April 8-14

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

My notes will be a little abbreviated this week due to 2 big events…

2024 Total Solar Eclipse

I was off work on Monday to view the eclipse out on the western edge of Ohio. I didn’t end up going to Texas due to weather—clouds in Ohio were predicted to be about the same or better than Texas, so why make the drive and pay for all the gas, hotels, and so forth?

I’ve posted photos and videos over on my updated weekly photo blog photonic teleportation. It was a great experience, and I’m so thankful the weather held out well enough to make it work. I’m not one of those people that claims it “changed my life” or anything like that — I just enjoy it a lot. What’s so crazy is that I saw the 2017 total solar eclipse, too. Didn’t think I’d experience two in such rapid succession.

The next eclipse to cross a big swath of the U.S. is in 2045, a full 21 years from now. I plan to still be alive then, but you never know.

CDSO conference in DC

The day after the eclipse I traveled to Washington, DC to attend a conference hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, focused on a handful of Chief Digital Service Officers (CDSOs) from federal, state, and local governments. Indeed, this conference was put on specifically by the Digital Service Network team at the Beeck Center.

With only about 25 of us in attendance, this was a pretty intense conference. It was also expertly hosted on the Georgetown campus by the DSN team, with a side-trip to the United States Digital Service (USDS) in their home base — the very secure Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) directly next to the White House.

Honestly, I’m exhausted by this week and have to prep a bunch of stuff for two days of off-site leadership meetings starting tomorrow, so I can’t recap the conference with too much detail right now. But there are a few brief takeaways I can share:

• I don’t know how the Beeck Center / DSN and the U.S. Digital Response teams are funded (I just haven’t explored this yet), but wow… they are funded. They are all running very well-organized, well-resourced teams with top-tier talent calling the shots. It’s impressive. I hope the funders keep the money flowing because the impact produced by these organizations is vital.

• All the problems / challenges we are experiencing in the GX Foundry are typical. Limited resources, too many demands on our time, inherited tech and policy decisions that blunt service effectiveness… all of it is “normal.” That doesn’t mean it’s right, it’s just that we have plenty of company.

• The public servants working on developing digital government practices are the vanguard of government service generally. The quality of talent, the dedication to improving public service, and the relentless self-imposed pressure to improve is astonishing. I knew there were good people working hard to make a difference, but I didn’t realize it was this intense (and heartwarming!).

• Digital Service Standards are not new, but they are not as widely deployed as I would have expected in the American government space. Even USDS doesn’t have them today. Danny Mintz from Code for America came in to talk about Standards, and there’s a lot to do here—this is a rich area for exploration. The Brits have had it forever now. We need to do something similar.

• The difference between State and Local governments is substantial when it comes to digital services, and the needs of those two levels are more divergent than I expected. The only State that felt like it was close to my own large County experience was Delaware, probably because it’s only got about 1M people — the same as Franklin County. Future efforts to share resources and ideas across digital government teams may need to stratify by size and complexity of team.

DC is a character in the American story

When not in a charged-up conference session, I was enjoying being in DC in the spring time, before the heat and humidity chokes the city for months on end. I walked a lot, used the Metro, took in a White House East Wing tour, and attended a concert at the Kennedy Center.

There’s a lot of corruption in DC, and all too often lately it feels as though our entire political system is melting down. But if you walk around our capitol and see these structures, the monuments, the statues… it feels timeless and there’s a patriotic sensibility that bubbles up, even in my cynical heart.

DC feels as though it represents the best of our intentions. It’s why the January 6 insurrection felt like such a slap in the face—it defiled a place trying its best to represent our hard-earned mythology.

I need to go back more often.

Internet funnies

AI is now routinely becoming the butt of online jokes. And, I would argue, it’s earned the derision and skepticism.

April 1-7

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

An abbreviated week

I took Friday off to get a breather and to prep for the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse, which is the biggest of big deals next week (tomorrow, as I write this). So my weeknote will be a bit shorter this time.

