Open Thinkering

We’re now three months into living in our new house. Although we’ve unpacked everything and done most of the things that needed sorting immediately, there’s still a lot to do. My home office is still in the utility room, something which I need to rectify as soon as possible. If I hear another washing machine spin cycle while I’m working, or if one more member of my family comes in during a Zoom call to get something from the fridge behind me, I think I might explode 🤯

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It’s been the last week of term for our two teenagers, with my daughter finishing middle school and my son finishing the first year of Sixth Form. I’m not going to trot out any clichés, but the pandemic does seem to have had quite a distorting effect on the passage of time. This time next year, my son will have finished school, and perhaps be preparing for university; my daughter will be starting her GCSEs.

This is the first year when we haven’t booked at least one of them into summer holiday activities. As teenagers, they’re going to have to entertain themselves a bit over the next six weeks. My son will be doing more shifts at his part-time job, and (hopefully) doing both revision and some school assignments. My daughter? She’ll probably read the entire local library while recovering from her knee injury.

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A month ago, I went to my GP asking for some preventative medication for the migraines I’ve experienced all of my adult life. I’ve been reticent to do this, as when I’ve tried before, everything I’ve tried has made me tired. I explained this to the doctor, and he prescribed Candesartan, which is usually used to treat high blood pressure.

Guess what? I stopped taking it a couple of days ago because I was knackered.

It’s only when I spent a moment to reflect on having migraines for the past 25 years that I truly grasped the impact they have on my life. I get them from not having enough sleep, from being even moderately stressed, or from drinking more than a couple of beers. I have to keep my heart rate under 160 when I exercise, ensure that I’m hydrated enough, and don’t consume too much sugar. Air travel triggers them, as does too much time on screens, and flashing lights. I get migraines from having too much caffeine. Yet caffeine also helps dispel them if I haven’t got my Rizatriptan handy. It’s a constant struggle.

Like most chronic conditions, I can prevent and mitigate my migraines by controlling my environment and day-to-day routines. Working from home greatly helps with this, to the extent that I don’t think I could ever give up remote work. I’m not entirely sure that my family realise the extent to which I experience shared activities differently to them. I just hope that my two teenagers don’t develop migraines; I was 18 when I started suffering from them, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

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Anyway, what have I been up to this week?

• Working on the Job Readiness Credentials project with JFF, IRC, and Participate. We ran the client kick-off meeting, came up with survey questions, sorted out logistics and finance-related stuff, and populated the kanban board.
• Having a chat with a couple of people, including Simone who connected me with a bunch of contacts who might be able to help with the above project.
• Collaborating with my colleagues as part of a WAO monthly co-op half-day of planning. Anne joined us for most of it, although she’s started a new job so will be collaborating with us much less over the coming months. It’s great seeing her development from our intern to striking out on her own.
• Studying towards my MSc in Systems Thinking. I’ve started working on my second assessment for the module I’m currently taking. The word count is ridiculously small given the size of the ideas with which we’re grappling. We’ve been told that we’ll be penalised by one mark for every 1% over the word count 🙄
• Updating the WAO wiki in preparation for our new website. We’re going to keep the latter super-simple, linking out to the wiki and our Learn with WAO site. That means moving and updating pages. I took the opportunity to update our various policies.
• Listening to The Phenomenological We which was recommended to me by Jamie Allen after he read my post on the role of phenomenology in systems thinking. It’s an interesting and well put-together lecture, but ultimately I think we need to take into account both intention (forwards-looking behaviour) and existing webs of beliefs (backwards-looking behaviour) when thinking about shared/group experiences. Perhaps I should write more on that, as I have more to say than is appropriate for a bullet point 😅
• Being driven by my son, who is progressing really well and I would say is almost ready for his test. He’s very keen, even driving my daughter and me to the swimming pool even though he wasn’t going in himself!
• Continuing with my summer social media detox. That’s given me space to tinker and experiment with stuff, including an installation of Writebook and (separately) creating a PDF of blog posts I wrote about my previous MSc module.
• Writing blog posts, including those for my current MSc module, and:
  • AI for boring project tasks
  • On the bench

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Next week, we’ll hopefully be sending out the stakeholder surveys for the Job Readiness Credentials project. I’ll also be coming up with the user research questions, and ensuring that everything is set up for me being on holiday for the two weeks after that. I’ve been looking into some of the stuff we can do while we’re in the Azores.

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Photo taken on my 10k running route via Mitford. Given the shape of the tree canopy and that there’s the remains 12th century castle next to it, I’m guessing this is a pretty ancient road.