At work, we recently switched expenses system to one with virtual credit card functionality. I decided to test it out by buying myself lounge access for my upcoming work trip to Mexico.
Unfortunately the new system mis-detected my lounge access as being a purchase from lingerie company loungeunderwear.com. I’m expecting a ping
from Finance any moment to ask me why I’m using a company credit card to buy a bra.
One might ask why our expenses provider can (mis-)identify loungeunderwear.com from a transaction in the first place. Did somebody at some company that uses this provider
actually buy some ladies’ briefs on a company credit card at some point?
I’m a big fan of blocking out uninterrupted time on your work calendar for focus activities, even if you don’t have a specific focus task to fill them with.
It can be enough to simple know that, for example, you’ve got a 2-hour slot every Friday morning that you can dedicate to whatever focus-demanding task you’ve got that week, whether
it’s a deep debugging session, self-guided training and development activities, or finally finishing that paper that’s just slightly lower priority than everything else on your
plate.
My work focus time is Friday mornings. It was originally put there so that it immediately followed my approximately-monthly coaching sessions, but it’s remained even since they
wandered elsewhere.
I appreciate that my colleagues respect that blocked period: I almost never receive meeting requests in that time. That’s probably because most people, particularly because we’re in
such a multi-timezone company, use their calendar’s “find a
suitable time for everybody” tool to find the best time for everyone and it sees that I’m “busy” and doesn’t suggest it.
If somebody does schedule a meeting that clashes with that block then, well, it’s probably pretty urgent!
But it turns out this strategy doesn’t work for everybody:
‘Urgent meetings only’ might not mean the same thing to you and I as it does to the not one, not two, not three, but four people who scheduled meetings that clash with it.
My partner recently showed me a portion of her calendar, observing that her scheduled focus time had been
overshadowed by four subsequently-created meetings that clashed with it. Four!
Maybe that’s an exception and this particular occasion really did call for a stack of back-to-back urgent meetings. Maybe everything was on fire. But whether or not this
particular occasion is representative for my partner, I’ve spoken to other friends who express the same experience: if they block out explicit non-meeting time on their
calendar, they get meeting requests for that time anyway. At many employers, “focus time” activities don’t seem to be widely-respected.
Maybe your workplace is the same. The correct solution probably involves a cultural shift: a company-wide declaration in favour of focus time as a valuable productivity tool
(which it is), possibly coupled with recommendations about how to schedule them sensitively, e.g. perhaps recommending a couple of periods in which they ought to be scheduled.
But for a moment, let’s consider a different option:
A silly solution?
Does your work culture doesn’t respect scheduled focus time but does respect scheduled meetings? This might seem to be the case in the picture above: note that the meetings
that clash with the focus time don’t clash with one another but tessellate nicely. Perhaps you need… fake meetings.
“Wow, what a busy afternoon Dan’s got. I’d better leave him be.”
Of course, creating fake meetings just so you can get some work done is actually creating more work. Wouldn’t it be better if there were some kind of service that could do it
for you?
Here’s the idea: a web service that exposes an API endpoint. You start by specifying a few things about the calendar you’d like to fill, for example:
What days/times you’d like to fill with “focus time”?
What industry you work in, to help making convincing (but generic) event names?
Whether you’d like the entire block consistently filled, or occasional small-but-useless gaps of up to 15 minutes inserted between them?
This results in a URL containing those parameters. Accessing that URL yields an iCalendar feed
containing those meetings. All you need to do is get your calendar software to subscribe to those events and they’ll appear in your calendar, “filling” your time.
So long as your iCalendar feed subscription refreshes often enough, you could even have an option to enable the events to self-delete e.g. 15 minutes before their start time, so that
you don’t panic when your meeting notification pops up right before they “start”!
This is the bit where you’re expecting me to tell you I made a thing
Normally, you’d expect me to pull the covers off some hilarious domain name I’ve chosen and reveal exactly the service I describe, but I’m not doing that today. There’s a few reasons
for that:
I’m not saying I think the prior art in this area is good, but it’s certainly good-enough.
Firstly, I’ve got enough too many pointless personal/side projects on the go already1. I don’t need another
distraction.
Secondly, it turns out others have already done 90% of the work. This
open-source project runs locally and fills calendars with (unnamed, private) blocks of varying lengths. This iOS app
does almost exactly what I described, albeit in an ad-hoc rather than fully-automated way. There’s no point me just doing the last 10% just to make a joke work.
And thirdly: while I searched for existing tools I discovered a significant number of people who confess online to creating fake meetings in their calendars! While some of these do
so for reasons like those I describe – i.e. to block out time and get more work done in an environment that doesn’t respect them simply blocking-out time – a lot of folks admit to doing
it just to “look busy”. That could be either the employee slacking off, or perhaps having to work around a manager with a presenteeism/input-measurement based outlook (which is a
terrible way to manage people). But either way: it’s a depressing reason to write software.
Nope
So yeah: I’m not going down that avenue.
But maybe if you’re in a field where you’d benefit from it, try blocking out some focus time in your calendar. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and I love that I’m employed somewhere that
I can do so and it works out.
