Daynotes 2023-05-17

Must be busy, as I’ve not been writing day notes. Today is sunny, and there are two mini chainsaws yelling outside of the front door. The heron at the pond matched the shape of a tree, and the paths are overgrown with nettles and cow parsley. I suspect this is a metaphor for something.

A path leading away through overgrown plants on both sides, with the top of a house visible in the background.

Since last time:

  • Finished looking into GoGoCarto – it’s a nice tool, but may not do quite what is needed. "What is needed" is then the question.

  • Doing more work in spreadsheets to organise my understanding of different projects and how they work. Something about 2D working seems to fit code documentation nicely a lot of the time, as if copying-and-pasting and flexible functionality are inherently non-linear.

  • Attended a welcome event run by Arts Council England as our charity is now a National Portfolio Organisation, along with all the governance and reporting that goes along with it. Secretly excited by the challenge of overview and data here, although now working out how to make a bit more time for it.

  • Eurovision happened, and I still can’t get Finland’s song ‘Cha Cha Cha’ out of my head.

Coming up:

  • I’m thinking about a way to order my time better, as I still feel like I’m jumping haphazardly between things a bit too much. I think I might try blocks of 2-3 days for a project at a time – enough to get into some solid work, but that allows a bit of flexibility over a 2 week period.

  • I also want to start building in deliberate breaks, what some might call "mindfulness" breaks, but for me, at least, it’s about giving myself the opportunity to step away from responsibilities for a moment. Mid-life seems full of these things, and TBH I’ve been jumping from one set of responsibilities to another for years now: Feeling responsible for my own path, for client deliveries, for parenting and family, and for company Boards, and it can be quite tiring a lot of the time. Ten minute breaks to stop thinking, even just once or twice a day, may go a long way.

  • Thinking about both of these in terms of mini-metrics – I have a large spreadsheet for planning and timelogging, and it would seem to make sense to add it in to that somehow.