weeknotes

Complex processes, a chat with @elsua and some rewarding viewing, listening and reading #

Keeping the weeknote as bucket of stuff approach #

A rare face-to-face meeting with colleagues this week to talk product strategy. Although I’m a big fan of not shuffling back and forth to an office each day (we’ve been fully-distributed since the pandemic), it was noticeable that conversation flowed better, and it was clearly easier for the meeting chair to push people to make decisions. Other highlights: a chunk of fiddling with the nuances of Power Automate controlling SharePoint access for external guest users #

Revisiting a familiar format to reboot writing — technical debt, systems thinking and tool of the week #

And then a whole month had gone without publishing a weeknote. The lockdown phenomenon of days blending together, combined with deep focus to support colleagues in pivoting to online delivery. We’re starting to move beyond simple digital replacements of one-day seminars (even though they have been very successful), and have started building out a six week whole-school-staff CPD course into Moodle. With a much reduced team, my time has been split between operational support to colleagues practising the mechanics of live seminars, configuring new resources in Moodle, minor software upkeep of a couple of applications (including merging new plugins and upstream changes into our Moodle build) and a bigger technical architecture project. #

Adaptations… #

In terms of work this was the first full week of distributed working. I spent a fair bit of time coaching colleagues on how to work more effectively using Teams. I think one of the hardest things for people who are first exposed to the messaging side of the application is to learn a more considered approach when posting in a channel. The difference between a new post and a comment seems very hard for some people to pick up, and I think the app could do more to signal to people that channel chat and messaging chat behave differently. #

The lessons from abandoning focus time reporting, and adapting to life under Corona #

Kaizen Compared to the previous week, the reverse trend - higher working hours but lower total focus hours and focus percentage. PomoDoneAnalysis week 2020-W07 Looking at the year to date the change from the previous week is striking. Ratio of focus time to working time, 2020 weeks 1-7 I’m clear about the root cause. As I mentioned last week, we had an all-day, all-staff meeting on Wednesday. Not only did this take up almost all the day, but I found it really broke my flow in the middle of the week. #

An increase in focus hours at the same time as a reduction in total hours #