mopping up a little more

My week off is nearly over. I have a bank holiday today, and then back to reality tomorrow. I think that using the GTD methodology, albeit, one that I have amended to suit myself, has been a success. In terms of actually getting stuff done, I don’t really think that I have achieved appreciably more than I would have done using my traditional daily lists. However the system has scored in letting me use my time more flexibly, finding tasks that can be completed whenever I have some spare time, rather than finding myself with dead time between work.

It has also been useful in clarifying what is important to me, who I am, and prioritising tasks to reflect this better. By having tasks listed that are not important enough to do, when a couple of them overlap and can be combined, it makes a lot of sense to just do them both. I suppose the greatest benefit is simply one of reducing the amount of feeling guilty and worried about everything that I have not done. I certainly feel like I have straightened out my thinking a lot in this week.

As I am going to be much busier in future, I’ll once again use this blog entry to mop up random thoughts, which I might work up further in due course.

you could use lollipop sticks for plant labels, though probably difficult to actually write on them

I find that carrying any number of items in my head, greater than three, feels infinite. Therefore for my own sanity I need to resort to a written list when I have more than three things to consider.

you should consider managing your own morale and motivation as a explicit task. What would happen if you wrote it down as a project, what would you do to achieve it. Too important a task to be left to chance surely.

If you work with other people, or in a family. Consider for each individual what options do they have if they want you to do something. For instance, if your daughter wakes up and decides she wants to go to the beach, how would she convince you to take her there. If the only options available to her, are ones that are not acceptable to you, for example, moaning and throwing a huff, then the reason she does that behaviour, is because that is the only options you have given her.

The same applies in politics, if a government ignores people until they strike, or until they starting rioting, ... then the blame lies with the government for not giving people easier ways of actually making their views known. Surely people would take the easier options if they were available to them. So before you condemn people, consider what other options they actually had if they wanted to get their way.

as a practical application we are giving our daughters more delegated decision making. For example we offered them the chance to ask for a treat that they were both agreed on, and if practical they could get it. They jointly decided and we delivered. Similarly a mobile with a pre paid card, or an itunes card, you can phone who you like, but within this financial limit, spend it too quickly and you will have to wait before you get another.

when buying shares it is important to limit your exposure to shares whose value is based on sentiment rather than business realities. I have invested in four shares, only one is such a speculative share, and it has certainly given me a roller coster ride lately, the others have been more predictable. Fortunately the easiest way to determine whether sentiment is at play is to look at the price to earnings ratio.

In theory you could address risk by assuming that your speculative share could lose half its value, say, and then ensure that it is a small enough part of your portfolio to allow overall growth as long at your low risk shares manage to match the footsie index. Depending on the circumstances you could increase or decrease your exposure to risk. The logic is easier to follow when your risky shares are losing money, when they are making money it is probably more important to retain the logic that you could lose much of their value, and ensure your share portfolio is allocated accordingly.

Personally I suspect that if any of my risky shares were to double in value I would be inclined to sell half my holding. That way I would retain the same value in the share, and the same exposure.

We should recognise that everyone makes their decisions for a rational logical reason. Thinking that other people are stupid, lazy or evil, does not help you to understand them. Try and influence the environment so that the right decision for them becomes more acceptable to you.

You can always catch more bees with honey than viniger.

I am currently having vastly more ideas than I have time to pursue. It is worrying and inspiring at the same time. I suppose that it is part of who I am.

Often people do not know who they are, or what they want. Because they don’t know these things, they tend to make non decisions, like watching the television, or aimless shopping. In effect these activities are just using up time and money, they seldom contribute much to anything you want to do, unless you put the effort into thinking of what you really want. We all deserve to relax now and again, but we should ask ourselves how we want to do it, rather than drift into habits, like the zombies in the shopping mall.

If you assume that there is no such thing as morality, and that criminal sentencing should be entirely rational, based purely on the cost to society of an action, then what would it look like? You could calculate the cost to society of a murder, or vandalism, even by extension domestic violence. You would need to ignore the cost of the police investigation, trial and prison sentence, otherwise you would create perverse incentives for government to criminalise people and then charge them for the privilege.

The sentence should then repay the full cost to society in some way. It would be illogical to insist on less than full repayment. Many crimes would therefore be beyond the lifetime of someone to pay.

It seems unfair to offer the ability to pay with money, rather than time, as it favours the rich.

You could hypothecate and treat the opportunity cost to the individual as the money you are notionally recouping. This would mean that the more likely you were to be in employment the more quickly you could repay, this would incentivise people to ensure that they maximised their earning capacity, it would also increase the pressures on the poor. You could make it fairer by applying rules, so that you incentivise behaviour that reduces recidivism, such as improving your literacy level and employability, without simply further penalising those already at a disadavantage.

As an side thought, are we creating perverse incentives for the NHS to make people ill? Sick people pay their salaries, there are no incentives to keep people out of hospitals or doctor’s surgeries.

To be fair, you could extend the argument to most public services, the incentives exist to promote certain behaviours and priorities, but these seldom match the actual needs of the society that they are serving.

it would be useful to make an exercise of comparing what the professional and salary incentives actually encourage and reward, and what the service should ideally be doing to meet the needs of society. That is the difference between business and the public sector, business knows when it gets it right, because it makes a profit. How does the public sector know when it gets it right?