Lads, I've been having a think. How much do you plan your life? As in:-
• "I want to live in a nice house in that lovely village I always pass through. Here's how I'm going to achieve it."
• "The ultimate aim in my career is to be doing x.
• "I want to retire by the time I'm 60. I'm going to put away x amount of money every month to try and achieve this."
• "By the time I'm 40 I'd like to have traveled to the Azores, Japan, New Zealand and the Galapagos islands."
• "I want to learn a new language in the next two years."
• "This summer I'm going to walk the Three Peaks, go white water rafting and start training for my first 10k."
You get the idea. I have a milestone birthday later this month and, whilst my life isn't without direction, I could probably do with some more concrete end goals and how these are to be achieved.
>>418566 Not at all. No interest in owning a house, no idea what I want to do career wise, no family, I jut have debt to repay, once that's gone I'll have no direction whatsoever. I have a pension because it's sensible, not because I have any retirement goals.
I'm more of a short to medium term sort of thinker. I typically don't plan any further than a year ahead, honestly, apart from financially, but I pay someone else to plan that for me as I'm fucking terrible at it.
I'll typically decide I want to do something and immediately start working towards it, but it's always something that can be achieved in a matter of months. New car, better job, an improved level of physical fitness, that sort of thing. It means I'm almost always achieving my goals which feels lovely.
I've never felt the urge to, or the point in, a plan for ten or twenty years in the future - my life just hasn't ever worked that way. I couldn't tell you where I want to be when I'm fifty, as I'll likely not know what it is I want at 50 until I'm about 48, if you see what I mean. So a plan for a decade to me feels meaningless.
Everyone's different though, nobody but you can really say how far in the future a goal has to be to motivate you. Everything you listed sounds like a good thing to be working towards, so you're certainly thinking along the right lines.
I'd suggest writing this stuff down in a journal or something, and maybe even periodically writing in it to assess what you have or haven't been doing to reach said goals.
I'm so happy you made this thread, because I'm probably on the more insane meticulous end of the planning spectrum. I use a lot of tools to make sure I'm achieving things that matter to me.
The main one is just a Google Drive spreadsheet. I started it when I was 24 years old and wanted to sketch out a career plan, in particular how I could tie in my relatively boring admin job in the present to the kind of work I wanted in the future. On the main sheet, a block of four or five rows represents a particular aspect of my career I want to develop, and each column represents a month. On the secondary sheet, I have a list of life goals, broken down into their constituent parts. I reference the end goal on the date I want to achieve it on the main sheet, and work backward with all the smaller goals until I reach the present date. It ends up reading as a manageable list of stuff to do each month.
The statements you've put in the OP are perfect examples of reverse engineering a goal. I can't stress enough how important this is. It's amazing how easy it is to have these wonderful aspirations but never to think of even the most practical elementary questions about it, like, "how much will it cost?" or "what would I need to learn before I could do that?" etc.
On that note, another really useful thing about this approach is that it doubles as somewhere to work out your finances. On a third sheet I work out my typical expenditures versus income, then use an =Finances![Cell] reference at the bottom of each month, subtract any costs from treats or goals that month (e.g. taking a trip or paying for a course) so I'll know roughly what I'll have in my accounts for the foreseeable future. I've never had to doubt whether I can afford to do something, or worry that it will throw off my long-term plans.
The longer I've kept it, the more functions its accumulated, too. Most are probably easy to guess from the sheet titles. Others are more subtle but just as useful, e.g. I can stick a relevant hyperlink to a job or course application.
The sheet extends indefinitely, but I also understand that you can only predict so far into the future. That's why it's so handy to have a kind of living document. I update this file about once a month, shift things around, and reevaluate as I need. Many times I'll completely misjudge what's needed to achieve a particular goal, but one of the most important things about planning isn't executing everything you set down as intended -- it's having a push to research and jig things around, to adapt as needed, to make sure you're committing enough time to it.
It'll probably seem utterly anally-retentive to a lot of people, but it's had a huge impact on my life practically and brings me a certain peace of mind.
I'm a diagnostically confirmed schizoid, and one of the key characteristics of schizoids is that life doesn't seem to have any kind of direction like it does with most people. I'm a functioning adult and I have completed such marks and milestones in my life as secondary education, university and the first few jobs. But it's as if my life sort of topped out after that, and I never really took on the next steps like settling down with a wife, have kids, buy a house, that sort of thing.
