Week 40, 2020 - Moved!

Over the years, one difference I’ve found between life in Tokyo and Paris is the degree to which we rely on the resources and goodwill of friends in daily life. In Tokyo, we manage most things self-sufficiently with the use of professional services and established processes. My business is mine to deal with, and yours is yours. Here, we ask for housing tips online, sell and buy things from each other, pitch in to move heavy things, and make use of each other’s couches and extra storage spaces.

With the help of good friends who helped me drive and carry my stuff, a few more who welcomed me to the new neighborhood, a beat-up van rented from a car-sharing platform, and the kindness of apartment staff who lent me their industrial-size dolly that I’m now settled into a new place. I’m savoring the change of pace and having new pathways to discover in the city!

Week 39, 2020 - Packing up

The season is changing. The cycle invites us to creatively destruct what does not serve us anymore so that we may bring forth new ideas.

I’m moving soon, have a few projects wrapping up, and am seeking how else I might clear the slate.

Week 38, 2020 - Be water

I write this on a Sunday morning from my balcony that overlooks the apartment courtyard. There’s a good 150m stretch between the street and our various building entrances and I’ve spent a lot of time looking out to this view, watching the endless stream of people coming in and out. A husband getting in a quick stretch before starting his mission for a fresh baguette, a young man striding back home from a gym session, a kid swiveling his head from the vantage point of the back of dad’s bike, dolled up girls checking their phones, toddlers on their little scooters circling their parents. The courtyard acts as a buffer between home and street, an in-between where our defenses are lowered, and it fascinates me how much inner monologue seems to be expressed in the physicality of how people move through it. I’m moving out soon, and I think the courtyard is what I’ll miss the most.

I overdid it this week with a book club, a facilitation class and two conferences, one for which I was a speaker. I treasure the rich discussions, though.

Conversations

• The distinctions of the role that only someone who’s both a friend and peer can play when you’re delivering a public speaking engagement

• How our insecurities shape how we interpret power in group dynamics

• How communities of practice take years to gain cohesion and there’s just no rushing it

• How to consider where one’s line is between unpaid passion-driven work and leisure, and why that’s a/the key to balance

• What kind of feedback loops lead to feeling deep satisfaction in the work done, and how our individual needs are actually quite different

• Structures that allow us to sit with a question when our initial reaction to it is ambivalence or even boredom

Week 37, 2020 - Chasing the last summer days

Three blissful long rides, two beautiful aha moments and never ending waves of work. I don’t remember much else of this week.

Week 36, 2020 - Homemade energy bars

I baked a big platter of energy bars for the first time. As I wait for them to cool, I feel a quiet sense of accomplishment from being able to “provide” for my future cycling and the symbolic act of preparing an energy source that will enhance my endurance for greater exploration.

I managed to get in three CrossFit workouts this week, too. Patting myself on the shoulder. I read a news article a few years ago that pointed out two indicators of economic downturn: people workout more, and they watch more Zombie movies. It makes sense, right? When things feel out of control, it feels good to invest in our physical bodies. We cannot escape our bodies, no matter how much technology advances. It’s also more straightforward than taking care of our mental state. The Zombie movies are an escapist fantasy where our own wits determine our survival; not the Boss or immigrants or rich people or whomever we feel has more control over our destiny than they should.

I’m not a 🧟‍♀️ 🧟‍♂️ fan but have plenty of other fantasies to escape to. And I’m committed to working out regularly to maintain a baseline of strength and endurance, even if I’m not hitting any PRs these days!

Conversations

• The difference between consulting, mentoring and coaching. What makes a good mentor, anyway?

• Are all sales processes the same if abstracted enough?

• If we keep asking “why”, will we arrive at the same existential answers regardless of the question we started with?

• What is an evolved form of online communities of practice?

Week 35, 2020 - Highs and lows

Infection numbers are rising again. We timidly go about the city, wondering what the next few months might look like. My week has been full of high highs and low lows. I’m tired, and tired of feeling tired.

Three hours later….
Weeknotes is a form of journaling. The power of journaling is that the process helps us reflect and reset intentions. I often find myself updating a weeknote hours after publishing it, adding an idea that the writing process helped me flesh out or an experiment that was triggered by a reflection.

This week’s entry was no different. After realizing that I’d let myself be down for too long, I went shopping, cooked a nice dinner, and prototyped a new calendar format. In the past month, I’ve been making tweaks to how I use Google Calendar in order to reclaim agency over my time. But having multiple calendars to separate work and personal activities, other people having permission to book such a big part of my day, food and health and hanging out with friends and family relegated to unclaimed time… it’s just not a great model to begin with. So I’m going to try something with a different mental model. Let’s see!

