Weekly 2023.15

This is the 15th weekly of 2023. It is the Monday the 1 May. Let me explain that shortly as I go into the summary and highlights of the last week of my work sides, tech and entertainment. So let's get some admin out of the way and I will explain briefly what happened. I went to office last week and with that I took my mic for some of the sessions that we had. Unfortunately, I left it behind and I don't have any backups at home, so it left me a little bit scuppered. On Friday I wanted to record some content. I tried a few variations with what I had to hand, was not happy with the quality that was coming through, so I took the plunge, bought some a new mic, which I'll talk about in a moment. Last week I also sent out the first monthly newsletter to the small sample group are subscribed. Not much response yet, but I want to try and just curate that content a little bit more and see how other podcasters people in tech are sending out their newsletters. Engagement has not been great from all the polls and posts and all the toots and what have you, I've been sending out there little nudge. If you can, please send your comments through. But until then, I'm just going to keep doing what I think is right and base it on what my own research looks like. And also the video templates and style guides that I've been working on for all the content is still in progress. Made a few small progresses last week. I like to dip in and out based on some inspiration that I might find. I'm not putting myself against any deadlines on this, but I want to make sure that it's more on brand with who I am, what I do, the sort of stuff I do, the style of the things I do as well. So work in progress and that will come through as soon as I'm happy to share. I will be reaching out to a few designers as well, just to kind of get their thoughts on the whole process and what that might look like. Maybe look go through some of the finer detail later on once I'm a bit more confident that I'm going down the right route. So work. The first one as I say last week, went into the office on Thursday for some group huddles. So we had all the teams coming in together on our typical anchor day work as we call it. By doing that, I wanted to make the most of some traditional agile ceremonies. So in the morning I went around for some of the teams just to see how they're doing their stand ups. Some were still online because they had their remote friends dialing in, but there was one team that was purely in person. So we took the opportunity to go and stand up around a board it was a digital version, granted, and literally go through the progress of the board, what the plans were for the day, minimal amount based on all the other ceremonies that were going on for the day, but it was great. And then in the afternoon, we actually did a retrospective in person as well. So, again, quite a novel factor after three years of hybrid working through lockdown. But some of us have been doing it before, so we were quite familiar, others are quite new to it. They all saw the value and the benefit of it, though, of getting away from distractions and screens, picking up a pen and paper. We still introduced Petals as part of the retrospective. I created a mobile friendly form with a QR code to dive straight in, get the score through, and I have my screen ready to show the results. And it helped contribute towards that conversation as well. We talked about the observations of being highly productive. Fantastic teamwork, very stressed, though, or low serenity. It was an opportunity to take away from the screen abstractions and actually handwrite some notes. A lot of people forgotten how to handwrite, by the way. I'm not the best, I'm not going to lie, but it was great. And we had just some snacks to kind of make the setting a little bit more relaxing. I would recommend it though, when you get the opportunity to get your teams together in person, think about those sessions that you can run together and have a proper face to face conversation about what the best outcomes could be. It helps kind of build that empathy up together as well. You give yourself an opportunity to really relate to people and read the body language and actually set the scene, get away from all the distractions, which I think is fundamental as well. Yes, you can do it with your computer, you can turn on notifications and all that sort of stuff, but there's nothing better than actually down in tools and literally just looking at each other with some papers and some sharpies or markers on a whiteboard. Really recommend it. Side project. So last week was mostly about Petals content. I set myself the goal of writing most of the content, not all of it, but most of it outlining, what it's all about, how to generally do it, get some case studies to demonstrate how it can work, some of the sort of contacts and engagement opportunities through Slack, email Masterdon, whatever LinkedIn. So I've basically got all that content together now, which gives me a chance to kind of go to the next stage of wireframe in the content and give me some structure around that. So that's my goal for this week is to get the wireframe altogether and I'll probably be reaching out to a couple of people that have never used Petals before to see if it makes sense to them. I want to make sure that it is clear what Petals is all about and how you can pick it up and go. That's the plan for this week. I'm going to set myself some goals and put them in the trello that I talked about previous lee and hopefully get some outcomes from that. But I think one of my takeaways from this one is I set myself some relatively achievable goals, sort of a stretch. I added the wire framing as a nice to have, but it was nice to sort of say, right, this week is all about the content and holding myself accountable through this sort of content or through the on the side community, saying these are my goals. I really do recommend giving yourself some kind of stretch goals, not too hard on yourself, but give yourself something to aim for that's not necessarily quite straightforward and make yourself accountable for putting it out there. You can join us on the onsite community, which is where we do this on a weekly basis. You can do it your own way, you might have some friends or contacts or some acquaintances that you kind of want to do a project with, but making yourself accountable to those goals is a really nice way to make sure you actually follow through and get through to doing them. Tech right, as I mentioned, we had an office day. Basically I took my microphone to the office for one of the sessions. It helps with the audios actually, because we've got good acoustics and setups for team conversations, but when someone's presenting it's not so easy to actually hear them. So I took my own microphone and we plugged that into one of the laptops and we used that for presentations. However, I left it in the office and I'm not going to be back for a few weeks, so I was a little bit scuppid. I tried a few other variations locally. Not happy with the audio. I ended up getting this. Rode Nt USB mini Mic You can get a higher quality version, a more studio friendly version. Not sure I need it, so I thought I'd go start with something bit more basic. And when I listen to the sample test recordings that were available online on YouTube, there's a great comparison between the Samsung Q two U and this and you can hear the differences. I'm hoping it still sounds good and for what I'm trying to achieve with this, I noticed a lot of background noise with some test recordings, so I'm hoping to engineer it down so it's not so noisy and hopefully it'll lend well to some better audio on these recordings as well. I also had a few problems with the camera, so I normally use my iPhone 14 camera with continuity through iOS and macOS. For some reason it was not connecting when I was trying to record. I ended up just using the Lightning cable to plug it in. So that's the plan and hopefully this will work quite nicely. Finally, entertainment. So last week one of my favorite podcasts, the Glitterbox Defected podcast, dropped a session from Mr. Simon Dunsmore. Now he was the founder of Defected. I've always been always respected the guy, always looked up to him, especially as a tastemaker in the industry. And he did his retirement set, Print Works, a few weeks back. They recorded it for the podcast to put it out there and he was absolutely wonderful to listen to. He went back to basics again. He got the vinyl out, he didn't get play any digital music, a good mix of new old classics. The real generations were going from like the 70s through to now. Real good selection, played the full tracks and you could tell there's a few little complicated mixes in there, but he really enjoyed himself. You could tell he got into it and it was such a momentous occasion. It was wonderful that it was recorded and we really enjoyed listening to it. I played it a few times, if I'm honest. It was really got into it. Put the link in the show notes. If you want to have a listen to that, I would highly recommend that. So that's it for this week. It was quite a productive week. Got good stuff going with petals, but one takeaway is I'd recommend using your team huddles when you get together in person. Make the most of that time, get some pens out, have proper conversations away from distractions and cook computers and really think about what those useful conversations you can get out from them. Give it a go and let me know what you do with it. Get in touch. You can hit me up on Macedon Manageridgineers net at psy email [email protected] or go to the website psyjoblin.com weeklies. And I'll be back next week on Monday as normal, without any hiccups.