Thoughts and other things from the week…
- I spoiled my weeknote streak last week. In retrospect I can see how a busy work week going into a busy family orientated weekend contributed to this.
- To set myself up to succeed with future weeknotes. I’m going to adopt this bullet list approach.
- Can a person with sufficient competance and clarity beat a bad system? I’d say yes, they’ll figure out how to work around the system. But that comes as a cost. And by extension, someone without sufficient clarity and competance can easily hampered by the bad system. They might even become part of it.
- I was reflecting on the whole ‘build it or buy it’ question and realised that I’ve learned A LOT from the past couple of years of working with both approaches.
- I read a Wired story about chronological timelines being better for our mental health, but people actually dislike them and want the algorhithm. Whilst I get the argument that people like TikTok specifically because it’s finding new things for you to consume, it’s also the reason I binned it because I could recognise it wasn’t healthy for me. I sense this might be sugar/tobacco type thing. Feels good but potentially horrible for your health, especially for those who get really hooked.
- Of the many twists and turns of Twitter, the re-brand to ‘X’ has felt particularly sad. I’m not given to dramatic exists, so I’ll probably keep dipping in and out of Twit.. err… X for as long as some of the people I follow are active. But certainly feels like another step towards the end. Although admittedly, I’m surprised it’s all still lurching along so I’m semi curious what the end looks like.
- I used a problem definition template as thing to hang a conversation on about a couple of new systems. I think this worked quite well in surfacing the basics of things like user needs, desired outcomes and metrics. I think we’ll likely replace it with something like a more traditional MoSCoW list, but it feels like a useful starting exercise.
Interesting stuff…
- Hacking service blueprints – https://medium.com/@camerontw/hacking-service-blueprints-d1fcc526138e
- Agile isn’t everything and everything isn’t agile – https://paulitaylor.com/2023/07/28/agile-isnt-everything-and-everything-isnt-agile
- Don’t miss the boat – https://johnbromford.wordpress.com/2023/08/02/dont-miss-the-boat
- “People were more open to returning to the office if it was optional” – https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/research-damaging-results-mandated-return-to-office-worse-than-we-thought-rto-remote-work-careers-leadership-gleb-tsipursky/
- Germany’s €49 ticket pushes passenger numbers up 25% on local train services – https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/31/deutschlandticket-germanys-49-ticket-pushes-passenger-numbers-up-25-on-local-train-service
- Meta just proved people hate chronological feeds – https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds
- BBC Analysis Podcast – Does work have to be miserable? – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0g38qvp
