I’m in Manchester today helping another department out with recruitment. it’s nice learning about what other bits of government are doing. I also figured I could take the afternoon off as holiday to see some of my mates from the Co-op. an unforseen bonus of this trip though is that I could swap some Top Quality Virgin Trains Bants with Andrew. a year of sharing a 200 mile commute really sets up a friendship for success.
enjoyed this piece by Jessica Harllee who reflected on good challenges vs bad challenges on leaving Etsy. it’s dead easy to stay in situations because it feels like a failure to leave them, so thinking about good challenging x bad challenging seems like a good idea. it’s OK to decide something isn’t good for you and to want to do less of it. mistakes happen ¯_(ツ)_/¯
there was a moment midweek that I had my headphones on listening to a Paul Woolford remix of Higher Love by Whitney while I was at a board, alone, sorting post-it notes into themes. I felt happier than I had done in a long time [in a purely work context]. put down your screens!
the counter to my happy post-it sorting rave was the evening that I got home so frustrated by everything that I sat down and drew some pissed off graphs in my notebook. graphs! who knew they were a way to express feelings. only line graphs for now, but happily Jeremy gave me back my copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information so maybe my emotive graphs can get a bit more sophisticated soon. The Visual Display of Qualitative Information amirite??
in Italian on Wednesday I learned about different words for different illnesses. yesterday I developed mal di gola (a sore throat), and I still have it today. I imagine I’ll have a proper raffreddore (cold) before long and may need some pastiglie (pastilles) or perhaps lo sciroppo (cough syrup) to make myself feel better.
didn’t go to either the cross-gov design meetup or Meaning Conference yesterday. 100% rookie error.
thanks Nat and Phil for the weeknote shout outs! I’m enjoying some of the just-for-RSS content of this strange weeknote revival in what I think of as my ‘internet scene’, and look forward to joining it soon. miss u Google Reader.
finished Wilding by Isabella Tree this week. it’s a book about how she and her husband gave up intensive agriculture at their farm at Knepp in Sussex and let nature take over their land, to try to recreate an environment long gone from the English countryside. now I’m obsessed with incorrect baselining (who says nightingales want to live in woodland? maybe it’s that woodland is all we have to give them and actually they prefer scrubland!) and what built systems can learn from ecological ones (if anyone has any more reading on this, lmk, I’m here for it). looking out the window on the train to Manchester and there’s flooding everywhere on farmland, and I’m like, yo, maybe y'all need beavers or more scrubland or to let your fallen oaks stay on the ground to build beetle populations. (obviously I’ve got no idea what the land needs. sorry farmers for trying to woke-splain you, I’m just excited by learning about a new thing.)
I’ll be returning Wilding to the library tomorrow (it cost me 50p to bring it in from another library, aka A BARGAIN aka use your local library, people! they’re so good!) and picking back up The Mushroom at the End of the World, which is about “capitalist destruction and collaborative survival”, all via the lens of matsutake mushroom picking. Catherine read it months ago, I am very lucky to have a live-in thought leader <3
at one point this week I had a bit of a breakdown which involved sentences like “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!”. maybe it’s something to do with how much time I’ve spent on the expenses system. no, in reality, I am rational and responsible 94% of the time and I am slowly learning how to be selfish. it’s been tumultuous! no one ever told me that 32 is like 13, but older. is this a thing?
this week has felt exceptionally long, and I’ve been into the coffee shop across from the office enough times that they now only make me flat whites with oat milk, even when I want to go rogue and go cow’s milk. I didn’t mean to turn into a regular, I’ve never been a regular in a coffee shop before and I think I want anonymity again.
a few times this week I’ve felt that half an hour for a 1:1 meeting is much too short, but 40 minutes would probably have felt alright. why do we divide days up like this? would this still be a problem if we used Decimal Time?
we did a With Links on Time quite early on, in With Links’ second iteration. I still think about Mathew’s link quite often: Swatch Internet Time. assume Swatch were inspired by the French Revolution, and not sure why a company thought they’d succeed where the people who overturned the French monarchy failed. but ambition is important, right? be selfish, Swatch! don’t hide behind premonitions of failure, you deserve more!
on Tuesday I went to my first yoga class in months, and it was restorative yoga: did you know that means lying under a blanket in different positions? exceptionally relaxing but I can’t claim it contributed to my WHO-guidelined 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week.
also this week I had lunch with my best friend, who works about 15 minutes from our office. we are going to start having lunch once a week. I’m not sure why we didn’t do that before, but I’m delighted nonetheless.
9am is a very civilised time for a pre-work breakfast meeting near the office. I am accepting invitations.
DOTI Fest was great. not least giving myself permission to go to things that I’m interested in. for a very short period of time, I was going to skip the design x climate crisis workshop, because I had a bunch of office-work to do and I thought, maybe I should just go and do that. then I thought, hey now, why are you preventing yourself from being interested in a thing you’re interested in? have to assume that my occasional problems around giving myself permission to do or show interest in things I want to do is some kind of third-generation Catholic guilt.
we’re already talking about climate in the design team more: 11 minutes at 11 today, and Laurence doing some quality tweeting. in my real life I cycle to the zero waste shop in Nunhead to fill up a jar with organic muesli. in my work life I buy takeaway food and put the container in the bin. I’m hoping that now we’re chatting about this more at work it will close the disconnect between the two.
a general issue of too much work, too little time this week. obviously I didn’t make it easy for myself by being out all day on Thursday to go to DOTI Fest, but frankly I needed a day out of the office getting excited by and interested in the work that other people are doing.
one day this week I got an email that infuriated me so much that I closed my laptop, went for a short walk, and then texted someone at Brixton Cycles to say yes, I will buy that frame you’re selling. minty green Straggler with 650B wheels here I come! it’s been about five years since I first wanted a Surly. when I was growing up my parents taught me about buyers’ remorse and to sit with the idea of buying the thing in order to try to feel any buyers’ remorse before buying something. then you can still avoid buying it if you regret it! I am pretty sure this 5 year incubation period has removed any risk of buyers’ remorse. and somehow I’m never happier than when researching gear ratios!
I did not reply to the infurating email.
‘do you still write like Carles?’ Mark asked last night as we brainstormed more Hipster Runoff-esque content while I wondered out loud “do I have a voice? is this content authentic for me?”. so far: top 10 diary stalking moments. top 5 things I’ve watched on iPlayer in a foreign hotel room. top 10 central-and-eastern European pretzel sticks?
I spoke to someone this morning about wanting to build up a really strong user-centred design community across our directorate. in perfect timing, job ads for two senior service designers are now very much live. you too could watch the Thick of It from your room in a hotel run by an American chain! no seriously, it’s v interesting work. feel free to get in touch with me if you’re tempted to apply and want to talk about it more before doing so.
made a point in a meeting which prompted someone to send me a message saying “Smashed it with that comment”, bring me into your meetings for witticisms and hard-hitting, evidence-based truthbombs.
except don’t bring me into your meetings because did I mention I have a lot of work on right now? I’d have to run your meeting through my Monday morning prioritisation exercise and my WIP quota is really quite full.
an agency I won’t name once rejected me from a job because I couldn’t explain Kanban properly. they told me I didn’t know enough about agile and I thought, god, it’s not hard though is it? (an entire industry disagrees with me.)