Hayley North: Counting the little things

I spent a few days before the Christmas break filing and deleting thousands – around 15,000 – of old emails.

Not the most compelling start to a column, I agree, and you may well have already started anticipating the classified pages with more enthusiasm than usual, but bear with me.

It will not surprise you to learn that it really was the most boring process, although my now clean and efficient work inbox is a sight to behold. Yet it was through this most mundane and utterly tedious of exercises that I was reminded of how much we forget over long periods of time.

I always tell my clients to look at longer-term investment performance over the shorter-term results. Day-to-day performance tends to be up and down much more based on news and immediate reactions to data and can be stressful to watch. The future outcome is rarely as bad or good as it might seem from one day to the next. Short-term movements can be dramatic and uncertain and are rarely a good indicator of what is happening overall.

It turns out the same is true of our lives. Short, sometimes pivotal, or often seemingly unimportant moments are fantastic for a highlight reel but also form part of a bigger, more slow-moving picture that is propelling us forward at all times.

The emails I was reviewing spanned a period of more than 10 years and so very much has happened since then. That part did not surprise me but what did surprise me was what I had forgotten. I remember doing a lot of the work, but I had forgotten just how person-centred financial services was in the early to mid-2010s. We had personal contacts at every firm and issues were handled by people we had relationships with and did not mind speaking to by phone. Fast forward to 2024 and I avoid phone calls as much as I can, so stressful is it to explain myself over and over to a different person every time. We’re lucky if we even get given a phone number now, so much is done using centralised email addresses or online servicing platforms. It seems, until very recently, it wasn’t like this at all and I had completely forgotten how different it was.

Don’t get me wrong, getting information efficiently and quickly using a website is great, as is emailing at a time that is convenient. What’s less desirable are the long delays we often experience with no one to contact and the challenges we face when something goes wrong.

I had also forgotten many achievements, both in terms of how much the business has grown over that time and how many tricky situations we handled well. A boring process of admin in fact became both a history lesson and a reminder of how things work best, as well as buoying my confidence that I had achieved more than I thought I had.

It seems our memories are designed for the long term, ironing out the creases of the day to day to create a more seamless narrative, which is fine in the main, particularly when times are tough, but can also mean we miss important achievements and underestimate progress or even forget great ideas that had worked well in the past.

I think it’s important to remember many of those details. I know the modern trend is to write in gratitude journals, noting your favourite achievements each day, but since the end of my five-year diary in around 1993 – now that is an interesting read – I have not had the patience for that, although I am sure it would be rewarding. Although it is often not the things we think are memorable that are worth being able to recall. I did think I was doing a better job of remembering lots of things but clearly not.

It was with this in mind that I set to reading Guernsey’s latest Standard & Poor’s rating review this week. Granted it isn’t quite a page-turner, nor is it something most of us would choose to read, but while it does mention our change in leadership in 2023, it mainly reports a similar state to this time last year which it finds reassuring. So far so good. Yet we have achieved far more than it suggests and it is important that we are mindful of this as we start the year.

Debating GST for as long as we did, for example, was not a waste of time. We established that we need to get more creative in terms of revenue-raising measures and we reinforced the view that Guernsey residents do have strong views and will ensure our voices are heard.

Debating education policy again highlighted some significant differences of opinion in relation to borrowing and spending, again underlining areas where more voter consultation is needed, more creative thinking would be helpful and more joined-up thinking is key.

Even the famous vote of no confidence, which at the time felt like a very long and drawn-out process, did result in some positive broad consensus on who should take us forward and has had limited to no impact on how the external world views our competence. The process also gave all deputies an opportunity to make their views known.

Much has been written in recent weeks about our fantastic achievements in 2023 such as the Island Games, Art for Guernsey’s Renoir exhibition and another successful Guernsey Literary Festival, to name but a tiny few. However, we have also learned and moved forward from everything we have experienced over the last 12 months, whether it seemed important or not and whether it appeared to be an initial success or failure, and it is worth remembering that.

Let me be the first to admit that I tend to underestimate and undervalue things I have done, failing to recognise the cumulative impact of these things, both the good and the bad, on my life as a whole. When we reflect on last year and reset our priorities, it pays to remember that we have come a long way from who we were as islanders in 2023 and every step we take this year will similarly move us towards a new and unpredictable destination.

I could never have predicted in 2014 that 10 years later I would be writing this column and that’s the beauty of each of our precious life experiences. Each of our lives will be but a fraction of Guernsey’s infinite life, yet everything we do will permanently impact this island in important ways.