Anna Goss - Notes

Designing a design studio

2025-10-22T00:00:00Z

We just closed FF Studio. While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I’d write down some thoughts about the last three years, and about running a small studio that did mostly public sector or public sector adjacent work in 2025. For those unfamiliar: FF Studio was a small design and technology studio. I started it and ran it with Eliot Fineberg. At our busiest we turned over £900k in a year and had c.8-10 freelancers working with us across 3 or 4 projects, mostly in the public sector.

The personal (is political)

I thought that FF Studio would be the work of my life. My 10-15 year project, building a design studio that felt fit for the 21st century.

But it’s not to be — not this one, not this time. Eliot and I are parting ways (we’re still friends). Over the past six months it became clear to us both that we wanted different things from our professional lives. To keep things simple and avoid the prospect of complicated personal feelings getting in the way of our friendship if one of us took over the limited company, we're simply entering into voluntary liquidation and closing the company.

When we started FF, I had a vision of how to design an (admittedly small) organisation in ways that would make other organisations look at us and say, “oh hey, if they can do that…”. I think creating and running a business is one way of creating a prototype of the kind of world you want to live in. Erika Hall (who wrote Just Enough Research) reckons "the most important design work in these times is figuring out more ethical operating models for businesses". The desire to do that guided me almost as much as the work we did. I wanted to prove that businesses could be run in a socially responsible way fit for living life in the UK in the 2020s.

That means acknowledging house price growth comparative to incomes, that there's no longer a housewife in most households doing the laundry and cooking, that forms of inequality and bias exist and drive our behaviours in all kinds of unconscious ways. And it means trying to find as many tiny ways as possible to try and make our organisation one that was part of building better futures for people rather than maintaining the status quo. So: we tried to pay and treat freelancers well. We gave ourselves the compassion and flexibility we would have wanted from an employer on a routine basis when our children needed picking up from nursery or school, and when exceptional things happened in our home lives we each took the slack from each other to make sure the other person could handle their life situation without work as a distraction. And we tried to stay aware to our biases and check ourselves and each other, to listen to feedback from freelancers about what kind of organisation and culture we were creating and adjust accordingly, to build strong, diverse teams. We weren't perfect on any of these fronts, but we were conscious and trying.

Despite closing, I still hold the belief that organisations can be radically different - better - than most of them are. We tried to show that concept through the quality of our work as well as in how the studio ran. The work and the company were strong in ideology, morals and commitment. The experience of working with us was probably weaker in some of the areas we deemed as unimportant to us (don’t go to FF if you want the dogged pursuit of a particular delivery methodology that fit perfectly with your pre-existing governance structures), but on the things that mattered to us, we put in the effort.

Things I’d do the same

Build great teams, let them run.

Sonia told me that we excelled at "making a great environment to work: non-hierarchical, high trust, fast moving but not crisis mode or stressful environments." We brought in people we'd (usually) worked with before, set a clear brief, and stayed involved enough to keep the work on track and the team protected just enough from any noise coming from the client or people around them. We weren't micro-managing anyone. We set standards and trusted our teams to meet them. They pretty much always did. I think people enjoyed working with us, and we tried to treat people as well as we could, whether being flexible about life, or sending our freelancers hampers at Christmas.

Have a bit of fire, try to play it differently.

We didn’t want to be a digital transformation consultancy, we’ve both worked in that space and respect the people doing that (very necessary) work. But we were missing the creative spirit of the agencies and studios we’d worked in earlier in our careers, and wanted to bring that to the party too. Part of FF’s mission was to find out an answer to the question “is there a market for the weird work?”.

So: we wanted to be a creative technology and design studio that did beautiful, inventive work beyond the commodification of the Service Manual. I think that came through in some of the case studies we published. Over time “what does an FF project feel like” became clearer and clearer (big thanks to Lizzie at the V&A for helping us to see that). We ran pacy projects that modelled what good looked like and when we prototyped early it surprised people because, well, it turns out “you can just do things”.

Stay honest.

We almost certainly did ourselves out of some revenue and definitely some margin by being honest with clients, occasionally to our detriment. We gave up revenue opportunities when we said "no, we don't want to run a bums-on-seats organisation" and declined to find a client 8 content designers and skim off the difference on day rate. I don't regret that: we had a clear idea of what we weren't, and we stuck to it.

Open up.

We invested heavily in our case studies, trying to (as much as possible) "work with the garage door up" to share what we learned along the way. It's not always possible to do that with different clients - I wish we'd done more of it - but I don't regret spending the money or time on it when we were able to. It cost us margin and profit - a case study like the pilot fund probably took about ten days or maybe even more, once you added up everyone's time on it. But the internet is for sharing. If we're asking for your time in reading it, it's right that we put some time into making it, too.

Have a nice time.

The nicest days we had running the studio were when we got out from behind our laptops, whether in the studio with a whole gang or me and Eliot sitting on Brighton beach after lunch. I probably won't remember all the days at my desk drafting a Statement of Work but I'll remember the conversations on the walk to Baguette King or the trip Eliot and I took to Marseille for a week to try and write the first FF Studio strategy. Investing in having a nice time is one of the rewards of running your own thing. If we'd hired someone (more on that below), we would've tried to work out how to fairly distribute the nice-timeness of it as best we could too: there's nothing worse than seeing the bosses have a nice time while you're stuck behind a desk on £30k a year.

Things I’d do differently

This is a longer list. I think we did more things right than wrong. (Maybe it's just my personality to see the areas I wish we'd done differently or more on.) It was personal circumstances rather than business failure that led to us closing, but of course I find myself wondering whether, if we'd done some things differently, we'd be in the same spot.

Tighten up our product / service definition.

I am probably never going to be someone who runs a studio that offers fixed services, easily replicable, productised and sold and done systematically every time.

But we were probably too many things to too many people. At first we didn’t want to close down the chances of getting work by reducing our offer or target market: 2023 was the beginnings of a cold winter in digital services. I have a nagging feeling that not being able to say “we’re FF Studio, we do A B C so that you can X Y Z” held us back after a while. Certainly it meant I felt a bit blocked on going hell-for-leather on new business.

Build the support team.

We paid our accountants, of course, but otherwise tried to do most of everything else ourselves: new business, finance ins-and-outs, coaching, delivery. Then this year we worked with Alex on product definition, and with Kseniya and David K at Posterity Global on procurement and routes to market, and I thought: we should’ve had this support structure around us 18 months ago. “Procurement hacking will be the most creative thing you do for the next two years”, Tom told me early on: so spend money on getting creative support for procurement rather than on that fancy studio website. If I did it again, I'd try to start noticing when we were asking the same solvable questions over and over again - and then look for someone in a fractional or consulting role who could help answer them.

Keep the bar, even for founders.

About six months into working with Sport England, I told Will that I wanted all our Linear tickets to be tighter. No more stubs: every card should describe the work and have a definition of done. I wanted to be able to come back from holiday and have the board reflect the work, to be able to understand what was going on without asking for extra documents or chats. Perhaps that was too idealistic, but I wanted us to be tight.

Eliot and I espoused that standard for our teams but I don’t think we consistently lived it for ourselves. Without job descriptions for ourselves, our roles got muddied between us, and we weren’t always great at holding each other to account. When we were flying that was fine: we both knew everything the other one knew and could slide the work between us. But over time I think it made us a bit complacent: our fortnightly founder retros became monthly, or we skipped a management meeting because we didn't feel like it. Perhaps clocking what we wanted to hold each other accountable to and having some kind of six monthly check-in (call it a performance review if you really want) would have been beneficial, to make sure we were holding ourselves to the same standards as we held the rest of the team.

Take a position.

As much a note to self as anything. As a result of both me and Eliot’s nature, we were a thoughtful company, and sometimes thought maybe too much about nuances rather than taking a stand on anything. We probably nodded to “doing what’s right” rather than actively expressing our points of view or values. Clarity, care, generosity felt like the values we tried to embody, but we never really expanded on what that meant. So did we really live up to the idea of the company as a way of practising some form of social justice if all we did was try to do the right thing but never talk about what the right thing was? I veer away from statements that feel like gratuitous postering, so we tried to give money to charities like ABCD rather than write posts on LinkedIn about how genocide in Gaza is a) happening b) bad - but I wonder if that's cowardly, or whether we should have just been more public about those actions. Show, not tell.

That 'taking a position' expands to our own industry - I've got a bunch of strong opinions (quite tightly held, actually) about what is right, as in correct, on the internet. Things like: hiding content behind sign-in walls is bad, Markdown is good - nothing particularly radical round here. But I never wrote them down. So for an organisation with plenty of opinions, very few of them got codified in a way that opened conversations or made us accountable. I wish we'd expressed more of them.

Take more risks.

We didn’t hire anyone, despite multiple opportunities and moments to do so. I felt the weight and responsibility of hiring someone strongly, after having seen a designer get made redundant two months into starting a role at an agency I once worked at because the client work disappeared. I think we made a bunch of safe choices or non choices like that, and I wonder what would have happened if we’d run forward hell for leather.

Be even more transparent.

We tried transparency with the series notes - but they dropped off after a while. I think about whether it's a differentiator, and how reading and learning from other organisations and how they run has inspired me over the years, too, and how we might add to that ecosystem of knowledge. Could we have been more radically transparent? Tom Critchlow used to post an annual revenue-by-product-or-service-line chart in his reviews of the year. I used to gawk at Garden 3D's open P&L - the nerve!

We published our charity donations in 2023, but didn't do it in 2024. We never published our P&L in full. It felt maybe too bold, or too transparent - do we lose a strong negotiating position with clients? Is making money and talking about it just a bit cringe (it's certainly against the national psyche)? What would everybody say? In hindsight I'm not sure I'm bothered about what everybody (whoever they are) would say, but the unfounded worry was enough to ensure the idea never got to the top of our to-do list.

Experiment harder.

If figuring out more ethical business models is the design challenge of today, then there are a ton more things to prototype and experiment with to get there. One thing I'd try if I did it again is to attempt to align the incentive systems between us and our freelancers. It struck me a number of times that on a fixed price project, Eliot and I were incentivised to get it finished as quickly as possible: fewer days worked, lower staff cost, more money in the bank. But someone working on a day rate is incentivised to take the same number of days as they estimated it might take in the first place - everyone's trying to pay their rent. And we never really wanted to be the people who said, nope, you've finished, it was only 14 days not 20, off you trot.

