seems to have drawn both my wife and me further into its fold as a result of our phone choices. The G1 prompted me to switch my email to GMail and, when I’m at the PC, the Windows-only Google Chrome browser is my default choice for the way it turns my web calendar, contacts and tasks into fast desktop applications.  My wife’s adoption of Google Calendar has enabled us to share our respective calendars and encouraged us to dispense with the paper family calendar that we have always maintained hitherto.

I’ve written in the past about the risks to privacy of entrusting so much of one’s life to one company. The dimensions of this risk become ever more apparent, as Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center pointed out when Google demonstrated its ability to predict flu epidemics. His concerns were reported by The Register:

Google’s Trends service has long used aggregated search data to track the habits of the world’s web users. But health-related data is a particularly touchy subject, and Rotenberg sees Flu Trends as a chance to broaden the public debate over data aggregation – and finally put some meaning into these anonymization claims.

The problem, Rotenberg says, is that data aggregation calls attention to specific data stored on Google’s servers, making it that much more vulnerable to, say, a subpoena or a national security letter. “Let’s say that instead of Flu Trends, Google’s doing SARS Trends – tracking a very serious communicable disease,” he explains. “If there’s a big SARS upsurge somewhere, the government would be at Google’s door asking where did that data come from.”

And that’s just one example. “You can imagine any number of different scenarios where people would be interested in finding who the individuals are making those searches.”

Internet companies are beginning to identify marketing advantage in being responsive to privacy concerns. Yahoo! has upped the ante, setting a maximum period of three months for storing much of the data it keeps on users. If Yahoo! survives as an entity, it seems likely that Google and others may eventually follow suit.

In addition to privacy concerns, though, I’m now beginning to worry about excessive dependence on one company. Andrew Nusca, on ZD Net, is thinking along similar lines – warning that we are creating Google monoculture which may cause systemic problems if it were to collapse. I think this risk may be a little over-stated since Google operates in competitive markets for many of its products and I personally would have little difficulty switching if Google disappeared overnight. I chat to my friends through Google Chat, but they’re also in Linked In and Facebook. I’m a heavy user of Google Maps but Open Street Map or even this would serve me just as well.

The moral? The smartphone revolution is driving us to consolidate our data in fewer and fewer places. But it’s important to have a backup strategy. Your data should always be accessible whatever the agents to whom you entrust it might do.

Alan Johnston

A year ago this week, I was listening to a radio programme which made such an impression on me that my thoughts have returned to it many times since.  It was a 30-minute essay by the BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, in which he described his experience of being kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.  He’d been seized by Palestinian militants in March 2007, and held for nearly four months.

As a BBC employee at the time, and a former journalist, I’d naturally taken a great interest in his story and shared the relief and joy that coursed through the organisation when he was released.  I didn’t know Alan Johnston personally, but recognised the integrity and courage of his journalism.  In describing his ordeal, he showed characteristic decency as his narrative combined understanding of his tormentors with great insight into his personal condition.

It is the latter that has stuck in my mind.  In one section of the programme, Alan Johnston explains how he maintained his mental integration under circumstances of extreme duress.  He knew he had to fight off depression so he drew on a variety of techniques to strangle negative thoughts and encourage positive ones:

Of course, at first glance, there was not much to take heart from in my situation. But the fact was that I had not been killed, and I was not being beaten around. I was being fed reasonably, and I decided that my conditions could have been much, much worse. Whatever else it was, my Gazan incarceration was not what Iraqi prisoners had been forced to endure at Abu Ghraib jail. It was not the Russian Gulag, and it certainly was not the Nazi death camps. I felt that I would not be able to pick up a book again about the Holocaust without feeling a sense of shame, if I were somehow to break down mentally under the very, very, very much easier circumstances of my captivity.

I thought too that, unfortunately, every day around the world, people are being told that they have cancer, and that they only have a year or two to live. But the vast majority of them find the strength to face the end of their lives with dignity and courage. I, on the other hand, was just waiting for my life to begin again, and I told myself that it would be shameful if I could not conduct myself with some grace in the face of my much lesser challenge.

It’s an account that echoes that of Viktor Frankl, a psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps.  In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl analyses the factors which contributed to his own and others’survival and, like Alan Johnston, alights on the importance of retaining control of one’s own state of mind:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And, also like Alan Johnston, he recognises in the ordeal an existential test in which the manner in which one conducts oneself becomes possibly more important than the eventual outcome:

Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.  Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – even under the most difficult circumstances – to add a deeper meaning to his life.

