Month: March 2021

The biggest and most unexpected news in my life this week was receiving a COVID vaccine. I had been contacted by the NHS by text message, and had booked an appointment for April, but then was called on Wednesday morning and asked to go that very day.

I’m asthmatic, and was in childhood, and then again from age 27. It’s well-managed, though, and doesn’t stop me from (usually) leading a reasonably-active lifestyle. As a result, it felt a little like receiving some kind of golden ticket.

While I can’t complain about getting the vaccine, I had planned to receive it on a Friday afternoon. This is because I know how I usually feel after receiving my annual flu jab, and I didn’t want it to interfere with my working week. Sure enough, I felt rough on Thursday and Friday. I’ve also got a bad back (still!) but I’m trying not to grumble.

This has been Week 10 of the Catalyst-funded Universal Credit programme I’m project managing, and Week 5 of the Definition programme I’m working on with my co-op colleagues. With the former, we’ve just a week left (bar any continuation funding) so we’re wrapping up our prototype work and focusing on reporting/handover. With the latter, we’re helping the charities get ready to create their ‘Minimum Lovable Product’ (MLP) and then test it with their target audience(s).

Other than some business development, it’s been Catalyst all the way this week for the ~23 hours of paid work I did. I read an article in Fast Company this week about the 25-hour work week and how it’s the future. Well, right now it’s the reality for me. I’m not sure, to be honest, where the 37.5 or 40-hour work week comes from. I average about 5 hours per day and, as I’ve said many times before, four hours of that is solid knowledge work and the other is admin.

I’m still reflecting on just what my response should be to the ‘Deep Adaptation’ paper I wrote about recently. My concern is that it feels like a potentially-valid response to throw your hands in the air and double-down on things that maximise both hedonism and killing the planet.

That’s not what I feel like doing. I feel like minimising my impact on nature. As an educator (by training) and a technologist (by interest) I feel that I should not only make some changes to my digital life, but encourage others to do likewise. I’m struggling a little to know exactly what to do, but I’ve been checking out Low-tech Magazine’s solar powered website, and outside of work I’m using some older, lower-powered tech. It doesn’t feel like enough, though.

I think I might need a break from writing Thought Shrapnel for a bit. It’s devolved into me just sharing links via blog posts which then get packaged up into a weekly newsletter. Last week, I just shared a couple of posts I’d written on this blog instead. What I probably need, like most people, is a holiday to get away from the home in which I live and work.

Next week I’ve scheduled a couple of days off, but I may need to move things around due to the requirements of the projects I’m working on. Right now, I feel like I’d like to go and pitch my tent somewhere with some nice scenery for a few days, do some walking, and cook on a Trangia. It won’t be long before all that’s possible, I suppose.

Photo taken by me on Wednesday.

Our two children went back to school this week on Monday and Thursday, respectively. According to the government data, our particular area of Northumberland had between zero and three cases of Covid-19 the week before so, despite my misgivings, and due to their enthusiasm, they went back.

It’s a bit of a relief to get them out of the houses to be perfectly honest. Much as I love them, and as great as they’ve been during successive lockdowns, it’s nice to have some adult space. Due to my home office being separate to our house, I wasn’t even the one most inconvenienced, so I think my wife was the one breathing the biggest sigh of relief.

It’s been Week 9 of 11 for the Catalyst-funded Universal Credit project I’ve been project managing. This week has gone particularly well, culminating in us running a well-attended ‘show and tell’ session. We had funders, members of government digital teams, charities, and other interested parties.

The thing that’s been particularly gratifying has been the feedback we’ve had about not only the amount of work we’ve achieved but the quality of it in a short space of time. That being said, as I’ll say in the report, I think we could have achieved even more had things been set up slightly differently.

You can view the prototypes as they stood in Wednesday here and the slides from our presentation below. The recording from the event will be on the project blog soon.

In terms of the other Catalyst project, the one being led by Laura and involving 19 charities doing some work around ‘Definition’, it very much reminds me of my teaching days. There’s different levels of engagement and willingness to trust the process, shall we say. Thankfully, it’s been a mostly positive process so far.

That project has just finished Week 4 of 10 so it’s still early days for all involved. What’s interesting is that a few projects have started to realise that what they thought they knew about the people their charity exists to serve, and what might actually be the case, are two different things. Reality can be stubborn.

I wrote a blog post about the recent work we did with the cohort around system ecosystems and content audits on the We Are Open Co-op blog.

Prompted by some podcasts I’ve listened to, as well as some associated reading, this week I’ve been writing about human extinction. It’s not a cheery topic, but it’s a necessary one to discuss when our infantile and narcissistic world leaders do nothing.

• Everyone has an eschatology — “Whatever our professed spiritual beliefs I reckon everyone has an eschatology. That is to say, we have a theory, either explicit or implicit, about how the world will end ⁠— and whether that will occur in our lifetime, our children’s lifetime, or neither.”
• The role of the man who foresees is a sad one — “Things break down when groups within societies fundamentally differ about ontology, epistemology, or ethics. The result is a form of militant tribalism, where each tribe believes that another is stopping them saying or doing particular things. The ‘others’ pose some kind of threat to ‘our’ way of life.”

Sadly, these posts barely caused a ripple when I shared them on various social networks. Meanwhile, a photo of my tear-off calendar went viral on Twitter. I don’t understand the world anymore.

I’ve done very little in the way of exercise this week, not because I’ve been busy (which I have) but because my back has been painful. So much so, in fact, that I ended up phoning the doctor about it. Turns out that I need to do gentler exercise and take it easy for a couple of weeks.

Yep, I’m getting old.

Header image taken at sunrise at Druridge Bay, Northumberland.