2025 Weeknote 14 : Rome did not fall in a day, but it fell nonetheless

March 31 – April 6

My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, typically focused on work. Learn more about weeknotes here.

Professional weeknotes

Context switching

The life of a manager or leader is always busy. That’s not new. But as I look back over the past week, I realize I’m being pulled in three directions pretty much all the time, and it’s getting to be too much. First, I have the formal responsibility to lead two distinct teams (our digital services group and our project management group). Each team needs its own form of leadership and coordination. But there’s a third drain on my time, thought, and energy, and that’s directly influencing the broader organization. I’m constantly context switching, and none of these three areas gets enough concentrated attention.

There are projects that cross over from the project team to our customer relations team to our developers to our engineers, and the whole project needs nudges in the right direction. I push for approaches that preserve effort while still getting a good (enough) outcome. There are teams that are still storming / forming / norming and I’m in the mix with them—that takes time, too. There are managers that need help navigating political or performance waters so they don’t run aground (and I could use that kind of help, too, but… I’m on my own).

So one minute I’m in a project meeting with 15 people, the next I’m in a 1:1 with a direct report. Then I’m in leadership meetings with peers and my boss, followed by leadership meetings where I’m the boss. I’m in an organization branding meeting, then conversations about how to launch a new digital service that will affect a million residents and thousands of employees. I hear about ridiculous conversations with self-important bureaucrats in one agency, then get excited by the opportunity to work with enlightened bureaucrats that are really trying to make a difference in another. And then I’ll talk with national peers as we all navigate different versions of the challenges facing local, State, and federal entities trying to get the best out of their digital tools.

It’s a lot.

(And then I wonder why I can’t get individual contributor work done, which I know how to do but by the end of the day, back at home, I’m mentally beat and struggle to put in 2+ hours more before going to bed and starting the cycle over.)

I’m sure this sounds like complaining, but that’s not entirely accurate. Yes, I’d like to focus more and do more in-depth work at times. The context-switching is hard. But I can’t deny I’m exhilarated by the challenge of making all this stuff work, and further excited by the opportunity to make a difference in so many different ways, with different teams, on different efforts.

For now, I’m gonna keep muddling through, doing my best. And perhaps one day I will figure out better ways to time-block my work, to concentrate different leadership modes, to reduce the context-switching.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions on how to reduce the switching fatigue, hit me up!

One week closer to a newsletter

I spent time this weekend working on plans for a new blog/newsletter series on building culture through the use of “codes” written in pithy, memorable rules, with explanations. I’ve been collecting this wisdom from employers, articles, books, and colleagues going as far back as 1998. Before deduplication or simplification, I have more than 250 “codes” collected.

I should be ready to go in the next week or two with an intro post and a first example. I will be publishing a newsletter on LinkedIn to start, and then I will start posting either to WordPress or I may start a new Substack to improve engagement. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and I’ll be using the name “Culture Coding” as the title, and I’ll pick up a relevant domain or two I can use long-term.

Excited to start work with U.S. Digital Response

After a few false starts (on my end), it looks like next week will finally see the start of a multi-week engagement with U.S. Digital Response (USDR). Keith Wilson has kindly assembled a volunteer group to consult with my leadership team on a review of all our roles, job descriptions, team structures, and general strategies. For example, we’ll have a Product Management expert consulting with us, to evaluate whether we’re on the right track with our Product Ownership approach.

Not sure how this will all play out, but looking forward to the engagement. I just wish it could have come at a slower time.

Bwahahaaa! Just kidding. There’s never a “slow” time.

Linknotes

• Back in Weeknote 4 I pointed to Kevin Hawickhorst’s remarkable post about the Eisenhower administration’s development of the Work Simplification program back at the end of the 1940s. That process-improvement model lasted for decades in the federal government, but was lost by the 1970s and 80s. Hawickhorst’s piece inspired some other folks, too, including Derar Deek, who has been working on “converting” the Work Simplification model for current digital transformation teams. He talked about it on LinkedIn and posted to Substack about it, with a kind of “beta” of the model to a website called Standards. I hope this and some alternatives really take off in the next couple of years. We need more focus on service design and digitization of baseline processes.
• Yann LeCun, Pioneer of AI, Thinks Today’s LLM’s Are Nearly Obsolete — Shared by Chris Tonjes on LinkedIn. This rather long article on AI profiles Meta’s lead researcher and his thoughts on the limits of LLM tech and how AI will evolve next. Not sure all of this will come true, but it’s far more plausible (and actually hopeful) than the marketing hype coming out of OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and others.
• Sharon O’Dea posted her thoughts on LinkedIn about how the marketing hype around AI is just a mirage for any customer that lacks well-groomed data. She points out all the promises of AI are hollow when your data is a jumbled mess of highly variable documents and other resources. Thanks to Neil Williams for sharing this piece through his weeknotes (really fortnight notes, which is soooo British I’m crying tea over here).
• Improving productivity and the need for service design — This piece was also shared by Neil Williams, and covers how service design should be at the center of government digitization efforts, not more website refinement. Similar to the AI researcher at Meta, in this case Ben Holliday makes the point that more work on websites will have vanishingly small returns, so government digital teams should reorganize around digitizing processes and services first.

---

About this week’s header photo