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.