The Boring Festive Party

There you have it, working in 2024 is drawn to a close. We’ve been asked to down tools today until the new year, so it’s holiday time.

As you’d expect, this week was all about wrapping up the year so that we can hit the ground running in 2025. The main job for me was to make sure our Q4 OKRs are sorted. Two teams have finalised their OKRs, another did a prioritisation exercise and will write OKRs off the back of those, and another team’s need a bit of work to become ambitious and measurable. The substantive work is done though, the rest is polish. (The polish is important.)

It was a short week. Not only was I off sick on Monday with last week’s illness (food poisoning rather than a bug), the restriction on not working this Friday made it a three-day week. In between the meetings, the in-office chats, the catch-ups, the Slacks and the emails, I didn’t get enough time to finish off a few things. I’m going to do bits and pieces today and tomorrow, while it’s still fresh in my mind. And I’ve got time to burn on a train to North Wales tomorrow anyway. Might as well do future Steve a favour.

Like Kyle says:

In these last few days before the break, make the time to help your future self and write that note with all the stuff you’ve done and need to do when you get back to work.

Every year, I forget to do this and come back in January with a complete blank about who or where I am, what my job is and the annoying niggly thing I had put off…

For me, the main points to get done and note for next year:

  1. Merge the block diagrams of the teams with the blobs diagram of the services.
  2. Organise a workshop for plotting the milestones across 2025 – or create protected thinking space inside a document and do it there.
  3. Make a start on the handbook, it’s easier once you start!
  4. Add the performance dashboard to the ideas and feedback discussions, so we can shape it up more
  5. Get the quarterly objectives in our roadmap on GitHub
  6. Update the roadmap page and link to initiatives in GitHub Projects, so users and stakeholders can see the work happening
  7. Publish the platform KPIs, and run a workshop to decide leading metrics for teams
  8. Finish off the discovery brief

That feels better already.

Product for the People

Jukesie, Debbie and me have been plotting what to do with Product for the People in 2025. It’s going to be pretty exciting, so please do sign up to the mailing list to find out when the next events are happening. We have way more non-product managers coming now, which is great, but we’d like more! Share it with the designers and developers on your team.

Focus time

Looking at the list above now, there’s no way I could have fit that inside the three days this week. But the fact I thought I could is a problem. Definitely feel like I didn’t make the most of my focus time this week and was pulled in multiple directions the rest of the time.

I want to make sure I’m protecting focus time well next year and using it effectively. I also want to make sure we’re using time together more effectively, and it bugs me that people are asked to go into an office only to spend a portion of the day on calls.

So I had a look at some notes on Cal Newport’s Deep Work, in particular the 4DX framework.

It reminded me that I have been good at this before! Last September I created a system for tracking my tasks at work, and I was using it as recently as May, so I’ve just fallen out of habit.

To get back on track, I need to:

  • add my main goals and objectives to my tracker
  • track the tasks I do, and mark which do and do not contribute to those goals
  • re-introduce weekly, daily and monthly planning and reviews, to keep myself accountable to myself
  • increase my focus time to 3 hours every morning
  • set up rules for focus time: no emails, no Slack, only work that requires deep cognitive effort (like doing analyses, shaping strategies, writing docs, forming plans, etc.)
  • establish an interruption protocol: how to get hold of me urgently, and expectation-setting on not always giving immediate answers otherwise
  • track low-impact task: I’ve never really looked at these, but see which of these I can delegate or postpone until the last responsible moment

A national data library

A while back, Peter said:

[The] policy frame of “National Data Library” is skew whiff, it leads to single tech platforms & architectures, which don’t work. Something like a tech-agnostic “Govt Data Service” for capability to deliver data services is better

And I found myself nodding. He then said if anyone wanted to collaborate on a services-first approach he was up for it, so I dropped him a line. He shared an excellent first draft, and I added some notes during a rare delay on a Shinkansen.

My main gripe with the National Data Library is that it’s far, far too broad: making planning data valuable and usable is very different to making healthcare data valuable and usable, and those need different approaches. Planning data isn’t that sensitive and is largely open by default. Healthcare data is very personal and must be pseudonymised to be re-used.

And take a look at data.gov.uk. Can anyone point to survey or a KPI or other evidence to show it’s valuable and usable? Isn’t that already a national data library? Why do we need a new thing?

Anyway, there’s a bunch more thinking inside Peter’s piece on the National Data Library, so please do give it a read and share it around.

The Boring Festive Party

To celebrate a successful first year for Boring Magic, we went for dinner and drinks at Bouchon Racine. The restaurant was full so we grabbed a table in the pub and ate there instead.

Sardines on toast, Comte and guindillas on toast, a Merguez sausage baguette, a Comte and tomato baguette, plus Toulouse sausages with lentils and mustard. Delicious. A lot of food for £40 too.

Homework

Had a good review of my coaching sessions with Stefan. He’s really helped me achieve my goals and work through some perplexing moments, and I can’t recommend him enough. I’ve got some homework to do for our next few sessions though, producing a model for ‘how I do things’. It’ll be the first concrete process and set of deliverables for my services, and the fun bit is getting to wrap my values and principles in it.

Music

The Nothing Ear (a) earbuds I bought at the start of the month are really good, and don’t shy away from the bass. I’ve been enjoying the latest DJ-Kicks from Steven Julien, a self-titled mixtape from Actress, Дарен Дж. Каннінгем, early tape works by Kuniyuki Takahashi, plus Aphex Twin’s previously limited release dubs from the merch table. Worth checking out.

Bookmarks

I’ll write up my reading list picks for 2024 at the weekend. Here’s the best 3 bookmarks from the week.

  • Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025, 10 mins. A good reminder that many organisations still haven’t thought about making hybrid work work well. Organisations that tailor hybrid policies to specific team needs and invest in employee training will likely see greater success and innovation. The future of knowledge work is free-range.

  • Going unitary, 7 mins. diamond geezer plays with local authority boundaries off the back of English government plans to reorganise councils in England, moving from two-tier systems to unitary authorities. Results in some very funny arrangements, such as Peterborough City Council and Not-Peterborough District Council. One for the local gov nerds.

  • Is AI progress slowing down?, 3 mins. Good notes from Simon Willison. Includes an important point on the capability-utility gap: the capability to do something does not mean it will be utilised. So if we’re spending all these resources on things that won’t be used, is that waste rather than productivity? How are the costs (financial, ecological) of AI research distributed, and does that limit the potential benefits?

Other bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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