Plus, this felt like a catch-up week, with a grab-bag of administrative work, meetings, a little training, and so forth. It didn’t feel like the ball was moved all that far forward this week.

It’s hard to tell an organization’s story

One thing that came up again this week was the need to create a monthly report for the organization, to tell our story, to build trust and support. Totally agree with this, but the question is how to do this, without killing the staff working on it along the way. Plus there’s the problem of audiences and their interests. Many of the folks my boss talks to won’t be impressed with scorecards or even lists of accomplishments—if those accomplishments don’t address their personal / political interests. This is how humans work in organizations, so it’s not surprising. But how do you write one report that addresses each person’s narrow needs?

The result is likely to be three-fold:

• A continued monthly “story” we tell that’s more humanized and focused, to illustrate our values / mission / impact. This will be released in print and via LinkedIn newsletter.

• A new monthly high-level, scorecard-style, slide deck that highlights accomplishments and gives a generic dashboard of stats that non-technical government leaders can understand and appreciate. This is a pretty anodyne report written for everyone, and it might even be shareable publicly.

• A rolling list of “touchy topics” that high-level leaders need to know about for their political awareness and/or because they have their own interests in those topics.

All of these documents and approaches are needed. They can all help solidify support for our mission. Now we have to actually do it.

Gearing up for 2 weeks of… something

The next 2 weeks are… intense. Some proverbial balls are going to drop in the middle of all this, I can already tell…

• Mon, Apr 8: I’m attempting to see the eclipse with all the risks of traffic insanity and even just clouds ruining things. But I’ll be on the center line of totality one way or another, expecting a full 4 minutes of total shadow.

• Tue, Apr 9: I fly to DC to get ready for a conference.

• Wed-Thu, Apr 10-11: I am attending a conference hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, alongside a variety of government digital leaders from across the continent. This ragtag group represents all levels of government and we bring a wild mix of experiences to the table, since “digital services” in government remains a frontier-style activity. I’m hoping to learn a ton. Aside from meeting cool digital folks, we also get to meet with the United States Digital Service (USDS), one of the key inspirations in helping my team develop the GX Foundry concept. I haven’t been this jazzed about a conference in a long time. And I haven’t been on Georgetown’s campus since the late 1990s, when I worked for a consulting company at the Georgetown University Medical Center.

• Fri, Apr 12: As a capstone on the week, the Beeck Center got us access to do a tour in the East Wing of the White House. I have no idea what that entails. Then I scramble to the airport to fly home.

• Sat-Sun, Apr 13-14: Catch up on laundry, email, and so forth, plus record my weekly business news show for the local radio reading service. Then prep for…

• Mon-Tue, Apr 15-16: It’s 2 days of off-site leadership meetings. I probably can’t even prep effectively for them due to all of the items above. But in theory we should be talking about the rest of 2024, all of 2025, and beyond. Simple. Oh, I also have an HOA board meeting on Tuesday. (Yikes.)

• Wed, Apr 17: First day in the office since April 4.

• Thu, Apr 18: We launch our new Granicus-based “core” website for the county today. Luckily, this replaces a low-traffic site, so this is effectively a “soft launch.” But this is the nucleus of what’s to come—a total rewrite of our public-facing web presence organized around services we provide, not agencies or elected officials.

• Fri, Apr 19: Hopefully I’m still alive.

Leading like Loki

One last thing… This week I had another 1:1 meeting with someone outside my managerial sphere—talking shop, career stuff, and so forth. That’s the second in two weeks. Both conversations were great. It’s good for me to see perspectives from across the organization, and I’m happy to share ideas or feedback or whatever I can, if people find it helpful.

But I started to wonder… Why are people that are 1, 2, or 3 levels away from me, on entirely different teams, seeking me out? I mean yeah, I have an “open door” to anyone, but people rarely use those doors. So what’s different now?

