Story — notes

Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset
Published in
3 min readApr 30, 2021

As part of my #weeknotechallenge I have decided to challenge myself to doing a different style of weeknotes every week.

I’m now on my 14th! Ihave learnt so much from doing this, i will share my thoughts and lessons soon…

The other 13 are linked below:

‘Traditional’ Weeknotes , Gif-Notes , Sketch-Notes, Shanty-Notes, Week-quotes, Animal Crossing — Notes , Poster — Notes, Haiku — notes, Achievement — notes, Hanami — notes, Meme — notes, Retro — notes, Comic — notes

This week its Story Time! I saw a great Ted Talk on storytelling and thanks to Catriona’s session last week i was also inspired by some of the storytelling sessions we have done as part of the festival.

Enough jabber im sure you want to here my story:

Once upon a Monday there was a man in the same position he had been in for the last year. Motivated from the week past he finalised a blog. To inspire. To Encourage. To Energise. To be creative! That was the goal

“If i can make at least one person think more creative then i have succeeded.”

For once the inner perfectionist was restrained and pleased with the result in front of him*we will see how long he can be contained

The Motivation Monday ended, and all was calm

Or so it seemed? …

Tuesday was a day of process mapping, meetings arranged from all over the team to talk through the process,

“This can’t be too complicated can it?” he pondered

He was wrong.

Once he started mapping the process began to split and split and split and split some more.

“when does it end?” he began to think to himself

collaboration and percistance was the key. Once the mapping was finished it was time to admire the finished product…

“looks like a caterpillar” … the process went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Like an impassable game of Ping Pong.

“Well that’s one area mapped, onto the next”

PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!

Wednesday began with the sound of team’s notifications rattled through his eardrums. Excitement was in the air. The cause of this excitement and energy?

The Festival of the Future.

Ideas were pinging left and right spreading to different meetings and team sites but it had to stop.

“Let’s just stick a meeting in and get it all sorted” He exclaimed

And that idea was probably the best decision he made that week because everything was sorted in less then an hour and all decisions were made. What a rush!

Once Thursday came about there was lots to be done on a variety of different projects and tasks across digital & design. One momentous moment was arrive at the final version of the Digital Dorset Podcast.

There are no sweeter words then ‘this is great, happy for it to go out’

The podcast was finally out! The podcast was finally out! The podcast was finally out!

What feels like weeks of work and months of waiting had all come to a head

Breathing a sigh of relief, he hoped that the final outcome was worth all the waiting and debating.

As Friday came about the dreaded words began to echo round the home office… ‘Mandatory training’

Overnight some emails had come though to remind him of what needed to be done.

“Mandatory seems to take all the fun out of it” he mulled.

But he’s a big boy, he pulled his socks up and pushed through the various online learnings, you never know he might learn something!

Short story…He did.

Friday was also a day of data. Data, data, data. Better use of data, user data, how we use data. This was a word used a lot but maybe not a concept used a lot when it comes to the organisation.

There was a big ol’ spreadsheet and there was only one person who could perform effective analysis on the row after row of responses… Alan Kenyon.

But since he wasn’t available Sam had to do it himself.

He stuck his headphones in and found a Spotify playlist he liked, as movie themes began to play the data analysis began and time flew by. The power of music!

Although there was work still left to be done… you have to save some fun for the next week!

Hope you liked my story!

Sam out.

--

--

Sam McLaren
Digital Dorset

Working to promote Dorset as a place to live, work, and visit. DL100 member. Inspiringthefuture volunteer. TED Speaker #SamsBrightIdeas