As I read back over the past weeknotes I realise that there has been a bit of rhythm where by each week a different aspect of my role comes to the forefront for that week. I’ve worn the sales hat, the systems engineer hat, the strategy hat, and this week it’s certainly the people manager hat.

  • 🧔 - We’re entering annual appraisal season, which means I have to prepare for and deliver appraisals over the next 6 weeks for each of my 13 direct reports. This week I started preparations. Not the easiest thing to do as I have only been responsible for this team for six out of the twelve months and there is very limited information on 1:1s prior to me taking over. Like all of my knowledge-work activities these days I am also using this as an opportunity to train a cowork skill to capture useful information, coaching me on improving the feedback and formatting the output for input into our HR system. Likely that I’ll have a few more updates on this in the weeknotes to come.

  • 💎 - Project-R update on the week is a small but very exciting milestone. We got the verbal confirmation that we had indeed won the opportunity. There are still a few small contractual elements to finalise, but that will occur over the next week and then we’ll kick off the project properly. This is going to be a massive year in delivering this and an exciting opportunity for us to learn from the company and much as they learn from us.

  • 🏉 - I took a half day on Friday to travel to worthing for my daughters annual rugby festival. Two days of watching under-twelves girls ruby teams. My daughter has come on leaps and bounds this year in her rugby. Last year she really struggled but this year I’ve seen her score her first try and get involved in many tackles and scrummages. This festival was just the culmination of all that hard work and I couldn’t be more proud. It’s bitter-sweet for them because half the team moves up to under-forteens next year so this was the very last time they would all play together. For us parents, it’s a wonderful weekend of pints, chips and chat. Like most organised sport, it can feel like a chosen family and I’m happy my daughter continues to enjoy it.

📈 - This weeks stats:

  • 551 minutes of podcasts
  • 5,699 average weekly steps
  • 89 book pages read (Little Brother - p223-p312) - Finished

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: