Weeknotes 17 December

DavidBuck
3 min readDec 17, 2021

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The fire is on, my feet are up, and I’m listening to relaxing Christmas Music. Eloise’s is snuggled under the new blanket, Szu is uploading photos. Buddy is asleep on the rug and Rosie is next to me watching me type with my finger. Then licking it. It is very relaxing end to the week, and though it’s not quite clear if we’re be together with our close family over Christmas we are planning that we will. And planning to see our Friends at New Year. We will just need to see.

It’s been an odd week. I find it very peculiar that we can’t talk about Project X, though I very much understand it’s still peculiar.

Today I had a lovely chat with Clare and Nour. As ever it was a lovely chat and went on longer than anticipated and for the third time this week something that didn’t need to be about Project X went that way in part and was really helpful. The other thing that did was my coaching session. And though I hadn’t done my homework I found it very helpful, both in the moment and in the long term and I have more things to do and perhaps a method to do them which I’ll start to apply in the new year.

My aim for the last three days of work is to write a fuller draft of the strategy, to get down in words things I won’t recall, to make sure I’ve sorted most things for UKGovCamp we had a meet-up this week, and we have one next, to write two key emails and sort out things in flight and generally not leave myself with a big to do list. January is going to be hectic I feel.

Going back to that strategy, I think maybe I’ll write it here, I find writing here a lot easier that anywhere else, maybe not…. I’m rambling.

So where was I, ah yes ramble notes. I’ve been to a few meetings this week where it felt a privilege to be at. One internal and one with external stakeholders. I feel a real tension between setting boundaries to create space and over prescribing.

We had our 2nd lighting talks with three teams. I always enjoy these sessions though beforehand had as I was in the compare seat this month my gut seemed to be in overdrive. Being based at home has its upsides. I wonder if any team will ever come with five slides of just pictures.

We have the second quote back from calders for Together Day, will chat with Al next week but it looks like we’re about to nail the venue (in pencil).

This week we also continued with our synthesis of our current OrgDynamics research and had a wonderful session with Emi about User Research, really helpful and we will do some tweaking but it’s lovely to hear we’re on the right lines.

I also had a lovely coffee connect chat with Heather. It makes me think now if I’m really enough involved in that community and for now I feel the answer is yes, for now.

And lastly but not leastly I got to the last 2/3 of our Christmas Do, which was virtual and wonderful my quiz training during lockdown was not wasted 😂

As ever there were lots of other lovely chats with lovely people.

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DavidBuck
DavidBuck

Written by DavidBuck

Working from Defra in the Future Farming and Countryside Programme, OneTeamGov and UKGovCamp. Government romantic and lover of tea