Hello its been a while, so long in fact I’ve moved platforms since the last time I weeknoted. I never bothered to port my old notes over from medium, I’m not sure why but I wont bother now. I had a quick look, my last weeknote was 2019, the before times, so much has changed, and perhaps not that much at all.

I’ve found it hard weeknoting as a contractor, I’m never really sure what I can and can’t say, when I was a fulltime civil servant I was always pretty honest about how work made me feel as well as what we were doing, that feels more high stakes as a contractor, it probably isn’t, it probably just the fear of the unknown.

So anyway I wrapped up my contract at DEFRA this week so I’m technically funemployed, I’m giving myself permission to ease back in and see where it goes. These notes will probably be relatively boring, thats ok, these notes are mainly for me.

Wrapping up with DEFRA.

The beginning of the week was making sure the team I’m working with had extracted as much as possible out of my brain to help them succeed, this was complicated slightly by the person I was primarily handing over to having a family emergency, not their fault of course but it felt a bit rushed as I tried to get as much knowledge into the nominal Product Owners head as a possible. I’ve left them my personal address didn’t feel right not to give them the option to pick my brains further if anything was unclear.

A big art of the handover materials was a workshop I had prepped for them but couldn’t attend because we couldn’t land a schedule that fitted within my remaining contract time, by 2 days. Frustrating, I hope it went well.

Pottering about

The remainder of the week has been a bit of a potter, went for a few walks locally, Take That played at the Stadium opposite our house on Tuesday night, its the first big concert since we moved in and it was fun to watch it. I need to get the house repair trello list revived otherwise it’ll be the end of June before I know it and I’ll have spent it bimbling around.

Dad taxi

A fair bit of the remainder of the week has been supporting the kids, took Phoebe to a drum lesson on Wednesday, Freya was poorly Thursday, and Phoebs had an orthotics appointment today.

Catchups

I’ve opened up my calendar for June, come and have a chat. On Thursday I caught up with Ste who’s one of the best Heads of Delivery I’ve worked with, it was great to catchup with him after a couple of years of not working together. Today I had a regular catchup with Ben, he’s started a new job and it was great to see him buzzing. I’m currently talking to Neil as I write this post, we try to semi-regularly blog together, it’s mostly #excuse-club though.

Reading

I’ve found myself getting sucked into the election coverage far more than I had hoped. This post from James was a welcome reflection on the oddness of our political times. I particularly like his reflections on delivery, “theres more energy in how than what” this part really resonated.

There’s a lot of noise from NYC about the last minute about-turn off introducing congestion charging there, feels like a thing to learn about the perils of lat minute pivots, whether intentional or not.

Watching

Phoebe has discovered gogglebox and loves it, so we’ve mainly been watching that, a lot of episodes are from the pandemic which is a strange reflection of the time, I forget she was only 10 then and its fascinating to see her now realising its impact on wider society at the time and the viewpoints of the goggleboxers. It’s still incredibly funny.

Next week

Tomorrow I’m jetting off to Amsterdam for a bike tour with my brother who is over from Australia, we try to do this everytime he is over. He is talking at a conference so we thought we would take the opportunity to go and check out classic dutch cycling infrastructure, something we both like to nerd out about.