It’s been a while since I wrote a weeknote, although I’ve kept up with the other kinds of writing that I do. But: I work now. I’m working at a small B2B publisher helping them sort out a few things. This was originally going to be an in-and-out job which would take nine months, but I’ve extended my contract to the end of next year. Because there is much more to be done than I thought at the start.
That’s sometimes the way with contracts. I joined Redwood on a short-term gig for a couple of months and left eight years later. This job won’t last that long, I think. The hours are 8.30–4.30, which feels civilised but is different to the 10–6 that I had when I first started working, and that is probably my optimum working pattern. It does mean that on office days (two a week) I get home at a reasonable hour.
When I’m working on a job like this, the amount I can say about what I’m doing tends to be more limited. I can’t talk much about the details of strategy changes, structures, development, and all the other stuff that I do on a day-to-day basis. I can say that I’ve learned more about the pharmaceutical and food manufacturing industries, which has been interesting. I’ve been traveling a fair bit: Berlin, Milan, Amsterdam. This is business travel which usually means seeing (in order) an airport, a taxi, a hotel, a convention centre/meeting rooms, a hotel, a taxi, an airport.
Part of the deal is that I’m doing four days a week, although there have been times recently when I’ve needed to do five. What I’ve discovered doing this is that after a while a two day weekend feels incredibly short. How do people managed with two days off? How do you cope? There’s no time to do anything! It’s ridiculous.
(This is how it starts: the great long weekend of retirement. Is this how it feels? You suddenly realise that working isn’t interesting enough to fill the five days plus that you worked when young, and that lounging around is much more fun?)
Even when I work five days the busy-o-meter is pinging loudly and blowing out steam. My temptation is to dive into a bunch of things which are technically not in my remit, but which are very much in my wheelhouse – and that leads to me being spread far too thinly.
My curse is that I’m ridiculously experienced at a wide range of things. Want someone to create a content strategy? Do technical SEO? Lead and mentor a young team? Run a panel discussion? Develop product strategy? Coach people on how to pitch?
Done it all. Can do it all to a high degree of competence.
But does that look like a job to you? Is it one of those nice compact and well-defined roles which are beloved of the Harvard Business Review crowd? Nope. Not even close.
Things I have learned in this job:
- I’m good at moderating panels. I’ve done this in the past, but not this often.
- I like being on stage, and I’m extremely comfortable presenting.
- All B2B journalism is fundamentally the same. If you can do it in one area, you can do it in any.I already knew this, having done tech/financial services/you name it in the past.
- I really miss writing.
- I’m not sure how much longer in my life I want to be leading teams. It’s not that I can’t do it (I’m good at it) or don’t enjoy it (I find it pretty fulfilling) but it’s tiring, and you spend a lot of your time shovelling shit away from the people who you lead. That shit lands on you. There’s a limited time I can work like that.
A couple of weeks ago we found out from our postman that one of our neighbours had died. He wasn’t old – he was younger than me – and leaves behind a wife and four kids. Septicaemia. All of which makes me realise quite how little time I have left, and how much I need to make the most of it.
I’ve had a numbness in the front of my thigh for a while which has no developed into full blown occasional sciatica. Or at least I think that’s what it is: I’ll talk to the doctor next week. I was woken up one day by a shooting pain going down my thigh, like a stabbing electric shock, painful enough for me to make some real noise. Another reminder to do a few more things to keep myself healthier (as if any more reminders were needed, or less likely to be ignored).
I still have not fixed my bike.
I was greatly annoyed at the fact I have to pay for a month’s Discovery streaming to watch the rugby Autumn internationals on TNT Sport. On the plus side, TNT also has Australian football, which I find baffling and exciting in equal measure. There’s also a few Champions League and Premier League football matches to watch. But the last thing I need is yet more streaming, so I have to remember to cancel it at the end of the month.
On the tech front, I have been experimenting with using Readwise Reader as my feed reader (which is at least one two many uses of the word “read” in a sentence, but I will let it slip). I’m still in love with the MacBook Air M2.I still wish I had bought the one with more storage.
My friend Cory had cancer but he’s OK. It reminded me of my own health scares (a heart which needed checking out, and was perfectly fine; a “just in case” chest X-ray which might have revealed something a lot more serious). The key question: who do you tell? I told Kim of course, but no one else, and spent a few weeks worrying that I might be about to check out, and thinking about all the things I had left unfinished.
I have been playing around with using Nirvana, which is a really good GTD app, instead of Things, which is a really good GTD app which doesn’t quite work how I like. I still love Things because it just looks pretty, but Nirvana might actually be a better fit.