We’re making it easier for departments to build digital services here at GDS and we’ve built a tool to make it easy to create online forms for GOV.UK without any specialist digital skills. GOV.UK Forms makes creating an online, accessible form as easy as creating a document.

We’ve been testing forms created using our tool with the public, and found they much preferred online forms to PDFs and other document-based versions. We learned some interesting things from users about why they find online forms easier to use.

Usability testing

We’ve been doing lots of testing with the immediate users of GOV.UK Forms – civil servants who create forms. But we wanted to check in with the people who end up using those forms – the members of the public who need to submit information to government.

We ran some user research sessions with members of the public to understand their experiences of using government forms. We asked them to complete a range of simple forms and share their thinking as they did so. Some of these were document-based forms in PDF or Word format and some were online forms created using GOV.UK Forms.

Clear, trusted design

There was strong support for the online forms across the sample group we tested, with everyone stating they preferred the forms created using GOV.UK Forms. GOV.UK Forms uses the GOV.UK Design System, and our participants commented that they recognised the visual style as being a government site and something that they could trust.

“I do like that familiarity every time I come to a form, and it’s something I’ve begun to kind of notice when I’m on the government website.”

Forms using the GOV.UK Design System all look the same, increasing their sense of trust and familiarity.

Checking your answers

Online forms created with GOV.UK Forms all end with a simple ‘Check your answers’ page. Our participants said they liked this page showing them their information and giving them the chance to go back and change anything they weren’t happy with.

“Once I’ve finished, it also just means it’s a lot easier to check as well, rather than having to look down through every section. You can be moving your eyes around quite a large area, whereas with this it’s all nice and straight down the page.”

Automatically completing personal information

When completing online forms, people were able to use ‘autofill’ to complete common information, such as names and addresses, that was saved in their browser.

One person gave more complete information because they were able to use previously saved information from the browser using autofill.

“And yeah, obviously, you know, I know it’s optional, but because I could just click, I’m quite happy to do it because it’s not taken me a lot of time.”

It’s not always perfect, and one person found a previous form had caused them to save some incorrect information in their autofill, but it does usually save people time, especially if they use assistive technology.

One thing per page

One of the most distinctive aspects of online forms on GOV.UK is the ‘one thing per page’ principle. The online forms we tested had one question per page, and people commented that this was welcome and made the form easier to complete.

They said that this principle allows them to focus on one thing at a time and not worry about navigating through the form. They simply answer the question that’s in front of them.

“You’re not sort of presented with a long form straight away. It takes you through each section at a certain page, which I find helpful.”

Being able to focus on one question at a time was also commented on as a positive by people with accessibility needs. We tested with people using a range of assistive technologies and this simple, focused layout was something many found helpful.

“I’m not kind of bombarded or overwhelmed with loads of information at first looking at it. It’s not making me look at it and think, you know, where do I start?”

We also observed some people giving more accurate and complete information using the online forms.

Making forms quicker and easier

We’ve been building GOV.UK Forms to make it easier for civil servants to create interactive forms on GOV.UK. It’s been good to confirm that these types of forms are also easier for members of the public to complete.

Making forms easier and more accessible means people are more likely to submit accurate and complete information the first time around. This cuts down on the time both they and civil servants have to spend following up submissions.

“It’s quicker than the [PDF form] – and also, if I found out that I didn’t put something in, it would alert me to it.”

There will always be a place for document based forms where information needs to be provided in a situation where a hard copy works best, and to make sure people can access forms completely offline. However, using GOV.UK Forms can help government run services more efficiently, and can make it quicker and easier for people to access them.

“[The online form] says it’s been submitted without much of a hoo-ha, which is absolutely wonderful.”

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Originally published on the GDS blog.

YouTube has these cyclical themes that it seems to throw into my feed, and the latest one is Journalling. It’s easy to forget how hard platforms like this work on tailoring content to you. Open up a YouTube app on a device that’s been left logged in to someone else’s account and it’s suddenly quite clear how much it does this. It’s like being in another world. Pages of content all around themes that you didn’t even know existed.

