This week the theme has been to figure out the first most important thing. I am not sure I’ve got it right, and I won’t get another chance. But that’s true also of the next thing I do, and the next. Life is just one long series figuring out the next most important thing and mostly getting it wrong. Read on. That’s the current next most important thing.

I’m almost a decade into my professional career now, and I’m starting to feel like I broadly know what I’m doing. I know this is a trap, but it’s very tempting. I had a couple of meetings this week where I felt like I was doing really well. I challenged some people in productive ways, and I used my experience from a decade of public service to have valuable conversations. I used my experience of twenty years of relationships and navigating the world as an autistic man to have sensitive conversations.

I am starting to feel like I know who I am.

Friends I keep asking you to stop me doing things and yet, here I am, doing things. I’m disappointed in all of us. Let’s try harder next year to stop me doing things.

Sometimes I can see when I’m pulling up roots, and sometimes it takes a storm for me to realise how shallow they’ve become.

I was getting annoyed at myself for dropping things so I’ve started putting them onto a kanban. Time will tell if I can keep it up to date, but I’ve definitely found it useful in the past. It’s done for me the thing it always does for every team in which I’ve introduced it, which is stun me at the amount I’m actually trying to juggle at once. This is good. Explicit is better than implicit. Also, if you add a 🎉 emoji to a column in Trello, you get a little confetti shower when you move a card into that column. Tiny moment of joy (which doesn’t make up for them breaking my poweruser flow)