I noodled about with spreadsheets a couple of times that explored the idea of a profit-share at the end of a project, so that we all had skin in the game to finish efficiently. We didn't try it, but I still reckon there's something in it.

Trust my gut.

On everything. Choosing a website platform. How we spend our time. Whether it's been too long since the last retro. If that client is worth investing more time in. When to ask for help. I ignored my instincts sometimes to go with the flow, so I guess this one really means: back yourselves even more than you did, and run at it.

Fin

I worked for a studio called With Associates from 2013 until it closed in May 2016. Last week someone I'd just met told me, "I loved With Associates' work".

I lucked out getting to run a studio and design it the way I wanted it for almost three years. I miss it. I'm glad I had the chance, and grateful to everyone who gave us a chance. If anyone tells me "I loved FF Studio's work" in one, two, five or ten years' time, I'll be very happy indeed.

FF Studio was Anna Goss and Eliot Fineberg

with delivery work from: Sonia Turcotte, Rod McLaren, Alex Segrove, James Darling, Kim Morley, Jo Schofield, Will Myddelton, Debs Durojaiye, Maria Izquierdo, Ignacia Orellana, Kay Dale, Ella Fitzsimmons, Michael Cornford, Keelan Fadden-Hopper, RJ Fernandez, Samir Daoudi, Georg Fasching,

our communications and branding work were by Rod McLaren, Laura Silver and Conor Delahunty.

and this post was reviewed and edited by Ella Fitzsimmons.

everything you see is for sale, 37

2025-07-25T00:00:00Z

Five weeks of pretty much consistently 3 days a week at the gym except for one week where I only made it once. This is the consistency I dream of!
I’m running GZCLP while I attempt to get some numbers back to where they used to be. the mix of high reps and low reps of the same exercise on different days seems to be serving me well: my bench press has never been so good. Or is it carrying around 12kg of baby that contributes so much to the gainz?
Giles kindly highlighted FF Studio’s work on his new Doing Open page. Thank you Giles.
Temperatures, teething and colds all week. The little guy has suffered, we have suffered marginally less.
Almost forgot to pay the taxes I’m meant to pay by end of July and cashed out some premium bonds juuust in time. If you also owe tax: you’ve got till Thursday, get on it!
Got introduced to the concept of psychic numbing and it made me feel marginally better. Deep breath, go again, the world is awful but we’re the lucky ones.
Went to the pick-your-own farm near Worthing on Sunday. Sweetcorn and plums, no raspberries to speak of. Gotta get there on a Friday for raspberries I reckon, before the weekend pickers nab them all.

six for the five pounds, 36

2025-07-18T00:00:00Z

I have blogged since 2022 but elsewhere
like everyone who has every written a blog post or weeknote, I convinced myself that the platform was the issue, not the...not writing. it didn’t take very long to write a script to export Tumblr posts to Markdown, or to create an Eleventy site. file under ‘things that would not have happened before LLMs’.
nonetheless my position on ‘owned’ digital services has only become more extreme in recent years, I continue to resent how Medium tries to hijack my mouse when I engage in my habit of selecting text as I read, Substack is full of Nazis, Instagram shadow bans Gaza content. in 2006 I attempted to negotiate for GoodBooks to own their own mailing list, not Sony (it did not work). here’s my tiny Markdown-files-held-locally protest, 19 years later!
did nursery drop off this morning. his face crumpled as he realised I was leaving. ouch.
things keep costing money: vet bills (she’s fine), parking fines (I ran for a train and forgot), Italian lessons (gotta get that citizenship B1 exam passed or I’ll be the only non-European out of the three of us, even the dog has a European passport). I keep imagining that Things will stop happening, but they never do.
work is quiet, keeping up momentum on what there is while acknowledging and perhaps even enjoying the quiet is something I find challenging. I’m reading Not Working by Josh Cohen to help me come to terms with my inner slacker and-or slob.
haven’t yet read this by James Plunkett but everyone else I’ve seemingly ever met has, so if you haven’t maybe you’d enjoy it too.
more interested in reading Patricia Highsmith novels at the moment to be honest. she sounds from this like an absolute dragon but what a writer!

Expertise in the vibe-coding era

2025-07-18T00:00:00Z

I don't know if a term has ever been so ubiquitous, so quickly as "vibe coding". Five months in and it's still all my LinkedIn feed is talking about. It's stuck, most likely, because it's describing a thing we all already knew was happening, we were all already doing it, but it put a name to it.

(All Fours got massive for arguably similar reasons. From The Guardian: "There’s a funny bit in All Fours when she talks about the female artist’s lifecycle: first “hot young thing”, then wilderness years, and a final spurt of attention before you die". Miranda July says: “I wrote it as if it was OK – as if everyone knew what I was talking about...as if you could make a joke about something shameful, as if we had all already talked about that thing. Even though we hadn’t. So it was skipping a few steps, even to have humour about it. I was building on an internal world that I believed existed, not just in me.”)

The other week Ben Welby wrote a blog post about how after a few days of vibe-coding, he finally had a prototype that built confidence in the team and their vision. "One person can now create the fast, dazzling demos that make people believe again in what digital can do."

I'd been spending some time defining FF Studio's proposition around how we use pilots and prototypes as input into strategies and business cases that outline clear, actionable paths to success. And reading Ben's post, I panicked a bit. Oh crap, the bottom's fallen out of the market. Everyone can prototype now. No one needs to pay external people to make things real, they can just get Claude Code running in the terminal and bash out a prototype in a day or two.

But I was forgetting something, or at least, only doing a very selective read of what Ben was writing about. It's true that the prototyping cost of entry has dropped hugely - but it's only true for the pixels.

It isn't true for the rest of the stack - Sarah Drummond's model of full stack service design calls out services being underpinned by infrastructure, organisation, intent, and culture.

The vibe-coded prototype output is the start of the conversation. And the output can only be converted into value - something actually shipped - if there's clarity over the product or service vision. If the trade-offs of each decision that we're about to encode into software are well understood. If the team or teams involved understand the rationale and the user need. If the infrastructure is there to deploy. If stakeholders are aligned and the benefits are worth the investment and the business case stacks up. If the culture supports delivery. Ben talks about how you can "have the instinct, the skills, and the tools, and still hit a wall", because building the thing is not and has never been what gets in the way of idea to reality or theory into practice.

It’s great that prototypes are easier to build, because prototypes provoke questions and force us to answer them. Some of those questions are about the service itself and how it works. But there is no value in answering those questions unless the people involved know how to prod at the answers the rest of the stack requires. In any kind of complex environment (let’s be realistic, basically anywhere), every vibe-coded prototype that warrants delivering real value to an end user needs help from multiple angles before it can make it into production and into being useful.

There seems to be another market emerging from the emergence of vibe coding, outside of the realm of the public sector. Allow me to introduce it via metaphor. Building a digital product has become more like something like writing a novel - "anyone can do it" - rather than previously where it was more like hiring a team of builders ("I have a vision but I can't make it happen, over to the experts"). There remains a large industry for those novel writers of editorial consultants, agents, coaches, retreats, training courses. Hire someone who knows what great looks like and can help you to get there or pay someone to teach you (sell shovels in a gold rush). Designers asked to QA vibe-coded apps, developers asked to debug them.

So: I no longer think the bottom has fallen out of the market. It's ok if one thing becomes more commodified. Expertise remains valid, even if we might find ourselves needing to reposition how to describe it. The skill remains in not only knowing what we're doing, but also in asking better questions - and the ability to run up and down the stack asking them, in service of getting something that works out of the door.

cleveland arms, 35

2022-10-10T00:00:00Z

went for a beer with Alice and suggested I might write a weeknote when I got home
we each had two pints of Neck Oil. it was £6.30 for one pint. I’m glad I don’t go to the pub three or four nights a week any more
last night our next door neighbour said to me, “there’s a house round the corner, they’ve taken the whole roof off. shall we go round with the cargo bike and see if we can get some wood?”. so we did. I had a head torch. felt like a robber.
is it robbing if it’s in a skip?
wrapped Pepsi up in a blanket in the cargo bike this evening, cos it was gloves weather for me, and she can’t tell me if she’s cold or not, can she?
every day I enjoy being part of the anti-growth coalition just a little bit more.
C bought me one of those Ooni pizza ovens for my birthday last week so now I can be anti-growth while I eat pizza in the back garden, fuelled by the wood from the house round the corner’s roof. I wonder how many pizzas it takes, if you consider each pizza as one that isn’t ordered from a takeaway, but also the cost of the pizza oven, to get to a place where it’s actively damaging the economy?
suppose this is only true if I don’t spend my money on other things. guess what: it’s all going on buying different types of insulation.

open fields, 34

2021-05-28T00:00:00Z

noting as I look down the sidebar of iAWriter that Angus shaming me into writing week notes lasted three notes. it seems that shame isn’t a great motivator.
for whatever reasons, the world has felt ridiculously heteronormative recently, whether in the films we’ve watched or the things going on around us. it’s a hard do-not-relate, and as someone who has arrogantly never particularly engaged with LGBTQ+ communities and cultures, it leaves me feeling a little rock-and-hard-place. don’t want that and those values: not sure where else to look. where’s the art and the poetry and the sports sitting in the middle of the queer hipster x normcore venn? that’s where I live!
might start writing about work stuff a little more than I have done in the past, because there are floating thoughts and bringing them all together feels like a good idea. I have soooo many tabs open.
Alice and I went for a walk and soon we’ll go to the pub. imagine making friends as an adult!
today marks one year since Pepsi got found by the side of a road with her pups by a dog shelter in Bulgaria. next week will be six months since she arrived home with us. she’s the chillest dog in the world and having been 100% a cat person, am now convinced that it’s true: it’s better with Pepsi.
there is a real simplicity to having a dog, especially in the mornings. wake up, get dog up, feed dog, leave the house. I like it.
spending most of my time this week thinking about drilling holes in things and going for walks with the dog; about data as a material to design with; about potential. and Checksies too, our lovely little side project that needs a bit of love.
C just sent out a weeknote. we haven’t discussed this. SYNERGY.
vaccine tomorrow. just put the first Vaccines’ album on in anticipation. all of my 20s music snobbery has evaporated.