It also has to do with a tragic family history that was marked by early deaths of my closest family members. That kind of thing can exacerbate schizoid tendencies in a person who is already predisposed to them.
I'm in my 40s now, and that's an age where you either have done certain things in your life or you haven't, and likely won't do some of them anymore. I don't rule out the possibility of becoming a late dad and settling down after all in the next couple of years, because things like what will become of me when I am old do weigh on my mind. I am nowadays of great indispensable help to my mum who is now at an age where mowing the lawn of painting a window frame or fixing a broken fence are just not that easy anymore. Even the weekly grocery shopping can be quite a task for her. And so to think that one day in around 30 to 35 years' time that will be me and I won't have any help from my non-existent children is a thought that weighs on me.
I am doing alright career wise, but I can't say I have had a real desire to climb ever further to the top in my field in the last ten years or so. I have always been much to happy maintaining the status quo. It has been noticed negatively by bosses and superiors I have worked for, but in the end, it is my life I have to lead, not theirs. I decide what makes me happy, and putting in another ten hours a week just so that it says regional head manager on my name tag and business card simply never seemed appealing to me.
I think part of my reluctance to have planned out my life incrementally step by step was that I didn't really have many long-term romantic relationships after uni. I had my share of flings, erotic adventures and short relationships, but I guess being a schizoid, it always comes to a point where the other person will just want more from you than you are ready, willing, or even cut out to give. If I had had a wife by my side, maybe my life would have been different. My perception is that women in general have much more stringent plants for their future, at least once they've found somebody to settle down with, of course one reason being their biological clock which simply means they can't just let vast periods of time pass after age 30 at a virtual standstill in their lives.
But again, it's my life, I decide what makes me happy. Other people might say I have no goals and no direction in my life, I just say, I am happy right where I am at.
I started making daily to-do lists recently and I've found a lot of satisfaction from ticking the boxes next to each task, even if it's for something mundane like "remember to send that email". If you start ticking twenty little mundane boxes you start feeling pretty good.
I'll probably try to extend it to weekly, monthly, and yearly to-do lists. I'm a genuinely aimless drifter rather than one of you fancy-pants drifters with degrees and careers, so dog knows I need to plan for the future.
>>418623 Because it's used by multi million pound project teams across the world to people like me just organising life, or friends organising a trip.
You can basically edit it to however you want, so I usually have a to-do column, an ongoing/blocked (i.e. things I've started or are stuck) and a done column) so I can move stuff across.
Got something to do? Just click and add a ticket instantly, then drag it across when you're done, if you click in the tickets you can add due dates and get reminders to your phone, add labels and categorise the type of task if you want, attachments, write comments with more details, etc.
You can also create several boards too if you would like one for a rpoject you're working on, or perhaps you're planning a holiday with mates so you just invite them to one and you can add things like 'book accommodation, pay flights, Big Donald to get vaccines, THeresa to pay for flights Boris booked etc and then move them across when done.
It's just a really efficient way of organising life and it's free, it's used by some absolutely huge companies and I think it speaks for itself.
I personally have one for myself and use it to plan stuff with friends like holidays without worrying 'have we done this, have we done that'.
You can also get really clever with it and set it up so when you do certain things it emails certain people or if you add tickets you assign them to people etc, but that's a basic overview.
Fair enough, but that's the beauty of Trello, you make it exactly how you want it to be.
I appreciate what you're saying but being put off by how one person used it is like being put off using cars because one person you once saw was driving like a bit of a nob.
>>418626 Its free plan can be limiting. You can't have repeating cards and a calendar view and I'm not sure I'd want to spend $120/year on a single feature like that.
You lads are, remarkably, being more pedantic than usual.
I just merely threw it out there as it has massively helped me and literally millions of other people too and might be of use to some lads in the thread.
There's no need to use it to project plan the meaning of life, or pay £120 a day for a special bumped up feature, or whatever ridiculous flaws you are actively searching for. You use it exactly how you want it - the free version has always been beyond adequate for me and professional working environments I've seen it used in.
I don't really care if you lads do or don't, it's not my product, I don't see any real alternative suggestions other than excel though, which, isn't as interactive in my opinion or as clear to see if this is what you're looking for.
As for the lad claiming he can code a half a billion dollar website whilst hungover, maintained and developed by a near 6 billion dollar company, I refer you back to my good old LA Noire days.
