What we know we know and Hamilton: Weeknotes s02e02
A short week for me, as I spent Monday and Tuesday enjoying a belated wedding anniversary break with my wife. Turns out that wandering around, consuming vast quantities of tapas and guzzling wine in the sun are excellent ways to spend your time.
Things that happened thing week
Doing analysis as a team
As part of a project I’m working on to figure out ways we can use our research to improve decision making, we got together as a team to collaboratively analyse and discuss our research. We teased out some good insights and, along with our Product Owners’ expertise, we left with a better idea of what we did and didn’t know. Initially I felt a bit dazed and unsure as to whether we were in a better place or not, but in writing up the session I feel that we have a much better grounding in what we need to learn about next. It’s always worthwhile backing up what you think you know with some actual evidence.
Reading interesting things
As part of the background reading for this project, I came across a few really interesting reports and articles:
- How to be an effective minister
From the Institute of Government, this is an interesting publication that recommends more support for ministers who often are thrusted into their roles with no help or relevant experience. I didn’t realise that there’s not really a job description or much in the way of clear objectives when they are put into post. Very illuminating. - Show your working
Another Institute of Government report on developing a tool to assess the transparency of evidence in policy-making. Will be interesting at a later stage to refer back to this for my project. - A short guide to policy for government digital professionals
Probably relatively well known by people who read these, but something really useful to keep referring back to to understand what the dark art of policy actually is.
I now love Hamilton
After buying tickets about a year and half ago, me and my wife finally got to go and see what all the fuss was about.
For me, it really lived up to the hype. Great performances and it was just so bloody impressive how they managed to sing beautifully, rap eloquently, whilst remembering all of the lyrics as well as jumping around, dancing at the same time. An impressively, enjoyable feat.
What I learned this week
I need to put an actual plan in place to manage my time.
Over the last few weeks I’ve felt a bit stretched over lots of different things and have resolved to finally start properly planning my working week better so that I feel like I am achieving something tangible come Friday.
All too often, I fall into the trap of work happening to me, rather than me taking an active role in shaping my week. To fix this I’m going to try and:
- actually make a prioritised list of things I want to achieve at the beginning of the week
- actually block out time in the calendar to work on them
- planning only for about 4–5 hours of real work per day
- ensuring I close email and slack periodically to reduce distraction
- grouping meetings and catchups together as much as possible (and have them earlier in the day)
- declining invites to things that aren’t as important to me right now
- plan my train travel time to do things that are well suited to the train (like admin jobs, reading or writing articles ect)
Other stuff
I started watching the rather strange Elle earlier this week which features horrific sexual violence and disturbing behaviour by the protagonists ‘friends’. I can’t say it’s enjoyable by any stretch and I’ve been watching it in chunks as I’ve kind of lost interest, although feel a strange compulsion to finish it so I know who did it.
I highly recommend the West Wing Weekly for anyone with even a passing interest in the show — they’re finally starting to review season 5 which co-host Hrishi has never actually seen (he’s a committed Sorkin-phile, who left at the end of season 4).
More next week!
