To my own surprise I am slowing down for Christmas. My university time sheet (yes, we have them because I am EU funded) will record that I am on holiday today, even if I suspect that some thinking will go on nonetheless.
And that's my point: slow can be good. Whilst I have little doubt that I will be blogging in the next week, because asking me not to blog is like asking me not to breathe, I need to slow down from my work precisely because after a fairly crazy year professionally I need a little perspective on what has happened, and need to be prepared for a new year that already offers more trips abroad in the first few weeks than I really think to be wise.
It was George Bernard Shaw who said:
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I've made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
I'm making no claims as to how often I think. But I do believe that thinking takes time, and we don't make enough time for it. I have, for example, no idea how or when politicians get time to think because their schedules are always too packed for them to ever have the chance to do so. That's good explanation for why they are so event obsessed and so often way behind where the public are on issues of importance.
Not that the public spend enough time thinking either. There was an interesting comment from a woman in south Wales on the news a day or two ago. She said she had honestly expected to see the impact of the UK leaving the EU within days of it happening and was disappointed that nothing appeared to have happened as yet. Just a little thought would, surely, have made it apparent why this was unlikely to have been the case.
And we all spend a lot of time avoiding thinking. Apart from work, television and IT are massive suppressants of thought. They needn't be: if time was taken to reflect they could do the exact opposite. But when the best bit of going to see a film or play is, for me, discussing it afterwards, television provides instead another, immediate, offering and that chance is all too often taken away. Thinking is taken out of the equation.
That's why my dog plays a big role in my working life. Hector gets daytime walks when I'm stuck. He doesn't know that, and I'd rather you didn't tell him. As far as he's concerned I'm just full of magnanimous generosity for his wellbeing, but the truth is that twenty minutes dedicated to thinking an issue through is often enough to see things in a different way and to save a lot of time overall.
Which is why a while ago, when I was given an award for my work I made the point in the acceptance speech that I was grateful to funders who had taken the risk of paying me to look out of the window. Most don't do that. They do instead want an event, a fixed output, a tangible goal achieved or some other milepost when offering funding when what is so badly needed is thinking.
This then is a chance to say thank you, to the Friends Provident Foundation and to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust for letting me look out of the window for the last six or more years. Without that time and the freedom they gave me to develop my thinking on issues around tax and accounting and their impact on poverty in the political economy I would not be where I am this Christmas. I am truly grateful.
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Thank you too, Richard, for making me stop and think. My neighbour said the exact same thing and I was stunned – did she really think….? Clearly not.
As a fellow academic once said to me, ‘”Never let anyone accuse you of thinking too much!”
Have a thoughtful Christmas… And a fun one!!
And you
Echoing what you say, a wise man I once knew said:
“Peace is the potting soil of revelation”.
Peace, rest, stopping, thinking, space, time.
However we put it, it is in scarce supply and undervalued in our culture. In a world seemingly obsessed by “work hard, play hard” the missing ingredient is simply to rest hard.
Rest hard this Christmas Richard.
Thanks Richard
And peace to you and yours
R
Richard,
Thanks for the blog this year I have read with interest everyday. I saw a quote on facebook:-
“Maybe if we tell people the brain is an APP they will start using it”
Always a chance.
Have a great Christmas.
I like it!
Best, and thanks
Richard
Hope you have a good Xmas, Richard. Thank you for all your efforts over this dreadful year (lightened for me by the birth of my first grandchild). Let’s hope and work for a more enlightened and progressive new year.
Have a good Christmas then!
Thank you for your insight and inspiration. When you set out an alternative path, it is a source of hope in desperate times.
Thanks
But can I just say that most of this is me simply getting up and writing down what must have occurred to me overnight?
About 15% of all blogs even get written in the bath…
But I’m glad if they’re of interest
Thinking and walking seem to go well together. I no longer have my mad lab but can’t say that her peccadillos (cats, old ladies with poodles, unwary cheeseburger holders) allowed much possibility of idle thought, but just an amble to local shops seems to do the trick.
Anyway, sending you lots of love and look forward to reading your erudite ramblings in 2017.
