Ah, but to follow the process, young one, you must first find the process.

I’ve been in a lot of meetings this week. We’ve got a deadline coming up, which is helping to focus the mind. Actually, there are a lot of deadlines coming up. Oh no.

Alright. There’s a lot happening at work that I can’t get into. It’s hard, is what I’ll say. The emotional toll of the work we’re doing is increasing, and I currently can’t see any real end in sight. There are deadlines we have to hit, sure, but those aren’t the end of the work. They’re just milestones along the way.

People are still taking annual leave, which is one of my health markers for the team. On the other hand, conversations definitely feel briefer. The spaces around the edges of mostly-online meetings is getting narrower. As people feel the tension more, they shed the work that seems less important – and some of that work is the emotional labour of small talk.

As we go into next week I want to try to role model the behaviours I want, and continue to ask people the things that make them people, rather than resources.

At the same time, I’m still settling into my new role. I signed up to a lot of meetings to get a sense of what’s happening in my area, but I now need to extract myself and find the person who should be there permanently. This would usually be fine, but it’s happening simultaneous to objective-setting and the new financial year. Everyone is a little all over the place. I think it’ll settle. I just can’t tell what shape it’ll be yet.

Outside (ish) of work, I’m trying to settle on a thesis title. I think I want to do something about public-key infrastructure and electronic signatures – in Estonia you can sign something with your identity card online, and it has the full force of law. It’s a really interesting system, and is going to run head-first into the problem of post-quantum computing before very long.

I’ve got my next Toastmasters speech title, most of the content, and a speaking slot – so now I just have to rehearse it until I’m completely sick of it, then push through until it’s as natural to me as speaking.

I know this is brief – with luck one day soon I’ll be able to talk about things in more detail. With luck.