#Weeknotes 70 (19 Apr) — Reset default WoW, IOED, Self kindness, and gauging stress
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Work wise:
We kickstarted another phase of work with Sport England this week and decided to approach this phase a bit differently. The client has been quite satisfied with the work we’ve done and the trust is high. It’s easy to keep going and not change anything. But deep down we know, through the many retrospective sessions we had during previous phases of work, there are many ongoing challenges with this work that we still have yet to address along with inevitable inefficiencies. Thanks to the time we had last week to reflect, reorganise, and forward plan, we were able to identify some improvements.
We did a bit of reset when kickstarting the phase. The key questions we want to get clarity and alignment around are:
- What does success look like at the end of this 12-week phase?
- What can we do differently in this phase?
- Pre-mortem: What would prevent us from achieving success? What concerns do we hold that we need to watch out for?
These 3 questions then set the scene for how we work and what our focus should be.
We did this activity on Miro, the virtual whiteboard. It was immediately clear the value the exercise brought to the team: Alignment, clarity, and focus. Key things we learned include:
- Out of the 6 strands of work we’ve been doing, only 3 are crucial and what we must prioritise over others.
- We need to work smarter. Rather than doing more with less. We want to do less but better.
- A reality check of the team’s capacity and the work we want to do made the team realise we’re stretched too thin and are at risk of burnout. We agreed to have a minimal set of focus each week and deprioritise more ruthlessly on tasks that are not part of the key work aims.
Our team is small with only 3 full-timers and 3 part-timers, so having a really sharp focus and scope is essential.
This reminds me why it’s so important to pause and reflect if we want to make any type of improvements. We need the headspace and time. It’s worth blocking out time and embedding these reflection points as part of the work rhythm.
On a separate note. I feel proud to have finally completed my online AI (Artificial Intelligence) training for work. It took ages, and some parts were quite dry but some info did prove useful in helping me understand how AI evolved over the years and the many use cases of various algorithms and models.
One acronym I learned from the training module is: IOED (Illusion of explanatory depth)
It happens when we hear about a topic over and over again on media, the web, and or news channels which leads us to develop a false sense of understanding and confidence on that topic. This surface-level familiarity in combination with the lack of in-depth understanding makes it easy to overlook the necessity of proper training and knowledge learning to understand complex topics such as AI. This made me wonder how I might be affected by IOED on other topics. Perhaps I’m not as knowledgeable on certain subject areas as I think I am. Hmm. This is another reason why it’s good to stay humble. There is much to learn about all things!
Life wise:
I caught a cold over the weekend. It was caused by the blessing of having a toddler who catches all the illnesses from nurseries and then passes them all on to the parents. Yea, I got coughed in the face a lot to ensure that the ‘transfer’ was complete. It started with fatigue, then sore throat, and then the loss of smell and taste, which is the most fatal symptom for a foodie. These couple of days I’ve been super congested. My nose is like a leaky faucet. I lost count of how many tissue packs I went through. The spot under my nose feels raw. In addition, my period came and I just wanted to sleep all the time.
Despite all this, I still worked. I figured as long as I was not quite ‘bedridden’ I could still work. I only took an afternoon off early in the week. And when I did, I felt so guilty.
I just couldn’t allow myself to just rest without doing something more ‘productive’ with the time. Since I can barely keep my eyes open, maybe I can listen to a podcast while ‘resting’. Maybe I can get around to do some chores I haven’t gotten around to do and check off some tasks. It’s awful this default of mine to ‘maximise’ time yet not necessarily for the better. My body needed the rest and I was resistant and hesitant to give it. If it was a friend, I’d be telling them to rest. So why do I find it hard to be kind to myself? To what extent do I want to sacrifice my physical and mental well-being in the pursuit of higher standards and expectations?
Things I came across:
A colleague shared a nice post on a self-stress test. Mental and emotional well-being can feel difficult to gauge and measure. This makes it difficult to know when to seek help and it’s easy to self-blame. Based on the questionnaire on the post, I’m at 4 checks. Sounds about right that a day of rest would do me some good. I hope this can help others too.
My mind is a bit hazy from the cold virus and is jumping a bit over the place! If this week’s weeknote feels off, there’s my excuse!
Let’s finish off with a funny gif (thanks to DD)
Until next week!