jj72 33

2021-02-19T00:00:00Z

so many browser tabs. so many half started thoughts. so many “maybe I’ll be more productive when I’ve…..” moments. I think I could use a couple of days in an office. let’s not talk about work, hey?
bought 5 more Hive thermostatic radiator valves; now when we try to boost the heating in one or both of our offices during the day, we can keep the rest of the house cool. gutted that our smart meter has broken and I can’t see what impact this is going to make on our bills. hopefully it’ll reduce, because we’re not heating the whole house every time we want to be a bit warmer at work. but maybe it’ll increase, because the radiators in our offices are always trying to be or get to 18 degrees, rather than us letting them get to 15-16 before we press the ‘boost’ button.
I wonder whether, had I learned the phrase 'balance the heating system’ before yesterday, we could’ve done something jazzy like this using only the usual, non-smart thermostatic valves.
only the best content for my weeknotes crew.
if the stock market carries on this way, I’m going to retire by Christmas 2021. [the stock market will not carry on this way]
we got sent a brand new robot vacuum because of the network issues. it still doesn’t connect to the mesh network. but we can just stick it in a room, press 'play’, and it vacuums. in context, that’s still quite something.
taking a week off next week. apparently bike fitters can still work in this lockdown, so I’m going to go and get one on Tuesday. I am sick of my knees feeling dreadful every time I get on two wheels. I miss feeling brilliant on a bike, instead of nervously waiting for the moment my body starts to creak.
finally admitted to myself that perhaps my inflexible biomechanics are part of the picture here, so like All The Toms, I have started stretching more. Apple Fitness+ seems to take away the inertia of choice, because filtering for length of session is so easy. one more SaaS product enters the picture. at first I was wondering how long I’d have to do daily yoga for before it makes a difference, but that’s not the right mindset: really I think I need to admit that if I don’t stretch properly 3-5 times a week for the rest of my life, at some point it’s gonna hurt.
just as things (heating, robots) were starting to feel like they were working around here, the council have stopped collecting our garden waste. they came this morning, picked up everyone else’s on the street, looked at ours, and skipped it (says our lovely neighbour). mmm, more bureaucracy to interact with. I love it.
new sofa arrived. unlike bureaucracy, I genuinely love it.
slowly, reluctantly, disappointingly beginning to consider whether it would be easier or better to get a car. urgh.

the hound on the underground, 32

2021-02-08T00:00:00Z

despite having taken three days off the week before last, I remain very much at the end of my tether. I know this because I spend a lot of time muttering stuff under my breath and swearing when very minor things go wrong.
by Wednesday night I was texting pictures of the cheese in the fridge to the group chat after our Sainsbury’s order arrived. by Thursday morning we’d moved onto discussing bin collections. life is truly scintillating right now.
bought a turbo trainer a couple of weeks ago. tried to put my bike on it. only then realised - and I should’ve thought about this beforehand - that turbos work best for bikes with vertical dropouts, not my semi-horizontal ones, because lining up cassette and chain is…tricky. any excuse to buy another bike I guess.
like Chris, I’m also interested in the search results for ‘garden shelter lean to’. the tree surgeons came on Friday, so now not only is our garden much lighter, but we also have logs to dry out. and as if I’m going to spend £160 on a wood store.
feel like I spend most of my spare time at the moment, and occasionally time in working hours, doing wifi network admin. I miss the days of broken internet during working hours being someone else’s problem. and have you ever tried to get a robot vacuum cleaner to connect to a mesh network? a world of pain.
finished Broken April by Kadare, a book about people in the Albanian mountains living by a code called the Kanun, which involves generations-long blood feuds between families. I don’t think I understood the ending, but bravo to Daunt Books (my mum bought me a subscription for Christmas), who absolutely nailed the brief of “I want to read things about utopias and dystopias and also the Western Balkans”.
the dog has discovered how much she loves chasing squirrels; so much for the easiest dog ever. let the hard training yards begin.

Pepsi-cola 31

2021-01-22T00:00:00Z

Angus shamed me into writing again. what you saying, Chris, Hurrell?
we got a dog in December. she came over from a shelter in Bulgaria in a van with 19 of her other dog buddies, two months after her puppies all got adopted. from all the chats I’ve had since with other dog owners, we’ve lucked out: she’s calm, good with kids, doesn’t jump up at strangers, and is super loyal.
every morning when we get her out of her crate she is incredibly excited to see us both and it is the purest expression of unconditional love I’ve ever seen.
the routine is 3 walks / day, which exacerbates my previously stated feelings about lunch breaks. and it’s so difficult to pass a split bin bag! when she’s confused, scared or wants to go a different way to us, she freezes, so we spend a lot of time standing in the cold waiting for her to move. it’s getting better and I’m making my peace with it, but damn, hiding frustration from a dog is an emotional low.
Dishoom now have one of those dark kitchens in Hove, so there’s your last excuse gone for not moving to Brighton.
speaking of those lunchbreak thoughts, let me make it abundantly clear how little I appreciated people telling me how to make an omelette. I’m trying to dismantle capitalism and you’re telling me to crack open some eggs in butter. please.
I feel as flat as everyone else, and like all I do is work, walk the dog, drink and watch telly. grateful that the days are getting longer, and that I can start work at 10am every day to get some daylight in before work.
this week in particular it felt like most of my job is about influencing and steering; the slow pace layers of culture change and strategic direction. it’s great to now have a lead delivery manager in our little gang of three (DM, PM, design) focused on the accounts and data teams on GOV.UK. I’ve missed you Ruth!
bookshelves arrive Tuesday. once we’re not surrounded by boxes of books we’ll realise we don’t have any furniture, but that’s not the worst problem to have. C is planning the garden. I’m thinking about loft insulation. can you really imagine going back to an office 5 days a week?
this week marked five years since James died. someone called it the longest, shortest time; that about sums it up.
that doesn’t feel like a great note to end on, though it’s a good thing for me to think about. time to take the dog out.

balkan chic, 30

2020-11-20T00:00:00Z

back on this ‘self reflection’ bullshit.
we’ve moved, to Brighton right next to the South Downs, so now I strip wallpaper for fun. having enough space for us each to have an office is amazing, walks on the South Downs every morning are amazing, the sea poking its head up from all angles is amazing. I haven’t really ventured into Brighton which I half wonder is a fear of going back to the past, when I was a student here. or maybe it’s just that Sainsbury’s online and being neighbours with the local butcher means there’s no need to go anywhere.
I still miss south London too.
a difficult-ish week at work that reminded me of the importance of some kind of mix of 'strong opinions, lightly held’ and the importance of following your nose rather than the plan you had before. and how difficult leadership is when working remotely. and maybe just in general. but I think we ended the week in a better place to where we started it, so that’s something.
had a 1:1 with Jen who is my line manager for a couple of months while Stephen is doing some parenting and I am being head of design for GOV.UK (imagine that!). despite the “oh god line management with a friend” fear, it was good to be kicked into thinking a bit about my career and what I want to be doing for the first time in a while. cheers boss.
passing obsessions since we’ve moved have included compost, garage storage systems, garage doors, cork walls, wood burning stoves, office chairs, mountain bikes, elevation from sea front, the weirdness of induction hobs. it’ll probably be good when that expands to curtains, blinds and doorbells.
our neighbours think we will get a car within 6 months. I am determined not to. we’ve joined the car club though it’s 30 mins walk to the nearest one. but perhaps a smaller chainring for the bike, cos I reckon our hill rivals Swains Lane.
feel like having an office might reinvigorate my energy for work again. when I think about our flat in London it makes me feel a bit claustrophobic, in hindsight.
it was a lovely little flat though. not slagging u, Hillcrest!

cold was the steel of my axe to grind, 29

2020-09-25T00:00:00Z

thing about everyone caring about GOV.UK on the internet again this week: there’s no way to make everyone happy. it’s a public service, so everyone feels a bit of ownership. fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing how accounts play out based on what we learn, and having some proper chats about it as we go along.
moving somewhere bigger (…almost four times bigger) is making me mildly concerned about our electricity bills - it’s looking like we’ll move next month. so of course I’m now in a rabbit hole of privacy centric smart homes. I’m interested in thermostats and radiator valves, but not really in smart speakers. at the moment we’ve got a Hive hub but it’s a bit flaky, and it properly locks you into the Hive system, too. open source privacy centric smart homes? do I have to buy a Raspberry Pi and start building thermostats on local networks or something? (would probably quite enjoy that tbf.) I’m reminded that Nat wrote about Ikea smart lighting a few years ago, and might now go and look that up again. should probably write a proper post about it when I figure it out as a way to capture the research, because that’s what the internet is for.
even though we’re moving, I’m super happy that we got a grant of a few grand from the local authority to make the garden outside our current block nicer. I put in a bid suggesting picnic benches and some raised beds, and it might actually happen. chalk that one up to “the world only gets better if you do something about it”. this year’s Cleaner Greener Safer grant fund ends on October 4, if you live in Southwark you can apply here for ‘permanent, physical changes to your local area’ - things like bike parking, playgrounds and benches. as far as I remember I did mine a few hours before the deadline when I was a bit drunk.
I’m interested in the 'will there be a remote future’ / 'what will hybrid working be like’ debates, because I am a white collared tech worker (ha ha imagine wearing a collar in 2020), but I’m also wondering about business models for these things. what about redistributing estates budgets to individuals or teams? what does it look like to give financial autonomy about ways of working to individuals or units? I could see a world where individuals get, I dunno, £200 / month to sort out their office space - and maybe if you chose to take team funding, a team of 5 gets £1200, a premium to encourage face to face collaborative work. essentially how could we redistribute and decentralise the 'future of work’? because 'office open / office closed’ is hardly a new way of doing things, is it.
been feeling a kind of slow burn into stir craziness / cabin fever now I’ve been working from home for six months, which this week I told the internet about. astonishing response to be honest and I’ve no idea if I’ll have enough time left as a south Londoner to meet all these humans. I think it’s variety that’s been missing; the only days I feel like I remember from the past six months are the ones where either we’ve gone looking for houses or I’ve been out all day on my bike (big ups to my riding buddies Will, Kuba and Papa). hopefully an injection of different people and perspectives will help make life feel like a thing that’s being lived rather than survived. Though I suppose survival isn’t such a bad goal either.
thank goodness for Folklore. imagine this year if it hadn’t had a new Taylor Swift album in it? (the best bit, officially, is the bit in August at 1:43 - “back when we were still changing for the better, wanting was enough” - until “cause you weren’t mine to lose” at 2:08, because somehow she musically codifies the feeling of longing, how’d you do it Tay?)

