Weeknotes 06

It was a mixed week.

What did I learn?

We (Esko Reinikainen and I) made a visit to the publishing team at the Office for National Statistics. Visiting digital webby-folk is always interesting but also slightly awkward. “Oh, I see you too have desks, whiteboards and meeting rooms”.

Of course. We learned loads.

We sat in on a show and tell which made me rather wistful for the days when I worked in a technical team. We sat in on a retrospective and totally planned to steal ideas from how it was structured. We talked about graph databases A LOT and learned a bit more about the ONS and their transformation journey.

In return we gave a 30 minute talk at their lunch and learn. On reflection we perhaps tried to cover too much ground but some people were certainly nice about what we had to say.

What frustrated me?

I managed to make a reasonable scale error. A tender had been published which was unusually well-suited to our offer. It was exciting. We were excited. Somehow, even though it was correctly entered into my calendar I managed to kid myself that the deadline was several days later than it was. With the result that we didn’t get the tender in.

And this unforced (and somewhat out of character error) rather highlighted that I am not at the top of my game.

How will I behave differently?

I’ve been thinking about the supposed US Navy SEAL aphorism

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”

Work (and life) pressure can creep up on you. Before you know it you’re conscious that you have so much to do that you become paralysed. This is where tools ranging from Kanban to GTD all try to help: to move your focus onto the what is the most important thing to do now.

But tools are just tools. You also need to be mindful about how you use them. So this week, after the wake up call of the tender, I’ve been trying to slow it down.

What happened this week that gave me a glimpse of the future?

I’m at the very early stages of working up an IoT/conservation/agriculture project as part of our partnership with The Brightspace Foundation. We’ve got to put more flesh on the bones of the project and go looking for funding. So we probably won’t have devices on the ground for a while. Even so I can already see many more possibilities for future projects beyond the prototype we’re working up.

But I’m gonna focus on the first project first. Because slow is smooth you know.

Thanks for reading.

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