It has been a long time since I last tried to read Finnegans Wake. I think I managed about 3 pages last time. I got a bit further with the Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake, but even that left me scratching my head, rolling my eyes and yawning.
Nowadays, I don’t even care for the idea/ideal of Finnegans Wake. I no longer feel the desire to spend countless hours dissecting a purposefully obscure novel. As Nabokov said: it is a 600 page crossword puzzle and you can’t even win a dictionary for completing it.
Nevertheless, in homeopathic doses, Finnegans Wake can be interesting, especially when you start unpacking all the neologisms. My favourite (everyon’e favourite) is the word funferal, which contains “fun for all”, fun, feral, and is overshadowed by its closeness to funeral. I was reminded of this when I saw that the Armitage Shanks urinals in the toilets where I work are controlled by an infra-red system called the Cistermiser. Joyce would have loved this word and might have extracted the following: cyst, systemiser, cistern, sister, sodomiser etc. I’m not sure if the company who created the Cistermiser anticipated all of these associations, but I’m sure they’ll be overjoyced to have them brought to light.
A tipping point analysis of David Allen’s Getting Things Done would surely provide interesting reading. As Malcom Gladwell’s book shows, social epidemics require three types of people: Connectors (those who know everyone), Mavens (those who know everything) and Salesmen (those who softly influence others with their charisma). The tipping point of Getting Things Done (or rather its sexier abbreviation, GTD) is fascinating because it presents the uncommon situation where the three people required for an epidemic are concentrated in the person of the über-blogger.
Connectors
I think I first heard about GTD when Jon Hicks linked to Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders, but I can’t be sure. Both of these people are widely-read bloggers. 43 Folders is in the Technorati top 100. It is on lots of people’s blogroll and much linked on del.icio.us etc. You can’t get much more connected.
Mavens
What is a geek if not a Maven. These are people who not only read a book but spend hours discussing its finer points. Admittedly, a book about organization is incredibly pertinent for those who spend much of their days online, tempted by the infinite distractions of the internet (aka procrastination at the touch of a button). Mann is so much of a GTD geek that he has created a site devoted to just that one subject and the implications of its teachings.
Salesmen
Charisma is an innate quality that can’t be affected or taught. Nevertheless, there are certain stylistic ticks that apparently inspire trust:
“Here’s the deal”
“come on: something’s gotta give.”
“Well, heck.”
“Disco.”
“pretty freakin’ ace in practice.”
“Plus, kids, do remember”
“This is a truly great time to be alive.”
Mann is upbeat, cute, and slightly zany. It is sickening, yet not particularly grating. Perhaps the subject matter (productivity) makes it impossible to avoid self-help clich tropes. Of course, if you’re reading about it, you probably need pepping up. (I am reminded of Martin Amis’s attempt to imagine Samuel Beckett’s working day: “Beckett was the headmaster of the Writing as Agony school. On a good day, he would stare at the wall for eighteen hours or so, feeling entirely terrible; and, if he was lucky, a few words like NEVER or END or NOTHING or NO WAY might brand themselves on his bleeding eyes.”)
There you have it: worldwide domination for Getting Things Done (at the time of writing no. 49 on Amazon.com and 143 on Amazon.co.uk). Does it work? Well, it certainly presents an intriguing theory of the mind that sounds convincing. We are distracted by small actions that clog up our thoughts, we do need help to get in the zone, but there’s so many other parts of the jigsaw. Project planning, time management, dealing with soft addictions and self-discipline — none of these things are adequately addressed in GTD. It isn’t a magic cure-all, but then, there’s no such thing as a magic cure-all so why would you look for one in the first place? Oh, that’s right, because everyone keeps recommending it.
Yesterday, despite all my scruples, I took part in a charity ‘Dress Down Friday’ at work. I had thought about following the advice of Guy Browning (no.12) to dress up, not down, but feared the social consequences of isolating myself from my colleagues at this early stage. One fellow jeans and T-shirt wearer didn’t understand why we – in the IT department – couldn’t dress down every day: we rarely get visitors and rarely visit others, so why not?
Personally, I can’t imagine anything worse. Dressing up is one of the key psychological tools we use to get ourselves in the right frame of mind for an activity. As Browning says: “If you are wearing a welder’s helmet people expect rivets, if you are wearing a suit people expect business.” It is worth noting at this point that Keats always put on his best clothes when he was going to write poetry. Work – from writing poetry to writing code – is a performance.
The question for any employer, given that work is such a psychological activity, is how do you get your employees motivated? The answer falls into two categories: carrot or stick. The stick approach is generally used in low paid jobs where employees are expendable and in the public sector, which don’t tend to reward performance. The carrot is the preserve of the private sector, particularly those which are sales based. It is the stick approach that I am most familiar, so I was delighted to get a carrot, which was getting to see the Glasgow premiere of Casino Royale. At the time I thought this was just a kind gesture, but on reflection the choice of Bond was a masterstroke of motivational management. For what could be more aspirational than James Bond? A lavish lifestyle of girls, champagne, caviar, and fast cars, a sense of purpose, despite Tony Blair’s dubious foreign policy, and immense, truly immense self-confidence; if the workers are imbued with even 1% of James Bond’s qualities, their performance would improve by leaps and bounds. It was a very canny move and the film was superb.
After only a couple of days at my new day job I knew that if I didn’t do something urgently I was going to be crippled. My right hand, my mouse hand, was so full of aches and pains that it was disturbing my sleep at night. I tried to shrug it off, I did some yoga and other assorted stretching exercises (itself now a dubious practice); I tried all the hints and tips in the hewlett-packard guide to safe computing (straight back, feet on the floor, head level with monitor, changing position every ten minutes), and yet still the RSI in my right hand was getting worse.
Clearly something had to be done, but what? Losing my right hand would be awful, imagine being a singer and losing your hearing or a food critic and losing your tongue.
It was at this point I recalled the comments of a girl who, when I was fifteen, maliciously informed me that one of my biceps was bigger than the other. I laughed it off – she was a deeply jaded young hag – but immediately started experimenting with using my left hand.
I had never used my mouse left-handed, though. Like playing the guitar and writing, surely the mouse requires the kind of fluidity you can only get from natural predisposition.
Well, at first, it feels unnatural, there is a lack of sensitivity in your hand/eye coordination, but soon enough it becomes functional. Unfamiliar actions, like highlighting text and then pressing Ctrl-c are clumsy and awkward at first, but soon become if not second then third or fourth nature.
The only worry is that all I’ll succeed in doing is ruining my left hand as well. I can see myself wearing a stick attached to my forehead, desolately prodding the keys like those Romanian orphans who banged their head against the bars of their cot for stimulation.
Still, at least my index finger doesn’t ache any more.