I made up 3 questions for my weeknotes
Well, 4 actually. Some love, some frustration, some surprises and some putting off (again).
What was a pain in the ass this week?
Trying to do 2 x 2hr Catalyst Circle meetings in consecutive days. Monday was the Support and Training Circle. Tuesday was an all Initiative Leads meeting.
The pain in the ass was me running out of oomph and ability to engage in the Tuesday meet. This happened because:
- I had a post-lunch slump. Usually being on a call helps me out of a slump. This time it just didn’t happen.
- Parts of the meeting repeated things we’d covered the day before. I found this difficult as my to-do list had grown the day before.
- I didn’t feel that well. I’ve some personal challenges at the moment. And sometimes I get overwhelmed. On reflection I probably should have had a longer than 10 minutes break before Tuesday’s meeting.
What was delicious this week?
Diving into Service Recipes. I love this project. This week I’ve been planning user research for 4 weeks time. I’m excited because we are doing 6 different types of research:
- Desk research into tags and service patterns
- Review of similar products
- Content crit of 5 recipes
- Heuristic review of site UX (reviewing against broad UX rules of thumb)
- User interviews
- User testing
We are also recruiting people to help. Early hat tips to Steve Hawkes and Kat Quatermass — trusted people I know I can rely on.
What didn’t get done and why?
I again failed to make a start on the Catalyst Resources content strategy. Reflecting on why this hasn’t happened despite being on my list for a month I have concluded:
- Getting 8 new authors up and running with writing articles was more of a priority
- Getting these authors up and running pulled me away from other projects that I now need to put more effort towards
- We’ve got content guidelines that, for now, are helping us publish consistent articles
- Doing the website crit work took up more time than expected
I’m ok with the strategy not being started. Most of it is in my head anyway and we are learning from our new authors in a way that will actually help create the strategy in November or December.
What did get done that wasn’t expected?
I helped Matt from Platypus Digital develop a small proposal to share budget underspend from the S&T Circle across 7 initiatives. Usually initiatives would create separate proposals for what they wanted to deliver and then we’d sociocratically assess them as part of a co-budgeting process. However, this time as its not a full budgeting round we’ve decided to share it equally.
