Weeknote 06/2023
Sitrep: I’m starting to write on Friday at 17:00, sitting in the car at the side of an artificial football pitch, and not believing the temperature gauge when it says it’s 10°C outside. These things don’t factor in wind chill, as I have learned from bitter experience. Ten Storey Love Song by The Stone Roses has just come on the radio, so it looks like the weekend is starting off a positive note.
I published three posts on three different blogs this week:
- I’m pretty sure ‘status update’ meetings aren’t work
- I got 99 problems, but recognition ain’t one
- The art of the zeugma
There’s another one that I’ve got in draft form on Google Docs which you can take a peek at if you like; I don’t particularly care if you see how the sausage is made. Thanks to John Bevan, ChatGPT, and several people in my network for grammar corrections, content, and questions, respectively!
Last week I neglected to link to January’s issue of Thought Shrapnel so I’ll do so now. So far in February I’ve published the following over there:
- Britain is screwed
- Synesthetic xkcd
- Bad Bard
- Buying when the market is selling
- The party’s over for office-based work
- Sad Ben Affleck
- One place to rule them all?
On the work front, this seems to be the time of year where we wait for clients to catch up with the work we’ve done for them. I’ve spent a good bit of time in Whimsical, a tool which does a great job of allowing you to quickly visualise things which are either unspoken or buried in mountains of text. I like it.
Without wanting to be enigmatic, I’m going to continue talking about the type of work I’ve been doing this week rather than the particular projects. So, for example, I’ve been:
- Re-writing a Code of Conduct which lacked specificity around the spreading of misinformation and steps that would be taken to protect the community if the CoC was contravened.
- Coming up with a new workflow to help a client zero-in on what an ambiguously-defined new thing would look like in practice. We used people/product/process, a favourite categorisation of mine, for the second step.
- Collaborating with Bryan, who is now working with us through Visual Thinkery. We wanted his help in visualising some things related to setting up new co-ops and what cooperation looks like in practice.
- Discussing workers.coop with John Atherton about how WAO can help as it comes into existence.
- Creating a visual overview of the equivalent of a ‘sales funnel’ for attracting, training, and retaining people for a particular internal course which we’ve developed and iterated over the last couple of years.
- Advising people who booked a slot for the CoTech Digital Candle service.
- Running an advisory session for staff of an organisation we’re helping prepare for their offsite next week. We’re helping them with tips around presenting and facilitation.
I mentioned in my last weeknote that I was taking our daughter to the Newcastle United vs West Ham match on Saturday. It turned out that I then went to the Sunderland vs Fulham FA Cup 4th round replay game on Wednesday night. She was supposed to come, but then worked out that she’d be tired for her Science test the next morning. My dad still came though and, although Sunderland lost, we still had a good time.
It’s the usual four sportball games this weekend for our offspring. I do enjoy watching them, but doing so means that I do precious little else. I may manage to get to wash the cars on Saturday morning and hang out with my gaming buddies on Sunday evening. It’s a good job that I only work around 25 hours per week and my life is otherwise deliberately low-stress 😅
Photo of a copy of the book (The Names by Don DeLillo) that I was reading and enjoying until earlier this week. Unfortunately, I had to stop reading immediately as it was impossible for me to continue. Can you see why?
