August 4 – 10
My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.
Professional weeknotes
This week included 2 full days of leadership + management meetings, covering a variety of topics. But there was one topic that stood out…
RTO (kinda)
We’re bringing all our teams back to the office 3 days per week, with a set schedule. The other 2 days will remain remote-first, but folks still need to come in when needed.
For half my teams, this was not a huge deal — it was just a schedule change from Tue/Wed/Thu in the office into the new model of Mon/Wed/Thu in the office. For the other half, it was a bump up from 2 days (Wed/Thu) to 3 days. Those teams just added Monday.
However, for some folks across the organization this change was much bigger. Some teams were still doing 1 office day per week, going back 3+ years. Plus, out of our 100 employees, 3 are very remote—in other cities that are more than 1 hour away. When the change was announced to all staff on Wednesday, well… it made waves, as one would expect.
That said, the schedule change does not take effect until September 8 for managers and January 5 for staff. So there’s time to make adjustments or make other career plans, if needed. Some staff are starting early, however, opting to just get the schedule change done rather than waiting for January.
The decision came from our chief executive, announced to our management group, then to staff. But to be honest… if he hadn’t made this change I was already contemplating something similar for my teams before the end of the year. There’s value in heads-down focused time (which for many can be achieved at home), but there’s also value in being together for face-to-face time, collaboration, and so forth. Getting everyone on a 3-day cycle (yes, probably including Monday, which seems to vex everyone involved) just makes a lot of sense to me.
But to be fair, there are a lot of considerations. Parking is not universally provided. The office is cold all the time, and the bathrooms are neither cleaned nor stocked consistently. And we’re already strapped for meeting spaces as it is. So it’s not a situation where the office has been specifically designed to be enticing.
In any case… we’re moving ahead. It’ll be interesting to see how the culture catches up in the weeks and months ahead.
Other leadership topics
We spent pretty much two whole days on leadership and management stuff, so there was more to it than the hybrid schedule. We also discussed:
- The tough 2026 budget, which through some deft financial planning won’t be as constraining as it might have otherwise been.
- That said, we will have some constraints on training and travel in 2026, which will be disappointing. But we’ll still have a more robust training budget than I’ve seen anywhere else in the last 20 years.
- We discussed upcoming changes in our Jira environment, and I tried to make a fast presentation on how we’ll be tracking “projects” in a part of our Atlassian ecosystem that parallels the Jira platform.
- Finally, we discussed how we’ll be using some staff- and self-development tools and techniques learned from one of our training providers in the months ahead.
More work from this week (in brief)
- I met with the delightful Rebecca Woodbury this week to discuss our ADA compliance needs and how to attack them. We have sooooo much to do in this area and she was kind enough to offer some advice and point us to more resources.
- We welcomed two of our newest team members in a leadership lunch on Tuesday. A new comms person and our new CISO recently joined.
- I created my first “office hours” sessions in a while, specifically for folks to ask about using the new Atlassian platform for tracking projects. No takers this first week, but I anticipated that. We have a September deadline coming up, so I bet the office hours start filling in.
- After working on a massive Atlassian presentation that was only partially delivered, I’m now having to re-design my ADA presentation for a generalized audience of tech-related or tech-interested people across the various agencies we serve. I need to scare them a little, but not too much. I’ll be reworking my deck right up to the delivery this coming Tuesday afternoon.
Professional links
I’ve been so busy with leadership stuff and meetings and presentations this week, I’ve had basically no time to read articles. So no shares this week.
Personal weeknotes
- I had some minor eye surgery this week. In this case the doc used an infrared laser to blast a hole in the back of the “capsule” that holds an artificial lens in my left eye. I had cataract surgery last year in that eye, which was great, but a secondary cataract often forms for patients like me, and it did, so a little pew-pew-pew in the office on Thursday left me with a bunch of cellular debris in my eye (yes, it’s visible), but the cloudiness is gone. By the way, it’s a completely painless procedure, but I could just barely sense the teensy explosions inside my eye as the cells in the capsule were blasted away. Weird. But no problem—I’ve had worse.
- My family saga continues, with more flailing from my father over what to do next to get himself and my mother into an assisted living situation. Every time it seems he’s going to make a decision, he pulls back. It’s totally understandable, however. He spent his entire life having the messy life decisions and tasks figured out for him, usually by my mother. But since she’s no longer able to do that, he’s dealing with it, and he’s unprepared—especially emotionally—to handle all this. I feel bad for him. But it’s also wreaking havoc on all of us kids. I’m told tomorrow is “decision day,” but I’ve canceled all my plans because nothing that has been promised so far has stuck.
- I’ve been struggling to find an “ideal” backpack for the upcoming 40-mile trek in California and the 170-mile trek in Portugal and Spain. I found a good one from Gossamer Gear that solved my too-long-torso problem, but is also a bit too large in volume, so half the backpack is empty / saggy, which is not great. It feels like I’m wearing an oversized lumbar pack. It seems I’ve run into an un-solvable problem in the industry — if a customer has a too-long torso and they only need to carry about 25L of gear, well… too bad. I have an Osprey pack that’s too tall to be an airline carry-on and yet is still a bit short for my torso. I picked up a Swedish pack from USWE which is quite nice, but is also a bit short, with some odd dimensions. And I have a Mystery Ranch that extends out to the torso length I need, but in the extended state the frame is a bit floppy and the load lifters are worthless. I’m going to have to accept some trade-offs here. Still not sure what to do. But I’ll start some practice hikes shortly to figure it out.
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