Weeknotes 22 October, 2023

My weeks are continuing to be full on. Healthy or not, I do like crazy times at work. The difference is that now, as opposed to a few years back, I make time for breaks (walk the dog, yoga at lunch). I try to fit in time for decompression – even if it’s 5 mins here or there. I try not to give myself a hard time for not doing stuff like publishing these Weeknotes on Friday. After all, the important thing is I’m doing them.

Last week was a biggie – mostly down to seeing Madonna. Madonna! That, and attending Button, the Content Design Conference. Both were AWESOME. Here’s what else happened…

Sharing coaching tips with fellow content peeps. I had a great chat with Localisation and UX Writing Coach, Anna Söderbom. We spoke of ways I can build on my coaching skills and how I might approach coaching others. It was great to hear some handy tips and know I’m on the right path. It was also lovely to hear we’ve both experienced lots of similar stuff. Thank you Anna for taking the time out of your busy week.

Content tool review and product walk-throughs. I’ve mentioned before that at work, I’m looking at how we can build a Single Source of Truth for our copy. I’ve recorded some 5 min vids to show others how some solutions work and what it is that we are missing and need.

Attending Button. Button, the annual Content Design Conference, is always over too quick! As usual, the talks were incredible and their topics were so timely. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of coverage about AI.

Trisha Causley, Content Design Lead at Shopify, spoke about the importance of prompt engineering. Particularly, it’s place in Content Design. She showed how important it is to tailor what you ask a Large Language Model (LLM). Especially as they are prone to making stuff up.

I was really looking forward to Lauren Pope‘s talk. Time and again, Lauren shares ideas and tools that make the messy job of content design easy.

“Do less. Do it brilliantly. Do it with joy”, was the big takeaway from Lauren’s talk. She also shared a framework to help you make this work. It’s based on the ‘Control, Influence, Concern’ model from Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Yes, buy the book, but I’d also suggest you buy the Button recordings to hear Lauren’s tips for yourself.

Having development convos. Some of my team are in Paris. It’s no secret that France’s employment laws are radically different to the UK’s. That means there are certain development conversation documents I need to complete. I discovered this after I’d had the development convo with someone on my team, so we needed to almost re-run it. It turned out to be a really great exercise. Both I and the person having the development conversation were thorough in our prep. It made for an in-depth discussion with clear next steps. Yes, it was a bit more paper work, but I’m glad we did it as it’s set the tone for better dev convos next time.