My assumption… In my role I can be pretty visible, and I cut a path that’s fairly open, honest, direct, but also (I hope) fun. I aspire to take the work very seriously, but I don’t think we should take work too seriously. Put another way, I’m deadly serious about the spirit of the law, but I’m always skeptical of the letter of the law.

Then I remembered… this is why trickster gods exist in mythologies around the world. Perhaps the best known in the West is the Norse god Loki (mostly due to Marvel movies these days). I had to remind myself of the roles of trickster gods, as it’s been a while since college, but ChatGPT had a summary of the things tricksters do best:

• Disrupting Order

• Creative Chaos

• Teaching Lessons

• Testing Boundaries

• Catalysts for Change

• Symbolizing Ambiguity

• Entertainment

A lot of these appeal to me as a leader. Indeed, what brought me to FCDC nearly five years ago was an opportunity to lead a “turnaround” in operations and culture, which involves dealing with ambiguity, creatively applying chaos and disrupting the old order, catalyzing change, and so on. In the midst of all this, it also helps to be entertaining, to keep it light because what we’re dealing with is pretty heavy.

Leading like Loki probably isn’t a sustainable practice for static organizations. But who works in a static organization anymore?

In any case, I’ve enjoyed chatting with colleagues from across the organization. I hope there’s more opportunity to do so again. And again. 🙂

Internet funnies

March 25-31

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

Telling the story of our storytelling

We launched the first FCDC newsletter this week, featuring the story I wrote about Piper, a dog adopted by one of our teammates who was volunteering at the dog shelter and couldn’t resist. This is an experiment, to see if these kinds of stories resonate. We’re also handing out printed cards with this story on them starting this coming week.

Meanwhile, the monthly report plan has been put on pause for retooling. A few problems came up, with the primary one being that most of the topics the boss wants to talk about with county leaders are topics the rest of us know nothing about — it’s stuff he is working on, so we can’t develop a report for him. Additionally, many of the topics are not appropriate for public distribution, so… it will be smaller, private, and focused on county political considerations, not accomplishments from our various teams. Accomplishments will still figure into the content, but it will play a smaller part.

Maybe one day we will tell stories about our accomplishments openly, but not today. We’ll stick to the more emotional storytelling for now. Which is fine. I need the practice. (And I’m relieved to give up some of this work.)

Grab bag of updates

• We finally got training on the OpenCities content management platform we’re using to re-launch our public-facing websites, starting in less than a month. It’s a complex system, but on par with others in the field. It’s going to be interesting to see how the agencies deal with learning it and working within its limitations.

• An internal team made an initial pitch on moving all our work management and project management efforts into a single tool (Jira), away from the multi-tool mess we have today. The conversation continues, but it seems to be headed in the right direction.

• We’re finally launching a proper Change Management process, based on Jira, next week. It’s taken months to get here. Should have gone much faster. But coordinating action and moving everyone’s cheese is hard.

• Speaking of coordinating action, we had a serious meltdown this week when one team launched a whole new process and software tool that deeply impacted other teams, despite warnings it would not go well and we needed to collaborate a helluva lot more before going live. This event has deeply broken inter-team trust, and it will have repercussions that play out for a long, long time.

• Had a great career-focused conversation with someone from an entirely different team this past week. I don’t get to play “mentor” very often, and I hope I did okay with it. Would love to do that more. But a lot of people don’t really seem to think broadly about their careers. Most folks just think about their job.

Here comes the sun… and there it goes?

I’m still set to head out in a week to chase the solar eclipse. Despite it running right through my home state of Ohio, I’m still intending to drive all the way down to Texas, in hopes of more reliable weather.

However, the forecasts—a little more than a week out, so who knows—say my plan might be a mistake. I could end up under clouds in Texas while there’s sun (or lack of sun for 4 minutes) back home. I will be watching this very closely in the days ahead.

