Weeknotes 9 February 2024

This week has been another slow-ish one, which I’m enjoying. On Monday I ran the brand language session I’d been planning. After that, I got stuck in with some micro copy, and content ops stuff. It’s been a good week.

Brand language workshop. A lot of planning has gone into this. It was such a loose brief that there were so many avenues to explore. Despite nerves, I was really looking forward to running the session. I knew it’d give me greater clarity on what to focus on next. We do have a difficult challenge – one audience of ours uses specialist language. The another, doesn’t. So how does that work when the two have a conversation? That’s the bit I want to get under the skin of next.

Settings microcopy. We’re optimising the information architecture of our products. Part of this is settings. This was a nice, juicy microcopy task. The Virgo in me loved losing herself in the nitty gritty of fixing capitalisation and typos too.

Goal setting. This morning I ran a goal-setting workshop. We looked at things we know we want to do. Plus, the goal framework set for delivery teams and what this means for us as a content team.

I woke up tired. I hadn’t yet caffeinated. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this at 9am. But, the hour whizzed by and I relished thinking about our plans and how we’ll achieve them. Weird how we can think one way and then when we do that something, it can feel different. It’s like running – it can be hard to start, but I really get into it. Like salsa (dancing) – I never thought it was my thing, but I loved the lessons on a recent holiday. I guess the take away is one I know well – that stepping out of your comfort zone is always a great idea.

Re-launching Content Office Hours. I took inspiration from Whitney Homans Button 2023 talk for this. She shared some great tips on setting up Office Hours for success. Things like monitoring attendance. Then using this data should you have conversations about prospective content team headcount.

Our first Content Office Hours was this Thursday. Our UI team took us through a conceptual project they are working on. There wasn’t a ‘to do’ for content as such, it was somewhat more of a tour of what our colleagues are working on. For the next OO (they run every 2 weeks) I’ll do a little more promotion of them. It’s great to see people booking in and if they don’t, it’s also nice to take the time back.