When anyone turns on my smart TV and finds themselves in my account, a big chunk of the feed is productivity videos. And a big chunk of these every now and then seem to be on journalling. If I don’t click them then they go away, to be replaced by note-taking, or goal setting, or a rotating set of other themes. But journalling will be back every few weeks. Urging me to click it, and dive deep into the hundreds of people explaining what it is and why it has changed their life. Once clicked, more and more of these videos surface.. my giving in takes me sliding down the rabbit hole.

There are a lot of ‘methods’ that people share when talking about journalling, and I must be honest that has always put me off. I looked into some content around bullet journalling a while ago, and couldn’t get past not wanting to learn a bunch of specific symbols I was meant to use to mark different types of ideas or tasks. I tried a little using some ‘morning prompts’, questions to answer each day. But to be honest I found most of them a bit cringy. The ones I used just ended up a bit repetitive, I would find myself thinking that I’d answered that a few times now and I really wanted to think in a different way. Some people seemed to think this was entirely the point, and you gained something through the repeated reflection, but I never got that revalation If I am honest. I thought perhaps journalling wasn’t really for me.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was a bit stuck on a project at work. I had talked it through with several people, I had sat around thinking about it, and googling for things to read related to it, but I still just wasn’t clear. So I decided to write down what I was thinking about it, and the questions I had. Not to share with anyone. Not to report on, or to email to someone, just for me.

I sat down and spent ten minutes or so writing about it. And I found it incredibly helpful. I didn’t end up with a plan, or a document that would be part of the work. I just worked through some of the issues I was thinking about and made clearer what I needed to do. There was something about the concreteness of putting the thoughts down on a page that helped me to figure out what it was that I was clear on, and what was really not clear.

I’ve been reading ‘Working Backwards‘ recently, the account of two ex-Amazon execs on how things work at Amazon and how different this is to many organisations. One of the things they explore is how slide decks reporting on progress are banned at Amazon and everyone has to write narrative documents for meetings. They assert that slide decks are too concise, and allow too much space for ambiguity. Fudges and uncertainties are too well hidden in the slide deck format. In a written narrative, you can’t as easily get away with ambiguity or inconsistency. Writing things down in this way forces you to make them clearer.

That’s pretty much exactly what I found in my little exercise. Writing things down made it much clearer to be what I already understood well, and what I was still ambiguous about. It moved me on from thinking in a circular way about what I already knew. I got that stuff down, and then had to work through the other areas.

I think I had forgotten how much I think through writing. That linear narrative that you have when writing, and can miss when just thinking or talking about things, really helps to get things more clearly worked out.

So I went back to journalling, and for the last week or so I have been spending a little time each morning before work writing. Not following lots of journalling-with-a-capital-J methods, just writing. I’ve made a new note each morning, and just written down what I am thinking about, what I am planning for the day, what I need to think through. Sometimes that has been work related things, other times it has been planning out jobs I need to get done for myself. I’ve not had massive goals about how much I should write, just that I should write something each morning.

More often than not, I end up getting into a flow and writing quite a bit. I have noticed that the most valuable part of this is often once I’ve got down everything I was thinking about, recorded that stuff, and then continued. Once all the obvious stuff is written down, that’s when the thinking really starts. I start thinking ahead about what the next thing I need to work on is, or what the implications of what I’ve brain-dumped onto the page are. It’s like the part I get to when I don’t actually know what I am going to write is the part that is most useful.

So I’m keeping this up. Writing each morning, just spending enough time to get past whatever is buzzing around in my head and into the space where I am thinking. But also writing when I think it might be useful in the day too. No expectations that it is for someone else to read, but just writing to think things through. It can seem self indulgent to spend time writing with no intention of it having any audience, but I’ve been finding this is a really valuable way of getting my thinking going and figuring things out.

Things I’m paying attention to this week

• I’ve been updating my approach to note taking (or ‘personal knowledge management’ as the YouTubers call it). Tiago Forte’s YouTube channel has been a useful resource for picking some new apps and approaches.

