British

I photographed the anti-Dorries protest last Friday:

100 people or so gathered to protest her bill, which called for teenage girls to receive teaching on abstinence. Just girls, presumably because unwanted pregnancies are entirely the fault of women. Or something. She also claimed that girls learning to say no will help cut child abuse - the major problem with child abuse being a lack of clarity around consent, obviously. Anyway, it was a vile bill, anti-women, anti-sex and generally creepy, and it died in odd circumstances halfway through the rally. So yay!

I've just read this slightly odd report of the event, and found myself in the background of one of the shots (brightened slightly):

I don't think that was necessary at all.

2011,then

It's been a quiet week, for the most part. Other than the 12 people + 3 children + a labrador + trying-to-keep-my-mouth-shut madness of xmas day, I've mainly been lazing around reading. As is traditional I got a cold the moment I stopped work, so much of the holiday has been a fuzz of nose orgasms followed by speculation on whether it's possible to dynamite the sinuses. Still, it's been good to have some kind of rest. And I now have a Kindle, which is excellent.

My highlights of 2011:

• Got a job at the BHA
• Completed my photography degree
• Moved to London
• Ran Questival (successfully enough that I've been asked to run 2012 - hooray!)
• Had a 2 month photo exhibition
• Performed a magic show for the first time in a decade

My big worry this time last year was the Big Looming Crisis of my degree ending with no prospects in sight. Happily, things seem to have gone ok. The first few months of the year were spent worrying about that, followed by non-stop trying to find somewhere to live, settling into the job and generally trying to get any kind of stability. After seven months I am, finally, just about settled. I live on a little boat in Rotherhithe, which suits me fine, and the job is going generally ok.

So: resolutions. Hmm. My biggest problem has been focussing too much on work. I'm usually there late, and am on call at weekends / holidays. So it's a bit relentless, and when things start to get stressful I find it hard to detach. So my resolution is to start doing other things, and since I find myself still extremely enthusiastic about dancing, I'm going to try to take that up a level. Like finding somewhere to practice in London, and getting more technical about it. I don't really know how this is going to work, but there are approximately a billion dance schools in London, so something should be doable.

Various other things that occur to me about 2011:

• I've hardly taken any photos.
• I've given up any pretence at cooking. And much of it was pretence, so this is arguably more honest.
• Apparently I have also stopped blogging, which is rubbish. I will try to be better.
• Everybody is getting engaged. Or moving in together. That kind of commitmenty thing. Everybody. A timer on the biological clock has clearly gone off, or something. It all happened fast. But hey, next summer I'm going to be maid of honour at my ex's wedding, which should be fun.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

Almost GTD

Work has been overwhelming of late. I suspect there's actually too much for me to handle, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I spend too much time reacting to problems and working down lists of starred emails. There's been no way for me to get a handle on everything I need to do. So I came up with a plan, which was so very nearly successful, until I made a big mistake.

In early autumn I happened to be reading a book about the psychology of willpower. It has the look of self-help dross, but is actually a proper pop-sci tour of the current psychogical literature on willpower and self-control. Really interesting, and it had a chapter on the effectiveness (or not) of to-do lists, and the various approaches that exist - mostly in business circles - for helping people keep control of their jobs and lives in general. And it ended up recommending a particular system, which I'll get to. But as interesting was what doesn't work, which really gelled with my experience.

First of all, it turns out daily to-do lists are a nightmare, and very few people can actually use them. The inevitable inclination is to fill them with tasks you'd like to get done. But this is always doomed. As soon as you don't get a task done, it gets bumped to the next day. Which makes that day even harder to complete. Even if you catch up, once you start completing the list the obvious thing to do is add more stuff. For most people, the to-do list becomes a depressing reminder of stuff you haven't done yet, and every day becomes a failure. Most people find that so demoralising that they stop using them. I've certainly done that.