I’m grateful for this space that helps me figure things out. It’s more freeing to be writing here on my own website instead of Medium with awkward claps and pageview dashboards. I always seem to feel better, and often more energized, after writing and editing an entry 😊

Conversations

• What it means to advance the field of user research

• The role that music can play in expressing identity in a community

• What is it we care most in life and what are the challenges in investing in it

• How many bikes do I really need??

Week 34, 2020 - Starting four day work weeks

I’ve switched to a four day work week to have more time to think and write and cycle and rest. It’ll be Wednesdays off, which I chose by process of elimination.

• Monday - This would probably have the most negative impact on my teams and projects since I’d be MIA for a lot of planning activities.

• Tuesday - “Starting” on Monday and then stopping on Tuesday feels too abrupt. Tuesdays are also good for longer work sessions, so I prefer to keep it.

• Wednesday - Sweet spot!?

• Thursday - This would put a lot of pressure on the lone Friday to wrap up the week. I also tend to have workshops or user interviews on Thursdays.

• Friday - I’ve failed with a rhythm of every other Fridays off in the past, typically giving up in the middle of the week to work a five-day stretch instead. My current thinking is that it’s better to work Fridays but stop at a decent hour and start off the weekend on the right foot.

In the month leading up to flipping the switch, I made many arrangements to my workload and started being more conscious of where to draw the boundaries. The reactions of people I’ve told have been interesting. My colleagues’ reactions ranged from disinterest to “you deserve a break”. Friends have been universally curious and encouraging; some got really excited and helped me think through it while others shared their experiences. I hadn’t realized that so many had or have four day work weeks. It normalized the idea for me. I’m glad to receive guidance, too. I feel amazed to have this kind of agency, guilty when so many people are struggling in uncertain economic times, and relieved after more than a decade of grinding.

So this was the first week but it was a weird one being right after the holiday. I’d taken Monday off as an extension of the company break but was on Slack since it was everyone else’s first day back, started Tuesday at 7am to run an APAC-timezone workshop, took Wednesday off, put in fourteen hours on Thursday and then had a normal Friday. It was hard, with the upside being that it re-affirmed that I want to commit to a structural change.

Excited to see how next week goes. It’s almost la rentrée, too, so that momentum will carry me into September.

Conversations

• Late night discussions about love and what’s important in life

• Finding an artist that you seek to emulate in how they make artistic and life and business decisions

• How a fashion student makes sense of where they stand as they prepare to enter an industry grappling with how to balance expression, business and ethics

• Listened in on a wonderful EPIC roundtable event about “Regional Strategy in a Globalized World”

• Cheered on the Research Repositories project team during our best attended ResearchOps community Town Hall yet. So much good stuff, so much fun.

Week 33, 2020 - Writing and editing!

I added a Field notes from my Liberating Structures practice section to my website. It's not linked from anything and I haven't shared it publicly yet but it's live! And there are twelve structures already, which have gone through multiple rounds of editing.

Last week I'd started tapping notes in Roam but was drawn to move to the CMS once there were seeds for a few drafts. I spent a few days setting up "templates" while tweaking the words. Oscillating between content modeling <> content writing is an interesting process, and one that's become deeply familiar over the years. First it's exciting, then it feels like I over-engineered it, then I find ways to strip it back, and then things settle in.

(For a split second I considered setting up a Wordpress for the extensibility but no! Must not re-visit platform choices every time I have a content idea!)

And with some elegant information architecture decisions, you can do quite a lot with Squarespace's limited features. I'm happy with the form now, and the design investment has already paid off in the last few entries. With the constraints in place - because that's what templates are - thoughts are faster to come, easier to pull together, and the production is a breeze.

So the pages are accessible to all but no one actually accesses them, and I really enjoy the freedom of that. Like these weeknotes :P

Week 32, 2020 - In the studio

I’m looking forward to my little summer break next week as punctuation (to use Liberating Structures parlance) between month-long marathons of being consumed in projects and other matters.

A few thoughts on what comprises a studio practice.

• A dedicated place (in and out)

• A regular rhythm of time, with a clear start and stop to each session (again, in and out)

• A structure for experimentation and reflection

• Ying activities outside of studio yang time

• A broader practice into which studio time feeds

• Peers who share in the time, space and ethos of the studio as part of their own practice

• Visitors, who are invited into it with intention or not at all

The boundaries between home life, work and social activities evaporated as physical boundaries were rendered null. These crossings, whose transition included donning new clothes and hence slipping into a different expression of who we are, played such a big part of how we mentally switched from one mode to another. These cues are muted or gone, and that structural shift is what makes time feel like Groundhog Days of a very long slog of a day.