• ‘Working Backwards’ by Bryar and Carr is the story of how some of Amazon’s famous working methods came to be. Having recently left an organisation that grew quickly and developed some useful and some frustrating working methods, it’s an interesting comparison.

• Loads of words spilled about Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase this week… I found this piece by Noah Smith one of the more interesting takes.

I was talking with someone in another team at work last week about some things I’ve been working on. I talked about ‘mental models’ as something I was trying to better understand with some research.

Later in the conversation it became clear that we were both talking about two quite different things. My use of the phrase ‘mental models’ had keyed them in to a whole train of knowledge and thinking, but not the same one that I was basing my side of the conversation on. Granted the phrase ‘mental models’ has some level of descriptive power, so we were still both thinking about issues to do with how people think. But we’d both taken the phrase to coin something quite different.

I was talking about people’s mental model of how a specific technical process worked. What actions they took and what they thought that achieved in a system. They were talking about someone’s all round experience including how they think, feel and act around an experience. Neither is right or wrong, although their interpretation was based on a detailed bit of writing on the subject so probably has more claim to the phrase than mine. ‘Mental Models’ rather than ‘mental models’, you could say.

And it got me thinking about how many phrases like this we coin, and how we still all understand them differently. I’ve come across plenty of these over the years; Growth Mindsets, Learning Styles, Quiet Quitting, Ambient Intimacy, Group Think.

I think it’s pretty well understood that we all have slightly different understandings of individual words. When people coin phrases like this though, it gives them an air of being a concept well explained and similarly understood.

I’m not sure though whether coining the phrase makes the concept perhaps less likely to be understood in many cases. A phrase seems less ambiguous than a word somehow, especially if it’s been shared to the point we all think about it in inverted commas or with capitals starting every word.

The more ubiquitous the coined phrase, the more likely one or neither of the people in a given conversation where it is used are likely to have engaged in detail with where it came from. Especially if it’s a phrase that on the face of it seems descriptive.

Growth Mindset is one of these that I keep noticing. It seems pretty descriptive, and requiring little explanation. But it seems to be interpreted to mean all sorts of different things, with different nuances and affectations, to the point where two people could have two very different understandings of what the concept actually is.

Carol Dweck has set out in some detail in the book Mindset what ‘Growth Mindset’ is based on a body of research and a host of illustrative anecdotes. Quite a few people have read this book, and the ideas have been shared very widely. It’s a powerful concept because there is a certain descriptive quality to the phrase, and it’s an idea that is fairly simple to understand but challenges orthodox thinking.

Ideas like this are powerful and have spread because many of us feel like we ‘just get’ them. They resonate with our experience and give validation to it. At their best they can give us a framework to better understand that experience.

The problem with this though is that all our experiences are different, and what has resonated with you is probably not what resonated with everyone else. Especially if anyone involved got their take on the phrase from hearing it vaguely referenced somewhere else or casually brought up in conversation.

Because these phrases have gained a certain ubiquity, they are shared increasingly casually and the likelihood we have understood them in different ways ever increases.

The ex-academic in me is tempted to say that we shouldn’t use phrases like this to explain things to other people unless we have engaged with the original literature. While this may be good advice for undergraduates writing assignments, for anyone else it’s a recipe for either a life of almost constant reading or one disregarding of a lot of useful ideas.

But it’s worth noticing when these phrases come up in conversation or discussion, and testing out whether you really do all have a similar understanding of what they mean, and what’s important about them.

Those different understandings can be quite productive when they are surfaced. To go back to my original example, I realise I was disregarding how people felt about an experience in my research, which did have the potential to be an important factor.

When they aren’t surfaced though, you can be talking about entirely different things, while thinking you are very much on the same page.

After all you’re both using this clearly defined and un-ambiguous concept, right?

Things I’m paying attention to this week

• The Atlantic on how scientists are looking at the current crop of masks and how they might improve the technology and/or the use of them to mitigate pandemic illesses.

