Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Your body clock is rarely wrong. Some of us are morning people, some are evening people, some are night people (interestingly, almost nobody appears to be an afternoon person). I’m assigning different activities to different times of the day when I know I’ll have the most energy, motivation and opportunity to carry them out. (For example, I’m much happier exercising in the late morning after doing some work and before lunch.) This is one of the big advantages of being a consultant working from home – my time is pretty much my own.
2. Lists are your friend. Taking a leaf out of Ben Franklin‘s book, I’m going to use lists effectively. First thing in the morning, I’ll review and finalise the list of tasks I need to do that day; last thing in the evening, I’ll review my progress that day and draft the list of tasks for the following day. This ToDo list will be supplemented by Run Lists which cover specific areas such as writing I want to complete, errands I need to run, things I need to buy, etc. (I also need to remember that lists can also be your enemy, especially if you make the mistake of generating a never-ending list that, you know, never ends.)
3. Paper is for plotting. I want to avoid the computer and use paper for brainstorming and early drafting wherever possible. I’m going to make sure that there are three sizes of paper in the room: large (preferably A1), medium (A4) and small (notepad or post-it notes). A1 is for mindmapping and other planning activities; A4 is for drafting layout or copy by hand; the small sizes are for reminders, quick lists and keeping track of stray thoughts. (I tend to hoard paper, so I’ll destroy notes as soon as possible after they become redundant – when I type them up, when I action them, when they go over their own time limit.)
4. Keep the internet on a leash. Computers are great for productivity / computers are terrible for productivity. (In order to maximize the former and minimize the latter, you should never sit down at a computer without being absolutely clear about exactly why you’re sitting down at a – wait, what was I doing again?) In particular spending too much time online is a time-killer, leads to depression, and probably turns you into a morlock: I’ll assign specific sessions for activities such as checking email and RSS feeds, web searching, and social media, turning off my wireless connection outside those times.
5. Chunk your work, then take a break. This is basically a variation on the Pomodoro technique: every work task (or anything that resembles work, like blogging) gets a specific time limit, and a timer to tell me when that limit is up. Work takes place during that time only, and each task is followed by a break during which I’ll do something completely different, so drafting the executive summary for that evaluation report will be followed by baking a cake. Most of these work chunks will be 25 minutes (followed by 5 minute break) or 45 minutes (followed by 15 minute break). If I’m not finished in the allotted time, tough: I’m still stepping away from the task. One exception. If I’m writing creative stuff and I get into the flow.

NOW, MORLOCKS

Click here to view the embedded video.

So a lot of people are in a tough place, particularly when they’re operating even further out – not just away from the roulette wheel (aka the “stable job market”) but outside the casino altogether (e.g. outside the formal economy). One such friend has been ploughing a lonely furrow for a few years now, working on a critical issue for post-crash resilience, gaining traction but not generating income. He needs to change his strategy, and so far he’s come up with three possibilities:

1. Continue down the same path with the communities he’s already working with, while broadening his work into other areas of resilience.
2. Go professional and open source his work – the product is free, the services are paid – but this will probably need a lot of work, possibly some compromises, and definitely some investors.
3. Undertake some other work and receive payment in kind (specifically non-monetary – think gold or silver), on the basis that the existing money system isn’t looking very healthy.

He emailed a bunch of people recently with a call for comments on these options, and suggestions for alternatives. Personally, I think these options are interesting but insufficient. The first won’t generate enough income and break the cycle; the second will probably derail the community-focused work (since we’ve already established there isn’t a lot of profit in it); the third won’t further the work and renders you a hostage to fortune, i.e. the market for gold/silver (I’m not a believer). So what else is out there?

1. Seek funding from the sort of foundations that throw funding around – up to and including the whole TED Fellows circus. This might be good in the short-term, but I’d see it as a pretty big sell-out since I harbour an unwarranted hatred for the whole TED ethos.
2. Go the Kickstarter route a la Marcin Jakubowski and others. There’s a strong vision which can generate a plausible objective to fund, and I think other people could get behind it. This approach is ideal for relatively limited projects but might not work for longer-term income.

Overall, I think his only hope of survival is a three-pronged approach: first, pursue as wide a range of income streams as possible (including any and all of those described above); second, make a big push in branding himself more visibly, although that can feel a little uncomfortable in the Big Brother age in which we live; and third, establish a plan which enables you to say that it’s okay to spend a couple of years earning income outside your immediate interests, in order that you can return to your life project at a particular point in the future. If you’re forced to make compromises, you may as well set the terms of those compromises.

