Ye Shall Know Them by Their Spreadsheets

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing spreadsheets. Right, strap in listeners, spreadsheets here we go. I think if you don't mind I just like to kick things off a little bit because I think what we want to talk about in our sort of show notes, not our show notes, in our prep notes for this week. Through his spreadsheet, will you know him? How documents layout maketh the man? Messy documents, file structures, inboxes, desks, etc. equals messy brain. I don't know if I'm revealing too much of the magician behind the curtain there. We are, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But immediately this made me go, aha, because I think this is one of these, if this is not every episode, definitely this is an episode which I'm sure this is going to separate me from you lot. Because I mean, apart from anything else, I remember years ago, when I worked as an economist, God knows how, I was introduced really. Did the company go bust by any chance? It did, I failed within months. Yeah, I mean, spreadsheets all the time. I remember the first time I looked at a sort of GDP annual analysis, I mean, just numbers everywhere, numbers everywhere and linked files, linked all this business, linked pages.

Speaker B: 00:01:28

That's kind of what spreadsheets are for Fraser is. Organising things, yeah.

Speaker A: 00:01:33

Yeah, and I hated it. But also what used to really annoy my colleague was we work off these templates and I managed to break the template every time that I had one. It was a supposedly unbreakable template. And I managed to do it each time. And my spreadsheets were messy. I've got a bit of a messy brain. My inbox is all a bit of a disaster, frankly. So there you go. Yes. And I bet you lot, oh my God, I bet your spreadsheets are a work of wonder and mastery. No, but I think you're going to be surprised actually, Fraser. I think there might be interesting differences between the three of us. Okay. I seem to recall you and Peter have grudged grumbles. Massive spreadsheet arguments. Yeah. Well, actually, the big issue between me and Peter is about file names and file structures and stuff. I think we'll touch on that. I'm pretty sure we'll touch on that.

Speaker B: 00:02:26

And if Nick stops misrepresenting how I organise my files, then maybe he'll understand my-

Speaker A: 00:02:33

Organise? The cheek of the man. He just said he organises his files. It's a total lie. I like that. We're just a minute or two in. I've got a feeling about this one. I've got a feeling about this episode. Here we go. So who wants to go for it? Nick, you came up with the topic. Yeah, I do. Because I have strong feelings about spreadsheet design, right? They're not particularly doctrinal. I don't say that there's one way you should do it, but it's just that. I think you're looking at someone's spreadsheet. Yeah. I think looking at someone's spreadsheet is very revealing. So if someone sends me a spreadsheet and it's got like random empty rows, randomly merged cells, that's a particular pet hate. So when you've got someone's just merged cells because they don't know how to resize the columns, different fonts and colours, right? Where they don't actually mean anything, they just prettied it up by changing the colours of things. When they have notes fields in random columns, sometimes there'll be text notes in column M and sometimes it'll be in column N, where you've got no clear distinction between sort of input data and process data. So you can't, you know, kind of formulas randomly dotted around. And my absolute- I don't remember giving you access to my file. Yeah. So my number one pet hate is where you have effectively, they use one worksheet to do multiple different spreadsheets. You'll have like one four by six up here, and then a few rows down, they'll start a new 10 by three. And then there'll be another one, which is just one line of something all on the same worksheet. Now, and-

Speaker C: 00:04:07

Yeah. Nick's not doctrinal. There's either his way or the wrong way. Yeah. All but one of the ways of doing it are wrong, but he's not doctrinal.

Speaker A: 00:04:13

So I, it's, no, they're not wrong. Let me tell you what they are. What they indicate is that you're, I'm going to, I'm going to find it problematic to try and explain things to you in a clear way. They show that I'm going to find it difficult-

Speaker C: 00:04:27

You're not wrong, you're stupid.