Carol
Thanks Carol
Have a good holiday
Richard, have an enjoyable Christmas and thank you for all the work you do on tax justice.
I am currently reading The Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford. It is a very challenging book about the rapid advance of Artificial Intelligence and the implications for employment and society. It is certainly making me think and frankly our politicians should acknowledge that these developments need to be addressed in policy making. I am not optimistic that any of them have the vision to do this, sadly short termism always prevails in the UK.
Of the many challenges we face this is a real one
And I suspect most politicians are ducking it
I’d imagine too many politicians don’t bother to think about it because the feedback from focus groups is that most people either aren’t interested at present or just don’t understand the issues.
Forethought is not something we see from the political classes too often, more’s the pity.
On that depressing thought, Festive Greetings to all!
Perhaps a regular thinking session could be made a condition of a Citizen’s Income scheme?
Happy Christmas!
Amused!
AdrianD said
Perhaps a regular thinking session could be made a condition of a Citizen’s Income scheme?
Agreed, but even more so – could we ask our MP’s to sign up to a MANDATORY Continuous Professional Development scheme, a large component of which would consist of the equivalent of purdah – no phones, TV, radios, newspapers – simply sitting in a room, thinking, or at least reading a decent book, and then meeting with other MP’s to discuss the book.
Rather like the Silent Retreats I am expected to take yearly, as an Associate of the Order of Julian of Norwich, learning how to live in a “monastery without walls”, in the midst of everyday life.
Even a Quaker meeting – an hour in silence – might do them some good every now and again
As it undoubtedly does me
Go well Andrew and have the best Christmas you can
Richard
Merry Christmas Richard.
Thank you for giving a voice to those of us who feel that there is something wrong with our way of life and that we could do a lot better!
And to you PSR
Thank you for your very interesting ideas over the year – even if I have not always agreed with them. Thanks also for your absolutely vital flow of information on tax evasion/avoidance. This is a tremendously important topic and much neglected in many parts of the media (I wonder why ?)
Happy Christmas to you and your family.
I am sure we all hope that the New Year will be better for progress in human affairs. It would be difficult for it to be worse (wouldn’t it ????)
I’ll muse on that
You’re absolutely right about the need for individuals to make more effort thinking things through. The UK now seems to be in a dreadful mess because it hasn’t done much of this since the beginning of the 1970’s and the arrival of Neo-Liberalism’s market fundamentalism and the abandonment of any strategic state planning to revitalise UK manufacturing. I’m very grateful to be able to come to your blog and find your ideas for getting the UK out of it’s mess. Happy Christmas and long may you continue upsetting the apple cart of complacency and stupidity!
Speaking as someone whose been accused of ‘thinking too much’ on several occasions over the years, I’ll admit that reading your blog doesn’t help that ‘condition’ much, Richard. But by golly I’ve learned a lot over the years – 2016 being no exception. And your enternal optimism serves as an essential foil to my natural pessimism. So, for that I thank you too.
Have a restful and enjoyable yuletide break. You’ve a busy 2017 ahead.
Best wishes as always.
Ivan
Thanks for all your contributions
I look forward to seeing you in 2017
But you’re right: it’s going to be busy
Have a good Christmas
Richard
While I agree that most people don’t think enough, I also think it is possible to think too much. We need to observe before we can think productively. If we spend all our time thinking then all we have to think about is our own thoughts and we will learn nothing new.
Time to think, yes: and time, too, to talk. I recognise much of what you say here.
I am a programmer, and the popular conception of our work is that we sit at our computers, hour after hour, typing in our programs.
The reality? I doubt that as many as ten minutes of the day consists of typing (or, more likely, copy-and-pasting) the operating logic of our program and the task in hand.
Much time is spent with ‘plumbing’: where I find the data, who can set up the key exchanges, working with database administrators on tables and indexes and data replication schemas.
A great deal of time is spent on debugging and testing, integration testing; if we were honest, even more time should be.
Somewhere between these two vast consumers of our time sits the administration: documentation, wrestling with the version control and release system; and the soul-destroying time-sink of the time-and-task recording ‘ticket’ system, which never quite records things as you need to, and always forces you to misreport the hierarchy within which tasks and problems are related. Often the only way to close a task is a “**** it” attitude that knowingly misrepresents or erases what you actually did, and why: a bureaucreatic maze of boxes that simply does not let you take (or record) the path you actually took and why this turned out to be necessary.