Or if you’ve tried that and discovered that your workplace culture doesn’t respect it – if colleagues routinely book meetings into reserved spaces – maybe you should try fake
meetings and see if they’re any better-respected. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.
Today’s the last of three consecutive days that I’ve spent working in Milton Keynes. On each day I’ve taken a short walk while I’ve eaten my lunch to find a nearby geocache. This was
today’s.
After admiring the sculpture I snapped a selfie while I waited for my GPS signal to settle. The coordinates and the hint made the location seem obvious, yet somehow I did three laps of
the hiding place before I reached down to what by all accounts was, indeed, an obvious hiding place!
Muggles weren’t too multitudinous, so I soon had the cache hidden again back in its snug little spot. TFTC!
I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this
geocache.
Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I
found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.
(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)
I continue to be sceptical of AI‘s ability to solve 90%+ of the problems that people are trying to solve with it.
But damn, if you’re feeling uninspired as you’re getting ready to start work on a Monday morning, try dumping your to-do list into a songwriting AI like Suno and ask it to write an uplifting song about how you’ll get it finished. It’s like having your very own
cheerleader.
❎ Good ❎ Cheap ☑️ Fast. I guess generative AI is a “choose one” situation, and the one you have to choose is “fast”. But still:
it certainly got me pumped-up and ready to work.
Prompt:uplifting electronic pop about Dan completing his to-do list today: filing his meetup expenses; performance-testing his CircleCI workflow; leading a team
meeting; learning about Full Site Editing
Lyrics:
Filing expenses
Gotta get ’em done
No time to waste
Gotta have some fun
Dan’s on a mission
Gotta stay on track
He’s gonna conquer
Ain’t nothing gonna hold him back
Performance testing
Gonna make it fly
CircleCI workflow
Gonna reach the sky
Dan’s got the focus
He’s in the zone
Gonna make it happen
Gonna make it his own
Leading that team meeting
Gonna show his might
Guiding them forward
Shining so bright
Dan’s a leader
He’s got it all
Inspiring the team
Gonna make ’em stand tall
From 1696 until 1851 a “window tax” was imposed in England and Wales1.
Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of
windows provided the mechanism for assessment.
The hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is thinking in “old money”2.
Window tax replaced an earlier hearth tax, following the ascension to the English throne of Mary II and William III of Orange. Hearth tax had come from a similar philosophy: that
you can approximate the wealth of a household by some aspect of their home, in this case the number of stoves and fireplaces they had.
(A particular problem with window tax as enacted is that its “stepping”, which was designed to weigh particularly heavily on the rich with their large houses, was that it similarly
weighed heavily on large multi-tenant buildings, whose landlord would pass on those disproportionate costs to their tenants!)
It’d be temping to blame William and Mary for the window tax, but the reality is more-complex and reflects late renaissance British attitudes to the limits of state authority.
Why a window tax? There’s two ways to answer that:
A window tax – and a hearth tax, for that matter – can be assessed without the necessity of the taxpayer to disclose their income. Income tax, nowadays the most-significant form of
taxation in the UK, was long considered to be too much of an invasion upon personal privacy3.
But compared to a hearth tax, it can be validated from outside the property. Counting people in a property in an era before solid recordkeeping is hard. Counting hearths is
easier… so long as you can get inside the property. Counting windows is easier still and can be done completely from the outside!
If you’re in Britain, finding older buildings with windows bricked-up to save on tax is pretty easy. I took a break from writing this post, walked for three minutes, and found
one.4
There were a few work-related/adjacent activities. But also a table football tournament, among other bits of fun.
One of the things I learned while on this trip was that the Netherlands, too, had a window tax for a time. But there’s an interesting difference.
The Dutch window tax was introduced during the French occupation, under Napoleon, in 1810 – already much later than its equivalent in England – and continued even after he was ousted
and well into the late 19th century. And that leads to a really interesting social side-effect.
My brief interest in 19th century Dutch tax policy was piqued during my team’s boat tour.
Glass manufacturing technique evolved rapidly during the 19th century. At the start of the century, when England’s window tax law was in full swing, glass panes were typically made
using the crown glass process: a bauble of glass would be
spun until centrifugal force stretched it out into a wide disk, getting thinner towards its edge.
The very edge pieces of crown glass were cut into triangles for use in leaded glass, with any useless offcuts recycled; the next-innermost pieces were the thinnest and clearest, and
fetched the highest price for use as windows. By the time you reached the centre you had a thick, often-swirly piece of glass that couldn’t be sold for a high price: you still sometimes
find this kind among the leaded glass in particularly old pub windows5.
They’re getting rarer, but I’ve lived in houses with small original panes of crown glass like these!
As the 19th century wore on, cylinder glass became the norm. This is produced by making an iron cylinder as a mould, blowing glass into it, and then carefully un-rolling the cylinder
while the glass is still viscous to form a reasonably-even and flat sheet. Compared to spun glass, this approach makes it possible to make larger window panes. Also: it scales
more-easily to industrialisation, reducing the cost of glass.