Columbus prediction (8 days ahead)

Texas prediction (8 days ahead)

Internet funnies

March 18-24

This is my ongoing attempt at producing “weeknotes” to capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on my professional work. You can subscribe if you’d like to receive these via email or via Substack notifications.

While our team launched into GX+ Season 2 this week, I’m feeling a bit disconnected. Much of my time at present is being absorbed into organization-wide leadership efforts, leaving little time for working with my own teams. I’m hoping this is a short-term burst of work that will ease up over time.

Big Project 1: Telling Our Story

This work is absorbing a lot of my time and creative capacity. We’re doing two things to start telling the organization’s story this year:

1. We’re developing a monthly “impact report” in the form of a short-ish slide deck recounting accomplishments, but preferably accomplishments that point out the “business” impact we’re having for our agency partners. I’m creating this from scratch and pulling in managers and content from across our 90+ person organization. This will get easier once the “template” of what we’re creating is somewhat set.

2. I just finished our first “story card” to relate one human-scale story per month on a printed piece that we will distribute to our Board and other county leaders. This is more of a creative writing exercise where I try to relate our mission and values through the observed actions of an employee in contact with a client. The first one is done and off to the printer. We’ll release it April 1. (Why print it? Because no one prints anything anymore, so it actually makes the piece more meaningful because we’re literally handing them out, almost like business cards.)

These efforts will be sizable each month, but they are huge right now because we’re creating this from nothing. I’m creating the content calendar, the goals, design templates, and the first round of content on both pieces — all in one shot.

Plus we have no idea how this will all be received. I presume it will be appreciated, but… time will tell.

Big Project 2: Recognition Program

After creating a recognition program based on Mission Patches at the start of 2024 for the GX Foundry team, I’m now expanding it to the full organization, which requires capturing work efforts from across all teams and helping team leaders express those accomplishments in a mission patch format. So far, so good.

One of the things we’ve recently figured out, though, is that if you hand out mission patches in sticker format, there’s a limited list of options for what you do with them. Laptop lids? Sure, but when the laptop goes end-of-life, you have two problems: (1) you lose your stickers, and (2) someone has to clean the stickers off the lid to send the laptop into an electronics recycling program. Similarly, stickers on windows or doors don’t work because people move around and we don’t want to mar furniture.

Two possible sticker solutions

For the mission patches handed out to staff, our new HR manager had the idea to get plexiglass sheets and use those as mounting spots for the stickers. These are inexpensive and can be taken by the employee as they move around or even if they leave the organization. The particular sticker layout is up to them, too.

Meanwhile, large-format mission patches meant for team sharing on a visible wall could be mounted as magnets instead of straight-up stickers. Using a magnetic whiteboard or similar surface, you can do a “magnetic poetry” kind of thing that’s interactive for employees and allows for remixing over time.

Anyway, team leaders are assembling their “2023” awards now and we should be issuing Mission Patches and assembling our walls by May.

2025+ Planning

The boss has scheduled some off-site planning sessions next month, so we’re starting some “visioning” right now on the GX Foundry leadership team. All options are on the table. We have clear weaknesses to fill, including more BA capacity, lots of new UX research capacity, and of course more platforms and development capacity. We already have a multi-year plan to boost web-focused capacity.

This stuff is hard to do, but vital to ensure we can keep up with customer needs and build capacity for things that haven’t even been requested yet. There’s soooooo much government experience to improve.

Website “Content Rationalization”

Speaking of websites and improving experiences, this past week saw multiple hours of meetings with partner agencies as they start to get some training and are given deadlines to (a) look through all their current web content, and (b) decide what to keep, update, or delete as we move to a new content management system and redesign our web properties to meet the public where they are instead of asking the public to meet the agencies where they are.

This is perhaps the most important project in our area since the results, if done well, will reverberate years into the future. We need better design, better writing, but what we really need is to share information and resources in ways the public can intuitively understand. We are moving from agency-centric publishing to public-centric publishing. It’s a wholesale overhaul.

