The following covers the week from the 16—20th May 2005

Canberra
I'm in Canberra teaching some huge classes (16 people!) how to use Perl. We have students not only from Canberra, but also Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland as well. Some of our students are from businesses that have attended our courses previously. Most are from the wealth of government departments that live in Canberra.

Measuring happiness

Warning: Long waffling entry with little amusement value follows. In my last journal entry I considered that when all of one's work is completely unenjoyable, the best way to maximize happiness is to work hard and invest in order to gain an early retirement. However, this simple solution does not hold when one's work does hold some enjoyment value. A person with an extremely enjoyable job has little motivation to retire.

I'm in a position where I have a range of work options available. Some are more enjoyable than others, and some are more profitable than others. I'm wondering if my overall quality of life (taken from a long-term perspective) can be improved by dropping some of my less enjoyable tasks.

Last journal I discovered to answer this question properly, I need a way to measure happiness or enjoyment in a meaningful fashion. On a fundamental level I still don't have an answer to this. How does one put attach a meaningful metric to enjoyment?

Even though I can't put enjoyment into quantitative terms, it's still easy to order activities in terms of happiness (X is more enjoyable than Y), and it's possible to describe other factors that directly influence enjoyment. One of the strongest factors is freedom.

It's readily apparent that people value large blocks of free time more more than the same time broken into smaller pieces. Instead of taking their annual leave in the middle of the week and as soon as it's been accured, individuals will instead save their annual leave to go on a large holiday. People are more likely to take extra leave adjacent to weekends and public holidays. An old employer used to require a doctor's certificate for any sick-leave taken on a Monday or Friday, since a more people were 'sick' on these days, in gross disproportion to the rest of the week.

It's easy to see why contiguous time is so valuable. Given a large block of time one can do everything that's possible in a smaller block of time, but one also has the option to participate in many activities that have a significant setup required. If I have an hour I can go for a nice ride on my bike, but given six ten-minute breaks I'll have to start turning my bike around by the time I get it out the door. The most enjoyable activities — such as diving, writing, coding, and many games — require a significant and contiguous time investment, usually because they have a large set-up time, or take time to get 'in-the-zone' and become productive.

If the aggregation of 'free-time' into larger periods is more valuable, then one needs to consider not only how much time is saved or lost by dropping a particular line of work, but also what effect that has on overall free-time distribution. A new job that requires 10 minutes every hour for six hours is more disruptive than a job that requires a single sixty-minute block. This is why it's so hard to get employees to go 'on-call': it's so disruptive to the range of activities they can perform.

One of the interesting things that falls out of the value of consolodated free-time is the efficient planning of work. Taking on disruptive (eg, on-call) work has a large impact on enjoyment, but increasing the amount of disruptive work has progressively less effect. If you're already on-call for a business, then deciding to go on-call for a second business may double your income, but will have a much less dramatic effect on your free-time distribution. This suggests that when considering taking on disruptive work, an all-or-nothing approach is preferable. Performing disruptive work in moderation provides neither maximum enjoyment, nor maximum income.

The other aspect which falls under the 'freedom' category is that individuals value free-time more highly when they can choose when to take it. A break is often more valuable if corresponds with the breaks of friends, family, or important events (sporting, conferences, a dive boat, or whatever takes one's fancy). So large blocks of time are good, and being able to choose when to take that time is also good. "Retirement" (having sufficient savings and passive income to never work again) is the ideal, with close to maximum flexibility and contiguous free-time.

Now, let's consider my personal situation. My income is 70% training, which is enjoyable, has excellent pay, comes in blocks, and is often flexible. 17.5% of my income is in the form of "block-consulting"; it's less enjoyable, has acceptable pay, comes in blocks, but is rarely flexible. The remaining 12.5% is from on-call work; it's rarely enjoyable, has slightly better pay than block-consulting, is highly disruptive and never flexible. The disruption from the on-call work makes it seem like more effort and time than it really is, because it so frequently interrupts other work and activities.

