I’m supposed to be on leave this week; there is some truth to the notion that academics and educators get August off. I always have a tricky relationship with leave. I’d rather be working through August when it’s quiet and there are less random, emergent demands on my time. It’s almost impossible to do big chunks of work that I actually want to get done while the calendar is also full of committees, meetings and other people’s sudden crises. I’d prefer to take the odd quiet day off here and there during the year than dump it into a tranche of weeks over the summer because the same thing always tends to happen:
I down tools on the first day of leave, still knowing that there’s a bunch of things I need to do. I then go about distracting myself by playing video games, taking long rides and spending far too much time at the pub, still knowing that the work exists and hasn’t vanished just because I’m not doing it. I get anxious that what I could have leisurely and thoughtfully done over five weeks I’ve now got to cram into a week when everyone else is also back and will start inventing things for me to do, I give up and go back to work. So, this year I successfully took about four days of leave and threw in the can.
I also have to acknowledge, that working in a big institution means that a lot of the work is of the type I don’t want to do and the type that is invented because as we know that’s what institutions do. I really don’t like doing the whole, ‘It’s us vs them, the man is out to get you, the institution is a monster‘ thing because it’s easy to do, simplistic and inaccurate. But, being candid, I reckon my work to attrition rate is like 50%. In other words, 50% of the things I do either; never needed doing, wouldn’t have been missed if they hadn’t been done or turned out later to be unnecessary. To try and head this off somewhat, I have a three-week rule that I work to; if someone tells you to do something and your gut tells you it doesn’t need doing, ignore it. If in three weeks they haven’t nagged you about it then it never needing doing in the first place. Nonetheless, the institution invents PDFs for me to research, draft, approve and complete at a rate of three or four a week which as far as I can tell have very little measurable effect other than going to a file somewhere and holding me to account if the day should ever come. These PDFs are incredibly important at the time but then vanish into the system never to be heard of again.
By the way, the three-week rule, also sits next to my twenty-minute meeting rule: Nothing important is said after the first twenty minutes of a meeting, after that people just think of things to say to take it up to the hour. I start meetings I chair tending to just out and out say that and have never heard an objection. You’re welcome to try these rules out.
Short Stuff
- Nick Foster has categorised futurists for you. I suspect the quality that changes is criticality across the categories.
- I posted about Trust’s Moving Castles last week having skim-read it. I actually went back to full reading it and it’s good. It’s really good. It’s all coded in Berlin-hipster-intellectual language but if you can read through it there’s some great meat in there. Still love CGI kit-bashing too. Putting game engines at the centre of it all seems to fit. It’s got just about the right ingredients of blockchain, community and game to be feasible.
- For more on that transgression between the virtual and the actual, I quite enjoyed this article ‘We Beat the Cops in GTA‘ from Melike Demirbag-Kaplan and Begum Kaplan-Oz, looking at how gamers respond to real-life actualisation of video game scenes. They sort of suggest that video games provide the blurriest boundary between the real and virtual and between play and seriousness.
- Dan McQuillan on Luddism in the context of AI.
The reads on these blogs have been going up which is interesting. Where they usually got less than 100 in the first week they’re now usually getting three or four hundred. I suppose I’m nothing if not persistent. Though if you are relatively new, I’m sorry that coverage has been patchy lately. Normally these are mostly intellectual or at least observational. They’ve been more introspective lately.
Ok love you very much, see you next week.