Weeknotes S01 E04
True to form, I tried a new habit of writing weeknotes, and failed to continue it after three weeks. Can I blame the heat? 🥵
I’ll cover the last few weeks in this, as they’ve all kind of rolled into one blob in my mind. I will endeavour to keep it up this time, though next week I’m only working two days so it’s likely to be two weeks from now.
Outside of work
Lifemin
I’ve been back in Cardiff for a couple of weeks on my own (I spend a lot of time in Sheffield with my partner) so I could go to a few appointments. I’ve now had my second covid vaccine so I’m glad that’s out of the way. I also had my first post-lockdown dentist appointment, and sure I’ve got some fillings coming. I’ve also finally got a better internet connection after months of waiting for Openreach to install fibre — three different engineers came and went without doing anything. I had to go with Virgin Media in the end, helping fund another billionnaire’s unnecessary space racing (why does the Bezos spaceship look like a massive penis??). At least my colleague’s will be able to hear me on calls now.
Double jabbed YASSSSS 💪💉
Soaking up the sun
I’ve been taking advantage of living in Cardiff and made a few trips to Jackson’s Bay with friends. It was pretty busy there, so I can only imagine it’s been in Wales Online “hidden treasures in Wales” type articles. I swam in the sea despite the cold water and millions of paddleboards floating around. I think I missed the memo on paddleboarding as there were so many people doing it. It does look fun 😄
We’ve also been to Calabrisella’s relatively new Gelateria. It felt like we could’ve be in abroad if it weren’t for the cars going past on the main road. CELEB SPOT: Wynne Evans (the Go Compare man) was in the queue, so maybe he could’ve sung us some opera to get the full Italian vibe.
In work
Restructuring into functions
The Digital Content and Publishing teams have been restructured into four different multidisciplinary functions: Publish, Innovate, Improve and Collaborate. This was floated months ago and it’s taken a while to get going, but this week we had our first weekly catchup in the Improve function. We don’t yet know how it’s going to work in practical terms, but anything to foster better collaboration between teams is a good thing. I helped Kieran set up a Notion page to house documentation and links to admin tools, and help everyone in the team understand our purpose.
Social media
We’ve been discussing how we can best plan our social media support, as we work to differing hours and the content often comes in late so the Batman system doesn’t always work out as planned. We’re trialling blocking out our afternoons when Batman, so we can have more capacity for work coming in late. I think it’ll also help as we get quicker at producing animations, for when we do those. Last Friday I wanted to finish early but there was a suggestion to do an animated line chart for Monday morning. Thankfully we have instructions written down for this, so I was chuffed I managed to get it done and still finish earlier than usual. It was embedded in a *cough* Mail Online article, which wouldn’t be my first choice, but I’ll take it getting more reach regardless.
Icons
I’ve just about finished making the tweaks to the latest icons we’re adding to our library. It takes a lot of concentration so I’ve been slower than I’d like fitting it around many meetings and other distractions. You end up questioning all your choices with every minute detail, trying to make them all consistent with each other, but in the end I think you just have to do what looks right and not waste too much time worrying about it.
Video call gaffe (not me)
Another highlight of my week was being in a project video call, when one of the participants shared his screen showing his private chat message with another participant on the call. It basically said something to the effect of “they don’t understand about working quickly and [another colleague on his team] has to keep calming me down”. We’ve assumed it was about us, though in reality the pace is due to them not providing the right information.
When he flicked back to the chat screen again later on, someone thankfully had the wisdom to say “you can stop sharing your screen now…” Needless to say, it was a bit awkward, and in true British form, we didn’t say anything 😂 It has been a good reminder to me to be mindful of what I’m writing.