Speaker A: 00:04:28

Well, that's more, that's where I'm going. I think there is something about the way that people are happy or unhappy or feel compelled to organise info in something like a spreadsheet. And I think as we're going to touch on probably other forms of documentation, that gives you an insight into the extent to which, into the way that they approach thinking about things. And I think, I think clear spreadsheets are once really just a very short step away from things like, you know, very clear code, for example, where, you know, you sort of try and make sure that the shape of the spreadsheet fits the shape of the analysis in a kind of fundamental way. And if people don't do that, it concerns, I find it disturbing. I feel like they're not thinking properly if they're not, if they're not spreadsheeting properly. There you go. I'll just put that down there. What brought this into your mind now, though? Because you suggested this subject. Why? Is it just, you just finally had enough or, I mean- I might have just, I might have experienced a couple of dodgy spreadsheets recently, that's all, but I'm not going to name names. Well, that brings us on to Peter. So- He's not here. Chris. No, so, yeah, well, look, let's have a response. I feel like there's a, you know, a grumbling going on here. There's unspoken of tensions. Yeah, I mean, who's got a response to that? I mean, what are Nick's spreadsheets like, Chris?

Speaker C: 00:05:49

Anal, I think is the- No, I mean, I think most of what Nick said, I agree with about spreadsheets, but I think there are different ways you might use spreadsheets. So, there are times where you want to use a spreadsheet simply because of some piece of functionality it has. So, like the fact you can sum a row of numbers, right? Where you don't necessarily want to think particularly about, you might have several sets of numbers you want to sum, all of which are, you know, and you don't label them or anything. You simply drop them in, use the sum function, and off you go. So, I think there's an investment of effort into structuring a spreadsheet, you know, appropriately for a piece of analysis. And it's, I think Nick's investment of effort sometimes outweighs the output, the benefit, yeah. But by and large, for something that's complex, yes, I agree. You know, you want, you don't want lots of different things happening in one sheet, but it's like the difference between, like, an essay that you're handing in and a set of notes that you might be scribbling to yourself, you know, where you've got something up in the top left-hand corner and something over here. And I think spreadsheets can be used, so long as you're not handing them on to someone else and expecting them to know what's going on in it, as a more of whiteboard kind of thing, where you can just drop things in, you know, put a graph here.

Speaker B: 00:07:21

Yeah, yeah. Peter, what are your two cents on this? I agree with Chris. I think it really depends on what you're doing with it. If the spreadsheet is likely to scale to very large numbers of things, then yes, you need a very highly methodical approach. But I'm, Nick's last criteria, I'm very happy to relax the one sheet per purpose thing, if it aids readability. Because there are some times when you want, maybe, for example, we often do, like, costing spreadsheets projects, where there'll be sort of labour costs, which is measured in numbers of days, there'll be travel costs, and then there might be a third set of costs, which are kind of like capital purchase costs. It makes sense, because there's only ever half a dozen of those, no more than that. You can get all of those on one sheet, in one view, on one screen, so that it's all readable. You can see the three different types of costs are added together. Whereas Nick's doctrinal approach would require three separate sheets, and then a fourth sheet for doing the summation, which is, they're not immediately obvious when you see, when you look at the sheet. Yeah, that sounds a bit, what's that word? Anal. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:08:29

Yeah, well, Peter's describing this problem of three-dimensional data, which is definitely a problem when you have spreadsheets. Peter's saying that he likes to express the third dimension by replicating the thing multiple times on the same sheet, and he's correctly discerned. I much prefer to use the multiple worksheets to express the third dimension, so that, for example, if you have time, and type, and category, for example, I want to see that same grid on, you know, the newest categories. That's the thing you use the tabs for. But it's not very good. I have to admit, no, it's bad, the third dimension. It really isn't. You shouldn't be using Excel, really, for three-dimensional data. But anyway, anyway, what? Well, yeah, well, let's try and answer the question that we sort of posed, which was, can you tell the personality type and their behaviours from this kind of stuff? Because, frankly, between, at the moment, between you and Peter, I think we're sort of, you can put a bit of paper down that sort of gap, really. It's not as big as it sounds. I mean, sometimes people just don't know how to use spreadsheets, really. I'm sorry, but the distinction between the three-dimensional tab and the three-dimensional verticality people is like Protestants and Catholics. It's the biggest difference you can get. Well, a bit like Protestants and Catholics. If you're a Muslim looking at this, you go, what are they fighting about? So, look, I think Chris wants to come in. So, we want to talk about personalities, right? No? I mean...