the encouraged mediocrity of our society, 28

2020-06-28T00:00:00Z

shed mouse has got some nerve. first eating our Brexit spaghetti. and now it’s taken to eating the caps off bike chain lube (that’s two bottles lost to it now) and the straps of every single piece of bike luggage I own. humane or kill trap? both make me feel sick, but then, so does the rage I have for shed mouse, so.
I was pretty dismayed by the comments on Gary Younge’s excellent piece in the FT (paywall, but the key sentence is probably: “The racism we are dealing with isn’t a question of a few bad apples but a contaminated barrel. It’s a systemic problem and will require a systemic solution.”). a lot of ‘all lives matter’, so there’s an example of people who are presumably reasonably well educated having not learned…anything at all, in the past six weeks. good to see how far uphill we have to go! black trans lives matter, btw. I’m doing my best to be braver at work and saying things that maybe previously I would’ve kept to myself. I don’t expect any medals for it; should’ve done it a long time ago.
for some reason, despite never having worked in the cycling industry, my activism lies mostly in cycling infrastructure policy. maybe because it’s, well, intersectional: safer infrastructure for getting around cities on a bike can benefit pretty much everyone. often it’s people on lower incomes who don’t have cars, and the roads are already safe for people in Range Rovers. and it’s not right that the image of cycling in London is a middle-aged man in lycra (known as a MAMIL). from TfL’s 2016 report on cycling potential: “more than half of all trips made by residents using motorised modes could be cycled.” “The most significant barrier to realising this potential is that most cyclable trips are made by people that do not cycle at all.” “According to 2016 figures from TfL, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups account for 15 per cent of current cycle trips, but 38 per cent of potentially cyclable trips.”
a qualitative insight into Black women cycling in London is Jools’ book ’Back in the Frame’ - Jools gave up cycling as a teenager, and refound it as an adult, and the book is really about that. part of this is being a teenage girl (I stopped cycling between about 11 and 21, too), but heck it’s way harder to go back into doing something when you don’t see others who look like you doing it as well.
not going to go on and on, mostly because it’s bedtime, but access to safe cycling is an intersectional political issue and yes I have been writing to my elected representatives about this.
C got offered a fully funded PhD position by UCL. I’m very proud. our main response was to stick the flat on the market and start looking at larger places near the sea, because 5 days a week in an office (or hospital, in C’s case) ain’t happening for either of us now for the foreseeable and if we’re both going to work from home, we’re going to need a bigger boat I mean place to live. made an offer on somewhere yesterday, so fingers crossed.. owned by (based on the photos up on the walls) a lesbian couple, so maybe there’ll be some pride solidarity in our favour?!
hi, sellers, if you googled me. sorry for creeping on your pictures, we like your house and would like to live there!

tres leches, 27

2020-05-26T00:00:00Z

cancelled an American Express card that I only got because I wanted some free lounge access. free for year 1, £140 for year 2 and every year after that, and when I got the £140 bill this month I was like “wuuuuut nooooooo”. anyway, the point is: never had a lovely ‘endings’ experience: accrued points transferred to another loyalty account, “obviously the account fee will be waived”, and a little chat about holidays. I guess that’s what the account fee is for. the Amex staff were all working from home, too, so that made me feel better about phoning them up.
Dulwich Park was heaving this weekend but the Dulwich College playing fields were still empty. y'all, what you doing, just cross the street!
someone at work was selling a Surly Cross Check for £350. the part of me that loves a deal and the part of me that loves a Surly suddenly overlapped, so I walked to Streatham to pick it up. thanks Andy for helping do it up nice!
it’s all getting pretty groundhog day isn’t it. finding it hard to think about any kind of planning or whatever for the future. measuring life by our daily morning walks and ice cream sandwiches from Jones of Brockley, where I am surely in the top 5% of customers.
finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, which only took me about three months to get through. there were some lovely bits but overall the narrative jumping around was not what I needed. started The Return by Hisham Matar which so far is excellent.
I’m on a day off, thanks to the Queen, so I’m going to go read it in the Alleyns playing field, another of the private school fields opened up. I have come to love that field and hope they never take it back from us.

come on pilgrim. 26

2020-05-05T00:00:00Z

the week before last, I didn’t want to write a weeknote. last week, I just didn’t make the time for it. sorry to my 25 week streak.
we cleaned out / tided the shed. I’m simultaneously very happy about this and also a bit sad that “sorting out the shed” is no longer a thing to look forward to. questions remain outstanding over what I should do with one working and one broken Shimano 600 STI shifters/brake levers, not to mention the many spare downtube shifters I appear to have acquired in the past decade. I’ve got enough spare parts that I could build a real mongrel of a bike, although it would be a bike without a front wheel, brakes or a seatpost.
yesterday I took an hour for lunch and went out on my bike and down to Fowlds (inspired by Andy). had my first flat white in 7 weeks which was simultaneously lovely and also underwhelming. hope the first pint in the Gowlett is more momentous.
the other success story of the week is that I bought a tiny solar panel and bulb (off Amazon, sorry world). solar panel on roof of shed, bulb off a hook inside. there’s a whole world of solar panel lighting out there when you start looking. surely we can’t be far off my dream of a solar powered freezer (never say I don’t dream big).
we’ve started going for walks first thing, leaving the flat somewhere between 6.30-7am. either up to Dulwich - park or woods - or, this morning, to Brockwell Park. it’s good to get a headstart on the day, and getting back at 7.45 still feels like enough time to have a cup of tea and a sit before starting work. when did I become a willing participant in mornings?
work: continues. there was a point last week that I was like, ah, here I am, at the perfect point which intersects across all of my experience. that quickly folded into “I offer nothing unique on this project”, and now we’re back to an even keel again. what a rollercoaster! I’m getting big meeting fatigue, though, so this week I’m trying to just…get us all writing stuff down more. like the Jeff Bezos 6-page-memo thing. though, lols at having a week to write something at the pace we’re moving. nice idea, Jeff!
the only other thing of note is that I bought a new phone for the first time since February 2015. the iPhone SE is pretty much exactly the same form factor as my previous iPhone 6. I was deeply impressed with Apple’s onboarding / data transfer process - just keep the phones nearby each other, and everything will switch across, just a bit of extra auth required for banking apps - but unlocking a new phone to find it looks visually identical to the old one really exacerbated the feeling of slight underwhelm. no clean slates here! just a metal object, slightly different to your old metal object. I guess that’s the feeling when there’s the flip from smartphones being an object of novelty into being utility items. but at least Strava tracks my runs more accurately now.

covid power couple, 25

2020-04-19T00:00:00Z

fell off my bike on the way back from the shops on Friday morning. clipped a bin and came off sideways on a route I’ve done probably 150-200 times. there are bruises, no skin was broken, I only cried ten hours later after C got home and was nice to me.
arnica is helping.
started doing the Running Clinic’s 5k programme last week. jumped straight into the end of week 6. so until Friday my mind was entirely thinking about intervals and the next run. dead annoying to have to skip a couple of days!
C’s days at work are getting longer. I am not above saying that I find 12-14 hours home alone challenging. big love to the people who live on their own.
the long weekend was excellent, but can I remember what happened? like hell I can.
long chat with Iso this morning, partly around the ‘hero’ narrative for NHS workers. they’re not heroes, they’re skilled workers we should be grateful for and we should pay and reward properly. the moment people become heroes is the moment they can also become martyrs.
I think the only work news is that I’m staying on GOV.UK as lead designer indefinitely now and won’t be going back to international even after coronavirus stops making work a bit crazy. happy to carry on working with Stephen and the rest of the crew.
started thinking about this whole 'what does the world look like after coronavirus’, the narrative around “we can’t go back to the Before”. the trouble is, as far as I can tell anyway, the way things have been (and continue to be, let’s be real) structured is as a result of power, money, and comfort. so when I buy that coffee off someone who earns less than a proper London living wage, I’m doing that for my own comfort, and I’m still part of the exploitation. how do we reimagine power structures when it causes people discomfort to give up some of the comfort they have? I’m not entirely convinced that enough people are willing to do that. (I mean, one argument is that some people have more money than there is comfort to buy and won’t feel it anyway)
anyway, if we could reimagine the world, then thoughts around being less influenced by Europe / US - how do we get a media that properly references the whole world? I want to read about Argentina and Colombia and Nigeria and the Pacific Islands as much as I want to read about Germany and the US, please: equity of coverage hopefully leading to a bit of diversity of thought.
if the economy needs rebuilding and economic stimulus and all those things, could we rebuild it in a green way? build cities for pedestrians and bikes (so tempted to buy two of these and put them in the middle of our road early one morning to create my own car free street), tax breaks for investments in renewables, ummm other things that would help also welcome.
finally and related to the last point: just went for a walk around the grounds of Dulwich College, which have been opened up to the public for the time being. it’s huge! bigger than Dulwich Park! not to mention the attached golf course. how about we share that kind of land more often than just a once-in-a-lifetime (I hope) global pandemic, huh?

