Launching the 10 More Blog Posts challenge
Anyone who follows me on Twitter will have seen me Tweeting about the 10 More Blog Posts challenge pretty incessantly this week.
Helping more people to share their perspectives and experiences is something I feel really strongly about. Our industry desperately needs a more diverse set of voices to keep conversations moving and evolving.
Part of the reason I’ve felt empowered to blog here is because I’ve had a really solid set of friends and colleagues encouraging me to write and cheerleading for me when I do, and I wanted to think about how I could help more people to have that.
So this week, I took a step forward (with help from some very kind people) and launched this simple initiative to encourage more people to write blogs about their work by finding a buddy to help them.
The challenge has already yielded 20 blogging pairs, and I’m so excited to see the posts that come out of it. A huge thank you to everyone who’s taken part so far—I hope there’s more to come.
Changing my working hours
For the past year, I’ve been doing compressed hours, meaning that I work slightly longer days, and have every other Friday off.
It worked pretty well for a while. The extra time felt doable and it was great to have a day off every other week to attend to life admin.
But over the past couple of months my hours have become blurred. I’ve been working more than my necessary overtime, and often find myself needing to do the odd bit of work on my Fridays off.
I’ve decided to go back to a basic 830-430 and be strict with myself. It’s giving me a better work-life balance, and being stricter with my working hours means I’m planning my time better.
So far, so good.
Changing my weeknotes
I have a tendency to be a bit "all or nothing". When I'm not writing weeknotes every week, I feel guilty about it, like I'm breaking the rules.
And when I have written them every week in the past, I find they become a bit of a chore and I don't have enough things that I want to write about or even can write about (my job means I often can't talk about things that happen during my working week).
But this week I came to the—in hindsight pretty obvious—realisation that it's perfectly fine not to write them every week, and there's still value in writing them when I can and want to.
I'm also ditching my usual “What’s gone well, what hasn’t gone well, what I’ve learned” format, allowing me to say what I need to say without constraint.
Breaking rules that aren’t serving me
For a while now, I’ve been doing daily at-home yoga and meditation, and a persistent theme in both is letting go of things which aren’t serving you.
In yoga, that means focusing less on achieving perfection and following the practice to the letter, and more about finding what feels good and appropriate, day by day.
In meditation, it’s more about recognising thoughts, emotions or behaviours that aren’t doing you any favours, and learning to gradually let go of them.
I’ve tried to extend that wisdom into other areas of my life, focusing less on what I should do and more on what I really want / need to do.
Like the change to my working hours and my weeknotes.
I’ve also made a couple of important decisions where I was torn between what I felt I should do, and what I really need right now. It’s not always clear and easy, but taking the time to question my defaults and check for any changes I need to make has been a useful exercise, and one I’d recommend.