Speaker C: 00:10:06

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And there's definitely something there about the way you think. But I don't know that it relates to personality as such. I think it's a difficult one. Because I would say, Nick is somebody who uses a lot of systematic structure for things like spreadsheets, inboxes, the task management thing. So, when you've got a to-do list, Nick's isn't just a list of things. It's highly sort of, he uses a software tool to kind of structure it all and give it ratings for different things as to its priority and so on and so forth. So, from that point of view, he's sort of very, very ordered with his task management, right?

Speaker A: 00:11:01

I never have any time to do any of those tasks, because I'm spending so long organising them.

Speaker C: 00:11:06

But there's a big investment in that. But that's something that he does. But then if you look sort of, you know, if you look around, you know, our listeners won't be able to see this. But if you look at Nick's sort of background, you know, you look at, like, I visited Nick's, you know, house a number of times, it's not a sort of, you know, bastion of Nordic minimalism and order. It's, you know, it's sort of, everything isn't, it's not like, what is it, Marie Kondo, you know, with everything sort of hung in a really efficient way to get all your shirts out of the thing. You know, it's a sort of cluttered, you know, environment, like, you know, a lot of people's houses. And, you know, Nick himself sort of, you know, has a certain air of kind of Boris Johnson dishevelment about him, you know, he's not, he's not there kind of ironing his clothes or, you know, routinely shaving or putting all his shoes in a neat line by the door, right? So, I don't think, so you wouldn't say he's an ordered person. And, you know, I have a test, right, which is my sort of sense of the, that I've long held as a sense of the reliability of a person, right, which is the letter test, right? Go on, this is very exciting. The letter test is... I want to know if I've been subjected to it. Well, it probably is a mental exercise as much as anything else, a thought experiment. But if you have an important letter, right, would you give it to that person and trust them to post it for you, right? Nick is the only person who's actually, in reality, failed the letter test for me, which is when we had some, we're sitting out of a bank account or

Speaker A: 00:12:46

applying for a loan or something. This is still, this is glitch in the Matrix territory. I still don't

Speaker C: 00:12:50

understand what happened to that letter. And, yeah, Nick effectively had it in his hand, and then he left it in a taxi. And some, anyway, somehow the letter got to me, some, you know, Samaritan somewhere picked it up, and after embezzling thousands of pounds from our bank account, sent us the letter. So, sort of in terms of, you know, he's got this very methodical approach for his management of tasks. But I think that probably what that tells you is that his capacity to do it without that structure is not really there. And so that's, so it's not that he has that structure, not because that structure exists, it's because it's not naturally inherent in his brain, and he's

Speaker B: 00:13:38

imposing it to manage the world. It's a crutch he uses in the digital world that doesn't exist in

Speaker C: 00:13:43

the physical world. So I think that's perhaps sort of counterintuitive, that you think really

Speaker A: 00:13:46

ordered people have loads of order, but I think maybe... Right, yeah. I think I... Wait, wait, wait. What? Okay, you just carry on talking about me, don't worry. I'll just sit back. Yeah, because no, I want to bring in Peter, but no, I think you're absolutely right, Chris. And naturally, I'm not a particularly organised person, but I actually have lots of systems in place, which I'm not always great at organising. But no, I'm the same, basically. I'm the same, and I'm actually quite an organised person, because I'm not an organised person. That's exactly what I was going to say. So yeah, we are the same then, Fraser, you and me. We are. We're not so different, you and I. We're not so different, like peas in the pod. Exactly. Peter, any thoughts at this stage?