The Dutch window tax survived into the era of large plate glass, and this lead to an interesting phenomenon: rather than have lots of windows, which would be expensive,
late-19th century buildings were constructed with windows that were as large as possible to maximise the ratio of the amount of light they let in to the amount of tax for which
they were liable6.
Look at the size of those windows! If you’re limited in how many you can have, but you’ve got the technology, you’re going to make them as large as you possibly can!
That’s an architectural trend you can still see in Amsterdam (and elsewhere in Holland) today. Even where buildings are renovated or newly-constructed, they tend – or are required by
preservation orders – to mirror the buildings they neighbour, which influences architectural decisions.
Notice how each building has only between one and three windows on the ground floor, letting as much light in while minimising the tax burden.
It’s really interesting to see the different architectural choices produced in two different cities as a side-effect of fundamentally the same economic choice, resulting from slightly
different starting conditions in each (a half-century gap and a land shortage in one). While Britain got fewer windows, the Netherlands got bigger windows, and you can still see the
effects today.
…and social status
But there’s another interesting this about this relatively-recent window tax, and that’s about how people broadcast their social status.
This Google Street Canal (?) View photo shows a house on Keizersgracht, one of the richest parts of Amsterdam. Note the superfluous decorative window above the front door
and the basement-level windows for the servants’ quarters.
In some of the traditionally-wealthiest parts of Amsterdam, you’ll find houses with more windows than you’d expect. In the photo above, notice:
How the window density of the central white building is about twice that of the similar-width building on the left,
That a mostly-decorative window has been installed above the front door, adorned with a decorative
leaded glass pattern, and
At the bottom of the building, below the front door (up the stairs), that a full set of windows has been provided even for the below-ground servants quarters!
When it was first constructed, this building may have been considered especially ostentatious. Its original owners deliberately requested that it be built in a way that would attract a
higher tax bill than would generally have been considered necessary in the city, at the time. The house stood out as a status symbol, like shiny jewellery, fashionable clothes,
or a classy car might today.
I originally wanted to insert a picture here that represented how one might show status through fashion today. But then I remembered I don’t know anything about fashion7. But somehow my stock image search suggested this photo, and I
love it so much I’m using it anyway. You’re welcome.
How did we go wrong? A century and a bit ago the super-wealthy used to demonstrate their status by showing off how much tax they can pay. Nowadays, they generally seem
more-preoccupied with getting away with paying as little as possible, or none8.
Can we bring back 19th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please?9
Footnotes
1 Following the Treaty of Union the window tax was also applied in Scotland, but
Scotland’s a whole other legal beast that I’m going to quietly ignore for now because it doesn’t really have any bearing on this story.
2 The second-hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is
finding a reliable source for the rates. I used an archived copy of a guru site about Wolverhampton history.
3 Even relatively-recently, the argument that income tax might be repealed as incompatible
with British values shows up in political debate. Towards the end of the 19th century, Prime Ministers Disraeli and Gladstone could be relied upon to agree with one another on almost
nothing, but both men spoke at length about their desire to abolish income tax, even setting out plans to phase it out… before having to cancel those plans when some
financial emergency showed up. Turns out it’s hard to get rid of.
4 There are, of course, other potential reasons for bricked-up windows – even aesthetic ones – but a bit of a giveaway is if the bricking-up
reduces the number of original windows to 6, 9, 14 or 19, which are thesholds at which the savings gained by bricking-up are the greatest.
5 You’ve probably heard about how glass remains partially-liquid forever and how this
explains why old windows are often thicker at the bottom. You’ve probably also already had it explained to you that this is complete bullshit. I only
mention it here to preempt any discussion in the comments.
6 This is even more-pronounced in cities like Amsterdam where a width/frontage tax forced
buildings to be as tall and narrow and as close to their neighbours as possible, further limiting opportunities for access to natural light.
7 Yet I’m willing to learn a surprising amount about Dutch tax law of the 19th century. Go
figure.
An easy find. Didn’t take nor leave any books, but briefly skimmed the Borland JBuilder 2 Getting Started guide, because it was familiar/nostalgic. Pretty sure I used this tool… about
25 years ago!
An easy find. As a approached I thought that a couple cuddling here might be in my way, but they were just getting ready to leave as I arrived! SL (love
the long thin logbook!), TFTC. Now to make my way back to the station!
Eww. Had to put my hand into two gross holes before finding the (correct) third gross hole I needed to put my hand into. Worth it in the end for a happy smiley face. Thanks for bringing
me to this place and teaching me its history. TFTC!
TFTC! I’m not carrying any tickets for UK transport, but I’ve got a (mildly
defaced) British banknote and I found a tram (the number 13, which connected me to my hotel this week) and a ferry (which I then went and caught to go find some more caches!).
Cash? Not carrying much of that. But my credit card sits at the front of my minimalist wallet and, as a bonus, shows my geocaching username (which is the same as my actual name) without
showing the actual card number. TFTC!
No luck here despite an extended search, the hint, and the spoiler image. Confident I’ve found the right host but no sign in the cache. I wonder if another geocacher is holding it right
now, sitting somewhere nearby to sign the log? Or else it’s probably gone missing. 😢
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