Not really interested in the argument but the clear implication is that no, it is obviously not directly proportional but it is clear that it is extremely unlikely to be a weekend job either.
> As for the lad claiming he can code a half a billion dollar website whilst hungover, maintained and developed by a near 6 billion dollar company, I refer you back to my good old LA Noire days.
Develop and maintain are totally different but with AWS and some funding yeah it's scalable enough to probably Just Work. You can shove your shitty 4chan memes up your crusty ringpiece you overhyped pinboard software using ponce, as some of the most successful products to ever market in certain segments have been nothing but a Linux server with a bunch of perl and regex on it.
To quote a colleague of mine during a conversation with the staff at a booth near ours at a trade show one year: "I think your product is amazing. Amazing that you think anyone would pay for this heap of junk that I could code while taking a shit".
>>418695 You seem a tad upset that some people find something useful to organise their life and all you've done is have a teary, I'd have thought if these things were so easy you'd just be on your way to spending a weekend coding a multi-million pound idea instead of crying on britfa.gs.
There's at least two lads on here who's actual job is to code multi million dollar websites, to be frank with you.
I really don't care either way about Trello but you seem weirdly defensive of it. I think you'd be happier in life if you could enjoy things without the direct approval of others. I'm not trying to have a go here, it's just something to think about.
I also work in the industry, but to be fair a common theme is code-lads acting really supercilious for no real reason.
I mean, I could get a bit wanky about the value of my projects too but I don't think it changes the fact that the lad can't in fact code these websites in a weekend that are so easy to do otherwise he'd probably have done it by now and be sitting on a yacht in the Caribbean not fighting on here. It's also like a basic bitch version of JIRA, but I'm probably going to hear how that's useless too now.
For the record, I said I don't really care whether you lads use it or not - but it just seems silly to level such juvenile criticisms at a clearly popular and useful website and that's all I'm calling out.
>>418708 >I mean, I could get a bit wanky about the value of my projects too but I don't think it changes the fact that the lad can't in fact code these websites in a weekend that are so easy to do otherwise he'd probably have done it by now and be sitting on a yacht in the Caribbean not fighting on here. It's also like a basic bitch version of JIRA, but I'm probably going to hear how that's useless too now
It's strange, that. I went for a job interview for a financial advice firm in Leeds that dealt primarily with high net worth individuals. The admin head there was really up herself and seemed to be under the impression that the company's clients being important meant that she was important when she was probably on about £25k.
> I mean, I could get a bit wanky about the value of my projects too but I don't think it changes the fact that the lad can't in fact code these websites in a weekend that are so easy to do otherwise he'd probably have done it by now and be sitting on a yacht in the Caribbean not fighting on here.
Sorry for the late reply but the satphone signal to my Yacht is slow as fuck these days.
Nah, in reality most web oriented code bases as gut-wrenchingly desperately simple - the trick, or the luck, is in having an idea and running with it at a time and with the right marketing campaign that work together just so.
I mean do you really think twitter is a sophisticated platform? Instagram? Even early Facebook versions were depressingly simple. They're all multi billion whatever platforms that most first year comp sci students could ape in their spare time.
Tl;dr - Being the second person to figure out how get golden eggs out of 10,000 lines of ruby/python/whatever floats your boat doesn't get you the golden egg. It does, however, save you $120 a year if that's your thing.
>>418713 >Tl;dr - Being the second person to figure out how get golden eggs out of 10,000 lines of ruby/python/whatever floats your boat doesn't get you the golden egg. It does, however, save you $120 a year if that's your thing.
You would also need to develop your own cloud platform if you wanted to use it away from home, but luckily that's a cunt-off we've already had in another thread.
>>418717 > You would also need to develop your own cloud platform if you wanted to use it away from home
Unless you're talking about logging into it from someone else's computer (and I really hope not - this is 2018 lad, not 1998; I'm picky about whose computer I plug my USB thumbdrives into) I'd just run it on localhost on my laptop, you pillock. Why would I want my data in the cloud anyway?
Regardless, if you stretch your weekend out to a full week you could probably add a cross platform mobile app that does the exact same thing and caches your changes until you get home and sync with your home machine. No cloud and no internet connection needed.
> I honestly am lost. You're now backing this stuff up with reaction images from iruntheinternet.com
If you think a random image of a dog appearing to use a computer I found on this VM constitutes a backing up of "stuff" then yes, you are totally and utterly fucking lost.
