These weeknotes are primarily a tool for me to gather my thoughts and reflect on the past week. After many attempts at private journaling, the discipline of getting some structured thoughts down each week has been good for me1. I’ve been reflecting on how getting the posts out publicly changes what I write, particularly after reading the thoughts of Colin Walker and James Shelley, two bloggers I have discovered through the wonderful micro.blog. Colin Walker notes in Writing in the Social Era:
Is it a surety in our thoughts and our words, an arrogance that leads us to share them with the world? Or is it the opposite, an uncertainty that requires confirmation? Knowing our own mind is an internal, personal act but, being so closely linked to our perception of who we are, does it become a projection of ourselves. Is there a desire to be seen, to be known, to be acknowledged? A cry of “this is me” and the only way we know how to do that, the only way that is readily accessible, is to publish that cry to the web and hope someone hears. For those who claim to write solely for themselves to hit publish, moving from the private to public sphere, has to be something so fundamental to who they are, something incredibly individual – otherwise why post publicly at all? What would be the point?
There are definitely notes I capture during the week which get removed when I edit, either because they are too revealing about my client or people that I work with, or that I don’t want to say in public; perhaps the weeknotes are then less useful to me than a private journal because of this. I know from my experience of being involved with the Readmill platform that the very fact that I was ‘reading out loud’ meant that I became a much more prolific reader. For me, being public isn’t trying to ‘show off’ to an audience, it’s a genuine desire to engage with other people in interesting conversation, although I am sure I am also seeking some form of validation in the feedback from others. The reason I have been thinking about this is that I am now aware of how many of my notes seem to start off along the lines of “It’s been an incredibly busy week” and talking about how many things I’m trying to juggle. This week it has been incredibly busy once again, and I find myself being very self-conscious about starting yet another weeknote the same way because (a) it’s monotonous and (b) I’m sure there are many people who would read this who have had even more of a hectic time as me. I don’t mean to moan, it’s just how it feels. Despite being conscious of having too many plates spinning and cautious about adding to the number in rotation I’ve continued to take on more. Continuing a theme of recent weeks, my diary looked like this: I’m in a Programme Management role so most of my time should be spent talking to people and working with my team to keep things aligned and pointing in the same direction. The trouble is that I’ve also got some chunky items that I need to deliver myself as well — reviews of documents for each programme stream, putting together a coordinated plan, integrating the programme with others that are also executing at the same time. Focused time to work on these doesn’t exist, and the only time I’ve managed to find is in the evening. I’m sure the answer is to block out time in the calendar if I can, but this is a whole new discipline that I will need to master. Needs must? It’s a bank holiday Monday next week. I spent no time at my desk on Friday and have emails galore to catch up on; another day’s worth building up from the team in South Africa while I’m away fills me with dread. I’m currently contemplating working on Monday just to focus on getting through the backlog and getting organised, but it also doesn’t feel like a good answer. Our software rollout in Brazil was the most difficult since our pilot in London back in November. We spent a few evenings working as a team this week to try and resolve the issues; this was made a lot harder by personnel changes in the company that provides our IT infrastructure and our need to beg, borrow and steal to replace them. Communicating via group text messages across multiple countries and time zones is hard to do well and it’s so easy for information to be misinterpreted — there’s no substitute for stepping through an issue as slowly as you can so that you can ascertain exactly what’s going on: Who has the problem and who doesn’t? When did it start? What changed? What did we do so far? I am grateful that the office is small so that the team on the ground could keep the users easily informed. We got there in the end through a great team effort; I’m hoping that the success continues now that our team members have flown home. We have a ‘snagging list’ backlog issues from our rollout across the four countries that we have gone live in. Given our resource shortages it’s going to be difficult to get these dealt with on top of turning our attention to getting the builds ready for Asia. Frustratingly, we have a different desktop stack in the three regions we operate in, and different stacks again for the virtual desktop/remote access solutions. Part of my programme is to move us to a brand new stack and I will insist on the success criteria including having (as much as we can) one build everywhere; users and the support teams should be able to pick up any laptop and know that it will work exactly the same as all of the others. At school, our Full Governing Board meeting went really well. We managed to spend the right proportion of our time on the important things and reach some good collective decisions. I even managed to use my commute the next day to follow up with some urgent actions from the meeting, which felt great to have completed so quickly. We will lose a few governors over the next six months and have some important roles to assign to those who have left; the team have stepped up and most of these are now in place with a few notable exceptions. I’m sure we’ll get the rest assigned before the summer term ends. I’ve had Mariah Carey earworms all week (don’t ask — this deserves a blog post on its own and I’ll spare you here) so it felt a little strange to switch gears to a choice for Album Club. My selection went down quite well and I was happy that it generated a bit of discussion, which is always so much better than where everyone just agrees on a common view. I don’t think anyone loved it anywhere near as much as I do, but there’s a lot of joy that comes from repeated plays — it’s a real grower — and Album Club is mainly about immediate impact and a bit of follow-up in your own time. As host, I executed my role of quantity surveyor for beer and snacks near-perfectly, with just a few ales and a couple of bags of crisps left over. Once again I felt grateful the next day that I don’t drink anymore; a tough day would have been made even tougher if I had carried a hangover with me. I’ve been avidly ploughing my way through Alison Gazzard’s Now The Chips Are Down, the next selection for the WB40 book club. It’s very well-written and has brought back so many memories of being introduced to computers through the BBC Micros we had in school. I’ve got tons of notes and will have to write up my thoughts once I’ve finished this one. Next week: Keeping the plates spinning with on-boarding new staff, backfilling others, planning a technical workshop in Johannesburg, getting as far as as I can with reviewing workstream documentation and putting the first draft of an integrated programme plan in place, talking to a new vendor about migrating shared drive folders to the cloud, getting ready for our rollout in Asia, and so much more besides. And that’s just work…we also need to move everything out of our lounge ready for it be decorated the week after. So much to prioritise. Thank you for the encouragement Matt Ballantine and Dave Floyd. ↩ Related