TS Eliot's to do list

TS Eliot's to do list

I have just been reading about prioritisation and to do lists, and they really sound most wonderful. I have decided to put them into action, forthwith,

AM - write The Wasteland
check spelling
post off to Ezra Pound

It is a shame about Ezra, obviously he has not heard about time management, otherwise he would be a really great poet, like I am.

Lunch - not sure about the peaches, they look a bit dodgy to me

PM - dash off some minor works
discover that my name is an anagram of toilets, and will cause endless merriement to countless generations of school children, while no one understands my great poems.
Consider various alternate options for my name,
DJ Eliot, the versifier
TS - author of the Wasteland - Eliot
Virginia Woolf

decide to stick to TS Eliot

attempt to think of toilet related anagrams for FR Leavis until,

Tea - that peach is still sitting there, it is starting to look decidedly manky. Who keeps buying all these peaches.

This is the way the day ends,
not with a bang, but with dinner

This poetry lark was fun, maybe tomorrow I should try politics.

clench and relax

If you think about how a muscle works, you will tense the muscle, then you relax the muscle. It seems pretty intuitive that that is the right way for a muscle to work. If someone were to clench their fist, then try and clench it even tighter, and then keep on clenching it... You just know they would end up with a very sore hand or possibly even a damaged one.

But while it seems obvious how to treat a single muscle, it is not so obvious that perhaps just clenching tighter is not the way that we ought to behave towards ourselves. If you read up on time-management and all that sort of thing, often it just seems to be telling you, try really hard, then try a bit harder, then keep on trying, ...

I suppose that you either give up on this approach, because it is stupid, but you end up feeling like you have failed.

Alternatively, you attempt to carry on with this approach, but eventually your body starts giving up. Minor health niggles start to turn into major health niggles.

Basically, we can always push ourselves a bit harder, and squeeze in a bit more, but it does come at a cost, and you either repay that cost by giving yourself a break, or your body will start to stop working properly.

But giving yourself a break is not just having a kip on the train on the way home, or vegging out in front of the television. A break is making time for something that you enjoy and find worthwhile, and giving yourself enough of a break, with a clean enough conscience that you can actually enjoy it. Because, basically, if it is not fun, then you are not doing it properly.

Your body will have certain physical limits, often successful people have incredibly robust constitutions, so the fact that your boss never has sick leave, does not mean that you shouldn't either. You have to work within the limits of your own physical capabilities. Just like driving a car, you also have to listen to your body. If it is starting to flag, then ease up a little.

Learning to listen to your body is a vast art, that few of us ever trouble to master.

Much of it comes down to energy levels, when you are doing something enjoyable and worthwhile, you have more energy, when you are doing something dull and pointless, you have less energy.

Over the Christmas break, I have been trying to keep my daughters (two) busy, I have been doing this through allocating them tasks to do. I have found a few principles that seem to work
apply some structure - so chores in the morning, something creative in the afternoon
don't leave them doing something for more than an hour
check in regularly to see how they are getting on, and be very positive about what they are doing
support rather than criticise
mix up physical stuff with quieter activities, so if they are getting a little too boisterous, it might be time to settle down with something quieter.
if they are not happy, don't force it, but think about alternatives, perhaps they need to do something apart from each other
use opportunities to get them helping or interacting with other people, for example helping my wife in the kitchen
sit down and discuss possible things that they might do, to work out a bit of a list to last a few days
listen more than you tell
set an example of how you would like them to behave


This approach seems to be working well, sometimes I have great ideas, sometimes I have lousy ones, but by seeing what they enjoy, and always letting them shape the task to suit themselves, and giving them ownership of it, it is possible to steer them gently and keep them amused without being too prescriptive.

Like everything, if you are doing something well, it will often look effortless. So I stick a smile on my face, I am self deprecating, and really enthusiastic about what they do.

This approach is working well. I am sure that I would respond well to this sort of approach myself, either in a work environment or in a home environment.

And yet, I read these books, and they tell me that I need to be more organised, that I need to work harder, and smarter and try harder, and try smarter. These books suck the fun and meaning out of everything by reducing everything down to tasks. Like a man with a hammer, who sees every issue as a nail, task management sees everything as a task.

