Dan’s Weeknotes s07e19
Week ending 2020–12–04
Hi friend. Thank you for stopping by.
Writing these on a Monday again. Maybe that’s alright. It kind of fits with a bit of routine as I sit on a bed while my son is in the same room doing his early evening online Scratch class¹.
I experienced big swings from good to not good last week at work. If I was scoring from 1 to 10 where 10 is good I’d give it an average 5. That’s not the right way to interpret that data though!
What was good?
- Citizens Advice gave staff an additional day of leave during the latest Covid-19 lockdown as a wellbeing day. I’d encouraged my team to take it, and decided to do the same. So I took Tuesday off and I didn’t check my emails or anything like that, and I went for a walk around Walthamstow Wetlands and it was an absolutely beautiful day. I felt good for it and I realised that I’ve hardly taken any time off like that all year. Although, there have been significant periods of time where I’ve been working less due to circumstances. Citizens Advice’s flexibility and support has been superb in my opinion. But still, I need to find more space for rest.
- I had a good call with somebody doing research for a charity on the organisation’s data needs, particularly for internal use and decision making. I’ve had similar conversations in the past year. It’s always good to think about how you might apply principles from a larger organisation with means to a smaller one with comparatively less. I think there are some principles that apply no matter what — like making sure you understand and can prove the link between reporting and decisions being taken for example.
- I had a good discussion with Jake from information governance about data strategy and data ethics.
- I really enjoyed talking to Alex for his PhD and about other stuff.
- I binged this podcast ‘The Other Latif’ which was superb, really gripping:
- I really enjoyed this article about fish and chips:
What could have been better?
- I felt much of the effort I put into the metrics for the leadership team I’m in was wasted (see episodes 17 and 18). Lessons for next time are wait until the outcomes are finalised (these were changing in the run up to the workshop I’d committed to doing the measures for), I could be more clear about my thought process, and getting a shared understanding from the group in advance. I didn’t expect to be going into a workshop and starting everything largely from first principles, but that’s what happened.
- I missed a catch up with Sam because I sent the invite to the wrong email address like a chump.
- I missed the second internal unconference led by Leanne because of the school run. There were several sessions on the grid that looked great.
- I had to miss the VCSEP working group (see episode 17) due to other priorities — mostly admin.
- I had a thought or realisation about my workload — or managing work in progress and incoming work. It’s impossible really. I feel that there’s very little I can do to control it, because a wide variety of requests and priorities of varying shapes and sizes come at predictable and unpredictable times. People will make unfounded assumptions that things will be done, or will be easy to do. And priorities aren’t always what they seem to be — take the measurement work described above, for example. I should have prioritised something else last week, like recruitment. I realised that one of the differences between this role and my previous one is that I’ve inherited a larger and more visible ‘business as usual’ area of responsibility². In addition that, I have less end to end control of delivery. And finally I am less able to establish new things due to limited capacity. This isn’t a criticism of Citizens Advice, and I could just as easily put this in the ‘what was good?’ section because it suddenly struck me and gave me some clarity. I think managing the work coming in, the work in progress, and being firm with prioritisation³ would help. I guess I’ve never thought about delivery managing my own self.
What are you looking forward to next week?
- Josh (data architect) starting on Monday.
- Rescheduled catch up with Sam.
- Mine and Tom (chief analyst)’s teams’ Christmas do.
Thanks for reading. Hope you’re doing ok. There is good in the world. Stay safe. Fight racism.
Footnotes
¹ I am here to provide IT support. Something hasn’t gone right here I am not actually that good with computers.
² The main ‘business as usual’ responsibility in the last role was for our data integration platform, which is something less tangible to users that (say) a regular report that they’ve been getting for the past two years.
³ Like, if it’s not on my priority list of objectives that I’ve agreed with James (my boss) then it’s not a priority.
