Weeknote CW42 2023

This week has been much quieter than last week which I've been very grateful for as I've needed a bit of time to recharge my introvert brain at home.

On Tuesday we went to see 2:22 at Southampton Mayflower. Essentially it's a spooky ghost story where this couple move into a haunted house and haunting happens at 2:22am every morning. It also makes some poignant nods towards gentrification and since it was written by a millennial, it has an amazing nostalgic soundtrack featuring people who were big when I was a teenager (such as Massive Attack, Groove Armada and Mylo). The story is really good and I won't spoil it here.

We had a bit of bad news regarding the death of a family member on Mrs R's side so I cancelled my trip up north and thank goodness I did because my parents' area got completely battered by Storm Babet. In fact the tiny rural market town where my mum lives and where I grew up  made it into the national news when someone died there after getting dragged away in storm water. I was planning on driving up on Friday which was when the storm was at its worst and apparently many of the roads that I would have driven along were closed or jammed.

At work I'm trying to adopt a slightly more inwardly-facing perspective since now that the company is getting bigger we are facing more challenges around organization and communication that didn't exist when we were half our current size. I met up with a friend-of-a-friend who is a serial CTO for coffee and took some advice.

I read this spicy take (nsfw language) on agile earlier this week and shared it with some of my colleagues. I really enjoyed it because it does often feel like some of these meetings are a waste of time. We ended up running an internal poll about whether to continue to do standups or whether we should do async daily stand-ups instead (basically everyone just writes about yesterday/today/blockers in slack and @ mentions anyone who needs to be informed). However, the response was very mixed and a number of people said that they prefer scrum calls so we're going to leave things as they are for now. I think part of it could be because we run a hybrid team with some fully remote members and scrum is one of the only opportunities that they get to catch up with the team during the work day but it was an anonymous survey and noone has stepped forward to validate or disprove my theory.

This week I also published about some tips for dealing with a large volume of questions at work. It's really important to set some boundaries and really manage your time and focus.

On a related note I've been trying out a GTD-style workflow on todoist for the last couple of weeks to try to help me manage and balance my workload. So far it seems to be going pretty well. I think regular review is a really important part of staying on top of things and making sure that stuff on your list is well scoped and the next action you can take is really clear. I'm trying to start a routine of reviewing this on a Sunday morning just before I write my weeknote.

In the coming week we have a few things on including a colleague's wedding reception to attend and another play. I might end up going to London one day this week again. Since it's school half term a lot of folks on the team (particularly those with kids) are off this week so it may be a little quieter than usual.