People who think about hacking their lives and their work often speak of “granularity.” It’s a curious word. The online Oxford English Dictionary offers only “granular condition or quality” as a definition. A more helpful definition comes from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications: “The extent to which a larger entity is subdivided. For example, a yard broken into inches has finer granularity than a yard broken into feet.” To think of tasks and challenges in terms of granularity is to think in terms of breaking them down into smaller and more manageable parts.

Granularity is a tremendously useful strategy for students. The typical spiral-bound student-planner doesn’t seem to encourage it; that tool is often little more than a place to store due dates: “research paper due.” But no one can just write a research paper. That paper can only be the result of numerous small-scale tasks. It’s not surprising that students who think of “write research paper” as one monolithic task are likely to put it off far longer than they ought to. Instead of “write research paper,” one could think of these tasks: go to library to look up sources; organize them by call number; read first three sources and take notes; get article from JSTOR; read remaining three sources and take notes; organize notes on computer; check bibliography format; ask professor about endnote form; make rough outline; and so on. Each of these “granular” tasks is far more do-able than “write research paper.” Thinking of work in terms of granularity can be one way to overcome the overwhelming dread of getting started. And keeping track of such tasks on paper and crossing them off one by one gives the satisfaction making progress and getting closer to done.

A student might also apply the strategy of granularity to the work of writing itself. Instead of writing a draft and “looking it over,” it’s much smarter to break down the work of writing and editing by thinking about one thing at a time. Developing a strong thesis statement: that’s one task. Working out a sequence of paragraphs to develop that thesis: another task. Figuring out how to make a transition from one paragraph to another: another task. If you tend to have patterns of errors in your writing, look for each kind of error, one at a time. Noun-pronoun agreement? Read a draft once through looking only for that. Comma splices? Read once through with your eyes on the commas. It might seem that approaching the work of writing and editing in terms of smaller, separate tasks is unnecessarily cumbersome, but breaking things down will likely make it far easier to work more effectively and come out with a stronger piece of writing. No writer can think about everything at once.

Granularity is also a useful strategy for making even a daunting reading project do-able. If you have eighty pages to read, finish twenty and take a short break; then repeat. If you’re reading James Joyce or Marcel Proust, a handful of pages might be all that you can manage at one sitting, and sometimes you might need to chart your progress by the sentence. But those sentences and pages add up, and I should know. I just finished all seven volumes (3,102 pages) of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), averaging twenty pages a day over five months and two days of reading.

1. Needs to be short -- but able to embody a complex pattern of information (in the light of advances in auditory display and sonification)
2. Needs to be memorable -- especially in the sense of its function of "re-membering" a divided society
3. Needs to offer reminders of significant relationships between matters that may otherwise be treated as dangerously unrelated -- vital feedback loops from a systemic control perspective
4. Needs to be attractive in the context of a complex social system -- especially according to the new understanding of "strange attractors" in the complexity sciences
5. Needs to strike a balance between the dysfunctional symbolic extremes of:
   • the Ode to Joy, adopted as the anthem of Europe -- appealing primarily to the older generation, if only because of its classical quality, exemplifying the democratic challenge that admiration does not necessarily enable participation
   • the overwhelming popular winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007 (Hard Rock Hallelujah) -- a heavy metal band in monstrous demonic guise, appealing significantly to the younger generation [video]
   • the 300-pages of the legal text of the proposed European Constitution [more] -- unreadable, and therefore incomprehensible, to most EU citizens (and perhaps deliberately so)
6. Capable of being refreshed periodically, if not annually, in the light of new insights, challenges and opportunities -- and if only in recognition of the limitations of any previous version
7. Inviting participation, if not entraining it -- as a contrast to the apathy-reinforcement characteristic of modern political discourse
8. Inherently imaginative -- reframing the past, offering new significance to the present, and pointing to new ways of thinking about the future
9. Challenging to cognition -- an element of puzzle and mystery to be "solved", as with many computer and other games in which there is a gestalt to be recognized (possibly even at several levels)
10. Imminently practical in its elaboration -- as with the procedures for open competition for major architectural or other design projects
11. Susceptible to animated accompaniment -- with possibilities of exemplification through multi-media techniques and gaming simulations
12. Embodying systemic understandings valuable to governance at all levels -- and consonant with experience at those levels

One early example is the work promoted by the Cathars through the troubadours and trouvères, highly sophisticated verse-technicians, whose music and poetry combined in the service of the courtly ideal of love:

"Modern European literature originated in Occitania in the early 12th century. It was started by hundreds of Troubadours (poet-musicians), who sang the praises of new values and in a new way. Their themes were courtly love, and concepts such as "convivencia" and "paratge" for which there is no modern counterpart in modern English or French. "convivencia" meant something more than conviviality and "paratge" meant something more than honour, courtesy, chivalry or gentility (though our concepts of honour, courtesy, chivalry and gentility all owe something to the concept of "paratge". They praised high ideals, promoting a spirit of equality based on common virtue and deprecating discrimination based on blood or wealth. They were responsible for a great flowering of creativity." (The Troubadours)