• Didn’t get round to doing this last week because I couldn’t quite find the time/headspace. But hey this is digital publishing right, so deadlines don’t matter?
• This is what we thought when we took Design Week from print to online-only back in the day, and realised that deadlines are far less scary when they don’t involve printers shouting at you and threatening to fine you for not sending pages in time. …

I promise I’ll only do this once

Having a running buddy
Individually contributing
Gossiping
Hearing my son reading in the other room
Supporting my colleagues and having them support me

and

Letting people down by not being available enough
Overcooking the Valentine’s dinner
Worrying about the future
Scratching the car while trying to park

• Reduced my work hours even more this week as nursery remains closed (snow this time, rather than Covid). Still so thankful to work in a place where I can be flexible like this and it’s yet another reason I’ll never leave GDS.
• Fewer hours = greater intensity though obvs and I’m definitely in that place where you hop from one thing to another without being able to fully engage with anything.
• Reminds me of when I was editing Design Week and was asked what my one piece of advice was for someone who might want to do my job. I…

• Turns out public shaming is a really effective way of encouraging people to write. Wish I’d known this before.
• Been thinking about how much I used to rely on intuition when working on stuff rather than drafting big documents or fiddly graphics. Maybe it’s because I was a lot less experienced and amateurish than I am now, but sometimes at the moment I feel like I’m creating a world of complexity for myself. Ultimately you end up at the same place I’m sure and the trick is obviously distilling all this detail into something really clear and simple. But there…

• Managed to shame/encourage Anna to start writing again, so I feel like my work here is done.
• Was pondering why I publish these on a Thursday, and I think it’s because I’m still beholden to the old weekly print magazine process, despite having been out of the game for several years now. Back then Tuesday was for going to press then going to the pub; Wednesday was for being hungover and Thursday was for dealing with the reader feedback/litigation when your magazine hit the newsstands. Feel quite heartened that the ghosts of this schedule still haunt my actions. …

• Been meaning to do this for a while but kept putting it off due to a mixture of a) being cowed by people who are really good at it (Anna, Chris and Mark) and b) finding writing extremely hard and stressful (despite having done it for a living for roughly two decades). Normally my motivation to write is that someone is paying me to do it. …