Writing workflow, context switching and some useful links

Insanity Max 30—week 7

Definitely feeling fitter and with less wobbly bits. The workouts are horrible still but I’m lasting way longer in all the workouts expect the 5th day. Times below and one week to go. That rhymes.

First week fail times: 7:01 9:49 7:51 10:42 8:35

Second week fail times: 9:17 10:43 10:01 10:48 11:45

Third week fail times: 17:15 7:14 12:01 8:15 11:43

Fourth week fail times: 19:14 10:44 12:12 11:10 12:15

Fifth week fail times: 8:20 5:55 4:52 6:01 5:58

Sixth week fail times: 12:50 12:21 7:52 7:52 6:20

Seventh week fail times: 14:40 11:41 10:48 12:20 6:26

Things that didn’t go well

A number of things were happening this week to make things particularly stressful:

  • We moved to a new office in Aldgate and there are no windows. This sucks after about an hour of work. I’ve ended up working in little breakout areas spread around the corridors to get some natural light. But that defeats the purpose of being co-located with my teammates.
  • Working on a number of complex things at once has made things worse. I’m a work on one thing well type of guy. But this week, we’ve kicked off a number of workstreams. Which has meant loads of meetings about different things affecting my rhythm a lot.
  • And on top of this, the people needed across these workstreams are dispersed in different locations and are working on different things. Breaking down silos and encouraging co-design is becoming a big challenge and something I’ll continue to work on.

Things that wen’t well

  • It’s been well over a month since I’ve been out to research, so that’s something that went really well and supported the complex work in one of our workstreams. Research never fails to be one of the best things about my job.
  • We did our first retro in 4 months. Now not doing one for so long is bad, but doing one was really important and for a number of teammates this was their first retro since joining.
  • More of the designers across the program have been able to attend the weekly design crits. This has made things more productive and more fun too.
  • Improving my writing workflow. I’ve got ideas, notes and drafts all over the place in Google Keep, Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Medium and Github. I’m starting to move to a simple model of Google Keep and Google Docs.
  • The new office is near the GDS offices, so that’s helpful!
  • CSS Tricks shared my article

Things to watch and read