Last week was my first week back after a long, restful break. Maybe a bit too restful, judging by how discombobulated I felt when I arrived back at my desk. I don’t go in for resolutions, but I do want to recommit to writing weeknotes with more regularity. Taking time for reflection is one of the things I advise all my coaching clients to do. But I’m lax about doing this myself. I’m going to start writing weeknotes on a Monday, to set the tone for the coming week and as a retrospective on the previous one. I’m going to play around with a few retro formats, until I find one that suits weeknotes well. This week, it’s the very poetic Rose, Bud, Thorn.
The roses: things that came to a full bloom
Unmoderated highlighter testing
Before Christmas, a team I’m working with sent out an unmoderated highlighter test in a survey to get feedback on a messaging hierarchy.
I’ve never done unmoderated highlighter testing before. It was an interesting process, but full of snags. A lot of people seem to have really struggled with the usability of the survey tool we used – around half the participants couldn’t get the highlighting to work. From the other half, we got some useful data that provided a nice combo of quant and qual.
However, this combo of qual and quant also made it hard to analyse. The backend of the tool was poor, and it took a lot of effort from one of my colleagues to get the insights together. And the analysis requires a lot of subtlety too. It’s not just about how many green highlights vs how many red highlights. You want to know about individual words and phrases, entire sentences/clauses where there are lots of highlights, even if people didn’t select exactly the same words. You want to see where green and red overlapped. And the highlighting heat maps that the tool provided were really misleading. I’d want to find a better tool before I’d do unmoderated again.
It followed some one-to-one qualitative testing, and after these two rounds I’m feeling confident that the messaging is in a good place. It’s taken a while to get here, so it was a great start to the year.
The buds: things that are just emerging
A content design project
Ruth Oliver and I started a content design project at the end of last year, but it feels like it really started in earnest this week. It’s hard to get momentum up when you know you’re about to go on a long break.
We’ve got two sprints underway: one where we’re drafting content, and one where we’re briefing and outlining. The first drafts in a new project are tough and take so much longer to complete. We have to settle into the world of the client, wrap our heads around the style guide, work out the tone, and spend a lot of time asking questions and checking our understanding.
The good news is, I think it’s all going to start feeling easier from this point on.
The thorns: the painful bits
Time
This was one of the weeks that there just weren’t enough hours.
I have two projects and three coaching clients. This should be easy to manage, but throw in the variables that come up and it quickly goes awry. Last week, new business was the variable. I had three proposals that I needed to complete, including one that ended up being a much bigger piece of work than I’d bargained for.
Meetings also make it hard. I need long, uninterrupted stretches of time to get quality work done. So one ill-timed meeting that breaks up my day in the wrong place can throw off my whole week.
I’ve put a couple of things in place to address this:
- I’ve cut my billable hours to 30 hours a week to leave more slack for variables
- I’m going to ask for meeting times that work for me wherever possible
Underpinning both these things is my commitment to keeping to these boundaries on my time and not saying ‘yes’ to everything.
Focus for this week
- Finish briefing and outlining content
- Work on a governance document
- Plan a session on content strategy skills mapping for a coaching client
- Plan how I’m going to get my new website live
- Saying no and upholding boundaries on meetings
Cultural stuff
- I went to the Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at the Fashion and Textile Museum – I found the DIY attitude really inspiring, and it made me slightly wish I’d been born in that generation. (Patti Smith’s Just Kids did the same.) The picture in this post is from the exhibition – a yellow silk t-shirt by Katherine Hamnett.
- I finished reading Boy Parts by Eliza Clark — a real page turner, like the other book of hers I’ve read. I need page-turners at this point in my reading life.
- I went to see Nosferatu — I’m a Robert Eggers fan and this didn’t disappoint. It was creepy and atmospheric and beautiful. Simon McBurney hamming it the hell up was a highlight. It didn’t knock The Witch off the top of my Eggers chart, though.
