Weeknotes — Week Ending 07/01/22

A picture of blue sky over a rugby pitch. Fondly remembering the two days in the week where the sun was out and it was not pouring with rain and very cold and windy!

Happy New Year!

Do you have a rule for when you stop wishing people Happy New Year? I don’t think I have a date in mind for this. I think I’m going to carry on until it seems weird.

I’m mixing up the weeknote format to give me half a chance at re-establishing the habit.

Good things

• I was pleased that the kids didn’t go back to school until the end of the week. It acted as quite a nice taper back to normality after the Christmas break. And it greatly reduced the amount of nagging I had to do in the mornings.
• I was quite happy to return to work after a very restful 2 week break. I was actually getting a bit restless toward the end which resulted in some freshly painted walls in our house.
• We had our third sprint planning meet up this week and it feels like we’re starting to get into a bit of a rhythm now that we’ve established some principles that work well for us as a team.

Difficulties

• I realised that I don’t have an easy way to convey the things the team are working on during sprints. Because we’re doing a pragmatic version of agile (we are not yet a fully agile team or org) our work as a team can be quite fragmented across multiple themes or threads which makes it difficult to summarise.
• I’ve been feeling really tired this week despite getting a solid 7–8 hours each night. I don’t know whether this is due to adopting a different sleep schedule following the Christmas break, or that the (mostly) crappy weather is sapping my energy reserves.

Learned things

• I need something that can sit between our higher level goals and our very detailed and granular kanban board to tie those two things together. Ideally it should not create a load of admin overhead!
• I should experiement with an earlier enforced bed time next week (eventhough I’ll dislike it as it chafes my nightowl tendencies).

Interesting things from the week

This tweet got my brain whirring, and the responses were excellent food for thought.

I enjoyed this MadeTech podcast on Retrospective Anti-Patterns and made some notes to improve our retrospectives: https://pca.st/qa6txnil

Just like everyone else at the moment, I’m mildly addicted to Wordle. I really liked this New York Times article which gave some insight into why it was made and what it’s gained such popularlity. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs. It’s just a game that’s fun.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/wordle-word-game-creator.html