Weeknotes 17 of 2024

A hectic few weeks in which a lot of things were done and I turned another year older.

I've been juggling 2.5 projects over the last few weeks, interspersed with all the other things I do (design community, talks and workshops I give off the side of my desk, catchups and virtual coffees with people, training and other events I attend.) It's been a lot.
I delivered a few things: An intro to design workshop for a team of policy people, a virtual conference talk, first drafts of some rough service design thinking, an article for the Service Gazette (well, this was delivered a while ago but just published now.)
I attended training and development things - I continued with the coaching course I talked about last week, and I also attended a half-day "Customer Experience" mapping session which was good but needed some tweaks to be more effective for the public sector audience.
I met and/or caught up with a few people, including meeting our ADM Jeff at a newcomer coffee chat he organized, and finally connecting with Molly, a designer from New Brunswick who I've been meaning to chat with for ages.
It was Canadian thanksgiving, so I made a turkey dinner for my family.
I also had a birthday, yesterday! It was very low key, just as I like it. I feel like I started this new year of my life with lots of self compassion and a sense of calm and strength.

I feel like I did a lot in the past few weeks, and it's felt good - I like delivering things, or more specifically I like the feeling of being able to say, I did that, well done me. I also think it's started to build some relationships with the people I work with.
I've made some connections and had some conversations over the last few weeks that have felt like steps in a good direction.
I've enjoyed the training sessions I've been in. My coaching course especially is a very supportive and lovely virtual space.

Workwise it's been challenging to juggle many things. On one hand, I like being busy, I'm most productive that way. But there's also the part of me that feels I'm not fully effective on anything if I don't give it my full attention. Do I need to get better at managing my attention across multiple things, or do I need to get better at saying no to things? I don't know what the answer is to this, but I'm pondering it.
I'm also struggling with what is a useful output for the audiences and teams I am working with. Part of the reason might be, I'm not doing any direct user research. Research playbacks and deliverables are easy for me, I feel like I am just the messenger and my job is to weave people's challenges into a narrative. But at the moment, I am only surfacing assumptions about what I think the challenges may be, and I have no data to understand which are most important to highlight. I guess that in itself is a narrative.
I've been feeling very anxious about BC's election so was looking forward to the election day when, regardless of the outcome, I would at least have an answer. But no! The election was too close to call.
Both my children are struggling at school. Academically for the older one, socially and emotionally for the younger one. It's been challenging figuring out how to support them.
And, our design community suffered a devastating loss. I won't talk about it here because I feel like it's not my news or story to tell, but many in our community are reeling from it.

There have been some excellent blog posts in the last little while - all must reads imo:

I started and finished the Secret History by Donna Tartt, it was good but I felt like it could have been half as long (or less!) and still been as interesting. Now I'm finishing Good Material by Dolly Alderton which I'm enjoying.
No new shows. I'm considering starting Nobody Wants This.
A podcast I didn't expect to like but actually loved so much: Andrew Garfield on Modern Love. And one I thought I would enjoy and definitely did: Why is it so hard to tax billionaires (parts 1 and 2) from Search Engine.