9 out of 12 ain’t bad
Out of a possible 12 weeknotes this season, I managed 9. I’ll chalk this up as a victory for re-forming the habit of weekly reflection.
On the flip side, I feel like I’m reading a less weeknotes than before. I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve got less free time to read things at the moment, or because as Sam Villis mentioned in her own season retro, it’s a combination of people leaving Medium to write elsewhere and some people currently on weeknote hiatus.
Two way interaction isn’t (to me) an absolute requirement, although the feeling of community does make it easier to work openly, especially when you’re in the thick of it. Something to ponder on. 🤔
Reflection remains challenging, but invaluable
Whilst I’ve found that establishing a regular rhythm can make weeknote writing easier, I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s ever become something I’ve found easy. It remains an activity that I have to get into the right headspace to get the most out of and that can be challenging depending on energy reserves & turbulence. Although, as I’ve observed before, this is often the very best time to slow down and reflect.
This year I’ve had a couple of occasions where I’ve needed to articulate thoughts & feelings on various topics, and this is where I feel the effort invested in reflection pays dividends.
Even though I can rarely (never!) recall the detail of specific weeknotes, there’s just enough connections in my brain to help kickstart a semi-cohesive conversation about something based on previous experience and observations. I wonder whether those connections would be there if I hadn’t taken the time make notes about the week?
Writing picked up and dropped off
In 2018 I wrote around 30 non-weeknote related posts. The year before I wrote 61 posts. Whilst I don’t want to churn content out for the sake of it, it’s an interesting data point.
This year I’ve written 9 posts, many of which were published in January when I went on a bit of a tear finishing off things that had been languishing in my drafts.
Writing remains one of my favourite tools for sense making and as I’m heading toward relatively new territory in the near future, would assume that my post count is about to receive an uptick.
Ambitions Update!
At the beginning of the year I wrote down some ambitions. Let’s do a check-in on where I’m at.
- Get Healthy — scale is not going up, but nor is it going down. No carb reduction happening. Averaging about 6 hours and 30 minutes sleep. Meh. More effort required here as it’ll be an assistive boost in other areas.
Grade: D - Refocus my work on my strengths — Landed new job in a social housing organisation to help realise some exciting ambitions for ‘digital’. 🤘
Grade: A - The year of weeknotes — Completed first quarter. A promising start.
Grade: C+ - A basic grasp of Wardley mapping — I attempted one Wardley map based on housing repairs. I need to write this up to cement the learning. I also need more practice to flesh out my understanding and build confidence in mapping other things.
Grade: C+ - Do a podcast — I’m still keen on doing this, and it’s entered my thoughts on a fairly regular basis, but I’ve not allocated any meaningful time and attention to moving it along. Less procrastination required.
Grade: C
What’s next?
I’ll be starting a new job in just over a month, which I’m sure will result in an influx of lots of new adventures to write and think about. It’s a little bit scary but also massively exciting!
Until then I’ll be trying extract and compress 10 years of institutional knowledge down into a digestible format for those that I pass the baton to. This will be relatively good test to see if ‘working in the open’ has resulted in depositing enough knowledge in enough places to make myself surplus to requirements. 🙂