2025 Weeknote 11 : 80% of success is showing up

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

March 10 – 16

I am updating the format a little this week, separating out professional notes from personal notes, in case folks are only here for one or the other.

This week in professional #weeknotes

Calm before the storm. I feel like I don’t have much to report this week. It was a busy one, and I’ll share a few notes below, but this feels like the calm before the storm. Next week we’ll have two new folks on the team and it’ll start a long process of onboarding that will require my attention repeatedly. Good things to come, for sure, but it’s going to be a lot of work. Plus next week will see our next awards ceremony, next Unconference, and more.

When the cat’s away the mice will play. Our Chief of Staff has been out for the past week, attending a unique professional development event overseas. And that’s left our executive team rudderless. It’s highlighted for me something I’ve always known: our executive leadership group requires a guiding hand to keep us focused on discussing relevant topics, making decisions, and just generally getting things done. Without the Chief of Staff role, we devolve into random chats and topics and it’s hard to get momentum. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break, of course, so that’s been the good part of the last week. And it’s good to get a reminder of what a leadership role demands.

Welcome to the Tech Roundtable, the Unconference, and the book club. This past week I played host to our “Tech Roundtable” meeting—a gathering of our agency’s customers (or some of them, anyway), in which we share tech and process updates with them. I was filling in, but it was easy. I just added this to other hosting duties. For example, I host our agency-wide “unconference” every 3 weeks, our “season finales” every 8 weeks, the upcoming Phoenix Project book club, my own leadership meetings, and every “whiteboarding” session I can get people to attend (because they solve so many problems). I never really thought of myself as having this kind of role in my career—meeting wrangler or host—but it seems like something that’s needed. I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, but I am one thing most others are not: willing to do it. Sometimes to be good at something, you just have to be willing to do the work when no one else wants to do it. As Woody Allen remarked, “80 percent of success is showing up.”

How do we want to work together? LinkedIn surfaced this post from overseas this week, about how the Victoria & Albert (V&A) museum organization is investigating ways to help their atomized teams and locations begin to work together and communicate more effectively. They originally posted about this on Medium last year, but then posted this briefing document earlier this month, seeking a consultant. This, combined with a recent conversation I had at work, has gotten me thinking about a possible career future.

For many years now, when I’m asked what I’ve been proudest of in my career to date, I’ve thought back to my work in designing the technology for and launching the brand new (in 2012) Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center, a 45,000-square foot public health facility. I worked my butt off to get that facility launched and even donated money toward its construction. I’m still proud of that work. But I’m realizing that may no longer be my proudest accomplishment. Today I might point to what I’ve done with my current employer. We haven’t built any buildings per se, but we’ve built an almost all-new organization. We took a broken, failing culture and completely turned it around. We grew from 40 to over 100. We’re still improving, of course, but the laundry list of accomplishments is long and, looking back, impressive.

I won’t be consulting with the V&A on their desires for transformation. But I feel like maybe I could? I could talk about digital collaboration tools, yes, but also about cultural tools… about creating rituals and artifacts—something museum curators could get behind. I could talk about missions, sub-missions, branding, sub-branding, and how to build a strategic vision, even inside a larger organization that actually has none. I could talk about leading people to some degree, too. Am I an expert? Of course not. But I’m not sure anyone truly can be in this area. It’s about organizing humans at scale, and I’m not sure there’s “one weird trick” to make that work.

I’m starting to think that the final phase of my career may not be in technology specifically or in melding technology tools and public service, but in helping organizations and leaders find their mojo—helping them establish vision, mission, values, strategies, rituals, and even branding. I kinda doubt I’d be a great chief executive. But I do believe I could be an organizational architect and leader-behind-the-scenes.

I just don’t know (yet) how to pursue such a career.

This week in personal #weeknotes

I now have 3 “AI” note-taking devices. It took a while to get them, because 2/3 of these devices are hawked by startups that don’t have enough cash to build enough units to stay ahead of demand. But I have them and in the weeks ahead I will be testing all 3, sometimes together. They include:

• Plaud NotePin. This is a polished device with polished software. It listens, transcribes, summarizes, and then looks for things like to-do items or other insights. You can customize the summarization templates and even export audio recordings (which you can input into other transcription software). It’s the easiest to buy, but also the most expensive, at about $170. The original Plaud Note (shaped like a credit card) is $160. Then there are transcription processing plans that go up to $240/year for “unlimited” service. (So far I’m just using the free tier of service.)
  • Device = $160 for the card, $170 for the pin (available immediately)
  • Service = $240/year for everything
• Bee. This wearable AI recorder is probably the simplest, and it is the most constrained in what it does. It’s more of a life-logger that summarizes your day in a more personal (less professional) context. It feels the most reductive, but that may be a good thing. It’s $50 and has the cheapest hardware with the fewest accessories. (You can also use an Apple Watch as a recording device to get started.) This is clearly from a tiny startup and my assumption is they don’t survive. Still, it feels like the most “complete” or “closed” ecosystem, perhaps because it has the smallest feature set. Fully unlimited services are about $150/year. (So far I’m just using the free tier of service.)
  • Device = $50 (available in batches)
  • Service = $150/year for everything
• Limitless Pendant. I just got this one on Friday, so I have a lot to learn yet. But this one feels like a blend of life logging and possibly work / meeting / task capture. Their goal is to get you to pay $480/year ($40/mo) for the unlimited recording approach and let it rip on everything. The hardware is quite nice and feels more flexible than the other options. They are also sharing updates via YouTube videos as software development continues, so it’s very clear the service is evolving and adding key features. This might be the winner, but we’ll see. (So far I’m just using the free tier of service.)
  • Device = $100 (available in batches)
  • Service = $480/year for everything

This winter came close to breaking me. Temperatures hit into the 70s this week and I had the top down on several rides home from work. Ahhhhhh… that’s better. But this winter was rough, and I found myself wondering about moving south to escape. And I’ve never thought that way before. Hell, I spent 12 winters in Alaska and while that could get annoying at times, you adapt to it and it could even be achingly beautiful. But this cold, intermittently snowy winter in Ohio was just awful. My sister moved from Minnesota to Tennessee last year, and I thought that was kinda nuts—why leave after 20+ years? But as I get older… maybe not so nuts. I’m not fully broken yet, but man… I don’t wanna do this again.

This week in Bluesky funnies

For an assortment of my favorite quips, puns, double-entendres, and hilarious off-axis observations over the past week, check out my latest Bluesky funnies collection.

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This week’s header photo