Leading individuals vs. leading organizations

In recent weeks I’ve been discovering there’s a spectrum of management engagement with employees. I tend to be on one end of the spectrum and a colleague of mine tends to be on the other end of the spectrum. Both are valid and valuable, but the best results probably come from mixing the approaches (which is hard to do).

My colleague tends to lead from private, personal interaction and coaching with each person he manages. It’s a deep, meaningful, and personal connection. It can be a powerful way to coach and develop people. But it’s limited in scale and can create unintended dependencies. There are only so many people you can coach deeply at one time, and there are only so many meetings you can attend personally to guide. And your presence is both deeply felt when you are there and deeply missed when you are not.

On the other hand, I tend to lead systematically rather than personally. I create big-picture mission concepts and frameworks, then try to teach those ideas and evangelize them, hoping to garner followers and leaders that extend these ideas into their teams. This is a very scalable model—presuming your models are accepted and used, and presuming the leaders following you are equipped to carry the vision forward with their teams. But it’s not a terribly personal connection between myself and those I lead, meaning if I need to lead intensely with an individual, that relationship is too light to sustain “heavy” coaching, where you’ll be processing a lot of emotional load along the way.

Again, neither approach is “right.” Both have plusses and minuses. The best thing to do is mix them in equal measure. Indeed, over the past few years I’ve been trying to move toward a more personal connection, but it definitely does not play to my strengths.

I’m thinking a lot about this lately.

I Voted

Yep, I voted in the primary election this week. I don’t think I’ve missed an election since 2015, no matter how “small.” Voting is a very big deal in local government, and a sizable swath of our organization works on various efforts to support our Board of Elections, including on election night. Our teams work on data analytics stuff, website updates, and specialty code that slices and dices voting results in various ways and posts the data online.

November 5 is gonna be wild this year.

Internet funnies

March 11-17

Heavy calendar, light sharing

It’s been a light week for Substack notes and LinkedIn shares, not to mention staying on top of email. The calendar was very full:

The all-day training on Thursday was with Business of People (again) and focused on how to provide feedback as a manager — the first of two sessions, although I will miss the next session. And sadly, that training was interrupted by…

NACo presentation on Unclaimed Funds

We prepped and delivered a presentation to a NACo audience about how we used Quickbase to solve our Unclaimed Funds legacy code problems. That presentation went pretty well, aside from a minor video/audio mismatch during a recorded features demo. Here are the slides, for anyone interested…

Storytelling and awards

I started the IDEO U course on Storytelling. Also worked on the draft of our first Story Card and hosted our first monthly Impact Report meeting with the leaders expected to produce a monthly scorecard and narrative. This is turning into a lot of work, and it’s taking away from leadership of my own team. It’s making me concerned. That said, I recognize improving our org-wide storytelling should yield more resources over time, helping everyone. After all, people will typically fund things that get results. You just have to show your work. Then ask for more.

Meanwhile, I’m pushing the new recognition (awards) program in the organization. It’s meeting some resistance, though I think that’s because of the extra work, not because people don’t want to acknowledge or celebrate our good work.

Truth be told, it’s always a lot of extra work to show off what’s being done, rather than just doing it and moving on. But I’ve come to understand, over the years, leadership of organizations requires this meta-work.

Cataract, week 2

The results of the cataract surgery have been perfectly fine. The big production around the surgery was overkill, but it was ultimately worth it. I now heartily recommend cataract surgery for anyone that needs it. I knew it was good, I just didn’t know it was this good. Better than lasik, I suspect.

Conference calendar

I’m very much looking forward to a couple conferences coming up. First is a 2-day in Washington, DC on April 10-11 hosted by the Digital Service Network (DSN) with other digital government leaders from across the country.

Then there’s the Code for America Summit in late May in Oakland, CA. I’m hoping to go and take 2-3 others from our team.

