Work-wise, it’s been mainly about rounding off Q3 and finishing prep for Q4. Nothing earth-shattering on the client side. For my part, I’ve chosen to take a more personal view of Q4: Whilst keeping my professional objectives pretty-much in line to follow on from Q3, I’ve decided to better highlight and monitor personal objectives for: my creative writing and writing about writing; my physical & mental health.
I’ve created a dashboard for KPIs in Airtable that are pushed (automated) from other places. OKRs remain in Weekdone.
We are only 4-5 weeks away from GovCamp Cymru 2025, so I’ve been looking more closely at the dependancy map that I created for a previous event - updating and modifying it to suit. We really need to be on top of things to ensure everyone has a great experience, so I’ll be playing bad cop to make sure we have everything in place in time.
I did the mentor/sounding board thing for a colleague, in preparation for an interview. I really enjoy doing this sort of thing. I was able to offer some suggestions, but for the most part, they had everything nailed.
On the writing side, I had an end-of quarter flurry of ideas for poems. For most of Q3, my creativity has been on writing about writing, and I was starting to worry that I wasn’t going to hit my Q3 objectives for the new book, ‘Earworms and Emotions’. Well, I didn’t hit the objectives (by quite a large margin), but I am comforted that maybe my creative dial is turning back towards the poems. To be honest, I’m just happy to be writing anything.
I also got the forward and some commentary written for the other book (an as yet untitled re-issue of an older book) but, again, not enough to be ‘on track’ to publish before Christmas.
In the grand scheme of things, these are not problems unless I make them so. I have no external deadlines that I need to hit. I’ve tweaked my Q4 outcomes to be less draconian (and told my AI project manager to chill out).
Finally, I sent in a submission to write an article for something coming out in December. Whether or not anything comes of that, we’ll see. I hope so; I would be writing about something that I feel very deeply about. Can’t say any more than that about it, though.