• One of my alma maters Nesta have set up a neat website to help people save energy and money by adjusting their boiler. I also found the way Elspeth Kirkman quantified the impact it has had already interesting.

• The Dune subreddit have banned ‘low effort’ AI art from their community. In a case of life imitating art, the community celebrated this as it mirrors the war against thinking machines and their subsequent banning in the cannon of the books.

I think many of us feel like as long as we’re learning, we are achieving something useful. Learning new things, dealing with new situations, it’s what keeps things interesting. Learning gives us a sense of achievement too. Simply feeling like we understand better or can do more feels like a win. And the learning can make us better equipped for future situations. We can do more than we could before, or we can do it quicker or more efficiently. We just understand things better. It makes us feel like we are progressing.

I know this isn’t the case for everyone, but I have been fortunate to do a whole string of jobs that have a large amount of uncertainty or ambiguity. Making sense of what needs to be done, and devising and executing new ways to do it inherently involves learning. I’d wager that a large proportion of jobs that can’t be automated are like this. Problem solving is learning.

I find learning inherently interesting and rewarding. I’m fascinated by the world and learning about new bits of it.

But with so much to learn, and so many opportunities to do it, I’ve found myself wondering at various points in my career whether I am really learning the most valuable or interesting things that I could be.

I’ve worked in some great teams, and some quite dysfunctional ones. Even in the dysfunctional situations I found myself learning all the time, and feeling that sense of achievement at doing so.

Finally getting a new project through an arcane approvals process. Working out how to convince someone obstructive to accept a way of trying to solve a problem. Figuring out how much information to share to make people feel like they were informed enough about your work to leave you to it without interfering.

This is all learning. It brings with it that sense of achievement, both at having solved a problem and having learned another approach to put in the toolkit.

But is it all valuable?

There’s definitely been times when I’ve realised that much of what I have been learning is just about getting things done in a particular dysfunctional team or organisation.

At the most charitable, this might stand me in good stead in another future dysfunctional team. Although when I come to look at leveraging all the skills I’ve learned into a future role, will I want that to guide me towards further dysfunction?

At the least charitable, this kind of learning learning something so particular to a context that it’s probably not going to be useful again.

How to get X particular thing done in Y unusual and very particular team is of limited value.

You can spend a lot of time learning, and getting the good feelings from doing so, even if what you are learning is of limited value beyond the current situation.

There’s a saying that’s flown past me a few times on social media feeds. It states that at any point in your career you should either be ‘learning’ or ‘earning’.

Not matter what my situation is at any time, I’ve always seen myself as learning.

I’ve learned though to step back, and ask whether the ‘learning’ going on at any time is really of value. If you’re a really learning focused person like me, then I think it can be easy to kid yourself about its value.

The more you’re learning is about discovering how to function in a dysfunctional situation, the more wedded your skillset is to those types of situations.

The more you focus on learning that is transferable and valuable, the better off you will be.

Things I’m paying attention to this week

• Matthew Yglesias on 10 years of YIMBYISM, what’s been achieved in the US through a movement saying ‘Yes In My Back Yard’.

• A detailed and thought provoking delve into the sustainability of running shoes.

• After watching Doctor Sleep last week, this week I read The Shining. Interesting to read the original after seeing the iconic film many times. Really creepy of course, but in quite different ways to the film.

I’ve had this small cloth for over ten years. It’s a pretty unremarkable glasses cleaning cloth. I found it again recently, 11 years, 5 jobs, 3 cities after it first came into my possession.

I put it on the keyboard of my MacBook Air. The manufacturing tolerances on this computer are so small that when you carry it around in a bag the keyboard presses on the screen and often transfers the dirt from the well-used keys onto the screen. This keeps the screen a bit cleaner when it’s crammed into my rucksack for the cycle to the office.

It’s just a cloth, and yet to me it has so much more meaning than it looks, so much more than the use that I put it to.

‘Learning without frontiers’ was an education conference in London in 2011. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my time. I’d been to quite a few by the time I headed down to London for this one. Yet it is a few days that sticks in my mind as a turning point.

