Daynote — Tues 8th Feb — finding the thing
Today felt extremely productive. I’ve now been back in work for 6 months, I’m working part-time — 3 days a week, and I have had maybe only a handful of days when I’ve really felt like I was doing the things and making progress. There’s guilt and frustration and a bit of a sense of loss around all that — BUT NOT TODAY.
Today was Progress Day.
Unlike yesterday, I knew this morning would be straight up meetings. 8am for an Australia and New Zealand operating board meeting. A catch up about Multi-Factor Authentication and work we’re doing there. A Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) system set up meeting with a supplier, a quick feedback session with an unsuccessful supplier from that process, a meeting about protecting my colleague’s time for two weeks so that we can get a project off the ground…then lunch (cheese and pickle sandwich — like them olden days).
We’re rolling out the last milestone of work we did to sites this week in overnight windows, and today I got into the supporting work for the next milestone. My colleague Matt is working on a large, long-running project and this is the second chunk of work in that process. I’m trotting alongside him to get the supporting work done for each milestone — things like public-facing documentation updates, communicating the details and progress with colleagues, managing any process change, and so on.
Past-me built a template to help us manage this quite-detailed work that surrounds milestones and to make sure we don’t miss important stuff. My colleagues have been keeping this template updated as changes occur in our processes and things we need to account for — so I am grateful to them (and to past me tbh)because I’ve been able to pick this kind of work back up without needing someone else to hand-hold and remind me of what it is I need to do.
Things I realised today:
We’ve started using a tool called Figma this past year, and some of my colleagues are absolutely smashing how to use it — creating lush boards of clear processes and change workflows and making things really easy to understand and communicate. I wish I had that skill. I am no good at using Figma to create things. I need practice.
I spent most of my afternoon writing updates and tying together things across various places (Threads, plan.io, in emails, in GoogleChat) about projects we’re in like MFA, SIEM, hosting and infrastructure updates, so that everyone in Delib who wants to can know what we’re doing, what the things they hear about are, why we’re doing them, and where the work is up to. And I think that’s perhaps my best thing? It feels like useful work.
And writing about the progress made on various projects, means it’s easier to see that you have made progress after all.