Alan Johnston’s account goes on to draw on another great examplar of survival: the explorer, Edward Shackleton, who led a doomed expedition to the Antarctic but brought home every one of his crew against formidable odds.

Ernest Shackleton

He seems somewhat abashed by this line of thought, but it made perfect sense to me as I listened to his programme:

In its search for inspiration, my mind took me down what may sound to you like some rather strange paths. But for me, as impressive as any story of endurance, is that of the explorer, Ernest Shackleton. After his ship was crushed by the Antarctic ice nearly a century ago, he took a tiny lifeboat and set out across the great wastes of the stormy Southern Ocean. He aimed for an almost unimaginably small island far beyond his horizon, and eventually he reached it. And in my prison, I felt that I needed some kind of mental lifeboat, to help me cross the great ocean of time that lay before me, aiming for that almost unimaginable moment far beyond my horizon when I might somehow go free. And so I took all the positive thoughts I could muster and lashed them together in my mind, like planks in a psychological raft that I hoped would buoy me up. And in some ways it did. It was one of several mental devices, or tricks, or props that helped me get through.

In this way, I fought what was the psychological battle of my life. God knows, it was hard, and lonely, and there were many dark passages when I edged close to despair. But I was always in the fight, and there was no collapse.

There is such a distance between the grim battle for psychological survival fought by an isolated captive in a Gazan safe house and the more mundane challenges the rest of us face that it might seem fanciful to draw an analogy between them.  But our challenges are real to us, nonetheless, and just as Alan Johnstone looked to circumstances of more extreme suffering to bolster his own endurance, so we can draw inspiration from his.  I was impressed in his story by his ability to draw on motivating imagery and shut down unhelpful lines of thought.  But, most of all, I admired his understated dignity, the humility with which he viewed his situation in relation to those in the death camps, the gulags or Abu Ghraib.  On a fair few occasions since hearing his programme last year, when I’ve been struggling with something, I’ve remembered Alan’s broadcast and thought I could do worse than simply “conduct myself with some grace in the face of my much lesser challenge.”

Alan Johnston’s From Our Own Correspondent broadcast is still available to hear on the BBC website. A transcript is also available.

Kidnapped and Other Dispatches by Alan Johnston is available from Amazon.

Lehman Brothers staff, London, 16 September 2008

When I talk to people in the financial sector, I understand the meaning of the current turmoil being a crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes.  The experience of redundancy is  unlike that any of us are likely to have come across before.  With banking institutions disappearing at a rate of knots, others laying off staff in their thousands and many of the remainder uninterested in hiring, the impression of alternative options rapidly closing down throughout the world can only compound the sense of shock for those who have suddenly lost their jobs.

I’ve seen plenty of advice to bankers along the lines of: polish up your CV and interviewing skills, tap into your network and be prepared to move.  There may be a place for these tried and tested career tactics.  But I wonder whether it is adequate to the moment to rely wholly on this approach.  When people suffer a shocking loss, they typically go through experiences such as denial, anger and depression before they feel able to accept the situation and engage with it constructively.  The slightly frenetic character of well-intentioned advice on job search skills seems to me to risk encouraging people into activities which – for some of them, at least – may be counter-productive.

There are suggestions that this is a crisis that is concentrated on the big financial centres, and that there are still banking opportunities to be found in places beyond London and New York.  But the impression I’m gaining from people who have lost their jobs is that it is the same story wherever they look.  Wise heads I know who have been through City slowdowns in the past are digging in for this one to last possibly five or six years.  If that’s a realistic assessment, it may be a recipe for despondency to go chasing after leads at a time when you are likely to be oscillating through a number of powerful emotions which may be preventing you from thinking straight.

As Lucy Kellaway has observed in the FT, “Unemployed bankers are in a world that has gone beyond pat advice.”  She suggests the best thing to do is to sit tight and take stock:

As an agony aunt, my advice to those who lost their jobs – at least to those with some money in their pockets – is to spend the immediate future on rest and play…  Don’t start chasing leads today. Have a bit of a think and work out if you really want to move to Dubai, or retrain as a priest, before doing anything silly.

I agree with this.  Even for those who don’t have a strong financial cushion, the chances of making a good decision are likely to be improved if they can find time and space to approach the situation more reflectively.  She’s right too to advocate thinking hard before instigating radical change.  But if ever there was a time to think laterally, this is it.