Are tasks so lovely, so much fun and so meaningful that we really want to see everything we do in the world as a series of tasks.

I have been writing about energy levels,
aligning the sort of work you do, to your prevailing energy level,
putting fun and recognition into what you do,
about interacting with people being what gives life meaning. In this moment, or the next one, can we make a positive difference to the people in our lives.

That is the sort of technique that we should be thinking about, something in bright colours that makes us smile and laugh. People do die, but it is not the worst that can happen, they might live a whole life without being happy first.

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

I bought this as one of the cheap paperbacks that you can get with the Times. The past few have all been more aimed at women, which probably reflects that fact that women buy and read books, whereas men presumably get magazines where you can look at the pictures.

Anyway, it was certainly a page turner. It kept you reading, it was never dull, and moved along in an engaging way. However, despite clearly being very clever, I really doubt whether the author was even alive at the time he was writing about, or whether he has ever met anyone from the working class. Not normally huge disadvantages, but when you are writing from the perspective of a working class person who gets a scholarship to a minor public school, it would help if you had some degree of understanding of the person and their background.

You do therefore have to choke back your critical facilties and suspend your disbelief to a huge extent. If you can manage that, you would probably enjoy the book.

One example can suffice, the protaginist comes from a very poor background, yet during the late seventies at university he has a car. During the early eighties, I only knew one university student who had a car. Without hefty parental support getting a driving license, or buying a car, were beyond the reach of pretty much everyone, without huge expenditure of time and effort.

It also fell into the pattern nowadays where in novels everything and everyone is notable. In real life everything and everyone is pretty mundane with exceptions so rare that they could be disregarded for all practical purposes. The protaginist is quite an engaging character, and it would have been more pleasurable if it had all ended happily. It reminds me of why I enjoy the Douglas Coupland books where nothing much happens, and folk are a little eccentric but nothing that outrageous.

I rather prefer books about people who are mad to be borderline insane themselves, like Patrick Hamilton or Malcolm Lowry, straining at the limits of reality. Rather than something that could easily enough be serialised without frightening anyone.

Random Quote - opening lines
"My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it's viewed here as modern. Its chapel was designed by Hawksmoor, or possibly Wren; its gardens were laid out by someone else whose name is familiar. The choir stalls were carved by the only woodcarver you've ever heard of."

I am guessing that the carver is Grinling Gibbons, but the point is that the writing does rather flatter you along the way, in a way that real life does not.

what is the point of blogging?

Well, what is the point of blogging? I've been writing these blog entries for quite a while now, erraticaly of late, admitedly.

I suppose, at its most basic, I like writing stuff down, I find it a useful way to order my thoughts. It also helps to lodge ideas in my head, so that I can come back to them later.

It is also useful to keep myself in the habit of writing, just putting one word after another, is something of an art. Like most art, the art is in making it look easy and effortless.

I've mentioned before, for blogs, I stick strictly to the rule that they are written at one sitting, and once checked, they are uploaded and are immune from subsequent revision.

Looking back, I have worried away at some topics. I don't feel that I have really arrived anywhere useful thinking about criminology, maybe it is a topic for exploration through some short science-fiction stories. Crime and punishment seem quite straightforward, with issues in black and white, and right and wrong, but once you start to delve it becomes clear that substantial castles are built on insubstantial sand. Crime is what we want it to be, as a society, punishment is there to make society feel good about itself, more than to make criminals feel bad about themselves, or fit for re-entry into society.

Similarly I have worried away at investing in shares. In parallel I have thought about decision making. There is a strong link between the two. In order to invest in shares you need to make all sorts of decisions, on a constant basis. You need to balance competing priorities. You need to re-prioritise sometimes, or even reappraise your underlying strategy as the market changes.

If you had perfect foresight, you would invest completely in the share that would offer the best rate of return. However you do not have perfect foresight, so you need to adopt strategies that balance risk and reward. It is like going to a horse race and betting on a wide variety of horses in the same race, in order to make a return. In order to really understand what you are doing, you need to step back, and look at your decisions not as single decisions, but as components within a strategy of decision making. You are constantly trying to find fault with your underlying theories and strategics.

