Weekly 2023.14

Um, this is weekly 14 of 2023. It is Friday the 21 April, and this is my weekly summary of all the good things I've been playing around with. So a little bit of admin. So this week it should be the newsletter week. But what I'm doing, I'm planning to do for the end of the month. Now, this is something when I say up the weekly content, I was playing around with all sorts of different formats and I'm still experimenting. I still need to find a better way forward of how to get that content out there. I appreciate not everyone was into weekly stuff. Some people prefer the kind of consolidated view. So what I'm planning to do is a monthly summary of the past four weeks of content, pull it together into a newsletter so it's actually curated a bit more rather than just being the same as what I put out every week. But what I'm curious to find out is the right day of the week or of the month to send these messages out. Everyone's got their own sort of preference and from what I've gathered, Thursdays seem to be a very popular day for marketing emails, which is this is not. And what I'm curious to know is, if you're interested in newsletters from people like myself, what would be the preference day? Would it be the first day of the week? Would it be the last day of the week? Would it be middle? I might have to experiment with this, but I want to find out what other newsletters do. So if there are any similar sort of newsletters that you subscribe to and you like the day it is or you don't, you just put it in the comments in the chat. So I get an idea of what works and doesn't. As I say, I'm planning to born out next week. So it's the end of the month. I'm thinking middle of the week, but again, I'd really like to be corrected if that's the wrong idea. Something else that I was looking at last week was templates in Descript. So they did a demo one evening the other week of all the templating tools available in Descript. Very cool. Quite a long winded. I think there's over an hour's worth of video to go through it myself, but it's great to see what potentially is there. What I now need to do is work out what my template looks like. And I know that I keep changing the format every time I do this, especially with the visuals. I don't know what it's going to look like yet. And I feel like I'm missing a trick with keeping it on brand, with what I've created as my identity, with my brand, with the side badge and all that sort of stuff. So I want to spend a bit of time over the next probably month just to work out what that style should be and then start applying it to the videos to give it a bit more consistency and again it would be syndicated to the email newsletters. At the moment I've got a lot of different styles going on. Not cool, I get it but they are just like MVPs. I want to get something out there, I want to get some feedback and I have kind of curated what the content looks like over that. Thanks for feedback. As I say, watch this space. I'm not giving up on it but it's not going to be an overnight sensation. It's something I need to spend some time on and do properly. Okay. Work been an interesting week when it comes to what I've been focused on. Something that I've been really trying to get my head around and get tidied up is my personal development plan. So we went through mid year reviews recently. Off the back of that there was some great feedback and there's some ideas of where improvement areas to focus on and as I live managing so many people I'm keen to get their development plans in shape as well. What I've noticed as well, there's many different ways to cut a development plan, how many different ways to align it, so we even challenge whether there is even value in doing them anymore. I see the value in them. I think it's very important to get the right balance as well between personal objectives and stuff that contributes towards how your team work or your organization what they're looking for. So using some of the KPIs or OKRs that are coming from the top I've got a few that align with both. Now what we tend to use for a lot of our development plans at the moment is Confluence. Love it or hate it, it's a great documentation tool, it's great for collaborating, lots of tools and hooks that you can bring into it as well some formatting up concepts. It feels like there's some missing for my liking but we've got some to play with. What we did this year was introduced like a standard template. It was a custom template that we created for everyone's development plans. Introduced it last year and as I've been going through mine this round I've tried to reorganize things a little bit. Some of the areas that we focus on, I'll put some visuals on to kind of complement this. We've got like a high level goal under that. You kind of measure it what a good looks like and what amazing looks like, and then you break that thing down into maybe two or three objectives to that goal, the action plans to each one of them with some kind of goal dates, any dependencies, any resources needed, any potential blockers, and then, ideally, compile the evidence for each one of those objectives. So again, I'm going through this and I'm just really interested to find out what other people are doing with their own development plans where you document them, how you document them? Do you even do them? I find this model quite useful. Last round, a lot of it worked for me. I was able to quickly add to this. I could get people contributing towards it. I made mine open to everyone that I work with. A lot of people keep this private, which is fine and understandable in some cases, but for me it was like for complete accountability. These are my objectives. I've already been telling people what my objective is going to be for the rest of the year. I'm going to be asking for help. And that's partly the reason, but also I like the fact that it's encouraging others potentially do the same. So yeah, development plans, personal development plans. Just love to see some examples, what other people are doing, what kind of objectives you put in there, how you're structuring them, what tools you use. Great to get some conversations