Tales from my week. 14th — 20th November
Is it really Friday already? This week has flown by!
Good things
- On Monday I returned to work after some unplanned time off due to ilness. Its funny how being away makes you appreciate what you have, and I have a job that is varied, challenging, meaningful and with great colleagues — I’m very lucky. It felt good to be back in a routine and to feel purposeful.
- I listened to a panel event with representatives from voluntary and community sector organisations who have been helping people fleeing war in Ukraine. It was inspiring to hear their stories and experiences from the front line, as well as their feedback and challenges to those of us working on the Homes for Ukraine programme in government.
- I attended the first half of a facilitation training course with Circle Indigo. Thus far it’s been a good balance of reinforcing things I already know and building confidence, and introducing new frameworks and tools that I’ve not come across before. I’m enjoying the learning-by-doing approach, and will be trying out some of the approaches next week (e.g. ORID question design).
- Our service owner has been wonderful this week in helping me protect my time. I’ve been struggling in the last couple of weeks to put down a project we worked together on over the summer to focus on our new-ish discovery, and they have been really helpful in giving me permission to ignore some emails/meetings in favour of focus time and allow other colleagues to respond instead.
- I had a lovely chat with a consultant who’s helping develop our communities of practice. We talked about our existing communities, what’s not working, what the make up of a future community might look like, why communities are important, how we might resource a community to thrive… and lots of other things I’ve forgotten. We packed a lot into half an hour!
- I took notes for three user research sessions. It’s been a while since I last participated in UR, and it’s always fascinating to hear the richness of conversations that our URs curate.
Challenges
- I’m still not 100% well and am having to pace myself, which I’m not very good at.
- I’m feeling sad about what appears to be imminent demise of Twitter. It’s not so much the tool but the community and connections it’s allowed me to find over the last six or seven years. It’s because of Twitter friends that I started writing, that I first attended and then became a UKGovcamp organiser, that I found the advert that lead to the job I do now. I’m experimenting with Mastodon and LinkedIn as those seem to be where the majority of my network are moving to.
- My writing is getting very little engagement, which is a bit discouraging. It was my choice to participate in NaBloPoMo, and I’m doing it to improve my writing skills and document some memories, but it still feeds odd to put my words out into the world and get nothing in return. I suspect this is also linked to the bird site meltdown, as that’s where the majority of my audience has come from during previous purple patches of writing.
Week Ahead
- Tomorrow I’ll be competing at Brass in Concert, our final competition of the year
- On Thursday I’ll be at part 3 of 4 of the facilitation training
- It’s Show and Tell week
- I’ve booked virtual coffees with two colleagues I haven’t seen in a while. I’m looking forward to hearing how they’re doing, what they’re working on at the moment, and what they’re excited about
