3rd February 2025
This week’s weeknotes are coming to you from the 14:48 London Kings Cross to Newcastle train. It’s rammed, the wifi is patchy, and there’s no plug, so I’m not sure if I’ll manage to finish this. No retrospective format this week, just a list.
I handed over a project
It was my final week on a project I’ve been working on for 6 months. So there was some furious wrapping up and handing over to the agency running the project. We’re having a retro in a couple of weeks time, so I haven’t reflected on it much yet. One thing I will say is that working with agency pals is hard for me. Not because of the agency, but because I’m so used to working in the way that suits me. Needing to check in often and have a lot of meetings is hard for me, not to mention managing two calendars and inboxes. Plus, the client for this project was based in the US, which made my preferred working hours impossible. I think not agreeing to ‘white label’ myself would help a bit, as well as setting some hard boundaries about when I can and can’t attend meetings.
My website broke
My website broke last week. The only bit that worked was the blog, which was a blessing as I’d just sent an email to 2,500ish people with a link to a new post. This was clearly fate messing with me. Last week I wrote that I was shelving the idea of relaunching (temporarily at least). I couldn’t handle the shame of my site being down, so I kept switching between trying to fix it and doing what I was supposed to be doing. I eventually managed to get it back up, but I need a better solution than propping it up. Really, I need to hire someone to do it for me. My cash reserves are okay, but still a bit shy of where I’d like them to be, so I’m wary of spending money. Plus, I need to have time to support and direct that person, and I don’t think I have the bandwidth for that. It’s a conundrum for me to mull over this week.
I failed at doing anything but client work
I had a few non-client work tasks that I needed to do last week, including content planning and talk development. I’d even booked a day at the Unlost Den to get these things done. But the website chaos and work for clients totally waylaid me. I’m not going to make any progress with either of those things this week either, but next week looks like it might have a gap.
Other things
- Signs of spring: It was Imbolc over the weekend — the mid-point between winter solstice and spring equinox — and I’ve seen hellebores and snowdrops on my dog walks this week. And this page in my almanac showing sunrise and sunset times for this month was heartening:
- I’ve been watching loads of Tiny Desk Concerts. I’m a regular viewer, but have been going through the back catalogue recently. The sound is always impeccable, and often I prefer these performances to the albums (See: Chappell Roan, and I LOVE that album). The comments are also a source of joy — they are always positive and often really funny too. (See: the comments on the Khruangbin one for the drummer’s timing, and the Idles one for the commentary on the evolving colour of Joe’s face.)
- Just started reading Yellowface by Rebecca Kuang, way behind everyone else as usual.
- Enjoyed and nodded at this post Old business problems in new design templates by Scott Kubie: ‘To many ears, ‘redesign’ puts an aesthetic and visual frame around the work, when what you likely actually have is an information architecture, content strategy, accessibility, SEO, user experience, authoring experience, content operations, or even branding problem. (Or all of them together.) Fixes to those kinds of problems are not implied by the word redesign. This is a red-alert, all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm frickin’ danger. It is entirely possible and sadly common for companies to completely redesign their websites while improving nothing with respect to the user experience or business value of said website. Which you certainly don’t want to do.’
This week
This week is a short one. I took my husband to a hospital appointment this morning, I’m travelling this afternoon, I’ve got a kick-off meeting tomorrow, and I’m taking a day off to explore Newcastle on Wednesday. When I’m back I’ll be in full-on content wrangling mode as I’m getting to the final stages of a content design project. The next sprint includes The Homepage, so hold me in your thoughts as I enter this most difficult of territory.