Ideas Machine - despite the best of intentions, I simply cannot keep up with all the various thoughts and ideas that I have, and struggle to jot down the roughest of notes for them all. Accordingly I am now accepting, that there is an element of natural selection, and the best of my ideas will fight their way onto paper, or blog, and the weaker will perish. Fortunately there does seem to be a near infinite supply of them., and the weakest are doubtless pretty feeble.
Anyway, in an attempt to simply record some of the, a rather random entry today, which will at least mop up some ideas.
Doors can be made of anything - you tend to simply buy a wooden door, but logically, as long as the material complies with certain physical characteristics, you could use virtually anything, what about bright plastic, doors with lights in them, rubber doors, metal doors, doors made out of clothes, doors made out of chicken wire stuffed with crushed aluminium cans, etc etc.
Wall ornament, attach a wire between two points on your wall, either a firm wire that you bend to shape, so that it catches interesting shadows, and projects them on the wall, particularly powerful when you have candle light, or a taut wire, with a little buggy device that moves alone it, the crawler device is battery powered and includes flashing lights, maybe not something for your house, but worth a shot for a nightclub or coffee bar.
Getting Things Done - book and stationery package, sell the book and supporting stationery, ie filing cabinet, and dymo tape labeller together, you certainly buy more stationery after you have read the book, so worthwhile for stationers to consider selling it, or booksellers selling some stationery to support it.
Washing machine tubs - these are made of stainless steel and can be obtained from scrap yards, ideal plant containers, I like the ideal of planting up fennel or florence fennel in them. Ditto dill.
Gabions - I am keen to put some gabions in my garden, basically wire structures filled with rubble, they would however probably be the mother of all slug traps!
Save documents - why do we have to consciously save, surely the reasoning for this goes back to the computing dark ages. A computer nowadays is perfectly capable of saving every key stroke as you make it. Simply amend the programmes to work that way. Whoever is the first to do it, never lose a document again, would be hugely popular. Bill, Steve, can you sort this out please.
Explicitly examine decision making - it is useful to consciously examine how you arrive at decisions. Look at pretty much every decision, why did I decide to do this now, why not that, why this way, why not do so and so too. It quickly becomes apparent that you are superb at juggling vast numbers of variables, incomplete information and uncertainty in a very intuitive way that you simply could not programme for. In real life you do not have perfect answers, simply good enough answers, and there is always an opportunity cost, if you do this, you are not doing that, if you phone your mum, you are not washing the dishes, if you walk the dog, you are not mowing the lawn.
Start from where you are - there is no point getting guilty about where you are starting from. You have done well to get here, simply figure out the most productive way forward. A better career would probably have meant a worse social life, so where you are now is probably the best place for you to be, focus on where you want to go, and how to get there.
I joined the Civil Service to indulge my love of stationery.
People say that share investment is complicated, it is not. You only have three decisions to make
what to buy
when to buy it
when to sell it
Think about those, and think of sensible reasons, and you should do okay.
People say that prioritisation is complicated, it is not. You only have three decisions to make
what to do
when to start
when to stop
the worrying and feeling guilty about what you are not doing won’t help.
Adopting a “Getting Things Done” methodology will not increase your productivity by more than a few percentage points, but it will reduce your worry and guilt levels hugely.
We really do not need extra ways of feeling guilty about what we are not doing.
Don’t waste your money on bad tools, scratchy annoying biro, just chuck it. Get a nice pen that you enjoy using. I never even bother looking at cheap woodwork tools. If they don’t work properly, I don’t have enough time, that I can waste it using stuff that I do not enjoy using. Get a decent computer you enjoy using. Why skimp on stuff that will just depress you.
It is perfectly legitimate to do something, simply because not having it done is depressing you. Do the stuff under your nose that depresses you most.
People are phenomenal about making decisions, they do it all the time, any explicit system is pretty feeble in comparison. Trust your own judgement more, it is far better than you give it credit for.
Finally, I am writing this in Market Felt format, which just feels wonderful for jotting down rough ideas. Change your font, change your outlook on what you are writing. However just ensure that you use one that kerns properly, so you are not driving yourself mad trying to figure out whether you put in one space, no space, or two spaces.
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