going around this right side projects. So, as I mentioned last week, a big focus for me is the petals framework that I've been working through over the last year. And one thing I wanted to get cleared up this week was a plan to get petals documented. Really more than anything, I've had a few people saying, where do I go to find out more about this petals that you keep talking about? There are blog posts, there are well, there's several different blog posts out there to kind of explain it. I've got some internal docs for people that want to do it at work as well. What I'm trying to do is create a single place to go to find out what it's all about, how to use it, and maybe some case studies to demonstrate how it can work long term. Got loads of other plans, but just to get something together. That's what I focused on this week. And I think I mentioned last week I was trying to use notion to kind of outline the plan a bit. Didn't work for me. Start putting some ideas together in Trello. Trello works quite nicely for just organizing thoughts, getting some structure around your plans. I upgraded my plan to the premium plan yesterday. I think it was just to get more customizations involved. Trello is quite nice for just doing a load of cards in no specific order, maybe with some columns to kind of work out where things should go. I like to stick to the classic Kanban board, having a backlog, having to dos with priorities and then some in progress and dones. That's as simple as that. Then I've classified based on sort of type of work that might be done. And then I've kind of broken down each one with some action plans using the checklist. So that's worked well for me. And actually what I've tried to do, I know it's a little bit waterfally. Put some kind of guide dates around each one so I can get some timings to this. You can do like a lovely timeline view in Trello just to see visually how long things are going to take. You start going, well, actually that will take about a week, give or take. Let's push that out for a week. That one's going to take a few days. It's fine, give myself a few buffers, but it's a nice way to kind of loosely plan what you're going to do. As you see in the visuals, this is something that I'm really keen to kind of keep on top of and make public. Eventually I'm going to put a link out there for people to vote on new requirements and make suggestions. Not yet, it's not ready. But as you'll see in the visuals, this is something that's getting ready now. I feel like the plan has almost come together and Trello has been really nice for me to do that. So again, plus one, if you want to use Trello for project plans, when it comes to day to day task management, I still love tick tick, that's my baby. I've not used it very well for project plans. I think there's pros and cons to both, I'm not going to lie. Okay, tech, right? Something that I realized last week that I've been doing for a while now, but I don't think it's very well known when you have your own websites or domains and you want custom domain email. I've been using Icloud Plus now, they introduced this a while back on Apple, I can't remember what it was, but it is a game changer. It's all included in the Icloud Plus plan and you can actually go through to add your own domains. You can register some yourself through Apple if you prefer. I tend to buy all my domains through Cloudflare or maybe Namecheap if there's a promo on and then I map it through to icloud. Icloud is really good at this by the way. So if you do do this, it actually automatically picks up the DNS, takes you through to your DNS provider and sets all the records for you. So a big win for me. However, I did notice when I was configuring one the other day, I was pointing the website to Netlify, it said we're going to get rid of this Netlify record, so make sure it works really. So I let you do that just because it's only in the place old mode. Anyway, got the emails working, then switched back to the Netlify load balancer and it seems to be working fine so far. So, little pro tip, if you are doing this and you are using Netlify, it's quite a unique exception. Keep an eye on any DNS records it will remove and maybe take a copy before it does that and put them back in after. However, grill for me because that means I've got all my emails readily available on my iPhone in my mail client. It's always coming through and it doesn't matter which alias you use, you can switch between whichever one you add in there. They've got about five custom domains in there now and it's working like a dream. So highly recommend doing that. And entertainment. So I tend to talk a lot about TV and I think the last few weeks it's been a lot of BBC content, but I am reading I'm taking a little bit longer than normal to read, but one book I have just finished, like literally this morning, was one called The Other Place by Nathan Heistad. Now I've read his series of Sci-Fi Dystopian stories in the past. Love him. Really quite addictive, actually, especially when he keeps you hanging on the end of the cliffhangers. For the next book, this one's quite interesting. It's it's a take on sort of dimension. Jump in, a little bit of sort of alien concepts in there. It's all based in the States mostly. There are a few references outside the US, but a lot of American characters, a lot of American references, which you'd expect from an American author. Loads of characters in there to kind of pull it together. And a lot of overlap, a lot of backstory and even like, the geeky references. I do love these sort of references to even like social media hashtags and all the little things it adds to current affairs and modern life. Anyway, really good book. Finished book one. I think it's three in a series. Would recommend it. Three stars. Wink. So there we go. That's this week's. Weekly productive week. Got a plan for Petals, which I'm really happy about. My development plan is coming together. Nearly done. And as I say, Icloud plus for custom domain emails. Pro tip, give it a go. And if you use alternatives, put them in the chat. Love to know what you think. That's it for this week, see you next one. Church.