Incredibly busy week from start to finish. I felt ready to drop on Friday night. But it was a good form of tiredness — we’d managed to move a number of projects on significantly this week.
After feeling a little croaky for a few days, my youngest boy tested positive for COVID-19 for the second time in six months and had to stay home from school. I keep hearing reports of people catching the virus a few months on from when they previously had it; I’m not sure this is the endemic state we really want to be in.
This was a week in which I:
- Spent a significant amount of my week on our planned conference in June. I established and chaired our first weekly project meeting that covers the technology aspects of the conference. We also met on site with a prospective vendor to go into detail about their proposal to run the digital components, and continued the discussion later in the week via diagrams and email. Some very big decisions on the format are lined up for next week.
- Completed testing on the Teams mandatory regulatory audio recording system. Ran a demo of the system for the CEO and their staff in one of our offices which went brilliantly — ‘feeling’ the change has so much more value than reading about it. I’ve now set up two more demonstration meetings next week and opened them up to the rest of our colleagues around the world.
- Circulated details of the financial implications of further simplifying our wide-area network. We’re planning to proceed with the changes this year.
- Participated in our digital working group.
- Met with colleagues to discuss how we can improve digital literacy throughout our firm. The conversation expanded to discuss how we can more generally become an organisation that communicates on all sorts of topics. This stuff really excites me; the possibilities are vast.
- Had a couple of random coffees with colleagues. We’re almost two years in but I still love having these scheduled catch-ups.
- Met with an old colleague for our regular check-in to keep in touch.
- Attended the Leesman Hybrid Working Employee Experience Data Debrief webinar. Lots of data and interesting highlights and insight, but I didn’t feel as though there were enough concrete statements about what companies should be doing in response. Perhaps this is asking too much given how unique each company’s setting is.
- Enjoyed an interesting internal ‘learning hour’ presentation on our RADIUS/NPS servers, what they do and how we have been optimising them. The weekly session continues to be a great place for people to practice presenting in a relatively safe space.
- Attended our annual ‘in-house’ school governor training, this time on on Knowing Your School and Ofsted, run by Herts for Learning. As always, the course was superb and gave us lots to think about.
- Hosted the latest Album Club that we have started up at work. I’m not sure that my choice of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake was the right one, but given recent global events I’ve been thinking about the album a lot. Any night when I get to sit and listen intently to an album is a good night.
- Joined the first session of the second Micro.Camp, to hear from the team on the state of all things micro.blog. The sessions started on Friday evening UK time and continued throughout Saturday so I couldn’t join any of the others, but I am looking forward to watching the videos.
- Pushed hard on my bike. Our Saturday morning club ride was satisfyingly punchy once again. The next day it was followed by the club’s annual ‘spring classic’ reliability ride. For a 106km route, the classic was really tough, with rain showers, headwinds and punctures adding to the challenge. I was so hungry at the end, and satisfied my savoury craving by gorging on an unseemly number of sandwiches.
- Heard the terrible news that one of my old school friends had passed away. We met up a few years ago and he told me that he had been dealing with significant health issues, but it was still a shock to hear.
Next week: Big project decisions, hosting some short on-line demonstrations, a school governor meeting and a team lunch.
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