First full week of the new year, didnt manage to get these typed up on Friday afternoon evening – in part because of a rather frustrating time trying to put the kids to bed. Fair to say I’ve still got plenty of opportunities to practice more patience.

In the spirit of not letting that get in the way of a bit of reflection, late weeknotes are better than none I guess.

• Much of this week has been taken up by ‘feedback’ which we do roughly quarterly within the design team. This time is a bit more of a thing because its annual review time. Its fairly safe to say that like many people I have pretty mixed feelings about reviews. I thoroughly appreciate the amount of good things that are shared with each other, positive feedback, development opportunities etc, but the annual rating process grinds me down and I can see it definitely makes other anxious too.
• As part of some team reshuffling I’m needing to do for 2023 I’m doing my first piece of recruitment since joining Co-op. There’s no job live yet as its early in the process but I’m finding it interesting doing this at a new organisation.
• I’ve moved around the hours I work this year, mostly because my wife has changed hers and so I needed to for childcare. I now have a whole day off on Wednesday, with a couple of hours in the morning before looking after my son for the rest of the day. Looking forward to seeing how this new routine settles in, I’m trying to tell myself its two mini weeks instead of one long one!
• This does mean I’m more likely to miss things, like I did with one of our project kick-offs this week. I know that the teams are totally capable of running these things themselves, so I’m not worried, but I do prefer to feel ‘in the detail’ of work to be able to support with direction and decisions. Lets see how much impact this has!
• Friday afternoon I joined a show and tell run by our funeralcare design team. They’re working on a project about supporting people who are terminally ill to plan a funeral. Its in discovery phase, and included multiple clips of resarch interviews (that were VERY carefully planned by the team, including using the ODI data ethics canvas with our internal data governance team). They were incredbly powerful, and multiple people outside of the design on the call noted Jamie’s skill in leaving space and time for interviewees to speak with a great deal of compassion.

This weeks long read (aside from the bonus one about annual performance reviews) is ‘Treasure Hunting’ by David Gasca which he summarises as “How I stopped worrying about grand objectives and embraced interestingness”. Enjoy.