Green Christmas

Save time – and the environment (a little) by getting your Christmas groceries delivered rather than visiting the supermarket. We’ve got a slot booked on the 18th. No doubt there’ll be last-minute items requiring some local shopping but an internet order saves time (I think) and carbon footprint. I’m not sure if we should share our order with the family who are with us over Christmas. When we all went away together in the summer, daughter-in-law Gayle placed an order for things like disposable nappies but she made the mistake of offering the order to the rest of us. So we had great fun adding – and changing – Gayle’s order. I think my credit card was used in the end, of course!

While we’re on green Christmas (it doesn’t scan like white Christmas) have you looked at whether the food you’re getting is locally sourced – or at least has reasonable transport history? I have a copy of the book Shades of Green by Paul Waddington. Paul discusses the ‘greenness’ of various things. He doesn’t cover Brussels sprouts which I’m sure are fairly OK – they are not grown under polytunnels or air-freighted from miles away. He does discuss courgettes which are apparently Britain’s tenth-favourite veg. While eating locally-grown ones in season is OK, buying imported ones is very poor – particularly as they are 80% water and have virtually no nutritional value! Has anyone worked out the carbon footprint of a Christmas pud?

Finding time

Three days with no time to blog – but I have found time to be with friends and the family – including young Alfie’s Christmas service at St Peter & St Paul, Tring today. This was the Tring Stepping Stones pre-school group. The costumes we wonderful and most of the youngsters knew the carols.

The Oxford Diocese e-newsletter has two entries that interested me: the first was the plan, sponsored by the World Council of Churches, to ring out the bells this Sunday at 3pm in support of action on Climate change. I’m not sure if we’re participating locally – I’ll keep you posted. You can read more about this here – there’s an interesting list of participating Churches – the Netherlands, the Nordics and Germany seem to have most. The web site address for the World Council is rather strange – www.oikoumene.org – can anyone decode?

The other entry is a thought for us all – spare a thought for single-parent families this Christmas. There are two web sites for Mums and Dads.

Copenhagen starts tomorrow

When I started this Advent section of my blog I had hoped to give some suggestion each day – in the same vein as the book I followed last year – and report my experiences. I’ve failed so far. I also thought I’d include some environmental suggestions. Tomorrow sees the start of the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change – see the official web site. I’m not sure how much a big political event like this can achieve: bringing increased awareness and acceptance would be good but I’m suspicious that anything more will be political rather than real.

I was prompted to think of global warming again this morning by, of all people, Ranulph Fiennes and Michael Jackson! The former chose a song by the latter as his inheritance track on the radio this morning (I’m sorry about plugging R4 regularly) The words quoted by Fiennes, which he was passing on to his 3-year-old daughter, were ‘If you wanna make the world a better place take a look at yourself, and then make a change’ It reminded me of one of the principles of the quality drive we were immersed in during the ’80s – I think it was as long ago as that. Who remembers the quality stuff? We were led by the Japanese. The apocryphal story of the supplier of widgets who was told that only 1% should be faulty; the box of 1000 contained a bag with the 10 faulty ones in: the rest were perfect. The principle was that we could only change things that were under our control: it was very easy to say ‘if only X would do something we’d be a lot better’ but that didn’t achieve anything. It was a good principle – but a tough one. I think the same applies to our attempts at controlling the climate: It’s easy to blame the Chinese, or the oil industry, or the people down the road who drive a big Volvo (oh dear!) But what am I doing? What are you doing?

Let’s start with energy-saving light bulbs. These have come a long way from the £15 bulbs that took 10 minutes to warm up and only give 30% of the light of bulbs they purport to replace. Unfortunately, I have some of those bought originally for the lounge but moved to the study because they were so poor. The disadvantage of long-life bulbs is that they last for ever! I have a cupboard full of bulbs given by the electricity company (well, half a dozen or so) and it’s possible to buy them for 10p or so. I’ve changed virtually all the lights we use regularly to energy-savers – and will change the remainder when the current tungsten ones die. Normal incandescent lamps are fairly easy to change but reflector spotlights are more difficult. I’ve found some that are pretty good once they warm up (10 minutes’ notice required to boil the kettle in the kitchen!) but they are slow and quite expensive. I see that Gil Lec in Chesham are starting to sell LED bulbs which seem similar to the spots we have in the kitchen but I think they need different holders. I’ll have to investigate further.

