Thursday, February 28, 2013

Azure skies and emerald fields

To balance some of the negative vibes on this blog:

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I was struck by the expanse of pure clouds and sky when we drove out the E’s hometown. Not all of Northern Ireland is pretty, but there are some great bits here and there along the way.

Just at the end of the road from E’s parent’s place is this gorgeous view below. Apparently the grass darkens when it gets warmer (and wetter), but I really love the current shade of green that’s out there in the country.

Can you spot the sheep?

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The United Kingdom–land where your blood boils.

I am up to my ears in rage and frustration due to the twists and turns in settling in, no thanks to the ridiculous regulations that are present in the UK.

Starting with my bank account – the UK requires that all applicants, citizens included, must provide two forms of evidence when applying: a primary form of evidence such as a passport or driving licence, as well as proof of address.

We thought that a signed contract from the letting agent certifying* that I do indeed live at this address would suffice - but we were wrong. The first bank wanted either a bill in my name delivered to my current address, or National Insurance-related correspondence. So we tried another bank, which was more helpful and showed us the application form^ which lists all the acceptable documents. Seeing that my best bet was to apply for a National Insurance number (NIN), I headed to the Jobs and Benefits Office to do so – more on that later.

While waiting on the NIN, we heard that B, an American, had applied for an account with Santander. B had to pay £5 a month for that account, but it was easier to open an account with Santander than with other banks. We checked that out, and to my delight Santander was willing to make exceptions for people who cannot provide the specified documentation. They scheduled for me an appointment with an advisor after confirming my photographic identity (by viewing my passport and my identity card from back home), and I got my bank account today. Yay.

So, now that I have a bank account, I was all ready to get a proper mobile line and purchase a new phone – a bank account is necessary to set up direct debit from that account for the monthly charges. However, I just discovered that what the sales person (#@!%*&) did not tell me was that customers must have resided in the UK for at least 3 years. The rationale for this requirement is beyond me, as where customers have previously lived has absolutely no bearing on their credit worthiness or their likelihood to default on payments! The only option now is for E to purchase a second phone and line in his name for me to use, with the bill to be charged to his account – which was a possibility we had considered in the first week of my arrival but eventually decided to wait till I got a bank account to make it easier for me to manage my own phone line in the long run. A two week wait and all for nothing!

Back to the NIN application. There was scant information available online on how to apply for an NIN, except for a phone number and address. We called the number, but when the person found out that we are living in Northern Ireland, she directed us to call another number instead – essentially “bugger off if you’re in Northern Ireland”. It’s the same thing for certain government offices – e.g. there are no Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agencies in the whole of Northern Ireland, and if you happen to need their services you are welcome to send things in by post or drop into the nearest office in Scotland instead.

At the centre for the NIN application – which we couldn’t contact by phone as no one bothered to answer the line – I was told that it is essential for me to prove that I am actively looking for work at the NIN application interview. The person then informed me that I could get a letter proving I’m actively seeking employment from the Jobs Centre near City Hall. Off I went, halfway across town, only to be told when I got there that not only was I misinformed, but that the place where I could get a letter was from the Jobs Centre housed in the exact same building which I was earlier in. *rage*

In view of the above, I thought to list down some tips for anyone considering moving to the UK:

Tip 1: Bring your NRIC with you when you are moving overseas. I usually don’t bring my NRIC when I’m overseas, and I had with me only because I’d forgotten to empty my wallet before I left.

Tip 2: Santander is awesome – bank with them if you’re in the UK. They are also the first bank in the UK to have an account which gives you cashback on your spending on petrol, household bills and the like – something which many banks in Singapore offer. They also have a credit card which gives cashback on purchases at supermarkets and departmental stores – which is uncommon, if not non-existent, in the UK as well. Unfortunately I’m not eligible to open that account, but if you are – bank with Santander.

Tip 3: If you want to move to the UK, make sure you know someone who is willing to apply for things like a phone line on your behalf.

Tip 4: Be appreciative of the public servants and administrative staff back home. They’re actually pretty good.

Tip 5: Be thankful that Singapore is small. Your needs are well looked after and the provision of services is fair no matter where you live – even if it’s in an opposition ward.

*      *      *      *      *

*: To get that contract and my keys to the house, I also had to fill out forms, send in a scanned copy of my identification and pay a non-refundable £30 (or more; can’t quite recall) – so it’s not like it was some scam job.

^: This is a sample from Santander – see List 2.

Drying flowers

Cut flowers can last a really long time here – while they tend to wilt by day 2 or 3 in Singapore, flowers can last about 10 days here, depending on what type they are.

My roses and carnations are about two weeks old now. The carnations are still beautiful and fresh-looking, but I’m more amazed by my roses:

They are drying on theirs stems – which, by the way, are in a vase of water.

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I feel like throwing them out as they are clearly dead, but am also tempted to see how dry they can get while remaining in the vase.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Two Weeks

It has been two weeks since I moved over and I’m not as settled in as I’d thought I’d be.

I’m still waiting to set up a bank account, as some idiot at BT screwed things up by acting on his own accord despite our express instructions to send a paper bill. Without the bank account, I’m still without a proper mobile line – and a new phone – here, and was forced to get a Tesco pay-as-you-go SIM card, which at least has given me some semblance of normality to life with internet on the go*. I finally hauled my lazy ass down to register with a GP so that I’ll have some medical coverage if I fall ill, and the appointment is next week. Same for the application for a National Insurance number – the appointment is next week as well.