I'm considering dropping that on-call work entirely. This will have a very strong positive effect on flexibility and contiguous free-time, but has the down-side of pushing out my retirement plans. Since only money after living expenses is available for investment, losing that 12.5% has a disproprotionately large impact on my savings plan.

If we make the assumption that large blocks of contiguous, flexible free-time have maximum enjoyment value, and that broken, unflexible blocks during on-call work have minimal enjoyment, then the problem becomes simple enough to examine mathematically. If dropping 'zero-enjoyment' work pushes out my retirements plans by a certain factor, then it's worthwhile providing that my overall enjoyment (approximated by contiguous, flexible time) is increased proportionately.

As an example, if dropping work were to double my required time until retirement — say from 1 years to 2 years — then this would only be worthwhile if it generated a full year of contiguous, flexible free-time in the process. Note that's different from generating a year's worth of free-time. One could have the free-time already, but have low-quality free-time because it's regularly interrupted.

The work I'm proposing to drop is not going to double my time to retirement, so it only needs to make a more modest contribution to my time distribution. It presently looks as if it will be worthwile to let the work go, but closer scrutiny of how I currently spend my time will be needed to say for certain.

Of course, it's easy to poke holes in all of my arguments above. After a point one can encounter diminishing returns on enjoyment for large blocks of free time. When busy and stressed, any amount of free time is disproprortionately valuable, regardless of its duration. Enjoyment of time is not binary value. While dropping non-essential work in the short-term will have a negative impact on income, it may actually be beneficial in the long-term as it provides the opportunity for more fundamental changes to work practices, and a greater focus on the more profitable core work of a business.

All these arguments can be used to argue both for and against a given plan. This may be why many individuals never try to quantify happiness, they simply move on gut instinct. That's probably going to be a large deciding factor here, but I value the opportunity to carefully weigh my decision before making it.

Unfortunately, due to numerous timing issues, I can't even begin to implement any decision I make until the end of financial year. As such, I have a little time to think and plan &mash; provided I can find a long enough break in work, that is.

Money, time, and happiness - revisited
In some of my earlier journals I contemplated the cost of living, and the value of time. I try to be profoundly lazy by spending an incredible amount of time working. The reason this is considered laziness is that the money I can earn (and accrue interest on) can be used to allow me to have much longer periods without working. My goal is ultimately to have enough savings that I won't need to work again.

Overall that goal is progressing very well, however I spent today contemplating an option that almost runs against the concept of being lazy and working hard. I'm contemplating working less, and retiring later; a kind of false laziness, if you will.

My previous thoughts were mainly concerned with the conversion of time into money and vice-versa. Passive income was also considered, but it takes time and resources to establish. However what I had not fully dwelled upon was the enjoyment of working. This would seem like an important area of consideration, since if one truly enjoys working there is little reason to think of retirement.

My previous thoughts glossed over enjoyment because, much to my good fortune, my most enjoyable work is also my most profitable. It was easy to curb our development and sysadmin work in favour of training, because training was both more profitable and satisfying.

For most 'regular jobs', the enjoyment issue is a straightforward one as well. If you can move to a more enjoyable job, and keep the same hours and wage, then you'd do so unless there were compelling reasons otherwise. If you can move to a more highly paid, but less enjoyable position, then you need to make a simple decision as to how much that extra pain is worth to you. That doesn't mean the decision is an easy one, it's often very hard to tell if an alternative job is going to be enjoyable or not.

My work is a little different, in that my job is made up of a series of smaller jobs, many with different rates of pay and enjoyment. Some tasks I can even assign to others. Many of my efforts thus far have been around maximizing income, since that will get me to any given retirement option the soonest.

