Weeknote 22: People yelling

Greetings, weeknote fans. We're broadcasting live from TV's Stoke Newington where host Owen is taking the day off.

You may've noticed that there was no weeknote last week. The reason is that I was knackered, to the point that I didn't feel in a writing mood, and the reason I was knackered is that I think it's time for a break. The energy levels have not been good over the past few weeks. Last week in particular I was getting to the last few hours of my working day and feeling like I really truly have nothing left to give, in and out of work.

To alleviate this I've taken all the remaining Friday's in March off to give myself a reprieve from work. I have a few guesses about what's going on but something isn't sustainable so stepping back might be what I need. The fact that I shut down my work machine yesterday, having not managed to finish tackling some code review, and had the thought: 'maybe I should log in tomorrow and try to finish this...' is an indicator that something isn't right.

I'm gonna have a go at a slightly different style to continuous prose and list out what I got up to with further reflections if I feel like it. So, last week and the week before I:

  • wrote feedback for folks on my team for their performance reviews this month (good luck everyone!) and chewed on incoming feedback from others (thanks everyone!)
  • attended an extra retro of our team processes, what's working, what's not, what we could do to spice things up etc
  • also took part in a team health check
  • put together some examples for a fresh DDaT submission and helped a line report do the same
  • did a series of handovers to swap out one of my line reports for a new one
  • consulted on the technical side of planning a coming cycle to do... something
  • continued thinking about feature flag strategy for immediate and future work
  • put together a more production-ready version of the feature flag toggling experiment I did last cycle with the intent to put it in our review app
  • some other stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about yet...

Is that a lot? It feels like a lot. You may be able to tell that it's the end of year performance period which is always a little bit of a strain on folks. It doesn't help that at the same time, we're working on quite a beefy secret project (that we don't want to be secret) that I've ended up hyperfocusing on bits of. I wonder if that's the source of my energy problems.

Dream team

Something else that I also hyperfocused on that I suspect also didn't help things is that we did a team process retro which ended up leading to some very in depth chats with folks on the team. I find delivery manager-shaped stuff like this oddly rewarding to get into which is why I wanted to reflect on it more. I wonder if this is an impatience thing of wanting to get all the gunk out of the way to get on with the work to make things good. I really truly hate a meeting with no agenda.

Some super interesting reflections came out of all this. The cycle system we devised was intended to resolve the hidden problems with being on an autonomous team, namely too much freedom can be daunting and a lack of boundaries in your work can mean you run away with stuff. It's been really good at providing some structure to what we do and encouraging people to work to a fixed time rather than spin out. We now need, in my opinion, to get the team in a position where they feel more comfortable helping to shape the work and make sure we actually follow our own rules ie: don't continue working on stuff past the boundaries on a cycle (myself included, as evidenced in these weeknotes).

Life life life

I have done other stuff, promise.

Last Saturday I visited Kew Garden's with my mum, her partner and my wife. I picked a good day for it too with the lovely spell of sun we had. I forget that it is in fact worth the trek across London to see some lovely plants.

I'm getting to the stage in jiu-jitsu where I'm starting to see my game go up which is nice. Having said that, I've been noticing after jiu-jitsu classes that I've been more achey than I usually am and I'm not sure why. I don't think I've been more aggressive with my training or more active in general. Writing this out, this is probably an indicator I need to stop doing the whole English guy thing and actually go see a professional. Or maybe just rest.

Listening to The Pill from the last 'note put me in a 'people yelling' music mood, which put me onto Lambrini Girls. Excellent punk outfit, although I think I'm gonna abstain from posting my favourite song from them on this blog which is supposed to be a work thing sort of.