I’m still waiting to apply for my provisional driving licence, namely because I need to find someone who has known me for more than 2 years and resident in the UK to sign on the back of my passport photo to verify that the photo is, indeed, of me. Perhaps E’s dad on our next trip down to the country. I’ll need to submit my passport with that too, so it’ll have to wait till all the essentials are sorted.

I’m very slowly working on finding a job, with the emphasis on ‘slowly’, as evidenced by me spending about the past 2.5hrs finding a suitable blogger template and updating it. Even then, I’m not entirely satisfied by this one – it seems a little too cheery for Belfast, and childish for my age and my unemployed circumstances – but I like its simplicity.

Already I’m certain that I cannot ever be a housewife, as it’s an incredibly boring occupation. I can imagine what tonight’s conversation will be like:

E: What did you get up to today?

Me: Oh, nothing much. Tried finding a job but got distracted and updated my blog instead. And looked into A and B and C about D and E and F.

E: I see. What else did you do?

Me: Well, I also did the laundry, and as I read that you have to de-ice your freezer regularly to ensure that it’s energy efficient, I spent an hour this morning de-icing it. You should have seen the amount of ice that had accumulated in our freezer – it filled up the whole oven tray and more!

Yup, I must be so proud that my greatest achievement today was removing the insane amount of ice in our freezer so that now we can save money on electricity with an energy efficient freezer! Yay. Really, it’s not so much that I’m bored of sitting at home – not yet anyway – but it’s just that I have nothing interesting to share or talk about with other people. Yesterday I went to see The Trocks (more on them in another post I think) which will be fun to talk about, but before that the most exciting thing I had to talk about was the immensely tiring walk I had to Forestside, which was much further and way more strenuous to get to than we’d thought.

Anyway. I’d better put in more effort into finding a job. And, out of sheer randomness, here’s a picture of the Big Fish – which I am told is called Kev.

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*: Yes, I am very attached to my phone, am a Facebook addict and am extremely grateful for access to GoogleMaps on demand in an unfamiliar city. Smartphones have to be one of the greatest inventions of the century.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Relax! You’ll Be More Productive

Article from here.

The New York Times

 

February 9, 2013

By TONY SCHWARTZ

THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious? Rarely get away from your desk for lunch? Run from meeting to meeting with no time in between? Find it nearly impossible to keep up with the volume of e-mail you receive? Leave work later than you’d like, and still feel compelled to check e-mail in the evenings?

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace. Paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less. A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

“More, bigger, faster.” This, the ethos of the market economies since the Industrial Revolution, is grounded in a mythical and misguided assumption — that our resources are infinite.

Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work.

Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable. Taking more time off is counterintuitive for most of us. The idea is also at odds with the prevailing work ethic in most companies, where downtime is typically viewed as time wasted. More than one-third of employees, for example, eat lunch at their desks on a regular basis. More than 50 percent assume they’ll work during their vacations.

In most workplaces, rewards still accrue to those who push the hardest and most continuously over time. But that doesn’t mean they’re the most productive.

Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute napimproved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm.

As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. This may explain why a recent survey by Harris Interactive found that Americans left an average of 9.2 vacation days unused in 2012 — up from 6.2 days in 2011.

The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.

“To maximize gains from long-term practice,” Dr. Ericsson concluded, “individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”

I’ve systematically built these principles into the way I write. For my first three books, I sat at my desk for up 10 hours a day. Each of the books took me at least a year to write. For my two most recent books, I wrote in three uninterrupted 90-minute sessions — beginning first thing in the morning, when my energy was highest — and took a break after each one.

Along the way, I learned that it’s not how long, but how well, you renew that matters most in terms of performance. Even renewal requires practice. The more rapidly and deeply I learned to quiet my mind and relax my body, the more restored I felt afterward. For one of the breaks, I ran. This generated mental and emotional renewal, but also turned out to be a time in which some of my best ideas came to me, unbidden. Writing just four and half hours a day, I completed both books in less than six months and spent my afternoons on less demanding work.

The power of renewal was so compelling to me that I’ve created a business around it that helps a range of companies including Google, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, the Los Angeles Police Department, Cleveland Clinic and Genentech.

Our own offices are a laboratory for the principles we teach. Renewal is central to how we work. We dedicated space to a “renewal” room in which employees can nap, meditate or relax. We have a spacious lounge where employees hang out together and snack on healthy foods we provide. We encourage workers to take renewal breaks throughout the day, and to leave the office for lunch, which we often do together. We allow people to work from home several days a week, in part so they can avoid debilitating rush-hour commutes. Our workdays end at 6 p.m. and we don’t expect anyone to answer e-mail in the evenings or on the weekends. Employees receive four weeks of vacation from their first year.

Our basic idea is that the energy employees bring to their jobs is far more important in terms of the value of their work than is the number of hours they work. By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably. In a decade, no one has ever chosen to leave the company. Our secret is simple — and generally applicable. When we’re renewing, we’re truly renewing, so when we’re working, we can really work.

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive officer of The Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything.”

 
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