HI BLOG. There, that feels good. Sooo, following on my first post, here are my initial "rules of engagement" for me and this blog. And this is a very personal set of rules. This blog is for Me, capital M. If that’s not working out, then it’s not A Right Thing.
Rules of blogging engagement
- I can post via EMAIL, using MARKDOWN. (This is currently in very experimental stages. procmail is involved.) This may mean less GIFs, boooo.
- I can post whenever I like. Sorry #weeknotes crew – Friday just doesn’t work for me 😉 Since October, I’ve moved to not working on Fridays – but, as it’s not quite the weekend, there’s a limbo zone between finishing ‘Head of Tech’ duties for the weekend, and actually relaxing.
- Posts should pick up on things I am finding either a) interesting, or b) challenging. Probably both, but not always.
- Writing must be fun.
That’s it for now.
RSS fan? I’m not sure if I’ll post these on Medium in the future, but the best source feed is probably this Atom feed on the original blog. Go easy, it’s hosted right next to my front door, under the phone and coats. Yes, I’ll post a picture soon.
Where am I at?
Context is everything, so here’s a bit of a recap. Oh yeah, I did a plain-text intro dint I?
- I have gone 3 days a week since October, split over 4 days, with Fridays off. Did this mainly to cover school runs, and take the stress off my partner who has an appreciated, flexible job, but this also meant she was doing more share of the school dashes, which is no good. It also means I get a chance to do more house stuff, and more of my own personal side-lines, because these things are Important too.
- Back in Sept/Oct, I set out a bunch of aims for the Tech side of things for the company. Broadly speaking, these lined up some work on … actually, maybe that’s a whole separate post?
- I’m now looking back over the last 5 months to see how all this has worked out, as well as the ongoing day-to-day stuff.
What one thing should I mention here, to make it look like an Actual Weeknote?
Looking back over my hastily-diarised notes (this is also another post…), the main exciting thing which has happened is clearly:
- "Broke a door"
- "The door got fixed"
Needless to say, I’m a little concerned about our building. Not to mention the flies over winter.
In the background, I’m really trying to figure out where the best place to involve myself is, in a lot of work. If you have junior staff, then you know you need to direct and support them quite directly. If you have senior staff, then you know you can (should) hand over a lot of responsibility to them. And honestly, I don’t know if I’m struggling to give up some control as the tech team have got more capable over teh years, or if I do still have a much … keener? sense of risk and awareness of Things What Can Go Wrong.
I think it is always better to keep people advancing, which does tend towards keeping them out of their Comfort Zone ™, which has its own tensions – even if you agree the "right" levels of support up front, I think it’s easy to collectively miss things in hindsight. I don’t want to get into a position where my own ‘step back’ approach, confirmed with one team member, has unconfirmed knock-on effects for others. That’s a tricky conflict,and I hadn’t really appreciated that before. Thanks, weeknoting practice.
I also keep coming back to a phrase in the Tao Te Ching: "People are difficult to govern, because they are very clever." Hmmmmm, so true.
What else is in my notes?
Warren Ellis on notebook processing: "It’s always worth running tests on the way you work."
Which bits of my work process should I test out?