Furthermore, they don't actually reduce stress all that much. Putting 'add monkeys section to the website' seems on the surface like something you have to do, but it's just a description. What information is needed for this monkeys section? Who has it? What kind of structure should it have? Do I need to run it by anyone else in the office first? Do I even have access to the relevant area of the website? Our brains know full well that all this is lurking in the background, so these tasks jump into our conscious thoughts when we're trying to concentrate on other things. You're trying to program a tricky bit of SQL, and you find yourself thinking 'actually, I need to email Eggbert about the scones, or the cakes will never be ready in time'. So you either find yourself jumping from task to task, never able to fully commit, or you are continually scribbling notes to yourself and can never focus - plus there's always the worry that something's been missed. And so the to-do list becomes even more demoralising. This is very familiar too.

So what does work? According to this book, our subconscious relaxes when it knows there's a plan in place. It's not enough to know what needs doing, we need to know how. And this is where it starts to recommend a particular system: David Allen's Getting Things Done.

I read the GTD book a few years ago, but never put it into practice. The system revolves around three things: your calendar, your project lists and your action lists. Your calendar contains the tasks that absolutely 100% need to be done that day. It does not contain any tasks you'd like to do - that's what the other lists are for. Project lists are like old-school to-do lists in that they describe everything you need to do, so you can keep track. But the action lists contain the next real-world step you need to take. So the project list says 'get presents for Mum's birthday', but the action list says 'search emails for the suggested present list Dad sent me'. So the action list contains only actions that you can immediately go and do.

You start your day by working through the vital stuff on your calendar, which is always very satisfying when it's done. Then you move to the action lists. A crucial part of the action list is the neutral hierarchy. Everything just sits on the same list. GTD strongly recommends against prioritising or categorising your lists, because:

a) prioritising takes a long time, and is out of date almost immediately - in most offices tasks change from hour to hour, and updating the list each time would be a waste of time.

b) you know full well what's important when you look at the list.

c) categories rarely work, as lots of projects cross boundaries, and trying to classify projects / reverse-engineer your own classifications is often frustrating. And removing frustration is a major aim of GTD.

d) who really cares about categories? Usually, work just needs doing.

You then go through the lists once a week to clear out the old stuff and add new things (you can do this as you're going along, obviously, but the weekly review is always required to make sure).

The idea of GTD is to get you organised and get out of your way. It strips out all the pointless stuff. It removes the failure of long daily to-do lists by giving you Actions to plough through, which is cool as it means you end the day having achieved stuff rather than seeing the things you haven't. And it provides much more peace of mind by providing a plan for each task that the subconscious is happy with. And this seems to be a psychologically valid approach.

All of which sounded ideal. There's plenty of slightly off-putting fanboy-esque GTD stuff online, but the psychological studies seemed to give it some actual validity. I figured that if nothing else it would help me get a handle on the workload. So I've spent the last two months trying to get everything into the system. That's the tough bit - you literally have to go through every note, email and thought to get everything onto the project/action lists. But a month ago I finally got there. And then I made my big mistake: I mentioned it to management at work.

I showed them my project list to a) give a very quick guide to what I was working on, and b) show I was getting myself organised. At which point they immediately wanted to know why it wasn't prioritised and categorised. Why isn't there a red/amber/green traffic light system so I know what's important? Although meant kindly, I could sense the slightly patronising tone as they described my apparently amateur attempt at organisation. I tried to explain that avoiding all that stuff is half the point, but despite a sympathetic ear I didn't have much luck. They now see it as a reporting tool, I guess, where it was only intended to help me organise myself. And GTD is, admittedly, not built for reporting.

So now I have to add a crapload of overhead. I'll try, obviously, but it's certainly not the smooth system I had in mind, and it's already seeming like the system itself is going to be annoying work. Which is very much not the point. So if you're reading this and GTD seems interesting, I highly recommend you keep it quiet.

Rivers of London

I went to a talk yesterday about the lost rivers of London. There are loads, and they're mostly in sewers, but you can still see them if you know where to look. Some are in pipes at Tube stations, others can be heard rushing during the brief periods when the traffic stops, and occasionally one can be seen by the sly lift of a manhole cover. They haven't been mapped terribly well, supposedly, and people have had to go back to 200-year-old maps to chart their routes. It turns out the Peck flows within metres of where I now live, so I'll have to investigate at some point.