I adopted a “low density working” strategy which is relatively simple to implement but requires a fairly radical shift in how you view your life. “Work-life balance” is a failed attempt to balance the requirements of industrial working patterns with the desires of post-industrial “leisure” opportunities, and pursuing it just leads you further down the rabbit hole. Instead, imagine your productive time spread out more widely across your life, both in terms of hours per day but also in terms of days per year and years per lifetime. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be working more, because exactly the same amount of work is spread out across a wider period of time. That’s low density working, and frankly it’s far less onerous than the industrial model.

What are the advantages? Well, you won’t feel like you’re working as hard, because the work is less intensive. You can balance out periods of intense work with periods of almost no work, and still feel satisfied that you’re not, in fact, slacking. These interests might turn into another job entirely, of course, even one that you pursue alongside your existing job; or they might simply develop skills that you’ll need to face our descent from our recent fossil fuel binge. You can schedule entire weeks, months or years for interests you want to pursue, and not have to call it a sabbatical (a colossal misnomer, if ever there was one). This all boils down to one thing: more autonomy.

This brings us to the biggest obstacle to this approach: most companies aren’t a fan of low density working, as you’ll quickly find out when you suggest to your boss that you alter your personal work patterns. Most companies follow an industrial model even when their business doesn’t require such a model; partly because that’s what they’re used to, and partly because that’s what their partners and competitors do. My way out of that was to become a consultant, but not everybody can become a consultant, and not everybody wants to be a consultant; if you start your own business, you can structure it in a way which makes low-density working possible (as the recent Rework recognises).

One thing is for sure: as soon as you accept the trends that I described in the first paragraph, it should be clear that the industrial model will not last for much longer. Whether it dies before I do or not, I prefer not to place my bet on a horse that has already lost the race. You’ll quickly realise that there isn’t actually that much work to do in the world, which is why so many offices are filled with people not performing work-related tasks but social maintenance tasks; contra Taylor, a significant proportion of a large organisation’s time is taken up with simply keeping the different units of the organisation together. I’d prefer to expend my social energy on people I choose to be around, rather than people I’m paid to be around.

On the other hand, I might be barking up entirely the wrong tree. Time will tell.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.

The “visceral experience of failure” is not something that people enjoy facing, but it’s essential to experience it for exactly the reasons that Crawford describes. Those who haven’t been through that aren’t the sort of people I’d trust, but unfortunately wealth and power tend to protect you from the impact of those those experiences – you might experience failure, but you won’t necessarily experience it viscerally. In the information economy, this is multiplied by the fact that the distance from failure is increased; Crawford suggests all students should learn a trade before they begin work, but it would perhaps be simpler (if less politically acceptable) to simply hold people accountable for their actions.

And now I’m going to plaster a wall.

1. I don’t do demonstrations any more – I’ve been charged by horses, clubbed with batons, narrowly avoided a lungful of something nasty and it didn’t really achieve much, to be honest. If I was out on the streets, I’d be stunting like this.

2. History always favours the winners. There’s a fairly obvious connection between this and my lack of demonstration-ing, but it doesn’t really matter that much. It occurred to me only because I was listening to the mix “Recollections from Old London Town” on the HAFTW blog (direct download on mediafire). Best listened to with the windows open so that the noise outside and inside bleed together.

3. I sent a list of Things To Do to an American friend who’s visiting Old London Town for a few days. Trying to think of things that would be a) worth doing, b) not too obscure / alienating and c) not too obvious / depressing, I realised how much of London I miss and how much I don’t, and how long it’s been since I spent any time there. Everything could have been swept away by recession for all I know, although that would probably be an improvement on the non-dom hard currency package tour that it had become.

4. What am I doing, sitting on my terrace on a Saturday night after yet another action-packed week? Ah, but it wasn’t action-packed at all – they rarely are these days. I’m in exile, not just from London, but from a way of life. Did you know that? Probably you didn’t. I’ll tell you all about it some other time, although you’ll have to buy the drinks unless that UNICEF contract comes through. Nobody can give me any performance indicators for returning from exile.

5. It’s very difficult to distinguish between self-destructive behaviour and self-constructive behaviour. Right now there are no clouds in the sky to derail thought, the dogs have quietened for the night, the lights across the bay are ghosts on the water. Put your troubles to bed before you lay your own head down, and good night.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE: Wow, that Vimeo embedding link really sucked. Fixed now!