Weeknote 700: what a lot of weeknotes

I was going to have a meet-up to celebrate hitting the 700 milestone, but events, dear reader. Events.

This week I have learned:

that I’ve hit 700 on the weeknote totaliser. That’s quite a big number. And I really don’t think I would have thought I would have kept the habit up this long back 14 years ago when I started.

I’ve been reading Roland Allan’s excellent The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper. Amongst many things, the value of writing stuff down to get it out of your head is reiterated again and again in the 700-or-so years of notepads, physical and digital.

I think I’ll keep up the light discipline of jotting down a few thoughts before the end of each working week to reflect on the week that’s been until I stop doing things.

Looking back at the first weeknote, how much has changed (and also scarily how long it has been since I last visited Australia).

If you don’t weeknote, all I can say is give it a go.
how smart John Willshire is. I knew that, of course. But it’s nice to be reminded every so often. Watch this talk:

I’ve started The Writing Process for The Book. It started with shoving the chapter summary into ChatGPT and then asking it to create a series of title for me to write about 500 words each day, related to each of the chapters. I’ll have 50,000 by January and some of them will surely be useful…
I also used a combination of cards and the Google NotebookLM tool to run a retro this week. A session using the Richer Retrospectives card deck (recommended). Then a “beginning/middle/end” session using the Meerkat Cards, and then a wrap up running through a timeline. The whole thing was recorded, and then processed in NotebookLM to create a list of recommendations for the client, a list of recommendations for the team and a list of recommendations for our broader business.

The lists weren’t perfect, but they took much of the legwork out of what would otherwise be a lot of admin.
some more tweaks for the Manchester Tech Festival talk. I now have a five-minute problem solving method using the Meerkat Cards, reshot video, and A CATCHPHRASE.

“Dwell on it!”

Thanks to Jason, Nick, Dave and Lee for your help.
I get irrationally triggered by the words “Individual Contributors”. It’s irrational, but it reminds me of my darker days at Microsoft. I always want to call people “team players” instead. Nomenclature matters.
of the concept of Nemawashi. It is beautiful. Thank you Lex.
of the existence of this glorious video about ERNIE, the random number generator.