> Can the mod please just delete all this crap and ban us all for derailing a perfectly good thread?
You're the one who needs banning for shitting up a perfectly good thread with this Cello junk or whatever the crapware's called. Now go and add "jump off a bridge" to your "actionable items" list for today or something, there's a good chap.
As I've got older I've learned to try to avoid long term plans because you never have control over all the variables and nothing ever really turns out quite like you want it to.
What I've found easier, and better for my overall mental health, are achievable short-term goals which deal with week to week and month to month progress.
When I was a kid my mother taught me that if I took care of the pennies then the pounds would take care of themselves, likewise if you take care of the weeks and months (e.g. I'm going to go to the gym four times a week, I'm going to study Spanish for six hours a week, I'm going to read a new book every month) then the years will take care of themselves in that you'll be making continuous positive progress towards your goals.
If you want to do something longer term like visit whatever countries by whatever year then start by sticking twenty quid a week or whatever into a savings account and over time you'll find yourself moving towards your goal. Who knows, by then maybe you'll hate the idea of travel and all you'll really want is a really flashy car and a sixteen year old girlfriend with daddy and cocaine issues; either way you'll have the money.
Don't worry about the future too much, and don't judge your own life progress by that of others. The person you are in ten years may be a very different person to who you are now, so setting long-term concrete goals for yourself is only ever going to be disappointing while small continuous progressive steps will allow you to be more flexible as you grow and mature as a person.
Good post, but here's a counterpoint: I don't believe that continuous steps and long term planning have to be mutually exclusive. What you say about disappointment is well taken -- I just think this is more of a failure to be adaptable, or maybe a failure in being overly attached to something too specific, than it is a failure in the idea of long-term planning itself.
I also find that having a long-term plan can give meaning to goals that may otherwise be absent. I totally agree that life takes us in unpredictable directions, but having a rough idea of the type of life you want and committing that to paper/screen, and then tying those into shorter and middle term goals, has been the best method for me.
>As I've got older I've learned to try to avoid long term plans because you never have control over all the variables and nothing ever really turns out quite like you want it to
Management science holds that there are basically three ways you can plan the future, in this case the future of a business. The first one is a quasi-chaotic, purely reactive approach, where you pretty much just act on a day to day basis. The second approach is a fixed, static one where you attempt to plan ahead in great detail for anything from one to five years. And then there is an approach that is favoured by many, which is called an incremental or evolutionary approach. Simply put, you have a general idea about where you want to be headed, but as circumstances change, you know to revise your plans and adapt to those new circumstances, all the while not losing sight of the original goals that you set for yourself. Only when circumstances really no longer allow you to reach your set goals do you abandon those goals for new ones.
Both the other approaches have a tendency to throw you off your game gravely if you are not careful. The reactive approach can mean that nothing you do has any kind of common thread, putting you a risk of not being prepared to cope with rare and unforeseen events. And the static approach means you will have no answers as to what to do when sudden or adverse events blow you too far off course compared to your original plans.
There is a lot of voodoo in management science, but I think all this is a way of thinking which can be applied to your own personal life quite effectively.
As I said, there is a lot of voodoo in management science. It's one of the easiest areas of economics where you can make shedloads of money writing books and offering seminars which at their core aren't all that much more than jazzed up common sense. Management science is only surpassed by marketing in that respect.
But to be fair, around 30 to 40 percent of it are hard facts that you can't do without in order to successfully run a business.
I don't really think it's a counterpoint, rather a complimentary point. I did briefly mention having longer term goals but taking smaller steps towards them because you never know when your longer term goals might suddenly change (whether by choice or not).
That said it was a good point worth making, it clarifies my lines of thinking better than I did myself and perhaps manages to make the point I was trying to make in a clearer and more succinct fashion than I was able to myself.
Just to annoy >>/shed/14684, I'm going to talk about the software industry.
Back in the 80s, the vast majority of software projects were planned up front from start to finish using the waterfall model. Product managers would work with the customer to develop a product requirements document, which would then be used to produce a design. That design would be implemented, verified and delivered. Everything cascaded down from that product requirements document, hence the name "waterfall".