I was just a couple of years into my career at the time. I’d quickly become pretty plugged in to professional networks online, but this was an early opportunity to meet many people I’d corresponded with, including some really influential people. I remember my first tentative wander around the venue on my own was interrupted by the late, great Tim Rylands greeting me like a long lost friend and catching up with me about some work I had blogged about.

I met so many people in person for the first time at that event. People who supported me in developing as a professional over the years. I met my friend and future colleague Pete Yeomans for the first time there, whose advice and support led me to a complete change in my career.

This little glasses cloth reminds me of all that, but also what came after. Nestled between my keyboard and my screen it travelled all over the place in the years after that conference. The design issues with my MacBook ensured I kept it with my at many future conferences, meeting new people and old friends, and increasingly stepping onto the stage myself to speak.

Most of the time this little cloth just subsumes into the background of my days. But occasionally I notice its significance. Taking it out from between the keys and the screen of my laptop, stopping to look at it for a moment will trigger a memory or a thought from some time years ago when I did the same.

You’d think the branding would evoke the memories of the original event, but it’s these later times that I remember first when occasionally noticing this object and thinking beyond its utilitarian purpose.

I think it’s possible to explore memories like this without using objects to evoke them. However, it takes stopping and thinking in a way I find I rarely do these days. Something about the object just makes you do that, it fires the connections off and accelerates that state of mind where you pick up on all those associations.

There’s something I find really poetic about these inconsequential objects, given deep consequence by having carried them around so much for so long. A a wallet, a glasses cloth, even that USB stick you keep using. I’ll bet most of you have objects hanging around that seem so normal, and yet when you think about it have accompanied you on some pretty interesting twists and turns of your journey.

Things I’m paying attention to this week

• The Hierarchy is Bullshit – Lots of no-nonsense insights to unpack on why and how hierarchies are used and misused in organisations.

• Stolen Focus – Johann Hari digs into how the attention economy is psychologically affecting each of us.

• How to think about user centered design in terms of risk mitigation.

Government Digital Service build things to help create a simple and joined up government. They’ve been doing great work in this area for years, some of the best examples of digital public services in the world. So when I decided to focus more on user research in digital products they were definitely a ‘bucket list’ organisation.

One of the things they have built, and worked with others to build, is GOV.UK. This site brings together many aspects of government services, so it has a lot of forms to collect information from the public. GOV.UK Forms, the project I am working on, is a piece of work to build a product that makes building online forms and publishing them on GOV.UK easy and accessible for civil servants who are not digital specialists.

There are a large and growing number of ‘document based’ forms on GOV.UK, where it’s not possible to get a team of digital specialists to build a fully online form. Our product should make it easy for civil servants to build these online forms without needing those specialists.

It’s exciting to be working on a key new product for GDS, and building on a lot of work that has gone before in previous, related projects.

I’m working on this team with another Senior User Researcher to keep building the understanding in the team of how our users work, what they need, and how we can help them. It’s involving spending time with people in various government departments we’re partnering with, seeking out civil servants across government who are less digitally confident, and working with members of the public who have specific access needs.

The research we’re doing takes quite a few different approaches. We’re running usability testing on prototypes of features for the form builder. We’re running testing with people with access needs to make sure it is fully accessible. We’re spending lots of time talking to people who build and process forms to understand their workflows, the needs they have and the challenges they face.

It’s been a really interesting few months so far, and I’m finding it energising to be working with new people, on new things, and learning lots. Now I’ve got into the swing of things I’ll try to write more regularly about what I’ve been learning. I’ve also resurrected my newsletter and I’m writing more regularly on more general reflections there.

I’ve been creating and publishing things online for over 20 years.

I’m also a digital hoarder. My partner would probably expand that statement by removing the word digital. I still have the first thing I published to the web in the year 2000 (the only year that gets to have ‘the year’ before it whenever mentioned).

