This week was continued in isolation after my positive tests for COVID-19. I am so fortunate that my symptoms were mild. By midweek I felt as though I was ‘over the hump’ of the illness and more or less back to normal. It coincided with a relatively easy week on my indoor bike training programme and I managed to get back in the saddle again.
Working for a company with headquarters in South Africa, December is always a quiet month which gets progressively more so as the calendar moves towards Christmas. A number of people in the team took advantage of the SA public holiday on Thursday to start their Christmas/summer holidays early, and some team members in London decided to follow their lead.
The quiet time gave me a chance to catch up on my project work. Having lots of time to myself also precipitated one of my occasional digital crises, where I find myself questioning my whole workflow for getting things done. I was useful to write it all out on a whiteboard and identify where things aren’t working. I have identified some actions to sort it out and am hoping that I’ll get a chance to make progress with them over Christmas. I’ll try and write up my thinking.
I now find myself coming out of isolation and having a rare day off coming up where everyone else in my family will be at work or school. It’ll be interesting to venture into town and see how busy it is given the ongoing massive rise in COVID-19 cases here in the UK. It still feels like we are walking on eggshells as we head towards Christmas, with nervousness as to whether we’ll be able to travel to see our families.
This was a week in which I:
- Reviewed the latest iteration of the architecture document for our door access upgrade in one of our offices.
- Restocked the backlog of Kanban cards relating to the projects under my name, including the door access upgrade, mandatory compliance call recording for Teams and a migration to Teams telephony in two of our offices.
- Reviewed a long list of items to get done next year in our office in Asia along with our local team member there.
- Caught up with our key IT infrastructure vendor on a list of outstanding actions across a number of projects.
- Met with another vendor of digital signage software and had a demo of their system.
- Continued a small amount of tinkering with the digital signage that I have up and running on a Raspberry Pi. To fully test it I need to take it into the office and ‘soak test’ it for a period of time, which now won’t happen until next year.
- Met with a new member of the team who will be working with us in 2022 on TableauCRM development.
- Reviewed our department risk board along with the rest of our management team.
- Had a ‘random coffee’ with a colleague working in our Global Markets team. We had met through the random pairing system before, but roughly 18 months ago. It was great to catch up again.
- Cancelled my Sky Sports subscription for the F1 off-season. I’ll be calling again in 90 days to re-enable it when we’re ready to go racing again.
- Joined a bunch of other people from the WB-40 podcast Signal group in the running of the World Cup of Biscuits. Plain old shortbread controversially came out on top.
- Created my first page of a knowledge base section on this site, with more to follow.
Next week: Out of quarantine in time for Christmas. Continuing to prioritise getting my digital life in order.
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