Speaker B: 00:14:26

Well, since Chris commented on Nick, I think it might be worth, it might be full to me to give a critique of Chris. Yeah. So Chris has got... By the way, sorry to interrupt,

Speaker A: 00:14:38

just say, Chris, you would... I like this letter test. And I would, I mean, anyone on this call, I would definitely give a letter to you. So just to say that. And obviously, I don't expect that to be reciprocated, that sentiment in any way whatsoever. Sorry, Peter, I jumped right in.

Speaker B: 00:14:55

If you give it to me, I'll scan it and email it for you. Actually, I'll give it to Peter as well, actually. I'm not sure if I would give it to Nick. Peter. Yeah, so Chris, on the positive side, Chris has got an incredible capacity for holding in his head a huge number of ongoing tasks. So Chris's task management process is a big list in his head, which is amazing that he keeps it together. But that's also incredibly worrying because it's not very transparent. I can't see what he should be doing. I have to ask him for a sort of what parts of what am I involved in. But also, it's very subject to, I don't know, head injury or something like that. God forbidden, he gets run over. There's no backup system. By a taxi driver who's looking

Speaker A: 00:15:41

around going, what's that letter doing there? And it knocks him out and, you know, then you're in

Speaker B: 00:15:45

trouble. But yeah, sorry, Peter. So there's that, which is positive and negative, because it's obviously very efficient for him. And it's efficient for us when we're sort of in conversation, because we can just say, Oh, Chris, what's number three on the priority list, and he can get it

Speaker A: 00:16:00

straight away. Yeah, when shit needs to get done. Yeah, it's definitely faster. Yeah. But the other

Speaker B: 00:16:05

thing is kind of what we what Nick and I sometimes call digital hygiene, which is sort of when, like keeping your inbox minimized, so you can only has the thing that require some action, or keeping when you share your screen on a video call, and you've got a million tabs open, it kind of just sort of indicates to people that there's a lot going on. And is it just a bit of a mess? Are they just chaotic? You can't tell if it's an indicator of chaos or sort of extreme organization. So does Chris have loads of tabs open all the time? He does quite often. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:16:41

Yeah, I've currently got a couple of dozen open. Good Lord. Yeah. And I can tell because I

Speaker B: 00:16:47

monitor our systems, and his is always running out of RAM, because he's got so many tabs open. Anyway. Computers can't keep up with me, Fraser. Yeah. But another example of digital hygiene is often when we are, once we sort of submitted a piece of work, or sent somebody a file, and it's been gone through an intermediate stage where it's been sort of edited locally, say in Microsoft Word or something. Chris quite often forgets to upload the final version to the files, so that we've got a record of it. So when we go, oh, where's this version of this thing? Chris goes, oh, yeah, it's on my desktop. I'll just upload it now. Fallible. Fallible. Yeah, but do you