I’ve also found some replacements for the PAR reflectors (the big spots) – we have some in Church. These are reportedly a higher wattage equivalent and are expected to last 15,000 hours which seems to be a double or triple advantage. We’ll see.

We have a large stock of tungsten bulbs in Church – presumably bought in bulk some time ago. I’m torn between being very green and discarding them, and keeping them till they are no longer available on the open market and then e-baying them for funds!

How are you doing changing over to energy-savers? What’s your experience?

The Panto

Plenty of time for Christmas today - at the Panto!

Click on the slideshow to see bigger pictures:

Information Overload - getting there

No time for Christmas today but I've got my inbox down to single figures - except that I have 50-odd e-mails waiting. But I'm getting there!

Another on-line Advent Calendar

Another link for you to follow: www.whywearewaiting.com

Information Overload

Bishop Alan’s blog (http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/) today has given me some new thoughts about finding time. He questions how the Church should react to the new media. How or even should the Church position itself to take advantage of the new communication capabilities. What new training or skill development is needed. Which of these technologies could be used to advantage. The entry reminded me of Alvin Toffler’s ‘Future Shock’ written in 1970 in which he forecast that as society develops from a industrial to a informational one, the rate of change of things will continue to increase and people will become increasingly disconnected and suffering from future shock. We’ve certainly seen the rate of change of technology and communication increasing relentlessly: I spoke on this blog about change in January. I quoted £4 for 1Gb memory card; today 2Gb costs £4.50 and 4Gb £7.50. That’s about doubling in a year. And next year?

Toffler also invented the term ‘Information Overload’ which well defines my problem in finding time for Christmas. I googled this and found a Guardian article – but this had been removed from the web because the copyright had expired (that’s a whole new theme!) The comments seem to endorse the problem.

The trick seems to be to find the right way of using the technology. Undoubtedly there are benefits: I still quote one of my computer friends’ Christmas e-mails. I had helped her set up her webcam and skype and she e-mailed me on 25th December that she had just successfully skyped to her family in New Zealand – great. I can remember some 35 years ago we had the son of a French friend to stay with us to improve his English. We had to book a telephone to Paris to tell his parents he had arrived safely.

However, I don’t seem to have mastered this trick. Phone calls are successful but the e-mails are stacking up. Today wasn’t helped by a long unproductive call to the tax man but the less said about that the better.

So no new actions for tomorrow but perhaps a better understanding of the problem.

Some other Advent calendars

Today

I don’t think I have really taken a risk with befriending anyone today. I have met a few new people or spent more time with people I’ve only met briefly before but I don’t think any of this qualifies. My telephoning (from Tuesday) has been more successful but I’m concerned that the e-mails are mounting up! I’ll have to work harder on this – perhaps tomorrow.

Tomorrow

I’ve found a few other on-line Advent calendars. Woodlands Junior School in Kent, has a wonderful web site with an advent calendar that opens each day – I tried it a week or so ago and got a message “Hey, no peeking! Please come back to this page...” Each day seems to have a national flag and a dexcription of how Christmas is celebrated in that country – at least December 1 and 2 do. Take a look: www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/Xmas/calendar/ Look at the whole web site, too, it’s got lots of fun things for youngsters.

There’s also an advent calendar on the Oxford Diocese’s online church – i-church - www.i-church.org. This is very different – and the message you get when trying a later date is a little more refined! I’ll put links on the right so you can keep an eye on them through Advent.

