Week 9, 2024
Work hard, play hard.
Work:
I don’t normally send work emails at the weekend. But I had the opportunity to give some really short, targeted feedback on a proposal that I knew someone was mulling over. The timeliness of my feedback meant I was able to help them evolve their thinking and so they returned to work on Monday with a much clearer idea of what they wanted. Reflection: I don’t like to encourage weekend working, and I don’t like to set expectations that I’ll work/respond at the weekends - but if you know when someone is going to be doing some serious cogitating, a small and well-timed intervention can have an outsized impact. Then when can be as important as the what.
I found myself getting impatient. As a firm, we’re always telling our clients to take a “start small, test and learn” approach rather than agonising over small details before they’ve tested the wider concept. Just as arguments over Googleable facts have disappeared from my life, our ability to prototype and run tests to varying degrees of fidelity means we should see far fewer speculation-based disagreements because we can JFDI and roll it back if it doesn’t work. It took me too long to realise in one instance this week that colleagues weren’t instinctively resistant to an experiment-based approach - they were simply trying to anticipate and respond to concerns of a leader who doesn’t have much experience of test and learn. Reflection: even in places where 95% of an org is culturally aligned, if you’ve a leader in that 5% then you still have to grow their confidence in your ways of working if you want their teams to feel safe working in these new ways. This feels especially true for corporate function teams like finance, commercial, HR - though I’m sure it holds more generally.
I showed a client team how to conduct some basic usability testing on a survey. It wasn’t anything ground-breaking - mostly a combination of Caroline Jarrett’s advice, and my own user research and research ops experience. But for client teams, it’s a great bundle of knowledge and skills to share. Reflection: even when there isn’t time built into an engagement for formal shadowing or pairing, this “working out loud” is incredibly valuable. Client orgs run surveys for lots of different purposes - so showing how to test and iterate to boost a survey’s usability is a great low-effort high impact piece of knowledge transfer.
Play:
I went to a daytime party on Sunday. I’ve decided this must surely be the way forward. Why choose between having a great time on the dance floor, and settling with a mug of cocoa and a book in the evening, if I don’t have to? Reflection: where else have I been accepting, or unnecessarily setting things up as, false choices? Spotting these false choices and thinking more laterally could unlock a little extra joy.
Our dishwasher stopped working so on Monday we fixed it - turning it on its side and replacing a £25 part. Unfortunately the process of righting the dishwasher caused water to flood into the motherboard and fried it, writing off the dishwasher :/ On Tuesday a new dishwasher arrived. It’s a bottom-of-the-range model because cost-of-living-crisis - nonetheless everything is coming out properly clean - no greasy glasses, no fork tines crusted with food for me to rewash. Reflection: I’d stopped noticing the sub-par performance of the old machine, even though I was having to handle the rejects each day. I wonder what else I’ve stopped noticing - where am I spending precious time compensating for or working around something that ought to just be replaced or redesigned?
I had breakfast at The Breakfast Club in Angel on Friday. It rarely happens and so feels really indulgent to eat breakfast out. It’s also significantly cheaper than eating dinner out - and doesn’t require a babysitter. Reflection: what other lovely things might I get to do more often if I just changed the time and place for them, or did them on my own? Karaoke-lunch anyone? Early-morning spa?
I had a really bad bout of delayed onset muscle strain at the start of the week from my time in the gym at the weekend, and so I didn’t get back to the gym until the end of this week. Reflection: I do have a track record of jumping into things over enthusiastically and demanding so much of myself (time, emotional energy, physical strength, attention) that I struggle to maintain it. This time it was physical muscle damage and I’ve since recovered. But what harm do I do to myself when it’s emotional or psychological harm? Or harm to my confidence, or to my other priorities? Am I making sure I take the time to rest, recover and repair then? Could I have an IFTT rule that forces me to consider how much/how quickly to take up something new in order to minimise harm and maximise my chances of sticking with it.
I want to do some embroidery to relax. I have some fun patterns I’ve designed but need to nail the basic stitches first. I just started working my way through chain stitch, fishbone, bullion knot, fly stitch, weaving stitch, french knot, satin stitch, turkey stitch, and long/short stitch - and came unstuck with the first one. I really struggled to reproduce a neat chain stitch - the instructions I was given didn’t help, so I watched how-to videos, and I practiced with scrap thread and material many, many times this week. I started to feel a little useless - it’s a basic stitch, it shouldn’t be this hard. I thought about giving up (I hate not being good at things - yes, I know, that’s a really unattractive trait). But I persisted and this morning I finally found a Youtube clip that explained the stitch well enough for me to realise where I’d been going wrong - and suddenly I had it nailed. There was a tiny detail I hadn’t had explained to me, but it made all the difference. Reflection: when explaining things that are second nature to them, people often leave out really vital information that it doesn’t occur to them to include. Even if (especially if) you’re teaching or communicating something basic, always test your instructions/material with beginners to find what’s obvious to you that really isn’t obvious to them.
Husband and I have been arguing about holidays and money. He told me he’s always wanted to go to Copenhagen. We can’t afford to go to any of the destinations I’d selected for a holiday this year. So (feeling reckless) I booked an Easter holiday to Copenhagen last night. In the past, when we’ve had too much time to think about it, we’ve talked ourselves out of it. Or we’ve delayed booking and then found the costs had become entirely unaffordable in the interim. Reflection: we’ve never spent so much on a holiday that we’ve come to regret it - so we need to stop overthinking things, trust our instincts, and seize the (holi)day.