Weeknotes 3 March 2023

It’s time again to reflect on my week. The sun is shining and it’s Friday. Let’s do this!

This week went like this:

• Highlighting missed opportunities. This isn’t in any way negative. It’s about documenting what’s getting done and what’s not. As I mentioned last week I’ve been noting down what I plan to do in the week and then, what actually gets done. It’s a way for me to spot inefficiencies in the way I’m working, and see how much real focus time I realistically have.

• Working in ‘good enough’ mode. Stress, burnout, and low impact are all side effects of doing this. You never feel like you’ve done as good a job as you know you can do on everything you touch. This is a vicious cycle and a really hard one for businesses to get out of.
  
  To be clear, I’m not feeling burned out, but I am feeling a bit stressed. I planned my working week last Friday. I communicated that I couldn’t accommodate any more meetings. (It would affect deliverables I’d already committed to). But when I opened Slack on Monday morning the first thing I saw was a request for a meeting.
  
  Often it’s my learning and development commitments that get sacrificed. Sometimes it’s lunch and/or a break, or the poor dog misses out on a walk (sorry, Muchacho). I know how this ends. Job dissatisfaction and burnout. I’m not there (yay!) but do I know what I need to do next…

• Building a case for team expansion. Where I’m working right now we’re deep in The Content Trap. I mentioned the ‘vicious cycle’ in my first point of working in ‘good enough’ mode. The Content Trap is doing exactly that. It’s seeing stuff too late. It’s requests for words to fill spaces so we content designers can’t add our true value. What then happens is the business struggles to see the full value of content. The team then stays small and we pull our hair out as we’re too thin.
  
  I have a (mighty) team of 2. And that includes me. I’ve already started documenting my priorities and everything else I’m working on. If you’re reading this and have ideas on how I can build my case for an extra pair of hands do get in touch.