Speaker A: 00:17:27

want to know, Chris, do you want to, there's going to be people out there who want to know, who will need to know what Chris does when his desktop gets too cluttered. Which his computer desktop? His digital desktop. Yeah. Wait, do you do what I do? Because I create a file that says everything on my desktop, and I put it in there. That's exactly what I do. Yeah. You also include the last version of the everything on my desktop, so that you've got this nested hundreds and hundreds of levels every week, you know. It's like a blockchain. Okay. It's actually nothing like a blockchain. So look, I didn't expect this to descend into like a character critique of one another. But look, I guess, look, the kind of question we're asking is, hey, the stuff that we interact with and design on our, on an everyday basis, or even don't design, does that reflect our personalities? And well, clearly the answer, clearly. Do you want some evidence? Shall we? Do you want some evidence? Yeah, well, clearly the answer is yes, right? I mean, of course, that's what's going to happen. But yeah, go on, Nick. Got some amazing anecdotes. But what about, yeah, what about actual studies? Well, I was hoping that someone had done a study into the connection between the big five personality traits and Excel spreadsheet behavior. And you found one. Disappointingly, I didn't. In fact, it is not very well studied, right? If you look for evidence about personality and sort of mess, about 50% of the references are to this one study by Katherine Vose from a few years back, which is a good study. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's hugely misinterpreted. And what she did was put people in a messy environments and tidy environments and then saw what bits of their behavior changed. So you know, were they more likely to think creatively afterwards? Were they more likely to give to charity, those kinds of things. And the environment did seem to make a significant difference to people's choices afterwards. But everyone says, oh, what this shows is, well, because if you're in a messy environment, you think more creatively, that messy people are more creative. Now, it does not tell you that. This study does not tell you that. All it tells you is that if you force someone into a messy environment, they might be more creative. It doesn't tell you when people have control over their environment, what the connection is between their choices about how they and the effort they put into making it tidy and their personality, which is what I really want to know. I found a couple of things. And there's no doubt, by the way, that the messy gang, which I consider myself to be in, but the messy gang have really got the PR sorted on this. Because everywhere you look, it's people going, oh, let's solve these tidy people. Aren't they annoying? Because messy people are more creative and they're more intelligent. So the messy people have got the narrative here. Now, but I, as you said... Because they're more creative. Yeah, I think it is. As you said, Fraser, I'm not sure, you know, what I think there's a distinction here. And I did find this one study where they were looking at IQ, connection of IQ, different bits of personality. And apparently, IQ is positively related to organisation, which is an aspect of conscientiousness to do with, you know, the extent to which you exert sort of organisational control over your environment, but negatively related to orderliness, which is the extent to which you like things to be legible and orderly, right? Now, I think this is the key, right? Which is, which is about, can you be organised without being orderly, right? And I think my, I think what it is that I care about is organisation. That's what I think I want a spreadsheet to be organised, right? But the problem is that actually, it's not very easy to see that. It's much easier to see orderliness. It's much easier to look at something and go, well, that looks orderly. All of these things are in nice columns. Therefore, it's organised. So that's, I think that's the issue, that actually they are two different things. And what you really want is organisation. But it's much easier to detect orderliness. So there we are. That's my, that's my theory. That's my hypothesis thrown out there. Yeah. I like this. Chris, you look like you're about to say something.

Speaker C: 00:22:04

Well, yeah, I was just, I was just wondering, you know, whether actually, as Nick said, what you see is what is observable, right? And I wonder, it's a little bit like, like graphology, you know, and using handwriting to determine personality, which is, you know, largely regarded as pseudoscience, but you can, you can see it, whereas, what is more difficult to tell, which is probably a much better indicator of personality is sort of the content of what's being produced, right? But we sort of fixate on what is visibly observable. And we ignore that kind of order. And I think, I think there are kind of two ways of viewing it. Either, you know, you create what, you create a manifestation of what's in your mind, right? So you have, you have organised thought. And so you create something organised as a result. Or, you know, is it the case that you can use tools, like spreadsheets, to organise your thinking, so that if you teach somebody, you know, how to use a spreadsheet properly, you can actually make them a more ordered thinker? And, you know, there's probably an element of both. But, but yeah, I don't, I think being able to determine whether or not the output of something is organised is actually very, very difficult, and quite, quite subjective, really.