Take a risk

Today

Lots of phone calls – and lots achieved with these. Also a long face-to-face meeting this morning that got much more done than a string of e-mails. However the ‘ruthless with the diary’ wasn’t so successful: I was doing fine until something cropped up that I hadn’t planned for and I had to spend time on it.

Tomorrow

Last week I ranted about risk – in particular, how risk assessment is both becoming a meaningless bureaucratic process and is making us all unnecessarily risk-averse. In her sermon on Sunday, Rosie spoke about our need for closeness or intimacy with God. She went on to suggest that “the most real way we experience intimacy with God is by taking the risk of loving one another. This will sometimes go wrong and it will sometimes cause hurt, but because the love you have from God is utterly trustworthy you will be grounded enough to handle those risks –and more than that –you will begin to unfurl as a bud turning into a flower. You receive what you long for by giving it away!... Not for Paul the idea of loving God in an ivory castle -we know closeness to God through closeness to one another -warts and all!”

This message was mirrored in Monday’s Thought for the day on Radio 4’s Today. John Bell tells the story of meeting some youngsters in Vietnam. He took the risk of befriending them, resulting in an experience which will stay with him. He ends by saying that Advent is not about fairy lights or turkeys or little donkeys, “...It’s about God taking the risk of entrusting Himself to people who did not know Him, some of whom being of no religious persuasion, so that they might touch Him”

So tomorrow: take a risk and talk to, and perhaps befriend someone who you don’t know.

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

Find time for Christmas

First day of December tomorrow. I’m going to try to start to get my workload under control so that I have time for Christmas. It’s a busy time and I have a significant backlog of things to do. But I do have lots of support – people who are willing to help in all sorts of ways. I’ve been trying to analyse some of the problems: one is that I underestimate how long things will take. This from an ex professional project manager is quite an admission! But, for example, I had hoped today to have an hour at 4-ish this afternoon to think about this blog entry – it’s now 10:30pm! Nothing has gone wrong – just things took longer than I thought. Another is task switching, I’m sure. Finding all the info about a particular activity takes time so with several on the go (I’m not going to own up to multi-tasking) this is a significant overhead.

I’m also looking hard at e-mail communications. There are lots of apocryphal stories: I remember hearing about a work colleague who only reacted to the second e-mail on any topic (the one beginning ‘did you get my note about....’) He argued that if it was important they’d send the second note, otherwise someone else would respond. Another suggestion was not to respond to any e-mail on which you were copied, i.e. not a direct addressee. Another is to keep the addressee lists as short as possible. I’m not sure that any of these are realistic.

I’ve already started trying to phone rather than e-mail where this is appropriate. The advantage is that usually the point can be resolved immediately. There are disadvantages, too: only one other person can take place and he or she must be there when the call is made. An e-mail has the advantage of being asynchronous. But the volume of e-mails is rather daunting: I was away from Tuesday last week, returning on Friday afternoon: I had 150 e-mails in my inbox. Quite a few were marketing ones (do you get several e-mails a day from Vistaprint?) but there were still 100-odd significant ones.

So to start, I’m going to try the following:

• Be ruthless with the diary: plan to spend periods on certain activities and keep to the plan as much as possible

• Manage e-mail activity down: telephone if practical, don’t perpetuate large distribution lists and don’t respond unless contributing – although a simple acknowledgement that a message has been received is often important

• One thing at a time: complete an activity before switching; we used to call this ‘completed staff work’

Do you want to try with me?

Advent Sunday – Advent is here

Last year was easy – I tried to follow the day-by-day suggestions from Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s ‘Do nothing....’ I don’t think I can do this again so I’m going to try to try to make up my own Advent calendar.

Find Time for Christmas

We all seem very pressed these days – I had hoped to spend some time in November planning this Advent blog but I seem to have run out of time. We had a few days away last week and I came back to 150 e-mails which I haven’t cleared yet. So I thought I’d try to manage my time a little better and share my ideas. I don’t think this will cover every day so I’ll mix with some other suggestions to help us make more of Christmas.

