I’m sharing two weeks’ worth of weeknotes this time, as I ran out of time (and energy) to share anything at the end of last week.
Last week was another 4-workshop week. I need to stop doing this to myself! 2 workshops per week is really my limit. I love running them, but as an introvert, they take a huge amount of energy out of me, and I was absolutely done in by the end of the week.
Having said that, they were good sessions. One was on content types*. We used a set of cards that I made for the different qualities we wanted to define. I think this worked well. It gave a nice structure to get discussions started with, and forced us to think things all the way through.
*I’m talking about content types in the editorial sense here, not the content modelling sense.
Another workshop was to create a set of proto personas. I often shy away from these because of the lack of data behind them. But in keeping with the whole ‘good enough’ theme of the year, they felt like a good move for this particular client and project. And as we worked through ceating them, lots of great data and insight came to light that made me feel excited about what we came up with.
This week was a complete contrast: no workshops and only 8 meetings in the whole week, which is a lot less than normal. It’s been great to have so much uninterrupted time at my desk for deep work.
I put a lot of time into getting my emergency IA and content model project close to completion. I’ve been running a tree test this week, drawing up page tables, and finalising the content model. I also tried a slightly different approach to defining the structure for the content. The site is based on a big and complex document, that luckily has a lot of structure to it. My task has been to translate that into user-friendly, user-focused digital content. Once I knew what content types I wanted, I created a database in Airtable to map out which sections of the document would be part of each content type, which content types would be part of each page, and how the taxonomy and tagging would enable content reuse. It was really helpful for making the structured content approach more tangible, and I would definitely do it again.
I also did loads of writing: an article that I’ve been thinking about for about a year, and an edition of 10 Things. Both are out on Monday.
Wellbeing update
I was a great big ball of stress and tiredness last week, but this week has been better:
- Left the office for a walk 3 times
- Left the office early to watch the sunset starling murmuration once (the first time I’ve done this this winter, to my shame)
- Meditated or did breathwork/grounding exercise 5 times
- Socialised once
- 3 yoga classes and 3 stretching sessions
