Retrospective October 2021
This month’s lesson is that my interest in things follows a power law distribution. I’m really interested in exploring new ideas but the level of interest quickly drops off. Some things, like writing weeknotes, I maintain over time so it isn’t a problem of not being able to follow through, but perhaps one of enjoying the initial exploration more than the building. Maybe the answer is in finding ways to identify and drop bad ideas more quickly.
Contributing to the digital transformation of the charity sector
We’ve been focused on completing the definition stage to get ready to start development, and its all going to schedule. One of the interesting things I found was in how we group up work in different ways and how this can cause confusion. For example, in discussing work with stakeholders we talk about the different things a user does, but when the developers talk about the work they group up all the APIs that are required into one. There doesn’t seem to be a way to talk about complicated things in a consistent way.
Learning about innovation, technology, product and design
Didn’t do any work on Adjacencies but still think there’s a vaguely worthwhile idea there about learning about the skills of those you work with on cross-functional teams. I think the thing that stopped me working on it, other than my usual thing about going onto the next idea, is the conflict between providing training that is about work but asking people to pay for it themselves.
My tweet100 tweets about innovat100n.com aren’t getting any interest, and I’m losing interest in the idea of writing a hundred essays about innovation. It’s looking likely that I’ll be dropping this idea by the end of the year.
Completed a few more Foundations of Humane Technology course. I slightly lost interest, which I tried to renew a bit by taking notes on the module I was studying, but I still intend to finish it.
I continued to write weeknotes on schedule every week.
Leading an intentional life
I continued to wander around the coastline, which is really nice.
I reached my financial target for the year two months early, which is nice.
I’ve been ill so didn’t get out running, which wasn’t nice.