Weeknotes s05 ep04: Wooden spoon
Hello.
Like Neil said in his weeknotes, it’s hard to know what to write when a week has mostly been quite standard fare. I’m not sure anything I was up to this week holds any big insight, though I do think the ‘just doing the things’ weeks are (warning: extremely tenuous cake analogy follows) the bicarbonate of soda in the sponge cake of work. It can’t all be buttercream and jam, and you don’t get a good rise without some of the regular, but largely invisible, graft.
I do really like buttercream and jam though, so that’s where this analogy which — let’s face it, is only held together with the lightest basting of egg yolk — totally falls apart.
CAKE.
My role has a lot of context switching. It’s incredibly rare to be able to work on one task for an hour uninterrupted, and it’s been a week of even more context switching than usual, as well as disjointed because I’ve not been in one location for very long due to life things.
That’s not to say I didn’t get anything done, I got quite a bit done, but a lot of it was necessarily transactional. Is there any point writing a weeknote which just lists the tasks I completed as though I’m parroting back my times tables? I don’t believe so. And as these are for me I’m going to write things that future me might find helpful. Hello, future me.
Here follow some things I have been thinking about, which are linked to the work I’ve been doing. I’m using The Satori Lab’s reflection questions again. They are good (both the Satori Lab and the questions).
- What did I do differently? Slowed down to go faster
This week I deliberately slowed down. As Sam mentioned in her weeknotes it does take energy to retain positivity when you’re not feeling it. It takes energy to re-word things, to consider, to be the best version of yourself, and I have noticeably not managed it as much as I have wanted to recently. This was a warning sign.
This week I worked four days and two of them from home. I gave myself the freedom to focus on the tasks I could complete in a week and not pick up the ones I couldn’t. A call I’d been worrying about for a while got completed. I took time to think about some of the longer-term things for Delib rather than getting lost in the day to day work.
Outside of work, I took my life back in hand. Wednesday I went to a spa in the woods and 15 different spa experiences happened to me[1]. I started running again. I looked at Tove Jansson pictures. I bought books. I spoke to my friends about how I’d been feeling (I don’t do this as often as I should). I cooked from scratch — which I’ve written about before.
And now I feel restored and more ready to face the weeks ahead.
2. What did I learn? Audits and their accompanying bureaucracy are not familiar to Delib
Andy and I recently started doing a monthly audit of our finance system. It’s important because:
- It’s fast becoming the canonical backbone of all our subscriptions
- It’s doing away with some superfluous and fallible stores of information
- and it may begin feeding into other processes like deployments as we attempt to automate the transfer of information between systems, like the lean and streamlined company we are.
I follow up on any inaccuracies we find and I learnt that I feel awkward bringing up any the findings with people, even though the aim is to achieve necessary accuracy, and I think it’s because we don’t have audits of this kind embedded in our working world at Delib. It’s unfamiliar to receive an email asking for something to be corrected, no matter how long the sender (me) has agonised over writing it. We mostly work in a way where feedback happens immediately and is sought out by the creator. I’m trying to approach this brave new world by clarifying in my message what the parameters of the audit are and what it is for, using neutral language, and recognising it’s often that our processes aren’t established or haven’t been explained (we’re not great at this), and hopefully we’ll get there. Still awks though.
3. What gave me a glimpse of the future? If you ask, you’ll often get the help you need.
I had a hospital appointment this week, which finally means I have a view to what’s coming up in the next few months. I asked Andy if I could make some changes and he was (characteristically) supportive. I then asked some of my other colleagues who were (characteristically) the same. I have not worked anywhere before which is as supportive of life things as Delib and I try really hard to provide that care to my colleagues too, because life and work are not separate worlds. Anyway, this now means I have more control over things in the next few months and I like having control, it is reassuring. More on this in a future episode.
Other stuff
I read this article, which was interesting:
I read Dan and @jukesie’s posts on social media platforms:
and I joined Mastodon: @pretendcato@mastodon.social and @pretendcato@mastodon.me.uk to see what it’s like.
I received two bonus instalments of Dan Hon’s excellent newsletter. These always make my head whirr in a good way. Here is the page to subscribe. And you can follow him on Medium for even more mind-expansion.
I started using Run Coach with Strava to get a bit quicker and keep my running on track. I ran 27.8 miles this week. I’m behind on my 1000 mile target this year, because life happened and also laziness, but I reckon with a push I can get there.
I got loads of great books which were mostly recommended, and one as a gift:
[1] I believe spas to be 70% nonsense, 30% quite nice.
The 70%
- A sink with ice in it 😐
- An aqua meditation room — sofas around some lit-up tubes of water (this was actually quite nice, but srsly, just call it a quiet room or something)
- 4 experience showers with cold experiences of:
1) Rain (I live in the UK)
2) Fresh (this was mist. I live in the UK)
3) Tropical storm (big rain)
4) Head (rain, but more on your head)
5) and Sides (like being splashed by two cars driving past in the rain) - A Greek herbal bath. Firstly, not a bath. More like being in the middle bit of a Locket throat sweet, but with steam and the very real risk of accidentally sitting on a stranger
- When you think of spa treatments as willingly paying someone you don’t know to touch your face, it’s difficult to un-think it. I am not that good at relaxing.
