Week Notes

My personal week notes

Find them all here.

• Week Notes 13 - 19 April 2024: Hastings A visit to hastings
• Week Notes 8 - 12 April 2024: Hampstead and Funfair A visit to the fun fair and Hampstead Heath
• Week Notes 1 - 7 April 2024 Underworld, Max Cooper, the Cutty Sark, and biking
• Week Notes 25 - 31 March 2024 Easter, Romford, & OKR workshops
• Week Notes 18 - 24 March 2024 Product management, theatre, dance, photography
• Week Notes 11 - 17 March 2024 Model railways, negotiation
• Week Notes 3 - 10 March 2024 My first week notes!

Why am I writing personal week notes?

I’ve loved Week Notes since they first landed in my inbox at the end of my first week at GDS back in 2014.

I loved the idea of writing a brief, informative, even fun email to your peers to instantly update them on everything going on in your world. I loved how every Friday everyone got a flurry of emails, sometimes poignant, funny, exciting, triumphant, hopeful, but always informative. With hardly a hint of effort, you instantly knew what every team was up to (and up against) before you headed off for the weekend.

I started writing them immediately with my new Digital Marketplace team at GDS and have used them with many teams and programmes of work since.

Earlier this year, I appeared in not one but two (consecutive) Week Notes from the ever switched-on Neil Williams.

It was both flattering and motivating!

While I’ve been a prolific journaller since adolescence, I’d never given much thought to publically blogging about my personal life. On good weeks I thought it would feel like bragging and on bad weeks I thought it would feel like moaning. Either way, I worried it would come across more as attention-seeking than value-adding. Maybe that’s an inescapable risk of blogging about your personal life.

But recently, while reading the excellent Agile Comms Handbook, it dawned on me: if transparency is great for teams and organisations, why not individuals?

If I can share more of what I’m learning, doing, seeing, feeling, and thinking about could it not only inspire and inform others but also help them to help me to make better decisions to learn new things and to achieve stronger more meaningful outcomes in my personal life?

Most importantly, it will force me to write down and share the details of how I’m spending the most precious commodity that the universe and my community has invested in me: my time.

Let’s give it a go. Watch this space!