Eclipse trip

Before heading to any conferences, there’s the total solar eclipse coming up on April 8. I will be heading to Texas to increase the odds of clear skies. If it’s clear in Ohio, I will be pretty mad because the hotels along the path of totality are super expensive!

The last eclipse in 2017 was a great experience. We went to a small town outside St. Louis to see it and while it was hot, it was clear and I got photos and videos that were awesome. I hope to do even better this time.

GX+ Season 2 begins

Our second 8-week season of work started this week. We’re still learning how to make commitments and focus on time-bound work. I’ll be getting a view of the Season 2 plans this coming week.

Play ball

I’m working on getting tickets for multiple Columbus Clippers minor league baseball games over the course of the spring and summer. It’s a great way to take colleagues out for some fun and socialization—vitally important in the remote work era. Plus, Huntington Park is a great venue that also happens to be owned by my employer. 😀

County website content revamp shaping up

With 14 launch agencies and another 30 agencies beyond that, combined with switching from an agency-centric model to a services-centric model, our massive overhaul of county web properties is starting to come together now. It’s complex. The GX Concourse team is really sweating the details and working to set us up for as much success as we can muster.

But man, is it tough. Sooooo much content to refactor or just plain write from scratch, so much to figure out in information architecture, lots to control when it comes to language levels and style for public consumption, and then there’s all the staff across the county we have to lead through this process, despite web communications being a secondary or tertiary priority for most of them.

We’re working on a pitch to expand the team now.

A few funnies

Finally, I do enjoy funny bits of old-school-Twitter-style humor. Including here for fun.

March 4-10

Starting with weeknotes

This is my first attempt at “weeknoting” after being inspired by Matt Jukes who referred to Steve Messer’s piece about working in the open. My intention is to make this mostly a weekly affair, probably on Fridays or over the weekend.

I’m starting with “Weeknote 10” because this is the 10th week of 2024, not because it’s the 10th week I’ve been doing this.

Still attempting an index card task habit

This past week I got a starter pack of the Ugmonk Analog system cards, after spending a couple weeks with basic index cards. It feels good to write, to make something physical. Though I’m not yet sure whether this will make a difference in my ability to prioritize and complete work better than an all-electronic approach.

A video I saw this weekend summed up a key insight for me: that electronic systems are excellent at collecting projects and tasks, but they are terrible at helping you get actual work done because the weight of all the collected tasks is debilitating—either by making starting much harder, or by encouraging a focus on organization and constant re-organization, rather than finishing work.

The act of physical writing and organizing slows me down to the scale of work being actually finished.

Cataract surgery completed

This week was a bit less productive than usual because I took Tuesday off to complete cataract surgery on my left eye. Everything went well, but being drugged for the procedure took me out of commission for the day and I was, of course, fairly stressed, despite the surgery being extremely common and fast.

Most of the stress for me was around how things would play out. I’ve had a thick cataract in the left eye since late 2000, as a result of multiple retinal detachment repair surgeries. How would my brain handle being able to see through that eye again (more than just light/dark and large shapes)? Plus, with the retinal damage done, how would I process my right eye and left eye images?

I did get a headache for perhaps a day, as I was trying to pull the images together (subconsciously), but the results were better than expected. This journey will continue for another couple months as things settle in and I get a new glasses prescription.

One thing’s for sure, though… I now want to pursue cataract surgery on the other eye, if it can be done safely. I now capture much more light in the eye with the intraocular lens, and colors are brighter / more vibrant, too. It’s obvious now my right eye is slowing fading and needs the same procedure at some point.

Building a new monthly Impact Report and Story Card for #FCDC

I’m working intensively on the creation of 2 new monthly products, aimed at our Board and other county leaders, that will “tell our story” as an organization. This involves our entire leadership team to some degree. But being something entirely new, it’s taking a lot of extra mental effort to figure out the right focus and level of detail required to get the message across.