It was a site to share music I had made on a particular hardware synthesizer. I threw the original version together pretty quickly and easily. Through the site, I connected with a lot of other people who used that device. We shared our music and remixed each other’s tracks. I still see one of them around on a modern popular music tech forum. Thinking about it makes me reminisce about the quality of the early web

Quite a few music sites later, an online journal and a forum a friend of mine coded from scratch later, I was training for what you might call ‘my first career job’.

I set up a professional blog on WordPress. I quickly moved it from the free instance to my own hosted version. I was lucky to be in a career where sharing detailed reflections about what you were doing was mostly positively encouraged. So I wrote lots about what I was doing and what I was learning. I connected with lots of other people doing similar work and we shared ideas back and forth on our blogs and our twitter feeds.

I moved jobs to one where I was going to a lot of conferences and events, so I set up another blog to ‘live post’ interesting talks I went to.

I started sharing ‘weeknotes’ that were more off-the-cuff, so I set up another place for them.

I set up all sorts of places to share different things online. Some self-hosted bits of software running on a web server I rent space on, many accounts on services across the web.

There is a lot of my stuff online in a lot of places. Much of it is connected. Lots of this was set up when I had more time and more inclination to mess about with technical ins-and-outs.

Recently I came to re think my website and blog. I was moving from one job to another, in a deliberate change career wise, so I wanted it to perform a different function. But I didn’t want to lose what was there, more than ten years of reflections on my work.

If I’d have been starting something new I could have just set up a new site for it. Domain name, hosting, quick set up. Easy. Or just sign up for one of the services that offer this for free or cheap. But there was enough established there I wanted to keep.

So I had to unpick it all.

What was this plugin doing? Why are there so many plugins?

Why is the feed sending to that other service? If I change it will I cut people off?

Why did I decide on this complicated way of doing things?

How did I make it do that and what will happen if I change it?

If I make this change I don’t understand, because I’ve forgotten why I set it up like that, will there be any way to go back or am I stuck with it even it it breaks something?

The longer I had been publishing things online the more complicated this had become. I had to change it, but I couldn’t ‘clean-room’ it and start from scratch. I just can’t lose all that content, all that thinking, all those connections.

I might be translating all this old stuff into a new context these days, but it is all still really important. It’s the foundations I have built for my career, my experience and my thinking.

So I had to press on and unpick stuff a bit.

I couldn’t unpick it all, some of it I just left. I don’t know how some of the feeds are working or who they are going to. They weren’t an impediment to what I wanted to achieve though so I just left them.

This goes agains my nature. It definitely goes against the nature of the version of me who set up all those plugins back when I had more time and was more motivated to mess with the tech and hack it together.

These days I am more motivated by the results. So I left the stuff that seemed to be working and doing what I still needed it to. I just changed the things that needed to be different. I made my front page more personal and about me, moved the blog to another page and set up a much easier way to browse through all the old stuff without the dated design of massive featured images.

It still took longer than setting up something new with none of the baggage would have. But I’ve got a new thing, that builds on what I had before and is what it needs to be for this new context I’ve got myself into.

There’s something here about getting older.

Early on you can just dive headfirst into stuff and start from scratch. Over time things seem to get more and more intertwined.

I can see how people start to become more resistant to change. When you’ve got lots of legacy stuff to unpick it can be a lot of effort to do things any differently.

But all that experience is incredibly valuable. It just needs a bit of curation every now a then. A lot when you make a big change. You get to a point where it just isn’t possible to start from scratch, you just have to unpick things a bit and keep on building.

You don’t feel speed, you feel acceleration.

Putting your foot down in your car pushes you back in your seat, but zooming along at a steady 70 miles per hour feels relatively similar to standing still. We’re all moving unimaginably fast even when we are standing ‘still’ thanks to the spin and orbit of the Earth. We don’t feel it though because it’s constant, it isn’t changing.

Often you hardly notice movement. What you notice is changes in direction or speed.

I’m fascinated by how inattentive we can be to things unless we have that change and contrast. So quickly what we are used to becomes normal and fades from our attention.

When there is a contrast, something comes to our attention that is different and allows some comparison, we tend to notice a lot more.