Many people who work in the City never intended to make this their life.  They had other dreams to which they intended to turn once they’d amassed sufficient wealth.  But in the shock of redundancy it can be hard to conceive of an alternative life for oneself.  Looking on this from the outside, I find it slightly bewildering to hear clever and talented people struggle to imagine their capabilities as marketable in contexts other than the ones they have most recently left.  But, on the other hand, I’ve been possessed of this mindset myself.  I ploughed quite specialised niches in broadcasting and – close to the action – could see my career prospects only in terms of the template in which I was cast.

Taking some time to luxuriate in breaking free of the template can open one’s mind to the broader options one faces.  David Freud, an investment banker who lost his job in the downturn of the 1990s, hints at this in discussing research which suggests that even the experience of depression can ultimately be a catalyst for a fulfilling transformation.  This is because it forces a reassessment of goals:

This makes particular sense for City workers. Many have been lured into their careers by the huge money on offer, but they may have little affinity for the work. And when you need to put so much time and emotional intensity into an activity, you do have to enjoy it to persevere.

Personal discontent can be disguised in an upturn but the pressures of a downturn – the firings, the up-ending of networks, the loss of autonomy, survivor guilt – means the misery can come back at full force. In these circumstances depression may be a safety valve, forcing the individual to give up the chase.

It’s not necessary to have felt discontented with the job you have lost to benefit from taking stock to think more broadly about one’s options.  There may be a holding pattern you could pursue until things pick up again.  Or, for someone with unexpected time on their hands, now might be the ideal opportunity to fulfil some long-held ambition.

It’s hard to see the upside when one is coming to terms with an unexpected job loss.  And I’m not suggesting that it’s helpful to don a sense of false optimism.  But disruption to one’s career brings possibilities as well as setback and being open to those possibilities can increase the chances of making a good landing.

Image courtesy conorwithonen.

Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’

As part of my continuance professional development as a coach, I try to immerse myself in the psychological perspectives that inform the profession.  But recently I’ve turned as much to philosophical and social theory to make sense of the challenges that people face in their lives.  So it was with some interest that I found Julian Baggini writing in The Guardian this week on the contribution philosophy can make to helping us live well.

Baggini was reviewing a new series of books – called The Art of Living – which aims to give the general reader an overview of philosophical insights into our age.  He finds that the books’authors have interesting and thought-provoking things to say about such subjects as illness, hunger or even fashion.  But they tend to reach conclusions that others commonly reach without recourse to the likes of Aristotle or Heidegger.

So while philosophy may have a historic mission to help us live well, it is not uniquely placed to do so.  Rather, Baggini sees its value in the scepticism it can bring to more simplistic approaches to finding fulfilment or contentment.  He’s particularly thinking about self-help:

The most important respect in which philosophy differs from – and is in some sense superior to – self-help is that it encourages us to think about the value of ends and not just the means to achieve them. In theory, self-help could do this too, but in general, the genre is focused on helping you to get what you want, not questioning whether you’re right to want it. Many bestsellers promise you instant confidence, greater powers of persuasion, and stress-free productivity. That we should be more confident, persuasive or productive is taken for granted.

Philosophy, in contrast, is about stepping back and questioning these assumptions.

If this is philosophy’s contribution, it is a valuable one.  But it strikes me that philosophy has no unique claim here either.  While no philosopher, I’ve found in my coaching work and working as a strategist in corporate life that scrutiny of assumed objectives, rather than finessing of means, often unlocks development.

A small example from my time in the BBC.  Not many years ago, the BBC used to broadcast its main evening news at 9pm.  Was its purpose to transmit a news bulletin at this given time every evening, or to provide its audience with the best possible take on the day’s news at the optimal time in the schedule?  Once we began to question whether broadcasting the news at 9pm was the best way to serve the audience, it soon became obvious that 10pm was much better.  This was true for editorial reasons because at 10pm the day’s domestic stories were more likely to be resolved.  It was also true for reasons relating to audience availability because people seem to prefer to turn to the news to round off their night rather than have it disrupt the evening’s entertainment.  When the BBC eventually shifted the 9pm news to 10pm, this was interpreted at the time as purely an opportunistic response to ITV vacating the slot.  In fact, the rationale had been laid long before through rational and sceptical enquiry of long unquestioned assumptions – which is why, when the opportunity came, the BBC was able to move so decisively.

