How’s your hair doing?
- Fathers’ day last Sunday. The kids wanted to get me a coffee machine but I’ve got a good kettle, a V60 dripper, a coffee grinder and a handsome glass decanter. That works for me, well enough I can make a coffee and feel involved in the process of making coffee that way. There’s a reflection in this about how we don’t need machines for everything or platforms that merge all this stuff into one. There are times when apart work as well, maybe even better.
- Every morning before work I make 700ml of coffee, fill a mug and head to the shed to work. I’ve got into the habit of also filling a Keep Cup to share the coffee with a neighbour. Every time I leave it on a fence post for him and tell him his coffee is there he sounds super chuffed. Would I have done this if it wasn’t for the lockdown? Probably not — he wouldn’t have smelt the coffee every morning, he wouldn’t have asked how I make it, I wouldn’t have realised there’s enough leftover for him, I wouldn’t have started to pour it and hand it over.
- The fruit bushes in the garden are bearing well at the moment, lots of loganberries. Cutting the bushes back and training them over a frame three months back has paid off with the best harvest in years.
- Thursday had a long lunch to listen in to Let’s Talk Service Design organised by the Co-op Digital design gang. So good to spend time with some other service designers, see and hear how others are getting on, and catch up with some familiar faces. Interesting to see how different orgs are approaching service designing, where they are at, going, and how. Also always interesting to see how agencies are approaching it. You can take the person out of the agency, but you cannot take agencies out of the person. Made me think a little more about do I want to keep floating about as a freelancer, build up “my own thing”, go work for an agency, or go work for an “in-house” team.
- Attending that came a few days of tapping something out over breakfast about why service design or a service designer. I got it down and out to move on to some other thought framing and in the middle of a couple of follow up pieces on framing your need for service design and what a service designer does.
- I had a couple of chats with friends in the industry and five minutes into the first did that why didn’t I do this sooner thing. My support network — as a freelancer, as a service designer in a team — is way too thin, verging on nothing at the mo.
- Had a really good session with a team working on NHS Jobs, working through some design work, how they are going to do some research off the back of it, and the what and why of that research. You know when a team just seem so into what they are doing, so sharing, passing ideas and thoughts back and forth? Healthy team culture.
- The boy had his second week “properly” back at school, in that school is giving him a full schedule of lessons to work through. Monday I had to break off and sit with him to work through all the tools and platforms the various subjects use to create a little board of Work To Be Done. Extract onto stickies, work out what three stickies he wanted to do on each day, and keep checking in on him every few hours. After the initial meltdown things were relatively smooth. Hopefully we can repeat that next week.
- ~Read~ listened to Good To Go It’s a great read (and there’s also some good video chats with the author Christie Aschwanden around the internet worth looking up), but the TL;DR get sleep: It’s The Healer. As someone who does “recovery runs” interesting floating of the code oaf recovery as a noun versus recovery as a verb.
- Managed to run 70 kilometres last week and trying again this week. (As I am only getting round to publishing this on Sunday, I know I managed this.) Stiff legs towards the end of the week, but being out on the fields on Friday night for an exploratory run as the sun was low with clear skies was glorious. A bit of running every day was just the thing though.
- Liverpool won the Premier League title. This “mop up” of the football season, when my own team isn’t playing because our season got cut short, has made me realise how little I am that bothered about other football. I tried listening to a couple of games this week. The crowd noise thing is just weird when you watch games.
- It’s 11 months since I had a good chunk of time off work (enforced Christmas time off aside). Need to get some time off soon. The kids’ school holiday is coming. And I could do with a bit of time to… do the things we do when we’re not working during the week.
Time for the television equivalent of 3D chess, the third season of Dark.
This post tagged with:
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2020 weeknotes