Weeknotes — Week Ending 14/01/21

An image of the Taff Trail with some very welcome winter sun and blue sky.

How are we in mid-January already? Absolute madness!

Compared with the gentle on-ramp of last week, this week very much felt like it went from zero to 1000 miles per hour in an impressively short space of time. On the positive side, I’m very much back in work mode now having shaken off the post Christmas brain fog.

Good things

• My kids managed to make their own school lunches for a whole week! And whilst it’s true that some of the food choices were a bit spurious (a box of plain white rice, a biscuit and some tortillas chips) I was pleased that they managed to stick with the habit.
• I was really thankful for the return of sunshine which lead to some excellent mid-day dog walks to help break the working day up.
• I’m proud of our team and the enthusiasm to which they’re taking to working in sprints. It’s not always easy because we interact with non-agile friendly things, but we’re learning and adapting together which is as valuable as getting through the work itself.

Difficulties

• I’ve been having a bit of a ‘mare with things that should be routine and mundane but end up being anything but.
• My estimates on how long things take have been somewhat optimistic this week. In retrospect, could be related to the point above.

Learned things

• If I don’t press the publish button on Friday evening, there’s a high probability that my weeknotes won’t make it out till a few days later (if at all). This week I’ll try setting a time limit to fight the urge to procrastinate.
• Good now is often better than perfect too late.
• Time regularly invested in minimising unplanned work and interruptions is time well spent.

Interesting things from the week

Mind slightly blown by this tweet on adding separators in Trello!

I thought this post on the achetypes of human work was fascinating, especially when applied to previous experiences of talking to people about their work: https://humanisticsystems.com/2017/02/06/the-archetypes-of-human-work-6-p-r-and-subterfuge/

Because we’re all Wordle addicts now…

I also found this tweet to be enjoyable for no particular reason.