Over time, software projects became increasingly complex and started to fail catastrophically. Sometimes the requirements were just flat wrong, because the customer and the project manager had failed to fully understand the problem they were trying to solve; a working piece of software was delivered, but it wasn't useful to the customer. Sometimes the design was so absurdly complex that it was impossible to implement and the project dragged on until the customer decided to cut their losses and abandon it. Sometimes the software worked, but it was far too difficult to use or didn't integrate into the workflow of the users or the wider software infrastructure of the company. Months or years of work often amounted to nought.
We started to borrow ideas from just-in-time and lean manufacturing, which evolved into what we call the agile methodology. Rather than trying to plan everything up front, the development team build a simple, minimal prototype that solves one narrow part of the customer's problem. That prototype is tested with the end users, with their feedback being used to guide the next stage of development. If that prototype turns out to be completely useless, it can be abandoned at minimal cost; if it's useful but flawed, the design can be quickly amended based on user feedback before it becomes too complex.
Today, the vast majority of successful software projects use some form of the agile methodology. Public sector software projects tend to stick with waterfall methods, which is why they tend to fail so often and so expensively. Doing "just the right amount" of planning had a revolutionary impact on the software industry.
Another approach that seems to be prevalent in software programming is to just haphazardly and without great planning start in one place, then put that area on hold suddenly if you run into a problem, and start another detail of the project, then you go back to the last unfinished bit of the project and think, what if we implement this and that feature as well, and so on, and you get totally lost and lose sight of the project as a whole.
I remember reading some programmer's blog where he likened that approach to building a house, and then one day deciding you want to build the roof first, then maybe you spend some time in the basement and decide you want gold plated faucets in the boiler room, then you go back to tiling the roof, and then maybe at some point you put a few bricks on top of each other which you think will one day be part of the downstairs livingroom. And so on.
I dabble in Arduino programming from time to time, and I have started projects with many different facets that needed many different functions, so I can relate to that kind of temptation of falling into a kind of ADHD approach where you do one thing one day and then in the middle of it decide that another segment of your code could use that one cool feature you found somewhere. It doesn't help advance your project, so I have decided that in the future, I will make a more stringent outline of what I want my code to do. This is just a hobby for me, I don't do it to earn any money, so I guess it doesn't matter. But still. It's annoying when you realise you have spent ten days developing a bespoke font library for your little TFT screen, but have not made one bit of progress on your code's actual core routines.
So that's what 'agile' means. I've always thought it was a stupid corporate buzzword. I mean, it still is a bit of a stupid corporate buzzword, but at least I know it actually means something more like 'adaptable', now.
Going back to the original thread topic, I'd highly recommend reading Angela Duckworth's 'Grit' for anyone interested in developing interests and committing to them in a more consistent way. She has a section on goal setting, and uses the following simple diagram to illustrate how prerequisite goals can add up to some ultimate aim, and how you can easily work around it when one section of the plan fails.
There's lots of other interesting research and such in there, too.
It's recently dawned on me that 2019 will be the first year where I don't have some form of achievement to aim for; most of the past few years have been dominated by completing professional qualifications.
I could go on to attain Fellowship status if I really set my mind to it, but I've very little desire to go on and do this. It means I've got a fair amount of free time which was previously taken up by studying which could be allocated elsewhere and I was thinking:-
- Learning a new language. I'm only fluent in English and I was thinking of either learning German, I vaguely remember the basics from school, or one of the Scandinavian languages.
- Writing a book. Even if it turns out to be a glorious failure I'd like to have tried writing a book at some point in my life. I have the feeling that I'd be best suited to children's literature. I'm sure there are challenges out there where you have to write so many words in a day.
- Getting in better shape. I have some neglected weights in my bedroom and there is a local parkrun I was considering joining, even if it'll make me look like one of those 'new year, new me' idiots.
If any of you lads have any advice in respect of the above then it'd be greatly appreciated.
Since this thread appeared again I might as well make a blog post.
A year and a half ago a job opportunity fell through and in terms personal development, fell off a cliff. I'm starting a job in January which will finally allow me to start trying to achieve my dream/s.
I've got a plan and a step by step list of things to do which will take quite a few years but I'm happy I'll finally have a shot at it. I still feel pretty shitty effectively wasting 1 and a half years of my life trying to get back on my feet with no personal development though.
>I still feel pretty shitty effectively wasting 1 and a half years of my life trying to get back on my feet with no personal development though.
