2025 Weeknote 48 : A pause on the way to 2026

November 24 – 30

📆 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

It was a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday, so things should have been quiet…

• Hiring in full swing. I finally talked to candidates this week for our IT Project Manager opening. I’m always impressed by the talent we find in the local market, and remain surprised anyone can find us at all—we’re an obscure agency inside local government. No one knows who we are (and why should they?). So if we’re being thankful this week, I suppose I’m thankful people bother to apply with us! Interviews will start up shortly, and if all goes well we will hopefully make an offer before the end of December.
• More hiring. This (long) weekend I started work on developing job posting materials for another role—this time a product owner/manager role working on Atlassian stuff like Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and more. We’ve already got a lead engineer but we have sooooo much to do both internally and for customers that are getting religion around team-base work management. We need to burn down the backlog, but also back up our lead engineer.
• Rethinking team leadership. So far I’ve avoided hiring a replacement project management leadership role, and I’m still in that head-space. But I’m thinking. I’ve avoided hiring mostly because I don’t want to bring someone in that could have their job changed in 6 months (or less) as we explore using Team Topologies to guide our future structure. (Feels like that would be a bait-and-switch on a new hire, and I never want to do that to anyone.) But I’m staring down the barrel of having to schedule a repeating series of 17 individual 1:1 meetings with my direct reports and then some selected skip-levels, not to mention multiple team meetings. It’s just… so much. And it’s not my schedule that worries me—it’s the fact that I cannot be there for my colleagues in the ways they may need. Not with that many meetings. So hiring a manager to help out may be what the team needs. So the question is: Can you hire someone—today—with the idea that they would be told, up front, that the job will change in unspecified ways in another 6 months? Can you hire someone—today—that will help you explore the future and build a revised organization, one in which their role is undefined at the time of hiring? That seems like a tall order. But that may be what we need.

Everything else over the past week was normal day-to-day stuff, just in a compact 3-day schedule because of the holiday.

Personal weeknotes

• I didn’t really have a Thanksgiving this year, and that was perfectly fine. First time, really. I headed north for a couple days to visit my parents, but the family gathering didn’t come together due to other complications. Then I fled the incoming snow to head home on Saturday. Honestly, I needed the slow couple of days to recover from work activity and to get ready for the push ahead.
• Meanwhile, I’m re-committing to changing my “life systems” or patterns, in order to improve my health across the board. I was re-inspired by a key insight that I understood instinctively, but needed to hear clearly: To change your life you don’t need goals, you need systems. Goals are often too far off in the future, or perhaps too amorphous, or even too difficult. But systems are things you can change, and it’s the systems that make the difference. So I’m starting a series of systemic changes, most of which I’ve used in the past to good effect. Perhaps I’ll write more about that in the future, but it’s a bit much for a weeknote.

The reminder I needed came from an unusual source: a pseudo-bro influencer on YouTube. It’s an incomplete vision of what I need, but the key insight is there: systems over goals.

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