Speaker A: 00:23:44

Yeah, because you think of those, you know, the famous, you know, pictures of sort of, this is Francis Bacon's studio, or, you know, Sigmund Freud's office, and it's just cluttered with papers and books and desks. And you think, well, these people, no one's going to say Francis Bacon will be a better painter, if he'd have used spreadsheets, right? But Sigmund Freud said, don't tidy up my office, I know where everything is. Now, that isn't being messy. That means that he's got a system, which is, which is, you know, might be hard for an outsider to discern, but it's there. And I think, I think this is the, this is, there's something to think about, about the way that, let's, let's assume that just a bit hand wavy, but intelligence, and the ability to use your intelligence is in some sense associated with finding patterns in information, right? So to be able to kind of, you know, I mean, that's what machine intelligence is based on, right? It's kind of, you know, to think of that as a model that essentially, you are trying to find some underlying explanation for patterns in data in some way. If the data is organized, so if things are organized, then, you know, that just surely is going to be easier to do. But if you're, you know, if, if you have a higher capacity for assimilating information, then you can probably cope with less overt organization, because you can do more of it cognitively. So yeah, so that might be why, you know, more Einstein might have had a messy office, because he might have been, you know, intelligent enough to be able to cope with quite a complex organizational system. Yeah, that's just, just a thought really, in the absence of data, it's a hypothesis. Yeah. I want to stop there, almost. Anything, I've got a question I want to ask. Well, I didn't analyze Peter, we all analyzed each other. Oh, well, don't worry about that. Don't worry. Well, well, you can, do you want to analyze Peter right now? Because actually, that's kind of what I want to go on to. Not, it's not all about Peter, but. Well, it's Nick's turn. Nick's turn. Do the round robin. So should we do that? Well, I'll just give you a quick summary. Go on. Of, of Peter the man. No, he, I think Peter actively disparages things that are orderly, right? And I think he, and I think he, he, he sees it as small mindedness to try and sort of organize things in a way that, you know, puny human minds can comprehend. And like a couple of examples is that, is that in, in our files, which are obviously all shared and cloud based, I, the number one thing I need to know when I look in files is where, what is the latest version of something? When was something made? That's the, more or less the first thing I look at, which is why my file names all start with the date, year, month, day, right? Peter couldn't give stuff about that. He's like, if you need something, you can just use the Google search function. It's fine. The, and the other one was that we would talk, you know, we're trying to come up with a common structure for our files, for specific projects. And normally a project has an ordering, right? So you start with a, you know, a proposal and then you end up with a startup meeting and then you have your deliverables, which might be in an order. And so the obvious thing to do is to label them one, two, three, four, and then say what they are. One, proposal. Two, startup. Peter can't be doing that at all. He thinks that's preposterous. Why, why give, put numbers on them? You know what they are. They're already described in words. So I think Peter is, he doesn't need- Because the order, the order is not, the order's not set. The order's never set like that. Right. So that thing is that, that Peter actively fights these kinds of systems, not because he's disordered, but because he sees it as a reductionist approach to what, you know, real world, what in the real world, everything is multidimensional and there's no, you know, what's the point of imposing one kind of, you know, dimension on these, these inherently messy things. Right of reply.

Speaker B: 00:27:56

My assessment. No, I think that's fairly accurate. Okay. But I, I, I just, just to pick you out, I, I, I put the date in front of my files as well, when they're files that other people are going to need. If they're intermediate files or, you know, not, not, not key ones, then they don't, I don't bother with the date.

Speaker A: 00:28:18

I'll be the judge of whether they're intermediate. I, I've started putting the dates on the files that I produce for, for these shows. Good man. Yeah. But that was because Peter asked me to. Yeah. Because they were all coming in, labelled, you know, podcast three and two April and stuff like that. They usually just say every single month, it was a different labelling convention. Yeah, no, exactly. That was just sometimes Nick rants a lot in this one or something like that. Look, question. Organisationally, what would you like to change about yourself? Jump in whoever wants to go first.

Speaker B: 00:28:55

So I don't want to change myself. I think I'm perfect. I want to change how the physical world works. I want to be able to impose digital like metadata structures on the physical world. So for example, you can't find your passport because you don't know where it is. I'd like some mechanism of recording where it is. That's just part of the physical world. So the passport isn't the physical object, but it's a sort of reference to the passport.

Speaker C: 00:29:20

Like augmented reality glasses that guide you to, to where things are.