just like OGDs, no wonder they hate on me 24

2020-04-10T00:00:00Z

completely adore the Surly. cables are starting to stretch a bit already, but I’ll deal with that in a few weeks. only ridden it twice since the last weeknote - once with C on her way to work again, once today to go to the shops in Peckham - but I love it. can’t wait until it doesn’t feel slightly edgy to go out on a bike.
we pre-ordered a Colomba from General Store to pick up this morning, and decided to go to the butcher at the same time. going to the butcher was effing stupid, because everyone else also wanted to go there. after an hour we fell for the sunk cost fallacy and decided it wasn’t worth going home empty handed. so we stayed and got what we needed after two fucking hours, but the whole thing made me feel like I never want to go to a shop again. something about being outside for so long made me feel like I was more involved in this thing that is happening than I do when I don’t go out. felt both stupid and anxious. as per the other week: I think I prefer staying indoors.
C’s team are no longer on the wards but doing research on coronavirus at the Nightingale. it’s been a bit up in the air, but yesterday when I was at a standup early doors, she got a call and came in the room to say “right, induction’s at 11, I’m off to the Excel, bye”. bit of a whirlwind. given the circumstances, research at the Nightingale is far from the worst outcome.
work slowly ramped up as the week went on. didn’t ship anything as previously expected. did show a prototype that I already think is off to a bunch of people in other government departments. got an email from Jen that set off an awful lot of thinking, then decided off the back of some engagement-type feedback that the thinking was in the wrong direction. but hey, course correction is what we do, right? and course correction of three days of thinking and chats is a lot cheaper than course correction of building something. had a crazy useful hour of chats with Ignacia yesterday morning: I think the thing I love about being on GOV.UK is being back working with other designers every day again. sorry, other people. I like you too.
had my last therapy session yesterday morning. I ran out of things to say somewhere around when working from home started. self actualisation doesn’t feel very important at the moment: I mostly just think about food, work, and which bit of the flat might need cleaning next, and how many days it’s been since I’ve gone out and whether I should do that soon. maybe I’ll go back at some point, but for now, figuring things out about myself feels…unnecessary.
after I tweeted about the Gowlett, group chat midweek turned into “top 5 moments in the Gowlett”. special shout outs for all the quick pints that turned into not going to yoga / spin / the gym, for all the “one for the road” on the way home from elsewhere that turned into three, for all the pints on heads photos from five years ago, for all the quick pints that turned into a full evening complete with pizza, for that first time after it reopened and was only taking cash, for all the birthday parties, for our first date nearly 5 years ago. yeah, I miss the pub.
I was very, very into Barking by Ramz when it came out. have been slowly doing a rewrite, spurred by replacing “AJT” with “OGDs”, which is the shorthand for ‘other government departments’ that seems to get used everywhere. I’ve got this far: “just like OGDs, no wonder they hate on me, cos I’m making Ps [pixels] and you see this code, yeah I ship it for free”. the million dollar question is what to replace the word 'Barking’ with. yeah, I’m good, busy, how about you?

Untitled Post 67

2020-04-03T00:00:00Z

enjoyed the occasional chat this week about what’s “right” with regards to the acquisition of stuff. all kinds of stuff. food. other stuff. this article in the New York Times ends with the line “Sometimes a fleece is only a fleece. And sometimes it can be a creative rescue line, and a bet on the future.” but do I want all those warehouse workers and delivery drivers being out in the world or would I rather they stayed at home? and is it alright that I’m having what a friend called ‘the boujiest pandemic’ by mostly doing Natoora orders and occasionally visiting Jones of Brockley for bread and radicchio? in my head I’m keeping supermarkets free for people who need them, and supporting smaller suppliers. in reality, maybe I just really like expensive rhubarb and Neal’s Yard cheese.
most of the ads I get on Instagram now are for fruit and veg wholesalers who have become retailers. the algorithm knows.
accompanied C on her ride to the hospital this morning then rode back home before starting work. really not sure why we’ve allowed construction workers to still be out there, cos no one’s keeping 2m apart. roads are decently quiet!
work has been less intense this week and there were points that I felt like I was designing something in a vacuum, a little blind of policy intent, user need or GOV.UK’s position in the wider ecosystem. that’s a potential problem with working at this kind of pace and with this much going on. I was happy to end the week with a thumbs up on the work and I think we’ve now got a way forward, so I’m expecting to be shipping a second thing in 4 weeks next week. I am enjoying being close to shipping products and services again: very much my comfort zone, even on a national government website in a crisis.
I took my Surly Straggler frame and wheels to Brixton Cycles a while ago and sat with Lincoln there to order all the other bits. on Saturday last week it was ready to go! so we used our government mandated walk to go there and pick it up. it is a nice bike. I am very, very happy with it.
in a mad good mood today for some reason. probably the hour’s ride first thing. maybe the work. maybe the beer delivery from waterintobeer (thanks Tim, thanks Helen!). maybe just getting used to the indoor life. just a strange feeling of contentment. weird.

you’ve got grottos mate. 22

2020-03-27T00:00:00Z

another mad work week. worked through the weekend prototyping a new form which went live on GOV.UK today.
Stephen was out for a few days earlier in the week so I covered him and pretended to be the head of design for GOV.UK. nothing broke, though that’s almost all credit to the brilliance of the design team who amongst them picked up on the businesses offering support work, switched focus to some other work at the drop of a hat, and calmly updated the landing page while politics swirled around us. Ignacia, Mia, Kate, Conor, Jeremy, Joe, Tim, Stephen: can’t think of anyone I’d rather design through a crisis with than all of you!
I’ve always thought the Design System was cool, but don’t usually come into contact with it in the course of my work. using it in anger made me appreciate it even more.
Conor suggested at one point this week that we’d shipped more in the past two weeks than some people do in a year. no slight on those other people, but he’s not wrong: we have shipped a lot.
woke up exhausted on Tuesday morning and took the afternoon off. definitely went too hard at it: by Sunday night / Monday morning I’d got into the mindset that “well, there’s nothing else to do I might as well be working”. and by Monday afternoon I was definitely not on my game: switched on my product manager muscles when I should’ve let someone else do their own job. Tuesday afternoon was just enough of a reset to get me through till today. I’m not going to make that mistake again.
due to minor cough last week, we’ve been indoors for our respective 7 days. C went back to hospital work yesterday. it was meant to be her first full time week of health research. instead, she’s being redeployed back onto the wards. felt a bit sick after closing the door after her yesterday morning. I’m trying not to be bitter about it, but last night with the NHS clap I thought, yeah, remember your clapping next time you go outside for an unnecessary reason.
complaining much less about my back since we started a Yoga With Adriene 30 day challenge.
I went for my first walk of a week just now, just to the park. stayed off the paths and on the grass and well clear of everything. feels well apocalyptic out there with this kind of zombie avoidance stuff; I think I might prefer staying indoors.
started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, but found it really hard to read it without wondering when the pandemic was going to arrive in the plot.
a family member of a friend in Italy died this week. Bergamo is the worst hit city in Italy so I guess that was likely to happen. but still some deep sadness these past couple of days. it is senseless. please just stay indoors. I’m re-orienting my mind from thinking “it’s just the corner shop to get some biscuits” to “are biscuits essential?”. and of course the answer is no, they are not.
have taken this afternoon off too: went for a walk, cleaned the floors, and dusted off my record player. picked out My Favourite Things by John Coltrane to play loudly. little things.

l’ho visto, il virus! 21

2020-03-20T00:00:00Z

well, what a mad week to join GOV.UK.
the past five days been a combination of finding my place, figuring out GOV.UK, remembering how to deliver, not putting my back out, learning how to work remotely. and probably something else too.
it feels like it’s been a very long week. as predicted, it has been great working with the design team. and everyone else! there’s been loads to get my head around and things have shifted multiple times. the team shipped a new version of /coronavirus today which has come together exceptionally fast.
made a prototype today for a service we’ll be likely launching early next week. deeply grateful to Tim who batted back and forth on screen layouts and flows with me. Mum, I’m an interaction designer now!
we both have sore throats, so I guess I’m not going out for 7 days, at least. probably inevitable given that C works for the NHS. hopefully it doesn’t get any worse. not sure why I’m not more worried.
most of my health complaints this week have been about my back: our flat was not built for home offices. lots of lying on the floor, planking between meetings, and 15 min yoga videos.
few of us went to ‘the pub’ on Google Hangouts last night. gonna do it every week.
this is mad weird. I’m glad to have been busy because I think I’d be going mad otherwise.
Sonia dropped a loaf of bread round. a proper drop off: brown paper bag at the bottom of the stairs. thank you Sonia! I’m having toast for my dinner.

fear and records, 20

2020-03-13T00:00:00Z

Rebecca Solnit once again making the case for hope as a form of resistance. “There is one hummingbird on the power line outside the window of the room I’m writing this in, in the middle of San Francisco, and this work is worth it just for hummingbirds.”
“We need to understand the worst-case scenarios and the suffering and loss happening now, so we know what we’re trying to prevent. But we need to imagine the best case scenarios, so we can reach for them too.” my imagination of best case has been lacking in recent years: too much cynicism.
when I had Italian on Tuesday, my teacher (in Rome) had been indoors for three days. she thinks everyone in the UK is insane for still going outside, told me not to go to work and if I had to, I should at least cycle and not get on public transport.
it’s good the weather has cheered up, isn’t it? that’s why I’ve been cycling to work every day since Tuesday!
moving team next week to join GOV.UK for a bit. quite pleased about this because I imagine international work will be a bit quiet for a while. plus, I get to work with Kate, Stephen, Ignacia, Conor, Mia and Jeremy! ace.
also, back in a dream team with Jen, which means I can draw identity assurosauri (?) on post-its and leave them on her stuff while she’s off at important meetings. sure, you cut Jen and she bleeds GOV.UK, but I’m not going to let her forget her identity creds.
“I live in fear of anyone asking me to actually do the work” “yeah, that’s how I feel about service design” -> after more than 2 years of majority ‘leadership’ and 'stakeholder management’ I am both excited and terrified to do what I sometimes call 'real work’ again.
at 6pm today I got a text from Leo saying that Control by GoodBooks is back on Spotify. that’s after around three years off it - Columbia’s copyright expired 10 years after release, if I remember correctly. thank you Leo for all your work! still deeply proud of this record and my part in it. management remains one of the most formative experiences of my life.
there’s a lush moment where in Violent Man Lovesong, about 2m30 in, and Max sings “within a frame of goldleaf”. still so nice.
back in things that didn’t happen 13 years ago, one of the best bits of my week was a long chat with Sanjay yesterday afternoon. I had a talk to finish cutting down from 45 to 10 minutes, and dinner with friends to be at, but it was such a delight to see him that I didn’t want to cut it short. I’m not going to say that one of the best bits of line management is when they leave, because it isn’t, but seeing the people you line managed after the fact is great: back on a level of human-to-human, rather than any odd power dynamics being in the mix.
back to GoodBooks: I think my feelings towards managing them are probably, approximately, what I imagine parenthood must feel like. fiercely proud and protective. wanting the best. advocating always. we had our fair share of challenging each other, but it was never and has never been in doubt: I will always, always go out to bat for you.
sounds kinda creepy when it’s spelled it out like that. I guess this is why I get annoyed when what feels like needless bureaucracy gets in the way of what I want for 'my people’.
schadenfreude is one of an Arsenal fan’s primary currencies. obviously I hope the Premier League season isn’t cancelled, because if it was that would be terrible for public health (pls get better Mikel). I still sent a text this morning that said 'lol Liverpool’.

