Weeknote: Week 33 2024
12-16 August 2024
If you’re wondering what this is or why I’m writing weeknotes, I explain in my first weeknote.
What happened this week
This week I have felt incredibly busy - both with work and socialising/personal life.
On Monday evening I thoroughly enjoyed the spoken word night held monthly at Argonauts community bookshop - hosted by my very cool flatmate, Murid. My highlight was a speaker who read a letter from one hydrogen to another - touching on complexity science, humanity, and love and hate.
And on Wednesday a friend came round to co-work (or cowork?) along with her very fluffy dog, Yuki.
At my main work, the School of System Change, I have been diving fully into my producer role on Basecamp 2024 - our 7-month transformative journey into the foundations of systems change practice (which I took part in in 2020/2021). This is a vast project with lots of moving parts to coordinate. I’m enjoying setting up the structures to manage the project and enable smooth working with the team, including a new project management document template I’m testing out with my freelance client too.
At our team meeting on Tuesday, we planned for the next six weeks of work (we work in cycles of six weeks). Most people have some leave planned in August. I took mine earlier as I knew August would be a busy month for me - and I was right. My list is very full - mostly due to recruitment for our autumn courses all launching around the same time. So I’m doing my best to prioritise my workload and stay on top of my different responsibilities over the coming weeks.
(I forgot to write a weeknote last week but just wanted to share the introduction I wrote for the School of System Change newsletter. You can sign up here to receive future editions in your inbox.)
On Thursday and Friday I worked for my freelance client, providing communications support during a merger process between two charities. I’m at the beginning stages of a big project - writing the copy for the organisation’s new website, and am feeling good about how I’m managing the planning of the project so far. Today I clarified the project’s purpose and objectives with help from ‘A guide to content design for charities, nonprofits, and the third sector’ by Lauren Pope - recommended by somebody on the organisation’s team.
What’s been sparking my curiosity and/or joy
Inspiring me to reflect on my own digital garden & learning in public experiments is Alan Hudson’s ‘knowledge gardening practices’ detailed in Knowledge Gardening in Complexity. These are practices “which support [his] explorations and enable [him] to nurture an interconnected, evolving and emergent network of knowledge.”
Anjunadeep presents: Earth Day 2024 (DJ Mix) - a spectacular mix to get me into the zone and flow for heads-down focus work
Landing within systemic stories by Finn Finlayson
"Doss, to me, is about the full spectrum of possibilities. I don't want it to be just one genre, so it's moving forward and thinking about singles as a forever album, right? Or like, "How can I tell that story/narrative?" What would be the next song in an album if my career itself was like one long album?" - DJ Doss in Doss Is Your Favorite DJ's Favorite DJ
Spoken word night on Monday!
Having the best time after a spontaneous decision to leave the flat and see comedian Ashley Gavin at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback or comments, I’d love to hear from you.
Please accept this gift of TWO very different songs to ease you into the weekend. I hope you have both fun and rest planned.
“Do not destroy what is mine, what also is yours.” - Cicada Rhythm
Mairi