Month: April 2020

Thuresday¹ evening before Easter weekend and then a week off, and look I sort of just want to drink beer and go and see if the shops have a little milk chocolate bunny for my wife, so I’m going to make this quick. Sorry, internet crowd, you just got to roll with it sometimes.

¹ "Thuresday" is the ancient anglo-saxon spelling for Thursday, from ‘Thuyer’s Day". Thuyer ruled over the season where there was still work to do in the fields but you knew it was gone Woden’s Day, which meant it was all a bit confusing. Thuresday is definitely not a typo.

In general, it’s been another busy week crammed into half-days, busier for going on leave next week. We’ll be lining up VR holidays in a few years, I’m sure.

On the whole, I’ve been rather enjoying working from home full-time, it must be said. I’ve been able to gather my wits a bit more – as notes previously, I feel a bit more secluded, a bit more able to use not just my brain, but my whole body and even out to my environment to do my thinking.

This sort of fascinates me. I am a very hand-wavy person, in that I move my hands when I speak. I think ‘physically’ – maps, blocks, construction through the confines of real-world space. I really do think it helps me to use my body more, and that’s not just being able to stand up for health reasons, but being able to move around and explore the actual space around me. It’s lilke an artist’s studio, but for code and engineering, for team structure and work interdependencies.

Having realised this, what can I do to capture it and build on it? How does it translate once we all get allowed out of our houses again? Does anyone else get this?

I have a few fragments in my diary which caught my attention.

One. I woke up at the right time after a bit of a proper sleep, and immediately felt the difference. I woke up with an enthusiasm of "what can I do to push change", and this probably ties in with having my own space to think. In short, I am feeling somewhat chipper, spurred on by some ideas for personal side projects, a year on solar power, and perhaps by more time in and around birdsong, Birdsong is everything. Perhaps we should start piping it into our offices.

Two. After writing my last unweeknote, I ended up reading Chuang Tzu and the latest issue of Fiddler’s Green and found ‘a way through’. When things are busy and squeezed, we can relax and yet continue to be productive by a ‘Third Way’, ie not just "busy doing stuff" and not "stopping and doing nothing".

The Third Way is to be curious, tread lightly, and enjoy the ride. We can maintain an interest, but not push to deliver. We can seek both efficiency and revelation (what others would call ‘innovation’) by being amused, asking intriguing questions, and exploring the space. Hopefully your work allows you to be like this sometimes. If not, you may be stuck between feeling "busy" and "lazy".

That’s me done, I’m off to the shop. Here are some links of other stuff I’ve been up to, just in case you want more…

• Minimising Slack a bit more

• Finished reading Moby Dick. Wow? Here’s my review, sort of.

• Thinking through virtual in-game photography

• Photos of the guinea pigs

Staccato crashes, lined up by some global synth machine stuck on an algorithm deep in layers. I currently feel a bit like each day rolls over me, into me, like a heavy square wave. 5 brass hits in a row. Which is all why I’m posting a quick midweek week note, to note that my weeks aren’t really geared up for writing weeknotes at the moment…

Over on my personal blog, I wrote about repairing disrupted rhythms. The rhythms and loops are in place now, but there’s not much downtime. Wake up. Do morning stuff, get kids ready, have breakfast, etc. My wife and I are juggling homeschooling and our (remote) work by splitting the days half-and-half, tag-time at 1pm.

It’s great in some ways – I love spending time with the boys and I do like remote working, but I’m squeezed for time, and haven’t worked out how to take breaks properly yet. So 9am-1pm working, then bang, the kids come in to tell me time’s up, and then it’s 1-5pm delving into phonics, maths, anglo-sarong history, trampoline fixing, or whatever we decide it’s time for. Dinner. Bedtime. Tidying. Collapse. Sometimes the morning and afternoon swap over, but it’s the same endurance run.

It’s not too bad during the day. It’s only around 6pm I really remember I haven’t taken a break, or 5pm if lunch was too small.

Writing in the evening hasn’t been foremost. I’ve been finishing off watching This Country on iplayer, migrating my own websites to a new server, and watched Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ over a couple of evenings.

So weeknotes may be more sketchy in the near future – if that’s possible. There’s certainly interesting stuff going on. Maybe I’ll try something more sporadic, but specific, when the time is right – my own personal retro, or something.

But anyway, outside there are three new moorhen chicks on the local pond. Welcome to Spring.