{"id":3955,"date":"2018-02-03T09:37:26","date_gmt":"2018-02-03T09:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/?p=3955"},"modified":"2018-02-05T18:51:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-05T18:51:54","slug":"weeknote-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2018\/02\/03\/weeknote-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Weeknote #3"},"content":{"rendered":"
I feel like I\u2019ve worn myself out this week. Monday turned to Friday in a flash, and here we are at the weekend already.<\/p>\n

On Sunday morning, Sleep Cycle<\/a><\/em> informed me that I had just experienced my best night\u2019s rest in years and I certainly felt good for it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been out every night this week to attend two very different school governor meetings, dinner out with an old friend, a visit to the O2 to watch my 10-year old in the Young Voices<\/a> choir and then rounding it off with Album Club<\/a> #84<\/a>. It\u2019s weeks like these where I remember why I decided to give up drinking<\/a> as I don\u2019t think I could easily handle being even more<\/em> tired than I ended up on Friday.<\/p>\n

I worked from home on Monday in order to squeeze more things into the day. My potential lie-in was sacrificed by being up at my usual time, replacing the morning commute with an hour on the turbo trainer. My wife\u2019s genius idea of setting things up the night before was brilliant as I didn\u2019t then need to faff about for 20 minutes or so in the morning, one less barrier to actually doing the exercise. I couldn\u2019t believe how good and sharp it made me feel for the rest of the day. I\u2019d managed to get on the turbo last weekend as well and it felt great to be back on the bike.<\/p>\n

We managed to finish Monday night\u2019s Full Governing Board meeting in just over two hours, about a third shorter than our last one. We always push to get the agenda and materials out a week before but typically there is the odd late paper which we need to deal with; this time we almost<\/em> nailed it and it helped a great deal, taking most of the papers as read and just dealing with questions. A couple of weeks ago I attended a governance meeting chaired by someone else who did a great job of keeping everything to time; this made me really conscious of my role to keep our<\/em> meeting moving along. It\u2019s a very tricky balance to be struck between spending time on an important point and moving onto the next thing. Our Clerk sent out a really good note to the Board prior to the meeting to try and get people to hone in their responsibilities of reading the materials and bringing along good, challenging questions. Our new governors are doing a great job of this already and have a great eye for detail.<\/p>\n

One of the problems with the role of school governor is making sure you get into (and then stay in) a rhythm of things. For example, you can spend a dedicated couple of hours looking at and learning about how to interpret school data. You\u2019ll get it and be able to ask good, challenging questions and identify strengths and weaknesses. But if you don\u2019t look at it again for a few months it is very difficult to recall that knowledge easily. Our Full Governing Board meetings take place six times a year which sometimes feels too little to force this rhythm and knowledge retention. More meetings is typically not the answer \u2014 we have to balance it with the availability of our Board volunteers and school staff who are always at the back end of an extremely long and busy day.<\/p>\n

A couple of times this month I have looked at a list of my governance actions and not been able to remember whether I had completed them or not. It\u2019s made me realise how much I rely on my \u2018external brain\u2019 of notes, emails etc. and don\u2019t retain things in my head.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had a good focused week of work but the amount of stuff coming in has exceeded the amount of stuff going out. (Which has always been my puzzle with GTD<\/a>\u2019s assumption that you can continually manage to triage everything coming into your inbox and still have time for everything else; when and how do you look at your system and realise you need a more structural change?)<\/p>\n

It was great to have a session with fellow weeknoter and WB40 podcast<\/a> listener Dave Floyd<\/a> on the challenges of Office 365 migration. On the surface things seem simple but there is significant complexity underneath. This week\u2019s podcast episode<\/a> was on the topic of Working Out Loud \u2014 including creating weeknotes like this one \u2014and as always is well worth a listen. I was reminded that I had read John Stepper\u2019s book of the same name<\/a> last year and hadn\u2019t yet got around to writing up my thoughts. Stepper seems to have read every management book out there and makes liberal use of references to lots of other material. For some reason the approach of \u2018targeting\u2019 people you want to develop a relationship with didn\u2019t sit well with me and seemed a bit contrived, even if there wasn\u2019t much emphasis on it; I always thought working out loud should be a little serendipitous and altruistic. But I\u2019m probably wrong.<\/p>\n

With the work stacking up this week I have been very conscious of getting into random office chats and knowing that although some of the conversations aren\u2019t directly moving things forward, they are building relationships and sowing seeds for the future. I hope the other person doesn\u2019t notice me being conscious of it.<\/p>\n

A lesson (re-)learned from this week is that as much as I want to plough forward with things I need to ensure I bring everyone along with me, particularly where those things sit under their remit from day-to-day.<\/p>\n

Had a lovely couple of email exchanges with two people I used to work with, one who has just been through a redundancy process and is making the most of the opportunities this has given her and another who really focused me on my values and how I think about myself.<\/p>\n

Media<\/h2>\n

Books<\/h3>\n

I finished reading Radical Technologies<\/a><\/em> by Adam Greenfield. It succinctly breaks down the topics of smartphones, the Internet of Things, augmented reality, digital fabrication, cryptocurrency, blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence, along with their societal impact and paints a number of different visions of the future. It\u2019s very good. I\u2019ll need to write up my thoughts on it separately but I\u2019m sure I can\u2019t do a better job than the most-liked Goodreads reviews of the book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Articles and blog posts<\/h3>\n