There’s some science behind this. We are much better at making judgements about things in comparison than in isolation.

A while ago I became really interested in comparative judgement in education. It’s been shown that teachers find it very difficult to be consistent in assessing students work when they just look at one piece in isolation and try to grade it. This even happens if they have a set of criteria they are looking for in order to decide the grade. Different teachers come up with very different results. Sometimes the same teacher comes up with different results at different times.

Ask them to compare one students work with another, repeat these comparisons until they have looked at enough pairs to form a ranking, and most will come up with the same ranking. This even works when they have no criteria for making the judgement. Just showing them attempts to solve a maths problem and asking ‘which student did it best’ and this still follows1.

We’re way better at making judgements of two things side by side than we are at ‘objectively’ judging a single thing in isolation.

As many of you know, I changed jobs recently. Having been in my previous organisation a relatively long 6 years I had seen a lot of change. However, it’s fascinating me at the moment how much I am reflecting and learning about previous jobs, situations I have been in, and myself in general from having the stark contrast of moving to a completely different organisation.

Given that we are so much better at seeing things through contrasts, I often wonder whether deliberately seeking them out more often is the way to go. Many of us do this to a certain extent by discussing our work with friends, sharing our situations and seeing where they are similar and different.

I’ve been wondering what I might to differently if I was to internalise the knowledge that contrasts and changes are the best way of making judgements about situations.

Hello readers! I missed a newsletter this weekend due to general busyness. While I’ll try to write weekly I don’t want to be dogmatic about it. However, my thoughts were provoked so I thought I’d put fingers to keyboard this morning and share them with you. Thanks for reading and, as ever, if you find this interesting please do forward to someone or share on social media so others can subscribe.

Ive been thinking about Artificial Intelligence. Not least because of the news this week about a Google engineer being convinced a language AI they worked on is sentient.

Yesterday I read a fascinating article by Thomas Pueyo on ageing. It’s well worth your time. His broad argument as I saw it is that people today are likely to be in one of two states. We’re either the last generation to live what we think of as normal lifespans, or the first to live radically longer. He’s talking 150 years or more.

There are lots of interesting points in this article, which I note is much more comprehensively researched than my writing here. One point in particular really got me thinking. Pueyo makes the point that if you can hold out until we manage to create Artificial General Intelligence, or AI that is at least as intelligent as humans, then the problem of holding back ageing and extending life is likely to be solved very quickly.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this point, but it got me thinking. I’ve been reading a lot about AI recently. One argument seems to be that if we can create an AI with our human intelligence that at least matches us in this capacity then it will be able to continue to develop the technology to take its intelligence well beyond this. Given the way technology often develops, this improvement could happen exponentially.

It follows that we would quite quickly then have artificial intelligence that is magnitudes more intelligent than we are. We can apply this to our problems and solve them very quickly.

We can apply it to the problems where intelligence is holding us back and solve those very quickly. But is the bottleneck to all our problems intelligence?

I’m not sure that intelligence is the only thing we need to solve many of the big problems we face. In fact, many large global problems such as climate change have multiple capacities needed to address them.

There’s certainly a place for the sort of scientific intelligence you might also use to develop anti-ageing technology. Some new science-based technologies to reduce emissions and address the high carbon levels in the atmosphere would be incredibly useful.

But technologies aren’t usually used in isolation. They need to be adopted, people have to be persuaded to use them, other choices have to be made in order to manage how they interact with our values. ‘Our values’ are not homogenous, not across any one society and certainly not across the globe. There’s different values to understand and reconcile, compromises to be negotiated.

There is a whole social and community, dare I say political, aspect to all of this. Scientific intelligence could get us so far, but as humans we work in groups. We already have some technologies that could help immensely with climate change, but implementing them is as much about communities and social dynamics as it is having the workable science.

Perhaps this is an argument for multiple types of intelligence. Discussions in this area quickly get back to fundamental definitions. I could be talking about ‘social intelligence’, which could be one aspect of ‘general intelligence’ alongside what I have slipped into defining as ‘scientific intelligence’ above.