Similarly, in my coaching, I find clients seem to benefit most when they take the time to explore why they seek a particularly end rather than fixate too quickly on engineering the means.  I’ve had clients who have come to me feeling stuck in their current job and desperate to leave who end up finding renewed commitment to their role and progressing rapidly.  Equally, I’ve had people wanting to make an impact at their current organisation who, after consideration, form the view that they’d actually rather move on.

Any form of rigorous enquiry takes you out of habitual, day-to-day modes of thinking and gives you perspective.  The paradigm shift helps you understand your situation afresh and, hopefully, make more robust choices. Now it may be that the spirit of enquiry behind such scrutiny draws on philosophy’s logical tradition.  But the distinctive contribution of philosophy to personal development lies in what it can offer as one of many perspectives, not as a standalone methodology.

Baggini says:

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy’s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else. The challenge for those who champion philosophy’s usefulness is to show how it can fit in with the rest of life, not stand as master over it.

He advocates drawing on philosophy as a rich resource among many that contribute to our understanding of the good life.

I like this idea of eclecticism of theory.  As a coach, I draw on leadership thinking, strategy analysis and, yes, self-help writing alongside psychology, sociology and philosophy.  Diversity of perspective generates greater and richer insights. If the different perspectives ultimately lead to broadly similar truths, that at least points to their robustness.

Image courtesy Innoxiuss.

Loch Lomond, Scotland

Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is part cultural history, part philosophy: a meditation on loss and being lost.

The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past.  19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way.  People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive.  Today,  even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.

For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.”  Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.

One chapter explores the mythology of captives who come to embrace the culture that enslaves them.  Such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who went to America as a Spanish conquistador, one of only four survivors of a ship that landed in Florida in 1528.  He tried to travel west but he and his men gradually fell to illness and exposure, eventually being held for several years by Native Americans, escaping finally to reach not just his destination but also a respect and sympathy for the people he had initially come to conquer:

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been…  The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of the soul did not exist, at least for him.  He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

The story pre-figures the American narrative of settler children who were captured by the Natives and became “adopted” by them.  Many of these – despite witnessing the murder of their families – became attached to their new culture and resisted attempts to “rescue” them, so far did they travel from their previous life, identity and values.

All this may seem distant, too, from contemporary life, but Solnit suggests that each of us routinely faces similar existential challenge – if, mostly, in less extreme form:

Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape.  Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them.  But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms.   There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.  These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in everyday life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.  Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in everyday life.  Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists.  Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.  And some people travel far more than others.  There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far.  Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Towards the end of the book she relates, through the voice of a follower of Buddhism, the story of Turtle Man, who was blind and hustled a living selling chocolates around the streets of San Francisco.  When he would reach street corners, Turtle Man would shout out for help to cross the road – not knowing who was around and simply waiting for someone to show up.  The narrator imagines what it would be like to live with the only certainty that each day would bring barriers which you would need help to negotiate.  And he reflects that it might hold lessons for the rest of us:

It’s okay to become like Turtle Man, it’s okay sometimes to experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier.  It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.  Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place.  It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling urgent world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation.  It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.

Rebecca Solnit describes herself as an activist.  In other words, she’s someone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.  There’s an aura of loneliness, as well as solitude, which pervades this book.  Reflecting on the death of her friend, Marine, when they were both young women, she recognises that even in death Marine had made choices which opened her to experience in life and which could have ended differently, at a time when Solnit herself closed off options.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost disrupts the continuities which inform our sense of self.  To find our way in the world, we must not simply tolerate uncertainty, we should embrace it.  There’s discomfort and pain on this path, to be sure.  But there’s also magnaminity and ease with life.  For Solnit, to be open to loss is the only way to know what it is to be human.  Equally, it is impossible to experience loss and stay the same.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Available from Amazon.

When I was preparing to go self-employed, one of the things to which I looked forward was breaking free from the shackles of corporate IT and being the master of my own computer setup.

One consequence of this is that, for the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with Linux.  I’ve had an interest in the open source movement for some time and have long used open source software, but always until now on Windows PCs.  As soon as I was working from home, it became necessary to buy another computer since my wife also works at home and demand for the main PC in the house was outstripping supply.  So I treated this as an opportunity to see whether it would be feasible to make the switch to a totally open source setup.

I may have been spurred on to do this by my experience of working with the gentlemen from the Open Source Consortium, during my last job at the BBC Trust.  They were concerned to make sure the BBC was more sensitive to Linux users in its provision of video on-demand and were persuasive in their advocacy of open source computing generally.  I felt I owed it to myself professionally to deepen my own understanding.

