Makers Week 3 — Friday
It’s been a very busy week-and-a-half since the last blog post, but I’ve got a moment to myself this morning so I thought it’d be good to catch up, and talk generally about how Makers works day-to-day.

There’s been a few days where I’ve felt a bit out of my depth, and some times where I’ve felt much more on top of things. The second weekend challenge was just as hard as the first one, but each time I have a poor experience it’s giving me insight as to why, and how to get better at it. As they say here, “It’s Not Hard, It’s New”.
Until it started, I really had no idea how Makers was going to work. The basic structure of a day is to come in for about 9.30am, start working on something about 10am, breaking for lunch around 12.30. There are often workshops in the morning, covering something from that week’s goals, but not always. You’re expecting to set your own goals and work by yourself if there’s nothing scheduled.
At 1.30pm there’s a meditation session (which I strongly recommend!), and then pairing with someone else from the cohort to work on the Weekly Challenge. The pairs are assigned to make sure you work with everyone else, and it stops the group from settling into friend groups too much. This is a really great way to simulating (to a small extent) the actual working experience of being in different groups for different projects.
The responsibility to learn yourself is a big, big part of the whole Makers ethos. It’s something you need to adapt to, as it can feel slightly strange to be left alone with no expectations. However, if you don’t make the best use of this time that’s also down to you — later on, when you’re staring at the screen wondering how to continue you’ll wish that you’d used that time better!

Makers remains a tremendous opportunity to get up to a professional standard in a short space of time. My main area to work on is the weekend-challenges, and making sure that I’m really digging into what I’m learning and finding ways to help it stick.
On a much lighter finishing note, we’re at the end of Week 3 now and that means a Friday social! There’s some karaoke tonight, so I’m going to be performing. I’m interested to see who else does!