What I am sure of is that this discussion is revealing of my world view. This is true just as much as I find the argument that AI will solve our problems through technology development reveals a world view that all problems can be broken down into problems of science and technology development.

But for me, my view stands. Artificial Intelligence could be very useful to develop new technologies, but unless it also directly helps us with the social aspects of making the best use of those, then it’s hard for me to imagine enormous leaps in really solving the big problems we face as societies.

When I was working as a school teacher I was very clear about how I used my work time. From 8.45am until 3.30pm I was in the classroom, and there was an expectation that we teach a certain number of lessons in each subject each week. Then I had a predictable level of marking every day. The remaining time was limited, so I had to be incredibly disciplined about how I did my planning.

As I moved through my career and into different types of jobs, how I used my time became much less clear to me. I had lots of different types of work to do, usually for multiple different projects at the same time, plus a bunch of ‘compulsory’ things like team meetings and the like. I moved into a space that while I was usually relatively effective at getting things done, but I didn’t have a really clear view of how I was spending my time.

Then I started using my electronic calendar as a to-do list of sorts. I find I have a tendency to make very long ‘everything bucket’ to do lists. I note down everything I need to do and the list inflates to huge proportions and moves way beyond being a useful organising tool.

So I moved to trying to put things I needed to do in my calendar as events, estimating the chunk of time I would need to complete them. Keeping this up to date, and changing the events based on how long it actually took me to do things, I started to get a better handle on how long tasks really take to complete. This approach also encouraged1 me to work on just one thing at once and avoid distractions.

Some time later I had a meeting with my team where a conversation developed about the number of meetings they seemed to have in their diaries and the balance between this and getting focused work done. Inspired by a conversation I’d had with a friend in consultancy who lives by ‘billable hours’ of work for clients, I suggested we try logging how we spent all our time for a week.

This sounds onerous, but with what I was doing already (and some of my team had started doing too) it wasn’t much more effort – just the time to colour code the events in the diary by category and then tally each of these up at the end of the week. Some of us did this, others totted things up with a spreadsheet. I said that we should have no expectation of sharing the detail of all this with each other, as that was a bit too much like surveillance to me. But we did commit to sharing what we learned from doing it for a week.

The results were really interesting. Everyone seemed to come to our next team meeting with a different understanding of how they used their time. Being researchers, most of us had worked out the percentage of time we spent in certain types of meetings, considered which things were non negotiable and which we had more control of, and all with some resolutions to spend less time on some things and more on others. As a team leader often responsible for the time-sucking meetings I took a long hard look at the meetings I was putting in as regular events that we defaulted to. I also looked at their duration, and tried to shorted them as much as I could so that they were kept to the bare essentials.

Now I’m not going to suggest that we should all track every minute of our days all the time. And I do think that requiring this info to be shared in detail in a work setting could be problematic and potentially constitute undue surveillance. However, as a personal exercise it is pretty interesting to see how you really use your time, because I think many of us don’t have complete clarity of how this most valuable resource gets used.

If you’ve ever thought ‘where did this week go?’, asked why you seem to spend so much time in meetings, or found tasks taking way longer (or shorter) to achieve than you estimated, then perhaps it might be useful for you to do a ‘deep dive’ on your use of time and get the real picture of how it’s being spent.

You might not have control of all of it, but if you are able to open up a conversation, for example, about spending upwards of 30% of your time in information giving meetings-that-could-be-an-email, you might find they are as concerned about the impact on productivity this is having as you are…

The clearer the understanding we all have of how we are spending our time, the more intentional we can be about this.

Thanks for continuing to follow my newsletter. It’s been very affirming to read your positive comments about this rebooted newsletter, to see that so many of you continue to read it, and so few of you have unsubscribed despite the long hiatus.

You might be interested to know I’ve got back into writing my weeknotes each week over at oliverquinlan.com/thoughts. I’m writing these more for myself than an audience, but if you’re interested in what I’m doing work and other projects wise they are there to read.