don’t forget the cheese, 19

2020-03-08T00:00:00Z

just full of bad energy this week. didn’t want to write these at all. but there we go.
one of the things I think about a lot around ‘leadership’ is kind of based on Paul Ford’s post about how irony doesn’t scale. essentially boiling down to, how do you provide 'air cover’ (urgh, military analogies) for people around you - and a lot of the time, I reckon, it’s just about keeping your mouth shut about things you’re exposed to or know that might frustrate others and they don’t need to know about them anyway, because all being well, it’ll go away without them ever knowing. anyway. I felt like I oscillated between being good and bad at this this past week.
not trying to turn these into therapy notes but often it ends up being the thing I think about for a lot of the week. this week’s session saw me searching my emails for a memory prompt afterwards and it threw up an email from James. suddenly felt slightly hit in the stomach with grief for the next 20 minutes, had a cry on the train, and arrived at work in a bit of a daze. it reminded me of Tonkin’s circle of grief: it doesn’t get smaller, life just grows around it. I’m still annoyed that he is gone.
made a biryani from the Dishoom book yesterday. different to but also not quite as good as the Bon Appetit one I made in early Jan. bit too greasy, this one (maybe I didn’t drain the fried onions well enough), but also, biryanis, what a hassle.
Will left on Friday. I think we gave him a good send off. we’ll miss you Will!
Service Design in Gov looked like it was well good. I was sad not to be there and would have liked to see both Will and Cassie’s talks.
asked my mum if she remembered what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was a kid. my memory was that I wanted to be an author. she said she remembered a holiday in France with my grandma, when we went to buy bread and then I spent nearly all morning there on the floor counting centimes. “Grandma thought you were going to grow up to be the governor of the Bank of England!”. is it too late? Mark Carney leaves next week, have they replaced him yet?
Jones of Brockley, a fancy food shop, has opened in East Dulwich. their blood oranges are cheaper than SMBS’s. time moves fast: can’t believe I’ve missed Seville oranges and also pretty much missed forced rhubarb this year just through not paying attention. wild garlic, Jersey royals and aspargus soon (ish) though right? ish.

aspirational authority, 18

2020-02-28T00:00:00Z

I’ve had two nightmares about getting on planes. hugely excited to stay grounded for at least another week after working out last Friday that I’ve been in flight for over 60 hours in the past month. that’s before hanging around in airports or getting to them. the flygskam is strong.
things that I have read and enjoyed this week include ’Garbage Language / why do corporations speak the way they do?’ shared by Ella. best sentence: “The primary unit of meaning was the abstract metaphor.”
also the White Pube on supporting arts inclusivity when you’re privileged. “something i’ve said before but worth repeating: ‘ask yourself how much you want the world to progress vs. how much you want to be SEEN as someone who wants the world to progress.’ It shouldn’t be about you and you know that. It should be about our generation as a collective and pulling each other up so we can dismantle the whole thing n start it again but better.”
talked to a friend about work this week who said to me “remember what [friend] said to me a few years ago: you’re not Jesus.” I mentioned this to my therapist and I have never seen someone try so hard to suppress laughter.
time in the market over timing the market, people. a guy on the overground this morning had a mask, a scarf around the mask, and disposable gloves on. I am not that person, but somehow I have taken on coronavirus paranoia enough that I’m trying to stop touching my face. it’s really hard!
Arsenal, though. why do we even. it’s the hope that kills you, etc.
I’ve never cracked the wallet / purse problem. I prefer to carry things in my pockets rather than in a bag, but carrying individual cards and change loose feels like a falling-out-of-pocket disaster waiting to happen. as of last week I am now putting an elastic band around the cards I carry. it’s minimalist genius, I’ve been laughed at at least twice for it, and it was all C’s idea anyway. come at me haters, it’s only one branded elastic band and an Instagram ad away from commercial riches.
restarted Italian lessons after a few months off while my teacher brought up a child. she’s pleased that I appear to be better at Italian than when we left off. that’s all thanks to Duolingo and speaking Italian more at home. turns out practice works!

fancy, not formal. 17

2020-02-21T00:00:00Z

this is another weeknote written from an airport. Zagreb airport is excellent.
stayed in both a 4* and a 3* hotel this week. the 4* hotel had a pool, but also my room was a bit dark, 25 degrees and couldn’t be made cooler, and confusing shower controls. the 3* hotel did not have a pool or a spa, but did have good lighting and daylight, was only 21 degrees aka a temperature you can sleep in, and exceptionally clear shower controls. a reminder that stars are given pretty much on the basis of the features of a hotel, not necessarily the quality of experience.
took too many books with me this week.
might’ve sussed out why I might owe some tax. still not sure if I actually owe any tax. tune in next week for more!
downloaded Reeder for both mobile and desktop to bring together my RSS and Instapaper in one place. it’s pleasing, and one step on for my 2020 personal stack improvements.
really, really, deeply hoping for at least a month at home.
the artists formerly known as Poplar have come out of hiding and renamed to Breakroom. it’s basically Glassdoor for frontline jobs. more transparency for non white collar workers is a good thing. given they’re building a product that appears to be, essentially, about empowerment, I wonder if a new category could get added…‘This employer is supportive of workers joining a trade union’
I haven’t yet worked out the boundaries for working in the open in my current role, so while there is loads I could write about my working week, I am only going to say that political structures of countries can make it really hard to deliver good digital stuff. any hand wringing done about the political system in the UK is obviously not in vain (I’m not a proponent of the “eat your greens, they’re starving in Africa” argument), but damn, we are in many ways very lucky - and we have a lot to learn from those who have more political barriers in place.
have now watched the Taylor Swift documentary. probably not for the last time.

behaving in a wrong way. 16

2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

went on holiday to Sri Lanka. we met some elephants and saw loads of birds (the type with feathers).
for the first time ever I took the exact right number of books on holiday. I was three quarters through the last one as the plane landed. finished it yesterday on the way to work. pretty sure this is the first time anyone in the world has achieved this feat.
one of the things I read was ‘Ceylon’ by Leonard Woolf, which is an account of his 7 years there as a civil servant straight after leaving university - from 1904 to 1911. he was given a year off after the seven years, came back to London, married Virginia Stephen and decided not to go back to Ceylon. deeply fascinating to read not only about the place but his reflections on the British arrogance of imperialism and being a civil servant. not from the book but from another interview: “the more I was there the more convinced I became that it was wrong. And that we were behaving in a wrong way.”
I’m going to pick out a few bits from the book and put them in a note somewhere.
Ben wrote about clocks on public buildings. since about 2013 I’ve been having a recurring thought when cycling: “the campaign for more public clocks on buildings”. there is a clock on the north side of London Bridge, above the old House of Fraser, but it’s never accurate and has freaked me out a few times. there’s another outside the big Natwest building on Bishopsgate, a digital one, that also gives you the temperature: excellent for benchmarking the day’s cycling outfit with the temperature.
going up hills, I always think, “change DOWN, James BROWN”. no idea any more which song I adapted this from.
so there’s a couple of thoughts I have when I’m on my bike.
back to an airport on Sunday morning. I am sick of going to airports and would like to spend some time at home.
HMRC have decided I owe them some money from more than three tax years ago. it has put me in a terrible mood.

ah, Siena. 15

2020-01-31T00:00:00Z

turns out gallivanting round London when you’re still a bit jetlagged is actually exhausting.
went to Daunt Books for an event with Hisham Matar on Wednesday night. the first time I went to Daunt I was a child and it was my schoolfriend’s mum’s book launch (yes, she worked for the BBC, yes, I grew up in north London). I remember gawping at the gallery and thinking I was in some kind of bookshop heaven. still feels the same way now, to be honest. more of that kind of thing this year!
I’d like to spend a month in Siena.
Matt Edgar wrote a good post about what he’s learned delivering digital services. I don’t disagree with any of it.
a few years after Columbia Records’ copyright expired, GoodBooks have started putting Control on Spotify. dripfeeding a song a month, so it’ll all be there by the end of the year. still very proud of the record, the band and the few years of my life when I managed them. did I mention that I discovered I have a page on Discogs?
this week I mostly prioritised a rapid turnaround of my expenses.

latchmere’s got a wave machine, 14

2020-01-24T00:00:00Z

skipped last week. wrote something. didn’t publish it. Friday was busy. have you done your tax return?
more travelling this week. have a feeling I’m not meant to write about where I was. how shady is that?
good trip though. met lots of nice people. ate a lot of nice food. had some great feedback at the end of the week. as someone who thrives off appreciation, that’ll keep me going for a week or two.
in every country I’ve been to, engineering and technical skills have been highly valued by people in government. and talking about transforming government and user needs has also been, mostly, bang on. but I’ve not seen much by way of ‘we need design’. there’s huge potential for design in government around the world.
a bunch of people stuff we’ve been working on at GDS in the design team has finally come together this week. the bureaucracy of organising progression in the civil service been wearing me down for months to be honest, but it’s fully gratifying in the end to see good people getting promotions.
I know why process exists, but it doesn’t half feel like it detracts from doing valuable work a lot of the time. slowing down good outcomes just a bit.too.much.
will be trying out my Sleepy Ride footrest on the flight home tonight. one day you’ll all have one! if it’s good. feedback to follow.
haven’t looked at Twitter for two weeks.
happy to confirm that Alice was not doing anything embarrassing in Beckenham Park Place when I saw her. maybe when the water in the lake there warms up a bit I’ll be back in that park for a swim and our paths will cross again!
three hours till we go to the airport. hotel swim here I come.
taking a couple of days off next week. excited to gallivant around London like I used to back in GoodBooks days.
omg I have a page on Discogs for being a manager!

