{"id":4130,"date":"2018-05-20T16:31:30","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T16:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/?p=4130"},"modified":"2021-11-21T19:58:51","modified_gmt":"2021-11-21T19:58:51","slug":"weeknote-18-gasps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andrewdoran.uk\/blog\/2018\/05\/20\/weeknote-18-gasps\/","title":{"rendered":"Weeknote #18 \u2014 Gasps"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The past couple of weeks have been so busy \u2014 this week reaching a \u2018having difficulty breathing\u2019-level of busyness \u2014 with regular gasps when remembering things I need to or have committed to do. Despite having a good ubiquitous capture tool<\/a> and a reasonably solid GTD<\/a>-esque reminder system I still found myself juggling to get through the week without dropping anything.<\/p>\n

In my current role I have fallen off of the Inbox Zero bandwagon and am struggling to prioritise the time to get back on again. I remember reading a post by Michael Lopp<\/a> which said that he gets all of his inboxes to zero every day. How? Surely he must take a brutal approach to processing it. Someone I know recently invested in a \u2018GTD coach<\/a>\u2019 and a couple of weeks later is still finding themselves doing a lot of capturing and processing and not as much actioning as they would like. The coach\u2019s advice is that the GTD process will reflect back at you when you have too many commitments and you need to do something to pull back on them. I\u2019m just not sure what I can pull back on right now.<\/p>\n

My calendar seems to be perpetually full. I\u2019ve thought about defensive scheduling<\/a>, but most of the meetings are with people who are getting work done for my programme and the cost of me having some time back is a potential loss of prioritisation, direction and focus in the team. I\u2019m going to have to do something about it soon as there are some big<\/strong> things to get done before the end of May: on-boarding workshops with our new chosen vendor to help us with where we\u2019re ultimately heading, working through the details of the programme plan with each of the stream leads, integrating the work across all of the streams and creating an approach and plan for hiring. All of this while we continue our software rollout in our final two countries and work on fixes and updates for the locations where we are already up and running. I\u2019m going to have to take a hard line with prioritisation as much as I can, and across the team we need to make sure we are as spending as little time as possible on the old\/current infrastructure platform. We have a small team and need to keep everyone focused on making where we are going<\/em> great.<\/p>\n

Late on Monday afternoon I suddenly found myself picking up and coordinating the communications around a significant production issue. As the team is small, if something like this happens it is very easy for us to get sucked into managing the detail. Looking back, it was interesting and unusual in that it only impacted us and not our primary infrastructure supplier, as in the past problems typically hit both of us at the same time. As we continue to move further aware from their infrastructure stack there will be more cases like this. The key thing is making sure that everyone has the same understanding of who is responsible for ownership and communications, no matter where the problem originates.<\/p>\n

My contract with my client has been renewed for another year, which is great. The first year of being a contractor has gone by so quickly; I can\u2019t believe that it\u2019s been 12 months since I was preparing to leave my old job<\/a> and venture out on my own. I still have a long list of things I want to do with the company I\u2019ve set up, not least of which is finishing off my website which has been on my to-do list for months.<\/p>\n

My evenings have been spent keeping on top of governor work. May is the time that we close out on last year\u2019s budget and agree on the next one, and I\u2019ve put a lot of time into getting my head around the various views of school financial data so that I can confidently sign them off. The staff at our new Financial Services supplier have been great; it was lovely to get my long list of questions answered so quickly, while the context and reasoning was still fresh in my mind. Next week we have the penultimate Full Governing Board meeting of the academic year and as usual we have a lot to get through; I\u2019m going to have to be on-form as Chair in order for us to finish on schedule.<\/p>\n

SATS week came and went in a flash. We\u2019re so lucky that our eldest boy didn\u2019t seem fazed by it at all. The school is so supportive; the year 6 teachers sent the fantastic letter below to everyone they had a special in-school breakfast all week, making sure that they were all settled in order to do their best. I\u2019m clearly biased, but I\u2019m so happy that our boys ended up attending this school.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

Our younger boy has made us proud by being chosen as \u2018player\u2019s player\u2019 of the season in his football team. He\u2019s so pleased to get the award and it\u2019s great to see him have some sporting success when usually so much of the awards and plaudits are focused on his older brother.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The hastily-assembled WB40 podcast<\/a> book club tackled our first book, The Power of Moments<\/a><\/em> by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The plan was to read the first three chapters (as that\u2019s the assumed distance into a typical business book required for you to understand what the rest of it will say) and then discuss it. It\u2019s been great to join in but I\u2019ve been worried about leaving a trail of half-read books all over the place. So, after reading the first three chapters I ploughed on and finished the book, helped significantly by having the audiobook version to accompany my commute. It\u2019s a good read and has sparked some very interesting discussion, but my conclusion is that in this case the three-chapter rule is correct. I\u2019ve fallen out of the habit of writing book reviews recently but will try and put something together on this one.<\/p>\n

I managed to remember to cancel my trial Economist<\/a> subscription before they hit me with a big charge. They seem a little sneaky in that there is no automated unsubscribe option and you need to send an email to them in order to do it. \u201cThat\u2019s how they get ya.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next week: More professional diary wrestling, running our next Full Governing Board meeting and then hosting Album Club<\/a> #87. My turn to host felt like miles away and now it\u2019s here, and I still haven\u2019t settled on an album choice. Here are some tracks from the shortlist of three:<\/p>\n