Notes

I started the week by emailing a whopping three people on my team about my priorities for the week. That helped me look at my diary and move or cancel things that didn’t help me meet those priorities. then tonight I looked through them and sent a follow up with green ticks or sad face emoji. you’ll be pleased to know that all my P1s were met (as of 5pm tonight), and I got four sets of bonus points.

• part way through the week, I looked around and thought, god, what a lot of people, and I bet loads of them are having good days, and loads of them having bad days. so many tiny systems sitting inside a bigger one!
• Three, my mobile phone network, seems to have been having a mare recently, to the extent of data networks being down completely for most of Thursday. I’m really trying to ignore the impending apocalypse but my mobile network isn’t making it easy for me.
• hot desking and open plan for more than 15 people: a modern tragedy. the best workplace I’ve ever had was 54B, home to With Associates, where there were just enough people to make it sociable but not noisy and distracting. while I’m rating workspaces I have worked in, second best prize goes to Co-op Digital’s Federation House. in at 3, a tied Gail’s Bakery - cold in the winter, but Roy made me cakes and bacon sandwiches when I was hungover - and Pivotal Labs, a reasonably harmless corporate office but also with snacks. you can do the math as to where GDS sits in this ranking. I don’t even think it’s that bad an office in the grand scheme of things. I guess I’ve just been jammy.
• so many good things to read this week, or maybe I read the same amount as usual and just forgot to close all my tabs as I read them
• went to the Apple Store at the weekend to try to recycle two old laptops while C was picking up a new one she’d bought online. the pick up was easy. recycling an old Mac: wait for 20 minutes. then: “have you cleaned the data off it?” “on one, yes. but not on the Powerbook cos it needed a disc and I didn’t have it” “right. I can take the one you’ve cleaned the data from. the other one, you’ll need to book a Genius Bar appointment”. we had a lunch reservation at Bocca di Lupo, so we left. maybe I should’ve just said “yes” to both and handed over the machines and run off.
• last week’s post led to a great chat with Mark (yeah him again) about Hipster Runoff, which I had a ton of thoughts about midweek and no time now to write down, but: that era is how I learned to be on the internet, so I guess that’s why starting sentences without capital letters feels ~authentic to me
• also turns out at least two other people here put therapy in their diaries openly, yes! nice one everyone!
• I’m going back to an airport again on Monday morning, but not before spending the weekend hunting for little egrets and Old Town jackets

Hurrell’s writing weeknotes and they’re so damn good that I thought I’d try too.

• got back from Buenos Aires on Monday morning. I didn’t sleep very well on the plane and after an hour’s nap, left the house at about 11am and tried to spend the rest of the day outdoors / not asleep on the sofa. gentle breast stroke = great for exhaustion / jetlag, but honestly, go before 3.30 because you wanna be swimming with old people, not primary school kids.
• also didn’t sleep well on Monday night, so spent Tuesday being basically horrible to all my colleagues. sorry! I’ll take an extra day off next time I travel across the ocean!
• spent Saturday last week [still counts as part of this week, surely?] walking around BA - had a steak sandwich, went to Recoleta cemetery and took a photo of a boxer’s grave (I thought the statue was of a man in a dressing gown, but no, a boxer), and went to MALBA. MALBA was great, the Leandro Erlich exhibition had loads of people laughing and taking photos which is nice isn’t it? and then the permanent exhibition was great too. turns out I know nothing about Latin American art and very little history, so it was great to fill some gaps.
• the best thing about working from home is flipping my laptop’s sound output to my airport express, which connects to my amp which connects to my speakers. I got an amp, CD player and my dad’s old speakers for my sixteenth birthday and they are still the best things I own, probably. (on reflection: alongside a frying pan Dina got me for a combined Hanukkah and Christmas present more than a decade ago)
• Coleen Rooney as a PI has been the best thing to happen all week. I was lucky enough to chat to someone on the fraud team on Verify about it around about the time that the story broke. “HUMINT followed by SOCINT” he said: human intelligence followed by social media intelligence. pretty much a double diamond of private investigation on the webs.
• recruitment is dead hard and time consuming. I’m trying to remind myself what a privilege it is to be able to build a team around the work that I’m doing, rather than stress myself out with how many applications there are to sift / how many interviews there are to do / how many other things there are to do at the same time.
• starting therapy again in November, not for any particular reason, more as a bit of a tune up. like new brake pads for the soul. I’ve put a recurring event into my work calendar titled ‘Therapy’ with an hour for travel time afterwards. that’s the kind of transparent thought leadership I am here to provide. no but seriously, maybe it helps to destigmatise the concept of talking to someone. at least for the people who diary stalk me.
• there are some people I diary stalk quite regularly, and others never. wonder who diary stalks me?
• Argentina has the most psychologists per capita in the world and everyone I worked with talked about it quite openly.
• for months I’ve been planning to move off Tumblr because it’s not 2008 anymore, but who even has the time for that? you’ll see me on a jekyll x netlify stack in about 2024, probably. Taylor Swift is still on Tumblr so at least I’ve got a kindred spirit here.