You would be forgiven for thinking that I had given up on writing anything.
Far from it, I’m busier than ever, but as a consequence find little time for writing here. In the UK we are in the midst of the second Covid lockdown, and yesterday over 33,000 daily cases were reported - the highest to date. Prospects for lockdown lifting on the 2nd of December look slim, and if this government goes ahead anyway, it must surely be at the price of a further resurgence of the virus.
I still enjoy working from home every day, but I find I have to keep reminding myself to set boundaries around the working time and not allow the work to entirely take over my life. There’s a lot to do, and like many who are fortunate enough to still have a job, it’s busier than ever.
My work has always been a mixture of strategic thinking with senior colleagues and then hands-on creation of systems with a small team, part of the benefit of working in a small company. The circumstances of the last 8 months have merely increased that dichotomy - the strategic decisions have become more significant as we adapt, and the amount of technical change has grown.
I miss foreign travel - this morning my wife and I were talking about how long it seems since we were in a place where no-one else spoke in English as a first language, and where the food was different. Even when Covid is under control, travel will be different thanks to the almost inevitable no-deal end to Brexit transition in 49 days. And it’s 4 more years until another election.
When I have been writing it’s been more in my notes. I’ve been slowly making some changes that I really should write up in this site:
- starting a move to file-based notes stored locally and selectively published on the web (continuing the trend I started when I moved this blog from WordPress to Hugo)
- migrating my federated wiki content into that notes system
- experimenting with bringing my work-day notes into a text-based system too: to reduce the friction inherent in swapping between a OneNote approach and markdown
- the continual struggle to focus on core PKM disicplines when “just learning enough for the immediate challenge” is my perennial Achilles’ Heel.
So there’s a few hints for posts to come.
To end this, I took some inspiration to break the silence from Matt Webb’s 15 rules for blogging.