could end in burning flames or paradise, 13

2020-01-10T00:00:00Z

I had no idea whether to write a weeknote last Friday or not because I’d already posted two that week.
had a great dream on Saturday night that, one way or another, Max and I ended up hiring a Zipcar and driving Taylor Swift to her gig in Glasgow. the best part was probably the bit where I dreamt about how we’d taken the Zipcar for longer than we’d expected, but the limit for Flex rentals is £72 / day and we could probably get Universal to pay for it.
Alice wrote about my weeknote in her weeknote so now I’m going to write about her weeknote in mine. which is to say, I’m glad that the reflexive pronoun misuse resonated with someone else, and this is the internet I love: loosely connected humans making new connections over shared interests (…or frustrations, either is fine). Alice and I have not met to the best of my knowledge, but [creep alert] I think I might’ve seen you in Beckenham Park one day in the autumn!
first week back at work. I was not ready.
maybe also not ready were the multiple cafes that have been, in my humble opinion, fucking with me this week. not open until Wednesday, says the sign on the door. opening at 9.30am instead of the Google Maps prescribed 8am. closed today for maintenance. I have empathy - guess who used to update the Gail’s Artisan Bakery Christmas hours on the internet? - but also, I really wanted a coffee yesterday morning and I was sad.
went to Turncoats last night thanks to a heads up from one of our team. a discussion about the nuclear family home. they said not to tweet about it and I guess that extends to blogging, but how about I refrain from a summary of the discussion and instead list some takeaways: architects look a lot like designers. the live art at the beginning was like something Sam Trotman might’ve taken me to in 2009. the people whose points of view resonated with me the most were, I think, also the people who hated public speaking the most.
just had lunch with Rod who is a delight and I don’t see him enough. we talked mostly about the minefield that is ethical investing. I had a jacket potato.
once Christmas credit cards and small stacks of books by the bedside are done, I’m going to get myself a Daunt Books subscription as a treat. look at that website. it’s so calm. don’t you wish you were in the gallery or sat in one of those wicker chairs?
on which: to get through that bedside stack, and reward myself with the treat of someone else choosing things for me, I have some reading to do. this is good also because reading makes me calmer. so consider this me signing out of Twitter for the foreseeable. you’ll find me reading novels and my RSS feeds. weeknotes will continue but I won’t be tweeting them. you can subscribe to tumblr via RSS which is great cos I haven’t got round to the ‘replatform my blog’ part of my 2020 OKRs yet. ok bye!

actually wrote this 1.5 weeks ago. 11

2019-12-31T00:00:00Z

Philip Pullman was always better than JK Rowling anyway
more on transactions, aka the two things I’d forgotten when I wrote about library fees last week: at With Associates, we ate lunch with each other quite often. Mathew had built the table to accommodate that. one person would say “Turkish?” and usually one or two people would go out to get lunch for the others. which meant we all owed each other money quite often. 54Bank (the studio we were in was called 54B) was Mathew’s solution for that. just a simple tally system on a web app, “Anna owes Mathew £6 for Turkish”. and over time, ideally it evens out, or you can call in your debts. I think when we closed I owed about £20 to various people, which was nothing on my unnamed but no less lovely colleague who owed Mathew over 100 quid.
upstairs at 54B Tim rented a desk. him and Henry used to have a token system - physical tokens - they had a limited number of physical tokens which were originally shared out evenly. hand over a token to the person buying lunch. when you run out of tokens you know it’s your turn to start buying lunch.
Taylor Swift is headlining Glastonbury. I haven’t been for years but it used to be my favourite festival. going to ask the three people I still know working in music if there are any tickets floating around cos MATE wouldn’t that be brilliant! a mere 15 years since my first Glastonbury, which involved an off-site party with the Magic Numbers where I bumped into a girl I fancied from school who’d just won Make Me A Supermodel on telly. being 17 was kind of brilliant sometimes.
last night C suggested I do a PhD in comparative pop music focusing on TSwift between 2014-2017 and while I’ve never thought of myself as a PhD person, it does sound tempting.
went to Paris for a meeting on Wednesday. you may have seen the news that most of Paris is on strike. I love the French fondness for industrial action - it’s so French! and their revolution was definitely more effective than ours - but spending 3.5h either waiting for or in taxis was not really my idea of a fun day out. at least the meeting went well.
started wondering about whether I should get a new New Yorker subscription next year. probably requires reducing my work hours so I actually have time to read it.
this week has been full on. I’m very ready to not go to work for a couple of weeks.

what day is it? 12

2019-12-31T00:00:00Z

what was last Friday? should I write as if it was then or as if it’s now?
the people who write weeknotes during the Christmas holidays are my people. well done everyone.
went to see my mum and dad pre-Christmas, then from there to Italy to see C’s dad. Christmas day was 9 Italian adults and 4 Italian children and me. I tried my hardest to keep up, but I was glad to be sent to the sofa for a little post-lunch nap. immersion is exhausting!
every time I go there I feel like I’ve not made any progress with Italian because there is still so much I don’t understand. but of course I have, and the words I find myself noticing are more advanced every time (this time: essere (to be) and volere (to want) in the present conditional tense!). seriously though, I just want to be fluent!
I’m never going to northern Italy without walking boots again.
Italian food is, on a day to day basis, far better than English food. even supermarket fruit and veg aisles are an inspiration. but I did find myself missing roast potatoes on Christmas Day.
more food: while there, we made pasta (some pappardelle, and C made casoncelli), ragù, veal with fennel and shallots. Christmas Day was polenta and rabbit. so. Italian food is better than English food.
everyone on the internet seems to be talking about their years and the last decade and all I’ve managed is to work out who I was going out with in 2009 and that I was three months into my second year of university. so. yes, a lot has changed in 10 years.
haven’t decided when to go back to work yet. I have to go back to work?

libraries, again. 10

2019-12-13T00:00:00Z

we had a very gentle design team meeting this morning, not least because it was the design team Christmas party last night. passing a panettone around in a circle the morning after the night before felt like about the right level for me today.
nothing but love for Hector Bellerin speaking his mind. some people think footballers shouldn’t have opinions on politics. me, I’m with Tim Stillman.
finished Girl, Woman, Other and it was brilliant. best thing I’ve read all year. it’s out in paperback in March so bags yourself a copy then. did I mention I got it from the library? all the copies were out when I wanted to borrow it, so I paid a whopping 50p to reserve it, then got an email when it came back in stock. 50p! and I don’t have to find bookshelf space to store it when I’m finished!
next up is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. another 50p to Lambeth libraries, another book not out in paperback until next year. honestly. libraries are so great.
speaking of that 50p: I’ve been thinking about how it feels like a joy / pleasure to pay it, rather than annoying or “books from the library should all be free” (let’s be clear, it’s a 50p reservation fee, not 50p to borrow the book: if the book was in stock, it’d still be free to borrow it). that’s partly because of how the payment system works. it’s not ‘pay 50p and then you can have the book’; you can pay that 50p whenever. no chasing, no judgement. pay 20p when you get the book out if you like, and another 30p another day three weeks later. it feels non-transactional. when I first thought about this I had examples of two other services that had a similar payment feeling, and now I’ve forgotten them. I think there’s something in this though: the way, place, time, reasons that payments are taken change the way that a service feels. payment at the point of use and free at the point of use are not the only models.
going to Paris for work for a day next week and I’m reasonably sure there won’t be time to visit Du Pain et Des Idées for pastries, which begs the question, why go to Paris?
a new DM started on the team this week. everything is a bit easier already. thank you Rich!
got wound up by seeing a totally inaccurate use of a reflexive pronoun in some work comms because it just did not need to be there. look at this sharp increase since the 1960s! I don’t know why this bothers me, except I kind of do: pretending to be formal and getting it wrong feels quite closely related to the kind of inauthentic lack of substance that riles me right up. I should be more forgiving, I know.
New Zealand are passing a new Public Service Act, which reads a bit like service communities getting codified by law: it “will lead to the establishment of interdepartmental boards, or “joint ventures”, comprised of chief executives from relevant government agencies. The boards will report to a single minister, and will have the power to collaboratively deal with high priority issues. They will have the ability to employ staff, enter into contracts, and administer appropriations, and public servants from across departments and agencies will be deployed when needed”. read alongside this from the Centre for Public Impact. well done New Zealand: please continue your progressive thinking on what governments should be, rather than only on what governments should do.

how might we swing the budget cat to make this work? 9

2019-12-06T00:00:00Z

Jack tweeted earlier in the week about feeling at a bit of a dead end, and how do you find a mentor etc etc. I’ve definitely felt similarly in recent months: something about getting to a certain level of seniority has meant fewer people looking out for me, and I’ve found myself feeling a bit jealous of the people I line manage or mentor. I want an hour to talk about my work and where I’m going! so I’m accepting offers from people of a service/systems design and product flavour. I’m also still accepting breakfast meetings near the office at 9am!
had dinner at Emile on Tuesday with some Gail’s pals. it was delicious, especially the pink fir potatoes with anchovy. and the Lancashire poacher croquettes with a brown sauce vibe going on too (cuts through the cheese, innit). I am definitely richer now that I don’t work in food and don’t go out for dinner all the time. but I also definitely eat less delicious food.
on Monday I went to a thing about systemic design at the Design Council. it was good, though some examples I was maybe a bit sceptical about. or maybe it’s language. some things can be products or campaigns rather than examples of systems change and that is OK. or maybe everything is systems change when you look at it through a certain lens.
when I start on this theoretical stuff, I very quickly get to a place of “I’m tired”. no idea how people can spend their lives so earnestly engaging with it to be honest - I really admire it, but almost immediately get to a place of “what if we all just went to the pub and had a chat?”. I’d like to be one of the earnest engagers, but…well, I’m not / I can’t right now. maybe it’s to do with the work I’ve been doing rather than me. one to consider more in 2020.
started reading Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo before bed last night and holy crap it’s good. resented going to work this morning because how DARE work take me from my novel? can’t wait to get on the tube to read more of it and will be devastated when it’s over. I read fiction really fast so it will probably be over by the time I get home :(
I know of at least two people at GDS who used to work in publishing and sometimes I’m like, why used to? what was wrong with reading novels all the time? can I have a go?
worked from home yesterday. I’m often not very good at working from home, because I don’t take breaks and then my brain burns out a bit. but yesterday was good, I got a whole bunch done. maybe this is because I didn’t want to turn the heating on, so I got a yoga mat out and did a bunch of jumping around for 5 mins every time I got cold. after lunch I went for a 12 minute run before a meeting. get buff, save money, work from home!