Part of what we’re producing is also a “Story Card” which will literally be printed and distributed to all concerned, including staff. This is a shorter piece that’s more narrative, more emotional, and less factual. To help develop this item I’ve been studying “storytelling” in a organizational context, including starting an online class next week.

The goal of all this? To inform, but also to gather support for continued expansion of our efforts. To have a broader, more meaningful impact, we need more headcount in particular. And that requires financial and leadership support. The only way to get that support is to prove we do good things with the resources we’re given. And the best way to do that is to share info, but more importantly paint a picture of what we’re doing.

Upcoming NACo webinar

It’s been a bit of work (and will be a bit more), but I’m looking forward to the webinar I’m helping produce on March 14 for the National Association of Counties (NACo). We’re sharing how we used Quickbase to solve a technical debt challenge presented by a legacy COBOL app.

I thought it was nice our counterparts from Quickbase felt Eric and I had a natural and engaging style. I think that comes from having made presentations so many times in recent years, and from being on camera nearly constantly since the start of the pandemic. Plus, we have a good story to tell on this one.

GX+ Season 1 wrapped

We completed “Season 1” of the “GX+” 8-week schedule this past week, including a lovely Wrap Party hosted by Sarah and an all-staff event where we looked back at how each team handled this new approach to organizing work efforts into set time blocks. We’re still learning a lot about this.

A couple observations right off the bat:

• We need more all-staff contact points

• We should probably read or share some kind of growth media or experiences a few times a year, to keep us connected

  • Shape Up would likely be a good choice for the GX Development and GX Platform teams

  • Hack Your Bureaucracy would be excellent for the GX Concourse team, though I bet they could write the book

• The GX teams accomplished more than I realized, which is making me concerned that I am not sufficiently plugged-in to what they are doing

Are my work foci appropriately balanced?

My job has always been split between doing work for the broader organization and my specific teams. In a small org like ours, leaders wear multiple hats. But balancing where you spend your efforts is key. You can’t ignore your teams for the overall organization for too long, or your teams and their efforts will suffer.

Lately I’ve been pulled into two major new org-wide efforts: building our all-new monthly reports and building an all-new work recognition (awards) program. While these are not solo efforts, I’m still doing the bulk of the work to get things off the ground.

This is raising concerns for me that I’m not leaving enough time or mental energy to fully engage with my own teams and their needs. And I’m not sure how to fix this.

Still thinking about the GX Foundry site and how to find time to post stuff

I’m sharing Substack-based Notes a few times a week — links and commentary. But I’ve yet to find the time to gather everything together into at least a weekly roundup. And we have lots more to tell.

I think this is another example of my time being drained away toward broader organization work, not leaving enough time for the team.

Grab bag of notes

• I finally filed all my 2023 taxes this weekend, using TurboTax as in years past. But I’m hopeful because the IRS is making inroads on better GX via their Direct File pilot program.

• Created my weekly pixelecho post.

• The revival of Comedy Central’s “At Midnight” show into the new CBS-based “After Midnight” show has been going well. Taylor Tomlinson has hit her stride and the show is a delight. Can’t believe they’re doing a full hour four nights a week, but we do appreciate watching everything on YouTube.

• I’m growing convinced the Aptera may never reach mass production, even on a small scale. The video they released in the last couple weeks suggests they don’t have the cash to make it to production, they’ve been laying people off, they’re likely to raise the price and cut features, and I’ve learned via Reddit their stock structure is investor-hostile. I really want that car, but… I may have to move on.

• Still thinking about the Camino de Santiago for 2025 or beyond. But the wife wants to go smaller and head to Ireland for a less-known and shorter 82-mile trek called St. Patrick’s Way. That would definitely take less time and money. But I would still like to walk across Spain someday.

• Started looking at the Clippers schedule for this upcoming season. I’ll take selected folks out to the ballgame again this year.

Looking back at everything above… I may be starting to see why each week feels a little exhausting. And I don’t even have kids to care for! This doesn’t feel sustainable.