For my birthday I got 12 hours of great sleep, a vegan cheese board from La Fauxmagerie, a fancy schmancy Victoria sponge, a spider plant and books: ‘Field Guide to the Shrubs and Trees of Britain’ by Reader’s Digest and ‘Rapture’ by Carol Ann Duffy. Spent the weekend chilling at my home from home, eating great food and snacks.
Work supplied the cheese and cake, and one of my colleagues gave me the plant. I really appreciated folks asking me how I like to mark my birthday and such.
Table of Contents
Learning about trees
Speaking of trees, this book is everything. Perfect follow-up to the course I did last weekend: Trees and Tree Identification: The Challenge of Early Winter.
Also, soil, permaculture & re-commoning!
Learning to ask better questions
This week, I learned about clean language. In summary, asking better questions and quick & easy strategies for giving/getting feedback and for preparing for potentially difficult situations.
Best of all was not being as tired as I expected the next day. Having got a point where I’m harnessing the power of my circadian rhythms, I feel disinclined to ruin all of that by going out in the evenings. But I think I’m getting a good balance.
Or, I was until I accidentally booked to evenings out for the same week… Well, I’ll see how that turns out as it unfolds.
Speaking of sleep
Twitter’s siren call and grasping claws latched on to me again this week. I don’t know why but I’m vulnerable to it when I ought to be sleeping, even with the web app. Want to remind myself to leave my phone off and outside of the bedroom to resist it. It’s the only way!
Oh, inspired by the clean language workshop I participated in, metaphors! Well, even more metaphors:
Twitter is a beast. Oh, maybe it’s a crocodile. Or a bird of prey. Except, not quite because it’s something I usually feel I can easily overcome and resist. But I’m wrong. Maybe it’s a jelly fish. Or a yew berry seed. I think it’s insignificant, but actually it’s deadly.
On meditating
This week I’ve been practising including meditation in my working day. We have a quiet room and a mindfulness room, and I used both this week. 🙌🏿
After one of my colleagues telling me that he regularly mediates first thing upon arriving at work. I eat breakfast first thing, so that’s not for me. Instead, I decided to schedule meditation just before or after meals. I’m still playing with the timing of it. Immediately after meetings seems to be working best for now.
I’ve been working on building in time for learning into my day to day too. Well, I’m continuously learning, but I mean study time. For reading books, listening to podcasts, writing articles, attending webinars… That kind of thing. Experimenting with different things with a plan to talk with another agile coach about it has helped a lot. I have a Trello card with a checklist of different things to try, and then I leave comments for myself of how they went. Rewarding challenge.
I’m starting to deliberately build in some slack for wandering around the office chatting with folks. Hanging around the coffee machine. Randomly catching up with folks. Visiting people’s desks in the afternoon. Making a huge difference with building relationships and feeling more connected to folks.
I’ve started planning my day during my morning commute. I was using that time to write, and I do miss that. However, been more effective and fulfilled in my work by planning like this, so it’s a tough one to balance. I’ve been leaving work at 5pm consistently, regardless of when I arrive, which feels great. So, it does feel balanced.
I do want to work on when I make time for writing, still.
How to enjoy budgeting
Last week, when I gave my presentation on myself, I talked about being into budgeting, my weird hobby. One of… 😅
I used to be terrible with money, hated budgeting and found it impossible. And now I find it reassuring. Thanks YNAB.
Anyway, because I’m signed up to You Need A Budget’s newsletter, I learned of this collection of articles, and it’s so helpful and interesting. Maybe one for the Christmas break. 😌
This week in audio
One of the songs that’s been helping me get up when I’ve not had enough quality sleep the night before. I have a playlist of songs like this for that reason. Sigala is over-represented in it, lol.