Quite enjoyed the talk. Lots of 'huh' moments when long-buried rivers turned out to have affected the makeup of the city. The oval, for example, is only round because it originally followed the bank of the River Thing, which is no longer there. This brings up one issue with the talk, which was that there were so many rivers it's hard to remember which was which. But I seem to recall the Fleet being quite good. And the Tyburn, which sounds sassy.

I'm so used to attending talks by humanists and skeptics that I forget not everybody approaches these things from the same direction as me. The talk began with the relationship between landscape and place, and how all the photographs we would see were taken on out-of-date polaroid film, meaning they had a lot of optical flaws that meant the final result would be entirely unexpected - and isn't this a good analogy for the subject matter? Me being me, I tend to see this as so much wistful sperm nuzzling at the egg of profundity, but after a degree of such things I'm perhaps a little jaded. But I'm not going to mock - if it works for some people, that's cool. I will mock the Q&A session, however, which ended with 'do you ever use dowsing?', to which the answer came that apparently lots of builders use it but are too embarrassed to say so, so there's definitely something in it.

Discussion after the talk quickly lead onto all manner of subterranean myths and stories, and I was able to tell a few due to having recently read Underground London. It's a florid journey through abandoned Tube lines, plague pits, roman remains, how the sewer system works (I have been telling people about this ever since, much to their bemusement) and why it saved millions of lives, WW2 bomb shelters, and mega-secret government tunnels. It's quite long, and when I started I didn't expect to read it all, but it successfully kept my attention. Just one to look out for if the underground is your thing.

Coincidentally I also recently read Rivers of London, which is less historical and more, well, full of ghosts and magic and stabbings, but does have a lot of characters named after old London rivers - so quite good for sounding clever at quizzes.

Tricked out

It is done. Phew. It went ok, though not great. My first trick failed after I didn't give my volunteer the correct instructions, meaning something in the trick physically broke, and I had no way out but a humiliating climbdown. So that was a bit of a shame. But the remaining tricks went fine. One, a Derren Brown-esque mentalist effect, involved me getting three volunteers on stage, and at the climax one exclaimed 'how the fuck did you do that?'. Which is basically the ideal result.

My introduction was quite fun, too. The Head of Ceremonies unexpectedly listed a few facts about me, including the baby-delivering incident. I then bounced onto the stage, full of self-affirmation and relief the moment had finally come, but was quickly cut off by people at the back saying they couldn't hear me due to music playing over the speakers. So various people went to sort this out, while I stood on the stage, trying to think of things to say. I had a few questions about Thriller etc, and I eventually gave them a blow by blow account of my nephew's birth. Which filled the time nicely, but was not at all something I expected to be talking about. Seems a bit vain in hindsight, but I couldn't think of anything else, and it's no more so than doing a magic show in general, I suppose.

I had lots of compliments about the show, and people did seem to have enjoyed it, which is lovely. I'm still embarrassed about the mistake, but more annoyed that I didn't get to show it - it's a really good trick! But these things happen, I guess. At least it was at the start, so things could only get better.

Have to say, I did like being on stage again. The nerves were crippling and not even vaguely fun, but there's nothing quite like getting gasps of wonder from an audience. Addictive.

Getting tricksy

Tomorrow is the annual conference for celebrants - the people who the BHA train to perform funerals, weddings, and naming days - and as usual I'll be helping out. I've been turning up for a couple of years, taking photos and generally doing what I can, but this time I'm properly in the thick of things. I'll be there with my usual photobooth for taking profile shots for websites, and will be running tech support and helping at a workshop, but I also agreed to be the evening entertainment - as a magician.

I'm not sure quite how this happened. I haven't done any magic for 10yrs. I think my last show was forcing my least favourite teacher into a guillotine on the final day of secondary school. I can only assume I must have mentioned this at some point, as the Ceremonies team out-of-the-blue asked if I'd be happy to do a 10-15min show for ~100 people, and I said yes, on the grounds that interesting things only happen when you say yes (thank you Danny Wallace). And have gone through various stages of panic since. I've spent the last 3 weeks thinking of little else. Despite moving house in this time, I've had magic stuff running through my head pretty much continuously.

This evening I did a practice run, and it seemed to go ok. Nonetheless, I am basically petrified. Hopefully it'll be fun. Will report back. Eep.