I'm a believer in the idea that time is never wasted. You may think that nothing much has happened in the last one and a half years, but evidently you did gain some insights into life itself, if just the fact that time is so easily pissed up the wall and that you need to fill your time with more meaningful things again from here on out. Maybe you just needed those one and a half years for yourself to figure out what you really want out of life.
I used to plan a lot, but something would always happen. I tried to make my goals more realistic, even to be small things, but somehow something happens the vast majority of the time that shatters or changes those plans greatly. So I stopped planning.
So much has happened to me in the past 2 years from just travelling around and saying "yes" to a lot. I've gained opportunities I could never have planned. I can imagine in another 2 years I'll happen upon even more and come across things I never thought to do before.
Why plan long term when so much can change in the short term?
That's actually something that's been discussed in a few different ways earlier in the thread.
I personally find long-term planning essential to getting the big stuff done, even when (especially when) short-term changes happen.
I guess it really depends on the nature of the goal, but I've found most things I've wanted in life haven't come about in the spontaneous way you describe.
It can happen, sometimes. You'll meet the person you eventually marry at a shit bowling themed birthday party you were thinking of skipping, or you'll be headhunted for a job you'd have never thought to apply for but fit into perfectly, etc., but this strikes me as much more rare.
Planning is for the stuff in life that requires consistent and conscious effort, things like getting fit or earning a PhD or finding meaningful work.
You're totally right that there's a hell of a lot you can get done by just actively participating in the world. But maybe planning is a process of exclusion, as well -- to decide you want a certain kind of future means deciding against others.
>>423224 As someone who wasted a year before getting my current job I can empathise. Still, you've gotten yourself back into the system now which is a much bigger deal than you might think and now have that base to work on your goals. I Hope the new job goes well anyway.
Not really.
I do wish for some things and I do put some effort into it [0] but I can't control the whole process. And it isn't like life hasn't shovelled shite in my face at times multiplying the major part of work by zero.
Too chaotic.
Also, that old 'beware of your desires for they shall come true' adage makes sense now.
>>418570 Definitely idiosyncratic but not like it doesn't make any sense.
For some reason you reminded me of Bucky Fuller.
>>418737 > Simply put, you have a general idea about where you want to be headed
Actually this is how I see it too.
>>423222 This year I've got the position I'd been aiming for. I'm coasting along now, thinking where I should jump next.
If you've got weights right in your room, go for it lad. They're just the best for getting into shape - always nearby and you don't have to drive/go anywhere.
[0] On a very tangential note, I'd like to have a fancy house somewhere near the town's centre and something like W124/W126/W210/W212 - I like the cars of that period - to drive but at my current place of residence that would cost an awful amount of money.
Has anyone here tried YNAB? It sounds interesting but I'm put off somewhat by the monthly fee and its functionality being aimed primarily at North Americans.
>>424525 I bought YNAB 4 on Steam, and I see it's no longer available. Back then it was just software you paid once for. I had no idea that it had switched to a subscription-based service. That's awful. You have to budget for your budgeting software?
Anyway, YNAB 4 worked fine for me. You don't even need the software, because YNAB is a method composed of simple rules:
1. Give Every Dollar a Job (i.e. categorise all your money each month, you don't have any 'spare' cash, and if you do, you put it in a specific 'spare' category)
2. Save for a Rainy Day (i.e. set up categories for any emergencies and allocate savings for them so you aren't taken by surprise when the worst happens)
3. Roll with the Punches (i.e. if you overspend in one category, no worries, next month just increase your budget for that category)
4. Live on Last Month's Income (i.e. if you can pay this month's bills with the money you made last month, you don't need to worry about money any more).
>>424526 They claim that you will save far more than the subscription cost. Its main selling points seem to be that it can integrate with US bank accounts to breakdown and analyse your spending and also it can be used to set and measure progress towards financial goals.
I've been spending a fair bit of time on r/UKPersonalFinance after seeing it mentioned on here a few time; the key things I've gleaned from it are get some form of budgeting software, change jobs every 3-5 years if your salary is falling below the market rate and to invest any money you can tie away into index trackers to benefit from compound growth.
Is it legal to just swim across the English Channel? I mean, just rock up on the beach and just decide to keep swimming. I wasn't sure if you needed to get a special permit for it to check you're not going to get the coastguard after you or you're not going to swim in the way of a ferry or arrested by French immigration services if you make it to the other side.