To elaborate my strategies,
I have an underlying belief that across economic cycles money invested in shares will continue to offer a worthwhile return.
However the economic cycle follows a sine curve, so if you buy at the top of one wave, you will not make a real return again until the top of the next wave.
It is difficult to know where you are exactly, but it is possible to get a gut feeling. For example for many businesses it was clear that the rate of acceleration was slowing a year ago. There was a frenzy and over-extension of credit, that felt unsustainable even then. We are now past the peak, and descending down. It is likely to be years before we reach the next peak, the absolute trough could even be a couple of years away.
As a small investor, you need to reduce dealing costs to a bare minimum, through not paying much commission, and not selling often. As long as commission is low, it is okay to buy often, as it gives you the benefit of pound cost averaging.
The only time you actually make money is when you sell, similarly the only time you lose money is when you sell at a loss, or the share is wiped out.
As a small investor your other disadvantage is that it is difficult to get a sufficiently diverse portfolio. You should have six or more different shares, but it is only worthwhile selling a thousand plus pounds worth of shares. The maths is easy enough, unless you have thousands you cannot invest effectively. You are just playing at it, and are excessively exposed to risk.
I tackled this by aiming for a thousand pound target in chosen shares, starting with a few. Each month I invest a hundred pounds, and this goes to whatever is short of the thousand pound target and looks to be a sound bet at the time.
I very seldom need to chose new shares to invest in, about once a year at my current rate of investment. I therefore have time to think about shares that I am interested in.

In order to be interesting, the following are essential
the business needs to be basically well run - if I don't have confidence in the business, if I feel they are making mistakes, then I don't touch them.
the business needs to be one that has a long term future, that will respond well, and take advantage of the changes to the world economy that I foresee.
the business needs to be totally unlike anything else I already have.

I do not look at the financial details in any detail. If it is getting to the stage where the business has failed and is getting broken up, I'm not likely to come away with any money anyway, whatever the accounts said.
I don't pay much attention to short term predictions. I cannot trade at that level.
I don't worry much about the PE ratio, I reinvest dividends, so whether I get capital growth, or dividend return, makes no difference anyway.

I do keep an eye on the following
large rises and falls across the market - daily
value of shares - weekly
general media coverage - ongoing
specific coverage of that particular business - when other factors suggest that I ought to.

Because all shares in the portfolio are monitored each week, from the purchase of the first hundred, by the time I have a thousand pounds worth of shares, I have been looking at the share weekly for a good year. Within that phase of the economic cycle, I therefore have a good understanding of the degree of volatility and return that the share is offering.

To date my biggest success has been British Energy, I always felt that basically it was well run, it had too big a share of an energy market, which was short on supply, and long on demand. Takeovers were always a possibility, which makes me feel that there is a quick return option available. Also it was overly volatile, rising or falling with great vigour. Clearly the market was taking an excessively short term view, so there were always opportunities to pick up cheap shares.

My biggest loss, Bradford and Bingley. Fortunately my gut feeling was that the business had no long term future, and I sold half my flotation shares for a decent amount, particularly as they had cost me nothing initially. However as they fell, I bought more, and bought into the rights issue. They are currently wiped out, and although the government might offer some return, it is far from certain.

There are clearly lessons here, I should have trusted my instincts and sold the lot. I should have either stopped buying or sold out as they fell, to retrieve something. However in fairness, the truly dire state of affairs was never really public knowledge, and the bank would never have been technically insolvent anyway, it was a cash flow issue, not a fundamental balance sheet one. Also in truth, Bradford and Bingley were less aggressive than some of the banks that have now been bailed out by the government. They were small enough to get nationalised, but too big to be allowed to fail. Also logically, the buy to let market could be more resilient than the usual mortgage market, as people lose their houses, they still need somewhere to stay, so buy to let could benefit over the next few years, for those who got in early.

However they clearly failed the basic tests, they were badly run, they had no long term future. They should not have been in my portfolio at all.

For the future, basically, I have what I already have, I am content with my current shares. My most recent addition was a European investment trust, to add diversity, but the pound -euro exchange rate is nosediving, so any purchase of European shares would currently be very expensive.