However, my thoughts now are around curbing work and replacing it with free time. Enjoyment now is just as important (if not more so) than enjoyment in the future, and increasing free time is the most obvious way to increase enjoyment. This had always been an idea on my 'gradual retirement' plans, but I had never given serious thought as to how hard it would be. In fact, I don't think I yet have the required framework to make optimal decisions.

I suspect that I want to organise matters to maximize 'total enjoyment' (integrated over an entire lifespan). In a simple system where time working is worth zero enjoyment, and time not working is considered full enjoyment (1 enjoyment unit), then doing as much work as possible at the beginning (and investing the results) is optimal, since it maximizes the amount of enjoyable time that can be gained from investments.

However, when one has a range of work available, some of it more enjoyable than others, the solution changes. If one has a small amount of work that is reasonably enjoyable (say 0.8 enjoyment units), and a large amount of work that is unenjoyable (zero enjoyment units), then the optimal solution may be to work a much longer time, but only on that enjoyable work. One would need to know pay-rates and investment returns in order to properly solve this problem.

I can currently rank my available work in terms of volume, potential volume, profit per hour, and enjoyment. Three of these terms — volume, potential volume, and profit per hour — are already expressed in quantitative figures, however I don't have any such figures for enjoyment. While I can say that I enjoy doing X more than Y, I can't yet map those rankings into figures.

How does one quantiatively measure enjoyment, anyway?

The Australian Perl Training Market
Perl Training Australia has been operating for three and a half years now. We're the primary Perl training provider in the Australian/New Zealand region. I get to travel a lot in order to teach people how to use Perl, and have an excellent chance to see how Perl is used by Austrlaian business. In a nutshell Perl usage is widespread, growing, and used in a diverse range of applications and industries.

Of vital importance to our business is who wants to learn Perl, and what they want to learn. A brief glance at our courses page reveals that we have a considerable range of courses available. However it's fairly accurate to say that 20% of our courses generate 80% of our material. Our introductory materials are consistently big winners in terms of sales.

What I find most interesting is the courses that people don't want to attend. Selling advanced courses have proven to be exceptionally difficult. We've attempted to present public training courses by both Damian Conway and Stas Bekman, both excellent presenters and leaders in their field. We've put considerably more advertising effort into promoting these courses than our regular beginner classes, however in both cases the response has been underwhelming.

I've spent some time trying to determine why our beginner classes are so popular, but our advanced courses are not. It seems there are two major factors of influence here:

Firstly, once people know a technology they're more inclined to continue with self-learning, or feel that they 'already know everything' and cannot learn from further training. The second reason is that many managers view skills in a binary fashion: you either know Perl, or you don't. Once an employee has completed the basic training they have a tick in the Perl box, and they don't require any further training. It doesn't matter if the employee disagrees.

The conundrum that we face is that experienced programmers are largely indifferent to our advanced courses, and beginner programmers don't have the funding to attend them.

Exceptions do occur form time-to-time. Particularly enlightened businesses will sometimes book advanced training to be conducted in-house. A few smaller niches here and there do exist, but they can take considerable effort to find and are exhausted rapidly.

Given that our primary business and majority of our income is from training, one may think this is a grim outlook, but the truth is far from it. We're running more training courses than ever before: Perl appears to be enjoying a rapid growth in a number of industry sectors, including government. Beginner courses are very popular.

Despite the growth in the beginner Perl market, I'm hoping that we'll be able to see somewhat of a change with Damian's upcoming Perl Best Practices course. This is a course that's useful for all Perl developers, regardless of their experience. Damian's new book will also have hit the shelves, which will hopefully improve buy-in from management. Places are limited, so register now to secure your place. Mention this journal entry to receive a free autographed copy of Damian's new book.

Port Phillip diving photographs
Pictures from our most recent diving trip are now online. Jacinta's done some excellent photography, although our batteries went flat during the second dive.

All the regions photographed are close to the proposed areas to be dredged as part of the channel deepening project. It's unlikely that these beautiful habitats will survive if the project proceeds.