Weeknote 5

An interesting week for both work and side-project stuff:

• A while ago I worked on a regular Newsletter (and for a while, a podcast) called 'How to IT Strategy', for a variety of reasons i let it fall fallow after reaching a decent number of subscribers. well, this week i've resurrected, on its own domain, here. My intention is that this will be a regular newsletter of interest to anyone involved in designing and activating IT Strategies. My secondary intention is to eventually develop a short course/guide to help people in creating IT strategies. Please do subscribe to the newsletter if it sounds of interest.
• Funnily enough, the impetus to revive the How to IT Strategy newsletter came from thinking up yet another side project idea, getting really excited about it and then thinking to myself 'why don't you just finish one of the other ones that you already started?'.
• This week i reflected on the lovely feeling i get when working with people in a positive, constructive, creative way, its exciting and for me makes a specific part of my brain tingle (like i could literally pinpoint the place where i feel it, what? why are you looking at me like that?). My reflection was that i need to optimise for doing more of that stuff.
• I've now completed my first full month of bullet journalling, and have managed to develop it into a useful daily habit. I have adapted how i use it over the month and there are still a few tweaks i think i need to make e.g. I find when tracking actions i'm currently biased towards tactical rather than progressing longer term actions. But its still be really useful, and i think it one of the reasons why i haven't fallen into my usual post-christmas mallaise/self-flagellation.
• Kept up with my running this week, and managed to clock up 65Ks worth of 5k runs in January, which for me is a good achievement that i hope to continue into February and beyond.
• I like metaphor, and overuse it when talking about work stuff, there have been a couple this week that have stuck with me.
  • "Do we want to deliver a hammer in our shed, or do we want a picture on our wall?", in a discussion about making sure we deliver real value.
  • (this one got relayed 2nd hand) 'we've opened the can of worms, but the worms have wings and are on fire and are flying everywhere'. I like the extension to the usual metaphor
• I've been looking at summer holidays this week, bloody hell everywhere is so expensive!