If you have any ideas to help me, please add them as a comment or contact me directly. And of course in the spirit of the calendar, do try to join in and share your thoughts.

Risk assessment and management

Today’s reading which we discussed at tonight’s staff meeting was the second time that Risk surfaced today. The first was a request for a Risk Assessment for a situation (not in the Church) that I’m associated with.

I’ve been uncomfortable for some time about the Risk Assessment processes promoted by the government Health and Safety Executive. I have a number of concerns. Firstly ‘Assessment’ is passive: the dictionary defines it as ‘the act of judging or deciding the amount, value, quality or importance of something’ so it doesn’t suggest doing anything other than judging. I’m also concerned that Risk Assessments are viewed as a piece of bureaucracy. Once done, they can be filed away and forgotten. I was once told by a Young Enterprise student who was involved in an event at the school “don’t worry about the risk assessment, the office is doing that for us.” The HSE web site information tends to support these concerns.

Risk Management is a much better description of what needs to be done: assess the risks and then manage them. To be fair the HSE documentation does include as step 3 ‘what are you already doing’ and ‘what further action is necessary’ but the concept of actively managing the risks is absent. Risk management needs to be an integral part of the management of any initiative or activity. It needs to be balanced, so it shouldn’t take over, neither should it attempt to eliminate risks. Risk awareness is key: understanding the outstanding risks and, in particular, the potential impact of these. I regularly see people taking silly unnecessary risks – especially ones where the chance of them occurring is slim but the impact very serious. Walking along a country road with no pavement on the wrong (left) side is an example – crossing to face the traffic is simple and may avoid a fatal accident. I always give parked cars a very wide berth if there’s nobody coming the other way: the chance of a door opening or someone stepping out is small but the potential very serious. Neither of these situations is covered by Risk Assessment.

The reading, by the way, was a version of the parable of the ten pounds (Luke 19 12-28). The verse which I recognise as ‘I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away’ was quoted as ‘He said, “That's what I mean: Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.”’ The full parable can be read in the two versions here and here.

Advent is coming

Advent Sunday is two weeks away and December starts on the following Tuesday. Last year I tried following Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s advent book: Do Nothing for Christmas. That was great but I don’t think I can repeat it. So I thought I’d make up my own advent calendar with things to try each day. These will be mainly, but not exclusively, green activities. Christmas, when we all spend lots of money – not to mention time, energy and thought – on presents, food, drink etc, Christmas is a good time to be more aware of being less profligate with the earth’s resources. Whether or not you believe in global warming, I hope there’ll be some ideas you’ll find ... challenging? interesting? amusing? We’ll see. And I also hope there’ll be some comments and debate this year: perhaps I need to me more contentious.

Here’s a simple starter: do you still buy bottled water? The evidence is that fewer of us are: sales are down – maybe a recessional effect. But I still see people walking around with bottles – and how come many people can’t last through a visit to the theatre without swigging from a bottle of water?

We’re lucky here that the tapwater is pretty good. I think ours comes direct from a borehole along the Rignall Road towards Great Missenden. But is fairly highly chlorinated and doesn’t taste too good direct from the tap. However, we keep a couple of bottles in the fridge. These we fill from the tap but leave an air space for the chlorine to evaporate. After a day or so the water is wonderful. Give it a try!

Do nothing...

Did you hear Thought for the Day in Today on R4 this morning? Author Rhidian Brook complains of drowning in e-mails and even taking his laptop into the bath to catch up. It rang a bell (but not the bath bit) Last Christmas I started blogging by following Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s advent book ‘Do nothing for Christmas’ This was a follow-on to his book ‘Do nothing to change your life’ I bought this after Christmas thinking that I needed to get to grips with things... but I still haven’t had a chance to read it. So when Rhidian Brook this morning talked about trying to have some time at the start of the day I thought that I need to try that – and perhaps I’d find time to read the book.

You can listen to Thought for today here:

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA