A slightly quieter week, more so out of work. Still in the planning stages of the work year, with many projects still at the start of the double diamond. A lot of time out of work this week spent on individual development.

Work

Time in meetings : 19.8hrs

  • Organisation agile project management: Continued prototyping some solutions in click-up our new project management tool, and demo’d a delivery team single briefing process to HoDs.
  • Content design:
    • Asked to pull together a showcase of the brilliant work Jo and team have been doing elevating digital content, and bringing to life the results of some recent projects.
    • Continue to stay involved in our content redesign working group, looking at how we more effectively deliver content between all comms channels. Still some fundamental issues that need to be addressed.
  • Chairing meetings: ended up chairing a couple of meetings this week, including our monthly HoD meeting.
  • HR bits: Stuck in the snail-paced ether of HR bureaucracy, trying to resolve some contract and team issues.
  • Rehoming next steps: Set the direction and expectations for our exciting new rehoming digital service, following a successful user journey mapping workshop the week before.
  • Team objective setting: Following locking the team strategy and my own individual objectives the week before, wrote the objectives for the leads in my team.
  • Infrastructure for new upcoming project: Lots of discussions around the route forward for an exciting project we started scoping a couple of weeks back. Looking at some of the options for architecture, along with delivery routes, including agency consideration.


Elevating my portfolio site: outside of work, continuing to get my hands dirty with Astro and sanity studio, elevating my portfolio site. Ambition to get new design system live by first week of Feb.

Read 📚

Work

  • https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-january-2026-report
  • https://medium.com/@nasir-ahmed03/ux-process-the-double-diamond-7f0b675920e5
  • https://www.contentful.com/blog/design-token-system/

Fun

  • Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Wolf ️️⭐⭐. First time reading, has a lot of plaudits, however not overly impressed, prefer story over artistic style.

Listen 🎧

Focus

  • The standard EMQs + Rest is Politics + Foreign Desk for my weekly politics

Music

Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env
Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env
Missing Spotify API Credentials in .env

Play 🕹️

Sports

Strava:

  • Run: 29.5km
  • Gym: 1hr 37

Signed up for first of three marathons this year in April - the London run. Bulking also started.

Watch

  • ★★★★★ Hamnet
  • ★★★★★ Cover Up

Other

  • Piano lesson on Wednesday
  • After work drinks on Thursday
  • Cinema and some shopping on Oxford Street Sunday