2025 Weeknote 02 : Snow day

January 6 – 12

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

The game’s afoot… almost

You can’t deny 2025 is upon us now. No more mid-week holidays, the lights have come down, my office has moved, and yet…

Monday was disrupted by the snow / ice storm that passed through the middle of the country. We got about 5 inches of snow at home, with a lot of the accumulation just before morning rush hour. So it was a surprise work-from-home day (including for 2 new hires that didn’t even have their laptops yet).

Tuesday was in the office. But then Wednesday was remote because I was prepping for Thursday (more on that below). Then Thursday I was out entirely and Friday was remote.

So 2025 started with disruption. Next week should be much more regular.

I’m #hiring again

Our leadership team reached a conclusion after weeks of debate (and disruptions from the holidays). We are moving ahead with hiring an “IT Project Coordinator” role, and it will report to me for now, then our Delivery Services manager later this year. The job is posted in our applicant system, it’s on LinkedIn, and I’ve shared it socially. I also submitted it for the next release of the #PublicSectorJobBoard.

This will be the most entry-level role I’ve hired in a while, so it should be interesting. I kind of have to down-shift to some simpler or earlier-career kinds of questions, at least for folks that are indeed early in their careers.

Intro calls start today, actually, and will continue over the next couple weeks. Then interviews are in February, with a formal hiring on 3/3 and a start date in late March. Fingers crossed!

Peek-a-poo

I was out of commission for about 36 hours this week as I prepped for and recovered from my second colonoscopy. I appreciated the “simpler” prep this time around — the two 16 oz chemical concoctions rather than the complete 4 liters of polyethylene glycol. It’s the texture of the latter that drove me insane the first time.

Similar to cataract surgery last year, what amazes me about this corner of the healthcare industry is how nearly automated it is. The small-ish facility I visited completes about 45 colonoscopy procedures per day, every day, with just 3 doctors (so about 15 per doc) and it was just one office in a practice with 4 similar sites in the area. You get herded through the cookie-cutter process really quickly. The cataract office I went to in 2024 was even bigger and processed perhaps 100 surgeries a day—the waiting room was enormous.

These very-common procedures are well-documented and well understood. So it’s not shocking they would line up the patients and crank through them quickly, especially with insurance companies breathing down their necks for efficiency. Even their email game is automated, with reminders and links to instructions flowing through a standard “drip” campaign aligned to your appointment date. Impressive. And yet… a little depressing.

In any case, I’ll spare you the colon photos.

Leader + Manager = Lanager

The YouTube algorithm provides. This 5-minute video caught my eye and was surprisingly good for anyone working in, well… any organization. If you’re an individual contributor, you should have certain expectations of your leaders / managers. If you’re in some form of leadership, you owe your team what is proposed in the video. It’s hard. It’s not popular. Maybe it’s a little schizophrenic at times. But it’s vital.

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