The first advantage became apparent at purchase.  I began by looking for a decent, used laptop on eBay to recondition.  Then I realised I could buy a new one from Dell for under £300 with the Ubuntu version of Linux pre-installed.  Everything worked out of the box, the machine picked up our wifi connection right away, and I was ready to go.

Ubuntu comes bundled with familiar programmes like Open Office and Firefox.  On the whole, I’d say these seem to work more seamlessly than they do on Windows.  I thought this might be my imagination, but I’m told there are good technical reasons why this might be the case.  Less appealing is Ubuntu’s bundled email client, Evolution, which is supposed to be compatible with Microsoft Exchange server.  I found the performance of Evolution far too flaky – with the cache having to be cleared out manually more or less every day in order to see an up to date picture of my inbox.  After some weeks of irritation, this actually turned out to be an advantage since it prompted me to ditch the Exchange account I’d been using for email and save myself £80 a year.

I’d been using Exchange largely because it offers push-email to my Windows Mobile phone but I also liked the way my calendar and task list was kept up to date across my phone and computers.  Counter-intuitively, I found these things were becoming less important to me as a self-employed agent.  I like to receive email alerts when I’m on the move, but I resist the temptation to reply to them until I’m back at a computer since emails composed on the move and on a fiddly little device somehow come out terse and abrupt.   My phone now collects my email via IMAP once an hour, and I’m rediscovering the joys of using Thunderbird to manage email on my computers.  Thunderbird can handle multiple email identities with ease and using IMAP means my email is always kept in sync across the PC, Linux machine and phone.

The solution for my calendar and tasks was to switch to web applications which bypasses the need to find software which works across different platforms.  I use Google Calendar and sync it with my phone two or three times a day using OggSync.  I don’t know why I ever thought it was useful to make sure the calendar on my computer was updated as I added events on my phone.  I’m the sole user of my calendar so there’s no danger of anyone adding conflicting events.

I manage my tasks with Remember the Milk which is a thing of beauty when it comes to personal productivity tools.  I’d been aware of this highly-rated service for some time and hadn’t seen what the fuss was about.  Now I’d say the simple power of its lists, tags and search filters has to be experienced to be appreciated.  It also provides a stunningly good scaled-down experience when accessed by mobile phone (which can’t be said of Google Calendar).

Finding a solution to sync my contacts across the different machines is proving elusive, but not a huge problem.  I use a plugin to Thunderbird called Zindus to sync email addresses that I use; not ideal but good enough.

For word processing, spreadsheets and so forth, I’ve switched completely from Microsoft Office to Open Office.  In theory, Open Office should handle Microsoft Office documents with ease and you should be able to use whichever application is available and takes your fancy.  But I’ve never found this to be the case, and Open Office currently can’t even open the Office 2007 format (something which will be rectified in its next major release).  So I find it easier to work with Open Office across my Windows and Linux machines and convert documents which I’m sending to other people.

So for basic computing needs a Linux set up works very well – especially in the context of cloud computing, where much of our data and the applications we use are actually held online.  Good, freely available software means it’s possible to run a comprehensive basic setup without hassle.

But for anything slightly tricky, the benefits of Microsoft’s network effects soon tell and the clunkiness of Linux becomes tiresome.  Linux can talk to Windows XP machines very easily, but it can’t network with our Windows Vista PC which means it can’t share the printer attached to this machine and I have to use a (paid-for) sync programme called Powerfolder to gain access to my files across computers.  I’m also having difficulty getting the Linux machine to connect to the internet through my new mobile broadband stick from T-Mobile [see footnote below].  For these more complicated requirements, you have to program the machine using the command line and the documentation available is not particularly penetrable for a non-technical user.

Ubuntu, with its Windows-like graphical user interface, hides many of the machine’s configuration possibilities behind the command line.  It’s a good option if you want a reliable computing environment and with which you don’t intend to tinker much.  Conversely, if you’re a techie, it presents a highly configurable environment which you can customise completely to your needs.  The problem arises if you fall between these two extremes.  Someone like me, who’s pretty technically minded but by no means a coding expert, has no option but to ascend the learning curve and get stuck in.  So what you save on financial outlay you lose again on the time you have to commit to manage your IT.

The Microsoft computing environment has its own frustrations, but I can’t yet see a scenario where I’d be prepared to say goodbye to it for ever.

__________

[Footnote: T-Mobile, incidentally, sold this to me with an explicit assurance that it supported Linux so brownie points are in short supply for them.]