It helps, that our superiors are trapped in it, and equally complicit, and this tacit understanding of reality is essential to our productivity; but, every now and again, you run up against an individual who uses this system’s ‘features’ obstructively, destructively, or maliciously.
I do not doubt that every job you’ve ever done has three components which can ‘map’ onto these items.
Those of you enjoying a career in Academia will know exactly where to place the REF – the Research Effectiveness Framework – which measures out your worthiness (and eligibility for funding) in terms of publication ‘scores’ that trap you in a hamster-wheel of ‘publish or perish’ measurements of ‘productivity’ that would count the shovelfuls of gardeners and gravediggers and weigh the clay as if it was their merit.
I digress, and there are worse things to the work of those who labour outside academia.
… And then there are the jobs that actually matter: thinking, and communicating.
Thinking? You have mentioned that and, were you a consultant or professional adviser, your dog should arguably be on the payroll and credited for his creative contributions. Might I suggest that there could be a tax-efficient way of doing this?
Likewise, the walk to the coffee machine, the gym, the café, and the elevator is where the difficult ‘programming’ – the logic – will get done; and it is a distortion of reality that programmers who work from home are not allowed to charge their shower and their walking boots as tax deductibles. Likewise the Winalot, or analogous consumables, for their own personal ‘thinking assistant’.
But, as well as thinking, there is talking.
A programmer who does not talk to his or her colleagues will never develop beyond a narrow ‘bag of tricks’ or toolkit: it isn’t just about requesting help on today’s difficult bug, or pointing out a better way of doing that, it’s the constant stream of stories and ideas, and the news of a profession that exists outside the cubicle. Often, the hilarious or disturbing tales of the mistakes in other companies; sometimes, new techniques, books, courses and talks on the Web.
Furthermore, the task in hand, and our professional development, demands that we communicate with those who use our work: the users, their managers, the wider public who will benefit from the existence our work.
We cannot always do this: larger projects break down into tasks which are ‘coding to spec’ a long way from the user and the analyst; but if we never, ever do this – the user communication and consider the ‘use case’ and usability – then we, and much of what we do, will be useless.
Very few programmers will ever speak to users, or watch them as they work and ask themselves: “How can I make this easier?”
Fewer still will look at any task or tool that they develop into a new application and consider where the information comes from, or goes to; but every task exists with in a workflow that could be made far, far easier for everyone contributing to it, or consuming what comes out of it, if only the programmer could take the elevator up and down a floor or two and talk to people in the ‘workflow’ of the user and the task in hand.
It seems that our professional development, and the imposed structures of our work environment, exist to prevent us doing any of the most productive thinking and communicating; and we are kept busy in our cubicles (our worse, our open-plan offices) in an unending working day of ‘busy-ness’ that is entraining uselessness.
Those who emerge, and are promoted for conforming and ‘producing’ more than than the measured output of their peers, are often terrible at the effective work of their profession: my profession, and probably yours, too.
…And I leave it to the reader to consider the importance of communicating with the wider public, and observing what your work is actually doing: do you think that the developers in Uber, or Twitter, or Palantir are doing that? Or, indeed, technicians and professionals in banks, ‘Big Four’ accountants, legal firms and engineering companies?
So I will leave you with a more cheering thought, and wish you a Christmas with both merriment and contemplation, conversation and quiet
Wise words Nile
And happy Christmas
Richard happy Christmas. I’m at the end of about 8km of 1930s aluminium telephone wire which is cut by combine harvesters normally but this time by what knows what; it has been sown since the 22nd but should be back up on Wednesday. This message is patched through with wife’s cell phone. Have a great Christmas and thanks for the blog. I also get accused of thinking too much. Thanks for the ideas and also providing a space for courteous, considered and reasoned discussion and debate. the quality is far better than the national arena. I may not always agree but feel that I have gotten to know and respect you over the past year.
Sean
The miracle of BT!
Thanks and enjoy your day
There’s a lot of thinking to do in 2017
Richard