handbrake OFF! 8

2019-11-29T00:00:00Z

I asked about sci fi on Twitter earlier in the week. there were so many replies that now I have absolutely no idea of where to start, except for starting with the books that Will brought in for me the very next day. actions speak louder than words IN ACTION!
when I was at Co-op I wrote an intro to a story of a food store in 2030 (yes, the most boring story ever) to try to get across how technology was changing retail, and I’m interested in that kind of thing as a design tool more than I’m interested in, as I said on Twitter, spaceships. really hope people haven’t just recommended loads of books about spaceships to me.
thought I was being clever today trying to tidy up who I follow on Twitter, to reduce politics and to reduce general noise, because I’ve been sucked right back in recently and I want my brain back again. started a private list, called it ‘mute’ so that I’d remember to mute people later. then Buzz told me he’d got a notification about it. what’s private about that, Twitter? you’ll find me in a shame cave somewhere.
yesterday morning I was brushing my hair in front of the mirror, getting ready to leave the house, and started saying in Italian the foods involved in our Italian Christmas lunch. 'involtini, stracchino, manzo, finocchio, funghi, polenta’. what can I say, I’m excited.
spent most of therapy this week talking about public loos. I don’t present gender-typically and I pretty much never have, so for most of my life I’ve experienced the odd funny look in women’s loos. somehow over time I’ve translated that into a feeling of guilt that I shouldn’t be there in the first place. it’s stressful! so it was good to talk about it. a reminder for anyone reading that other people in public bathrooms are 100% more likely than you are to know which loo they should be in, and are about as likely as you are to have made a mistake about which door to go through.
involved in my fifth recruitment campaign since September, three of which I’ve been the chair for. always write a cover letter!
keep being exceptionally un-Checksies and checked my portfolio a bunch of times because I’m close to a number that I’m excited about. this Monevator article is a whole set of good reasons Not To Check…but also to pay attention to milestones. after some chat with Rod where we worked out a bunch of ways I could cheat my usual measures and actually be at this milestone (including: “what if I sell loads of stuff on eBay in December so I have an extra £600 to put into Vanguard this month?”), we concluded that it’s all well and good to want to hit targets and so on, but ultimately, stick with good habits, pat self on the back, carry on. yes! it’s the obvious conclusion: do nothing jazzy, keep going.
omg Freddie Ljungberg
excellent piece on growth loops shared by Tanya Cordrey, yes I’m linking to the tweet not to the post for proper attribution. it’s easy to lose sight / track of techniques used to build and think about product development from inside govt, because…well, it’s different, innit?
the hidden insight this week (which I’ve only found through writing this) is around compulsive checking of things: portfolios, feeds, Arsenal news. might turn my phone off. bye!

cosa fai questa settimana? 7

2019-11-22T00:00:00Z

had my last Italian lesson before my teacher goes and has a baby and takes a bit of time off. unprompted, she told me that I am her best student. well maybe tied with someone else but they do loads of homework. obviously I was delighted, and then I suddenly worried that I should be doing way more Italian homework than I am. story of my life.
when the news broke about Spurs firing Poch and recruiting Mourinho, my godson posted an Instagram story about Spurs being a ‘terrible club’. we’ve not spent loads of time together in the past five years (geography innit) but I like to think me taking him to Arsenal once or twice a season has directly contributed to this mindset and frankly I am proud that I’ve helped him become the upstanding young man he is today.
met some Danes this week. they were thoughtful and interested and they all laughed at my jokes. what if we all moved to Denmark, huh?
after a bit of a rough day on Tuesday / let’s be honest maybe a rough few weeks, I messaged Ste, our head of design, to see if he was around for a pint 'soon’, because I felt like a chat with him might help me feel a bit better. his reply: “sure, what about now? see you downstairs in 5 minutes?”. and that is how Stephen and I ended up in the pub at 11.30am on Tuesday. no just kidding, it was 5pm. anyway. fast response + making time at that exact moment = leaders, take note. thanks Ste <3
on Wednesday we ran a user-centred design careers evening for people who are underrepresented in technology. we pulled it together fast (well, Clara did). I did a talk at the end, which was my usual 'take a boring thing like pensions or recruitment and try to explain it in human’. people seemed to appreciate it. I’m keenly aware that this translation of complicated to simple wouldn’t be a necessary thing to do if we made it easy in the first place.
it was very, very lovely to be in the Pilcrow last Friday and see some of my Co-op Digital friends. what a familiar place. the Pilcrow might actually be the pub I’ve spent the most time in ever?! (tight competition with the EDT and the Gowlett I imagine)
the design team went to the Design of the Year exhibition this morning. while I was looking at one of the entries, a man came along with a drill and an orange tag saying 'overall winner’, and proceeded to drill it onto the label.
the Design Museum lockers are £1, coins only, non-refundable. who left their ticket in their coat pocket and had to pay two pounds for the privilege of using a cloakroom? yes, me. first I had to go to west London, then I had to pay an extra quid for the privilege. there’s a reason I try not to go west of Vauxhall, and I’d do well to remember it.
just went to check just how far west Vauxhall is compared to north of the river, and have now created ideal boundaries for myself on Google Maps. no further west than Vauxhall Bridge Road / Park Lane, in an ideal world. I’m more lenient in other parts of the city. what can I say man, north London’s home.

shadow Co-op. 6

2019-11-15T00:00:00Z

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
Santi Cazorla says he misses everything about Arsenal. I miss everything about you, too, Santi. come home!

my name isn’t ****ing Warren! 5

2019-11-08T00:00:00Z

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.

new bike week! 4

2019-11-01T00:00:00Z

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.)

can i post in the past? Friday weeknote on Saturday. 3

2019-10-25T00:00:00Z

obviously I’m always banging on about pensions in terms of civil service benefits but do we mention on Civil Service Jobs that the Cabinet Office VPN allows you to watch iPlayer when abroad? we do not. is that an open goal missed? it is.
Lauren Currie mentioned You’re Doing Great in her opening talk of the Service Design Fringe Festival. apparently it’s an example of service designers levelling up! Funny that 1. a tiny thing me, Sam and Iso started to get Iso feeling better about freelancing is now being mentioned as…well, something bigger than hanging out with a couple of your fave morons 2. oh how we don’t acknowledge our achievements - I spent some of the first half of the year berating myself over lack of progress on side projects, but YDG keeps bubbling away as a useful thing to have put into the world - so I should take some credit for that eh.
a designer at GDS shared the slides for an “intro to service design presentation” by Kate Tarling and Ben Holliday. it’ll be from a few years ago as Ben was still at DWP according to the slides. it’s a very good set of slides and I imagine the talk was equally excellent. however because it is so good, I have a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) suggestion: a single deck for these talks that all service designers in gov use - communism for service design talks basically - because how much human capital is spent making new, slightly edited versions of the same talk? Sometimes I feel like I spend half my life making slightly different versions of the same deck (your mileage may vary)
yes, someone in a meeting this week said human capital - more pleasing than human resources I thought, but maybe that’s because it sounds a bit like Das Kapital and clearly that’s where I’m at right now.
stories from a plane: I had a connecting flight this week. the first flight was late leaving Heathrow and I nearly missed the next plane. but I didn’t, because at the connecting airport they put me straight in a lil minivan, like the kind we had at school to go to hockey matches at other schools, and drove me and the other two passengers for the next flight straight to the plane. how do I get more of that Taylor Swift airport treatment cos I am very here for it.
on the way back I got berated for not having a red tag on my hand baggage. I used the electronic check in machine so I didn’t have to queue at a desk and had no idea I needed a red tag. “I didn’t know” I said, “you have to read” in response. here’s an idea: don’t offer electronic check in if you need to see people’s luggage to put a tag on it. Austrian Airlines, you build me up then you bring me down. I thought you loved me but it seems you just don’t care.
Congresswoman
Congresswoman
Congresswoman
one last service design moan (if a service designer moans, is it always a service design moan? almost inevitably): we’re off to the Royal Festival Hall tonight to see Hannah Gadsby. obviously when I bought the tickets I said we’d pick them up cos what’s with £3.50 or however much it is? I have been known to use the postal service and I don’t believe it’s that much for a stamp, an envelope and some human processing time. anyway. Catherine went to pick up the tickets on Wednesday cos we’ll both be a bit squeezed for time tonight. “oh, there’s been a process change, we sent them out last week. it takes 10 working days for them to arrive. we can only reprint on the day of the show.” 1. 10 days means the tickets arrive after the event 2. ain’t no one told me they were posting the tickets 3. srsly if that’s the policy, say so and then busy people won’t waste their lives getting off the 68 before they have to.
lest this turn full moan, our plumber texted us the fix for our broken boiler this week, so now not only has my girlfriend shown a natural aptitude for plumbing, but it means we have TWO yes TWO qualified people we can text about house repairs and renovations. it’s a far cry from choosing people based on the latest East Dulwich Forum posts like I used to. do you need a plumber in SE London? call Dave from McHow, you’re welcome!

p1 p1 p1 p1 p1 p1 p1 p1 weeknote 2

2019-10-18T00:00:00Z

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

is it a weeknote? 1

2019-10-11T00:00:00Z

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.

Civil Service Pensions

2018-03-12T00:00:00Z

Civil Service (CS) Pensions are quite complicated. I tried to figure them out, made a presentation which I shared with the GDS design team, and made a spreadsheet to work out if I'll be rich when I'm old. I've been told that other people would find all this useful, so here goes nothing.

There are lots of numbers and options thrown around with the CS Pension scheme. When I did a bit of digging, all those numbers got more complicated rather than more simple. So I dug more, talked to some people (thanks Chris, thanks Will, thanks Jen, called the CS Pensions phoneline a few times, and decided I now understood enough that I could try to make it simple.

If you work for the Civil Service and you’re interested in pensions, then:

Here is the presentation I did on Civil Service Pensions (it’s definitely Not Financial Advice)
If you want to play around with numbers, you can copy this spreadsheet and see what comes out. (Thanks Rod for the help, I love making spreadsheets with you ❤️)

I hope this helps someone out.

This post is redirected to from civilservicepensions.co.uk, so that it's easier for people to find and point people to.

If you want to help pay for the domain costs, you can buy me a coffee

If you want actual financial advice, particularly if you're getting nearer to retirement, find yourself a Chartered Financial Planner. You can find lots of those listed at Unbiased.