
Another difficult week. I’m feeling a little crumpled by the weight of work at the moment, something that hasn’t happened in years. July was always going to be a difficult month with the amount of change that our projects are running through the organisation. It’s not a surprise, but it still feels difficult. I’ve found myself waking up somewhere between 4am and 5am, struggling to get back to sleep.
I’m typically in the office three days a week and usually end up being one of the last to leave. I cover the same hours at home, but the difference is that my commute is 30 seconds from my home office versus 90 minutes on the train. Later this year there is likely to be a push to get staff into the office at least four days a week. When we get to that point I’m going to need to try and adjust to getting out of the office at a reasonable time so that I don’t just get to see my family at weekends.
My colleagues and team members are excellent. Most of us have worked together for many years, which makes delivering a complex programme so much easier. Autonomy and division of responsibility are features of what we do. I’ve also brought in some external management assistance for our two main projects which has made things much easier. Most of the time I don’t need to micromanage or chase people up for things. But despite the load that the team are carrying, there is still too much left on my plate.
At the back end of the week my wife and I found ourselves home alone for a couple of evenings, a little sample of the future. Our youngest boy had gone to the Peak District for his Duke of Edinburgh expedition and our eldest was up in Birmingham, running for Hertfordshire in the English Schools Athletic Association Track and Field Championships. On Friday we had a lovely impromptu dinner out in town. Both of us were exhausted, falling asleep in front of the TV by 10pm. Hopefully we won’t be quite as worn out by the time we get to retire.
This was a week in which I:
- Had the regular programme and project meetings.
- Met to run through the pre-construction programme plan for changes to one of our offices.
- Reviewed the scope of our major programme with our Procurement team.
- Gave an overview and update on our programme to our divisional CFO.
- Met the divisional CFO again in a town hall meeting, hearing about his career and his view of our priorities.
- Was thrown a curveball from another company which means that we need to modify one of our plans.
- Prepared for and chaired a short Programme Steering Committee meeting. Getting into executive diaries is a problem that gets much more difficult as the summer months approach. Big decisions were made at the meeting, resulting in work to replan one of our projects.
- Had the first of a series of meetings with individual teams in one of our offices, taking them through the background to one of our key projects, explaining how the changes will impact them and fielding questions. We’ve got four or five more of these sessions lined up for the start of next week.
- Reviewed the responses to a request for quotation that we issued the week before and agreed our follow-up actions.
- Helped a colleague with a niche Office Timeline issue. I love it when someone says “don’t just do it for me, please show me how to do it.”
- Had conversations with members of our HR teams on a vacancy that I have in my team.
- Had our regular catch-up with our Non-Financial Risk team.
- Spent time looking at a long-running document management project, agreeing an approach and next steps with the project team ahead of talking to representatives from each of the departments who will be impacted by the proposed changes.
- Concluded that quality coffee is not my thing. I’ve been conducting a small unscientific experiment, trying americanos with oat milk from various coffee shops on my way into the office. I’ve had brews from Blank Street, Rosslyn and Dartbrooke, all shops of some renown. I consistently find the taste of the coffee to be too strong, too bitter, with an unattractive curdling of the oat milk. Starbucks was by far and away the most enjoyable. It’s not you, good coffee, it’s me.
- Was too tired to contemplate getting up early for a sixth day in a row to go on the weekly cycling club ride. I love it when I’m out there but I couldn’t summon the energy, particularly as it was going to be yet another grey and damp day, in a summer filled with grey and damp days.
- Enjoyed hosting Album Club, having picked an album that split the room.
Media
Podcasts
- It was interesting to hear Lisa Nandy speaking to Matt Forde in 2022 when she was the Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passionately talking about towns and communities not being left behind. I wonder whether part of the solution to distribute wealth and spending into more parts of the country could be to give white collar workers more rights to live and work remotely?
Articles
- Ian Dunt writes about how campaigning for proportional representation is still the right thing to do, despite it meaning that our voices will be united with the most unsavoury parties in parliament. I often wonder whether the Brexit referendum would have happened if the UK Independence Party had been represented appropriately in parliament; in the 2015 general election they had 3.9m votes, 12.6% of the total, and yet only ended up with one of the 650 members of Parliament. I disagree with UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform UK with every bone in my body, but I do not think it’s democratic for such disproportional representation. Having them in parliament with the light shone on them, needing to work with other parties in order to get anywhere near power would likely have neutralised them and left the main parties to focus on their traditional centrist policies.
- Project 2025 looks like a nightmare. When I read Heather Burns’ 2023 end-of-year reading list I made a note of the books as I thought they seemed interesting. I’m now prioritising them, starting with Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, as I can now see more clearly why she made the list that she did.
I hate to break it to you, but you need to be preparing for the very real prospect of the second Trump presidency.
And to bring it full circle, you need to be preparing for what a second Trump presidency will likely mean for internet governance and infrastructure.
This goes well beyond platform T&Cs, or culture wars over content moderation, or pushes for surveillance disguised as child safety. This goes to what happens when the country which happens to host most global platforms, and a good chunk of physical infrastructure, either splits into 1990s Yugoslavia or splits into 1920s Germany. Because it’s going to be one or the other. Whether you want to deal with that or not.
Video
- We’ve been enjoying Kin on Netflix, an Irish crime drama. It’s interesting to watch this so soon after The Dry as it has some of the same actors in the form of Cairán Hinds and Sam Keeley. They are superb, being quite believable in very different roles.
Audio
- Magdalena Bay announcing a new album resulted in an instant purchase from me. It comes out in August, giving me three months to get to know the songs before I see them live in November. I love them.
- I’d forgotten how good All About Eve’s In The Meadow is. I bought a second hand copy of their debut album on vinyl a few weeks ago. The record is missing a couple of songs that are on the CD, so this song finishes things off, and does it in style.
Next week: Turning the handle again.
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