It is clearer what I would not touch. I never liked the banks, largely on the basis that I did not understand how they made money. Additionally, any business that the government has a stake in, is bound to be unpredictable, and they do have a poor record of respecting shareholder's rights. Retail is uncertain, they are all suffering, but obviously some will survive.

I suppose big infrastructure type businesses, that are immune to the downturn, so energy, water, transport, telecoms, outsourcing, ports, things that have an innate value whatever happens, and that you cannot particularly defer spending on.

Ideally now is the time to invest broadly, a third of the shares could be wiped out, a third might do nothing much, a third could do very well. So the more broad the portfolio, and the sounder the underlying businesses the better your chances. But clearly it is not a nil risk option.

Investing in shares is an interesting mix of disciplines, you need to appraise qualitative and quantitative data, and make decisions based on both. My instinct is to rely on qualitative data more than most.

We are constantly faced with making decisions based on conflicting disciplines. For example, a lot of my initial blogging was about different prioritisation techniques, for example the Get Things Done methodology.

Over time, I have come to realise that I actually like to alter my approach slightly. Some of this is just down to boredom, but some of it is down to the changing external environment.

There is a world of difference between prioritising a variety of large tasks that often don't need to be done quickly, or small tasks that need done quickly, or a mixture of both.

Additionally there is also the situation where there are more tasks than time available, and the return on doing tasks can vary dramatically, so something that was important yesterday might be irrelevant today.

Factor in that you have different energy levels, and different opportunities at different times. This is not a single list of discrete items, but a nuanced proposed strategy to maximise benefit from a finite resource, namely your limited time and energy.

There are considerable similarities between how you might approach these two problems, getting a return on investments of money, and getting a return on investments of personal work time.

Part of the point is that there is no optimum solution, there are strategies that are more likely to succeed, but that is certainly no guarantee.

This blog has really not ended up where I expected it to, that is probably the point of blogging, you don't end up where you expect to. But you can have a rant along the way, and maybe even learn something about yourself, and how you think about things.

Dear rambling blog entry,

This weekend, I have been mostly, reading

Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks,

accordingly my head feels a little tight, probably because with increased age and decrepitude, my eyes are getting a little wonky. I'm certainly overdue to get my eyes tested, and I'm quietly confident that it will entail a change of prescription. Bifocal bottle bottoms - I think that is the technical term.
Anyway, it is not exactly kitchen sink drama, it does read rather like Evelyn Waugh called upon to portray the working classes, with decidedly limited success. Not entirely sure I could do much better, but I remember enough of the seventies to list huge numbers of annoying discrepancies in the book. However if you do just discount the idea that it is intended to accurately portray an era you lived through, it is an entertaining read. It is not obvious where it is going, it did rather look like it would do a John Le Carre Perfect Spy sort of thing, but that fizzled out. The protaginist is not exactly likeable, nor particularly unlikeable. I'll probably write a real review when I get the book finished. Not like the proper reviewers who can write a review without even reading the book.

While I've been busy with the obvious stuff the past few weekends, I have been remiss in failing to blog in sufficient volume.

Starting to get geared up for Christmas, work has been getting pretty busy, also doing some odds and ends of things too.

I was at a conference last week, and it got me thinking how much academics seem to fall into a particular type. They seem to see the world in terms of theories and references. A name forms a short-hand for a set of theories. Of course reality exists out there, but for the academic it is mediated through the lens of theory. It would be wrong to be too critical of the academic, because we all mediate our view of reality through our own particular lens. I realise in myself that I seek to construct a narrative explanation for things. I will then attempt to arrange the evidence to conform to that narrative. However I feel myself seeking to quietly omit the evidence that does not conform to the narrative, reality is forced into a mean little strait-jacket to conform to my optimistic, or pessimistic frame of mind.

The narrative then becomes a strait-jacket, failing to inform understanding, merely marshalling like facts together.

Perhaps there is some way to force a greater neutrality, an ambivalance, allowing the evidence to speak for itself.

We tend to create false dichotomies. Things are this, or they are not. Reality forced down into binary choices.

I am rather drawn to the wisdom of children, just playing about with things.