It makes the gift of having someone masterfully hold space for us to be in a studio-like mode more valuable than ever. Initiatives like Writer’s Hour, Cave Time and Connection Club tap into precisely that need. Existing tools are often used to set up this kind of space, making them look like yet another online meeting or event. Get a newsletter to be notified, sign up on Eventbrite, log into Zoom. But that similarity is deceptive because this kind of initiative goes beyond “moving online”. Beyond being dragged into trying the virtual equivalent and saying with astonishment “hey, it’s possible!” and a breezily optimistic “it might even be better!”.

Because it’s a gift, our readiness to receive it determines how it’s brought to life. And in this case, it’s the discipline to show up and continue showing up. Once we step into that space, we become part of what holds space for the practice to be, well, practiced. It simply doesn’t work if someone is waiting to be fed content, to be told what to do, to be served.

Week 31, 2020 - Listening to signals

We’ve had heat waves in France this week, which leads to a dampening of personal energy levels for conservation purposes, whether we’re aware of it or not. The mood stays high enough, though. It’s harder to be down when the sun is so bright, so I tend to be stay in a lazy, good mood.

Lately, I’m more sensitive to how the physical environment influences my outlook and clarity of thought. There’s the brightness of the sun, the freshness of the wind, how the air feels on my body, the level of noise and din around me…

And that helps to listen to signals from my physical self, to feel its (my) preparedness for what’s to come next and gauge how best to go about it. The body can be more truthful than the mind, especially when the mind seems to always be flopping like a desperate fish between short-circuiting or going haywire, in its attempt to process and make sense of all that’s going on.

On that vein of listening more closely to signals from within, the more I journal the easier and more pleasant it is to continue these weeknotes, and I find myself itching to write articles, next.

Rundown of happenings and thoughts:

• Put in motion a few blocks for the rest of the year, to decrease my working hours and focus to a series of projects instead of spread across multiple clients

• Facilitated two scoping sessions for a redesign project of a global customer support site

• Hosted two open discussions about the future of mobility to come up with a new way to communicate a client’s value proposition. Next step: synthesize the ideas into a few models and catch phrases

• Wrapped up Covid related content production for an app update that’s slated to go live next week. Clacking away at Wordpress for a few hours, with a workflow and bag of tricks built over almost two decades of publishing content on the web, discretely making IA decisions and tweaking a word here and there to strengthen the editorial… This kind of work tends to get pushed “down” the ladder or thrown over the fence to someone removed from the project, and this devaluation has a direct impact on the experience. And being anchored in this kind of work-work instead of simply managing the people and processes is so important to me. I was quite gleeful that afternoon!

• A bit of progress to pull together a few third party software pieces to build a customer insights platform. I’m looking forward to designing a study and intake process that’ll happen in September, with an eye towards disseminating findings to be incorporated into product decisions in November, and then overseeing design updates in October… This scope is really interesting, it’s rare to be able to flex the multiplication of research x design x ops x leadership capabilities as part of the same project.

• Kicked off a new project to understand the impact of WFH at a client org. It’ll be my third project conducting qualitative research on this topic, and I find that digging into the shifts in operations to be such a rich way to understand underlying team dynamics and management styles.

• A few minutes of swinging Indian clubs every morning or night. I’ll watch some videos over the weekend to pick up a few new moves to incorporate next week

• Re-started experimentation to expand my range with Liberating Structures. Very keen to achieve enough mastery to be able to sequence them over the next two months

• Attended a few hours of a Wardley map conference. I really like that there is a community here, with its own norms and stories and a center of gravity in Simon Wardley. Learned a few new perspectives but man, attending online conferences is tough.

• Helped out with a ResearchOps event which was an injection of inspiration and a reminder that there are many brilliant people out there doing similar work, facing similar challenges.

• A lovely meandering lunch with a friend where we unraveled what we wanted to do next

• Cycled my most frequently repeated route - a well-paved 30km piston along the river to a forest park - followed up by a half beer and half pizza. A perfect Saturday afternoon.

• Made a big trip to the Korean/Japanese supermarket to stock up. There’s been a few too many delivered dinners of late.

• An exploration of new flavors at a satisfying dinner at a Georgian restaurant