Dan’s Weeknotes 2021–11–28
Last time I wrote about trying to have a good Monday. I didn’t have a good Monday last week.
I have a list of things that help make a good Monday:
- Get through some tasks early in the day
- Get out for a walk in the daylight
- Have some conversations that give me good energy
- Have a great sandwich
I think I didn’t pick the right tasks so I was missing a sense of achievement. I need to focus on those ‘quick wins’ — the things that’ve been on the list for a while that I’m avoiding for no reason I can explain because they’ll only take 15 minutes. I should be more organised so that I can make sure I’m having those conversations that give me good energy and set up the week too.
It wasn’t just Monday, I was struggling with my energy levels for the whole week. I managed to get out for a walk in the daylight every day, which was good. Every day last week I had to have a nap in the early evening though — I was shattered. And so I got to Thursday thinking I really hadn’t achieved very much.
Hang on a moment though.
As a team we are changing our regular forums and practices, to help us feel more like a team and to help us collaborate more. One of the new things is everybody posts a few bullet points on a Monday morning in our team Slack channel. This was Jon’s suggestion. It saves us having yet another call, for a start. Then on Thursday afternoon we have a call where we go around and give an update on how we’ve got on. We do this on Thursday afternoon to accommodate everybody’s working patterns and preferences¹. We rotate the lead for the meeting so it’s not always me running it.
This week when I went back to my bullet points to see how I’d done I’d actually been really productive and achieved most everything I’d set out to do. I am my own unreliable narrator it seems.
On Tuesday I had a good session with the Seamless team helping to develop metrics to support their design principles. This is difficult work but we’re definitely making progress. I am developing a practice here that can be applied to any team, with the idea being that it could be run by anybody rather than relying on me. In the back of my mind of got a longer term aim to put together a ‘playbook’ for data work. I think there’s a gap there. Anyway, the main thing I need to ensure is that the metrics support the work and not the other way around.
We had another success with recruitment, and this means that from January we won’t have any vacancies in our team. I’m so happy about this. We’re not a big team — there are 12 of us at the moment. 7 of those people are new in post this year though. When I think back to when I started at Citizens Advice I had no scope to recruit people straight away, and I found that rather hard. Recruiting is hard sure but I love it and when the opportunity is there it’s the most important thing to be doing. We’ve significantly improved the diversity of the team this year too, including the Data Science leadership.
Josh ran our weekly open session on data architecture and data strategy this week. This session is open to anybody in our organisation and Josh and I try to make the agenda really varied and to include lots of different presenters. We are trying to normalise talking about data (thanks to one of our guest speakers Adam for putting this so succinctly). This week Josh presented on the data documentation framework he’s been working on. It’s great, and there was praise from the group about the difference the team are making.
I had a couple of calls about data publishing — one an external working group and another with Suzanne the new Data Science Lead. I really hope we can get something off the ground here, it is my absolute jam after all. Also I am really enjoying having Suzanne in the team — it’s great to have another experienced person to bounce ideas off.
That’ll do I think. Best thing at the moment is how well the team are doing. It feels very positive after a very difficult year.
Also
I have been listening to James Acaster’s Perfect Sounds podcast and I am really enjoying it.
I have been watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on Netflix². The episode about Detroit was really something.
Footnotes
¹ Most of the team prefer to work earlier in the day than me, for example
² Netflix could do with an equivalent of the BBC’s /programmes but hey the web is broken