Speaker B: 00:29:24

Sort of, but actually a sort of like a physical thing. So if you could have multiple instances of your passport that were actually the same passport. Shortcuts. Shortcuts.

Speaker C: 00:29:36

Like Henry VIII's 80 pairs of glasses that he had.

Speaker A: 00:29:40

That sort of thing. Yeah. Peter, I sometimes feel like maybe you were born a hundred years too early or a thousand years too early. But then that makes me wonder a hundred, Peter of a hundred years or a thousand years from now, what would you be moaning about then? I don't know. I'll find something.

Speaker C: 00:29:57

Chris. Yeah. Well, I think, I think for me, but basically my inbox is full of like, let's say, you know, a thousand or plus messages that I haven't deleted, but I don't, I don't think, oh, I wish I could, I wish I reviewed everyone and deleted them all and kept this, this inbox because I, I've, I've tried that a number of times and it's, it's like a Sisyphean task. It's almost, it's almost Canutean to me, you know, that it's.

Speaker A: 00:30:33

Well, why cut your toenails though? They'll only grow back.

Speaker C: 00:30:37

Well, because if you can manage with long toenails, then you wouldn't cut your toenails. And you don't have to cut your toenails every day about 60 times, do you?

Speaker A: 00:30:48

Yeah, you've only got 10 toes, so.

Speaker C: 00:30:50

10 toes, exactly. So, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't change, I wouldn't change that, but I would, I would like some mechanism whereby that kind of gets managed for me, like an extension to me, like a, like an automatic tool that would, you know, sort my inbox for me simply so that, I mean, as was said earlier, you know, I kind of, I'm on top of my inbox. I know the important things I've got to deal with. I'd just like that to be represented, you know, by the inbox itself because it's, it's rewarding getting rid of things, you know, ticking things off a list. So, so yeah, again, probably not, not changing anything, but, but the requirement for a, for a tool. So Gmail, if you're, if you're out there, that's, that's what I need.

Speaker A: 00:31:41

Yeah. Nick, we'll come to you in a second. Just for me, I think I'd like to be better actually doing the things at which I organise. So, you know, I have beautifully crafted systems that sort of sort everything out, organise it all, but I often...

Speaker C: 00:31:58

Is it a distraction strategy?

Speaker A: 00:32:00

I think it is, yeah. It's a non-procrastination distraction sort of thing. Then actually it's like, you know, drawing on that beautiful revision timetable and then not actually bloody revising. That's what I'd like to be better at. So it's not really the organisation, it's the doing. Nick, what about you? Yeah, I think in some ways I'd probably like to be a bit more Chris-like in that. So in some ways, you know, having lots of systems to organise things becomes a bit of a tyranny in the end, you know, keeping them, keeping them up and running. And I, I feel like I could, you know, even though I couldn't live without them, it would be nice to be able to just ignore them and not worry too much about it. Because I know in practice, actually, you know, anything important would let me know. If there was something that I'd missed, you know, I'd find out about it and nothing would be that bad.

Speaker B: 00:32:47

That's kind of freeloading though, because there's going to be somebody else who's waiting for a thing and they'll let you know.

Speaker A: 00:32:53

Yeah, that's true. So, yeah, I think that's it really. It's sort of, I don't see any alternative because I would be too stressed out if I didn't try and impose this kind of order on things. That's kind of what happened to us though, in this last week, because I missed our pre-podcast. The whole system fell apart. Yeah, basically it was just, I didn't notice my calendar notification. And as you know, I got dragged into another meeting with something else and, but then got sort of emails saying, where the hell are you? And, and so it kind of worked in a way, I don't know, the importance of it sort of reared its head and we managed to fix it, right? So, so yeah. I don't know. I don't know if that's relevant or not. Right, we'll stop there. That was an interesting expose, it feels. As always, thanks for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, what should people do? Nick? Well, smash the like button if you can find it underneath all those open tabs on your mobile. Yeah, yeah. Thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.