This week started with a couple of long days in the office, which meant that by Wednesday morning I already felt like I’d done a week of work. I got to spent a lot of good quality time with my teams and my peers this week though and while tiring, it always bring up my motivation.

  • 🏢 - Starting the week with two days in the office for our usual monthly management meetings. This time we made sure that everyone was face-to-face and we did an additional joined up session. There was nothing special about the sessions themselves, this is all business-as-usual stuff, but side conversations during breaks and the show-and-tell of AI usage, new tools and new reports was really the high-value stuff.

  • 💻 - One little perk of my Tuesday office visit was also that I got to pick up my new Mac. I’d been working on my Macbook Pro M1 since 2020 so it was time for a refresh. Honestly, that little 13" M1 was still doing a pretty good job for my day-to-day work but I think six-years is enough of sweating that asset and it was nice to get something a little bit more responsive. So from now on the machine I’m using is a Midnight blue Macbook Air M5.

  • 🌟 - I started annual appraisals for my team this week. It will take a few weeks for me to go through all my team but it was a good start this week. Being able to take pause and reflect over a year of work I think is a good opportunity and actually something I enjoy. It’s certainly a moment of intense emotional labour, which is why I stagger them over a few weeks. Despite not all the conversations being perfectly positive, I always get as much of out the process as I hope my team do. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that appraisals are a reflection of management as well as a reflection of the performance of an employee. This year I have used AI to help support this process, both in gathering supporting evidence and following up of actions but the reflections and feedback have been entirely my own.

  • - My side-quest of the week (mostly while on the train) has been starting the draft of my next blog post on my experience with Copilot and more specifically with Cowork. I’ve been using Cowork since the moment that it was released into frontier at the beginning on the month and it’s huge uptick in my productivity. There are some edge cases and some behind the scenes automation required to make it truly effective, but I’ve been really enjoying it.

📈 - This weeks stats:

  • 268 minutes of podcasts
  • 3,531 average weekly steps
  • 30 book pages read (Homeland - p39-69)

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: