This is the most unlikely corner of the garden. The little courtyard is just one metre from the fence, and then the back of the house is a metre from the other fence.

For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to plant a full-sized lemon in the corner. For some other, equally bonkers, reason the lemon loved the spot and would grow to enormous proportions if allowed.

Unfortunately, the lemons on the rooftop clog the gutters in winter if allowed, so I am constantly apologising the to the poor thing and cutting it back. It seems pretty happy about it all, considering.

The passionfruit is actually growing on the neighbour’s property. I have gone through at least 10 passionfruit vines trying to grow them in our yard, but THIS one has decided that the spot-with-no-sun is where it will fruit. If we beat the rats, and we usually do, we manage to nab the fruit for ourselves.

The Carnegie UK Trust is forefront of research into kindness and how it strengthens community. It is worth spending a couple of hours reading their research reports from the last two years that are themed around kindness.

Their output has developed from not even knowing what to call this “everyday help” phenomena , through quantitive studies about where people in the UK find kindness (**spoiler – public libraries came out top**), to asking some hairy questions about how transparency and good governance in public policy may work against kindness.

It is this last idea, of kindness vs. transparency and fairness, that fascinates me as I read yet another news report about a political grub who arbitrarily used his ministerial position to not follow due process, enriching a particular set of people.

From my reading in the last year, I have drawn a few conclusions about kindness. Kindness must be voluntary and discretionary. It involves an act of help of some sort. There needs to be a beneficiary and (my contention is) when the benefactor performs the act, they must aim for a positive outcome and more benefit to the beneficiary than to themselves.

At the core, though, along with all those features there needs to be a simple test, which is “is this a good thing?” If it is not good, then it is not kindness, it is something else. The test may be simple, but actually knowing what “good” is, and how one tells if this act is good, working out “good for whom?” seems ridiculously complex to the point of impossibility.

Now, if we look at the case of Barnaby Grub and the Lucrative Concessions, many of these elements are there. Yes, he voluntarily used his discretion to benefit a set of beneficiaries. It is possible that with political motivation and back scratching involved, there was ultimately greater benefit to Minister Grub than to the individuals helped….but it quacks a lot like the kindness duck.

Researchers have used the term “service nepotism” to describe how some ethnic groups in a market (in this case a group less well-off than others) favour people socially similar to them, challenging ideas of egalitarianism and competition in the marketplace.

In the latest Carnegie publication on kindness, which was released along with the movie embedded below, they discuss the idea of “radical kindness”. Within organisations, there may be people who choose to bend or break rules in order to do good, increase social cohesion and help others. It’s key to remember that kindness is something done by individuals, unobliged. Radical kindness comes in when there is systematic acknowledgement across the organisation that some people’s needs are greater due to structural disadvantage… and there is a social environment and norms where unobligated acts of doing good by individuals are more frequent, to try to level out this inequity. This goes a little way to guiding my “is this a good thing?” test.

The idea is still nascent, but I think all of the examples described above rely on there being a background social environment of unfairness. Of inequity. Of some having more than others. With “radical kindness”, the outcome of the act would be fairer redistribution. With political trough-feeding, inequity would increase.

This links kindness very much to power. Anyone who has opportunity to be kind will have more power in that situation than the potential beneficiary. A key element of kindness, discretion, means there always needs to be a choice by the benefactor to act or not act.

Does this mean that the largest acts of kindness will be found in the most unequal societies? That actually we should aim for a world with less opportunity for kindness? While kindness will always be a good thing (or else it is not kindness, it is something else), possibly finding “more kindness” also says something about the background power relations as well as the level of social cohesion??

I don’t have answers, but I am loving the journey.

Here’s the movie that goes with the latest Carnegie report, outlining ideas arising from the last year of the Kindness Innovation Network across Scotland. Kindness at the University of Glasgow library is mentioned at 1:46.

Lots of lavender down the driveway. At first I would carefully pick the flowers each year and dry them before giving the bushes a hard pruning back so the car could get past.

Now, we have had so much lavender that it is just binned.

One of the kids tried making a lavender syrup for ice-cream a couple of years ago. It was kind of successful, but not something we repeated.

Email rules my day far less than it used to.

Here are some tweaks I made to make it so.

1. I turned off desktop alerts – no more audio or popup messages when I get a new email. (Only took me 30 years of using work email…)

2. I close Outlook when I am not actively using it.

3. Filters, filters, filters and folders, folders, folders. Only about half of my email goes into my inbox. The rest is filtered automatically into one of 30 or so folders sitting under the inbox. I have:

• A filter for mail from each co-worker, with a separate folder for each person
• A filter for new mail coming from each Blackboard unit that I teach, each in a new folder for each unit
• Filters for alerts from journal databases, library catalogues, listservs and other informational resources – each one with its own folder
• Filters for important work distribution lists that would otherwise go straight to my inbox – each one with their own folder
• Filters for emails I sent from my other email addresses to myself

4. Prioritising when I check filtered folders.

• I monitor email from students from my Blackboard units every time I have my email open
• I prioritise emails from co-workers
• Journal alerts I would look at maybe once a week during quiet periods, when I deal with my reading backlog…

5. Each day I set aside two blocks in my calendar of one hour to deal with email. These are appointments marked “busy”.

6. I set aside one three hour block in my calendar at the end of the week to deal with any backlog. Most weeks I get to inbox zero and make sure I have either completed, or know when I will complete, each task associated with each email from that week.

7. When checking the filtered folders or inbox, emails are either:

• If they can be done in under 2 minutes, dealt with then
• If they are urgent, categorised with a red “Pending my action” flag
• If neither, manually moved to one of my “to do” folders. (see left hand side of image above)

Once I have done the “first pass” of my email, I go back and deal with the red flags, and then get to work on the “to do” folders.

8. Some tasks need more than just a reply email. I have other regular blocks of time set aside in my calendar (e.g. for teaching or for course admin). I add the task to the calendar description for the next block of time I work on that area.

9. I never delete emails once I am done with them. Either they remain in their original filtered file (so all email from co-worker x is together) or email from my inbox or a to do folder is manually dragged into just one of five folders:

• Done2019Teaching
• Done2019CourseCoordination
• Done2019StudyPlans
• Done2019Research
• Done2019Admin

10. If I want to locate previous conversations, I just use the search function.

I originally had a lot of categories in my Done list. Then for the last five years I had a “Done2019Month” folder for each month. This year I just started using these five, and will continue for the year.

11. At the end of the year, the whole lot of folders are transferred to a single folder called “[year]Archive”, keeping the same file structure. Then I set up a whole lot of new, empty folders ready to receive filtered messages and the cycle starts again for the new year.