Last weekend I was at a Hen Party. Think party games, alcohol and the cult of the aubergine emoji and you’ve got the classic cliche. Glorious fun with friends but honestly quite a weird set of rituals.

This time I headed off to Wordpress, so you can find my thoughts here: Weeknotes 43 : February Not so much #Weeknotes as #Monthnotes but it all counts. This month has been sandwiched by trips to Edinburgh - at the…controversially.wordpress.com

Its Sunday night, I’m at the gym on the bike and really quite pooped so these are *actually* going to be short! — This weekend has included a day trip to Leeds and Harrogate (which included me driving on a motorway for a lot of time– YIKES) and then a pretty solid amount of children today (what do you call the role towards kids that aren’t biologically yours but actively part of your…

Quite a week, and what a Saturday!! — In efforts not to spend my whole Sunday night writing these, I decided to do the ‘Five Things That Happened’ Method of weeknotes. Not least because I could easily spend four hours writing about just GovCamp. At our Weeknotes session at GovCamp we talked about sharing how long we took…

It’s been a while since I Weeknoted! Christmas happened (phew!) and I generally gave myself a pass over December not to do things that were “should” – so Weeknotes fell by the wayside. — In the meantime, it’s no longer week three of new job, and New Job is feeling like My Job, not least because I’ve been doing the sales pitch for it a LOT for the last couple of weeks while we’re recruiting. I did some End of The Year Reflecting and…

Straight up confession: this blog post is overdue. — It’s also Part 2 of 2, and Part 1 has turned into such a mammoth task I keep putting it down. I’ve been doing a fair bit of hiring my last couple of jobs, and I went to talk to a bunch of smart people about how to get it right (or at least better). I wanted to write all of this down in a post so other people could save themselves the effort and use the good practices I’d found and tested. I wanted to call that “What I know about hiring” and I knew there was also a spin off about applying for them. The spin off is the ugly cousin, it’s not had as much research and testing, but I’ve got some jobs live now, so I felt I really had to post some of these thoughts quickly.

I take quick notes of what we discuss at the One Team Gov Breakfast — imperfect, unattributed but hopefully it gives you good idea of the kind of things we discussed. Please join us to find out what its like in real life — everyone is welcome! Parish Notices! Cate…

I recently ran a workshop on getting started with blogging, to help colleagues across government work in the open and share what I’ve learned. I started in the way I start many things, by asking twitter. So I promised to do a little blog post to share what we talked about… — I wrote this session particularly for Government/ Work Blogs and Personal Blogs — because ‘write about what you know’. But first up, nothing in this space can start without acknowledging the help I’ve had along the way. Huge thanks to all those who gave me thoughts on twitter. Many of…

I’m trying out writing quick notes about what’s been talked about at the One Team Gov breakfast on Wednesday mornings at 1 Horseguards Road… Everyone’s welcome, if you’d like to come next time, sign up at https://oneteamgov.attending.io/ What question should I ask about nutruring rebels on talent schemes? [this relates to a conversation on twitter this weekend about the FLS, the…