Search Results for “vault”

My personal vault. Or what I learnt from a decade of progress tracking

I made a fun discovery today: It’s now been over ten years since I started this list of things I have done. Wow! I had no idea it had been that long, and seeing those entries from 2013 made me pause and reflect on the habit of keeping the list, a decade in the making.

Why did I start tracking progress in this way?

My archive page is a lot like a personal vault. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page you’ll see that at the start I added some entries a bit like you would on a CV. I added dates of degrees I completed and images of things like my doctoral thesis from 2008:

Initially, I added these things as I was moving blogs, and I didn’t want to loose track of what I was up to. I was just in the finishing years of my graduate studies, and started working full-time and I had no real idea of what was going to happen next.

For a while, in the first few years of working at ALT, I didn’t really keep a record of anything until I started blogging publicly again in 2010 on WordPress, rather than my old Google Blogger sites. But then from 2013 onwards I started keeping a running list of projects I completed, conference papers, media stuff and so on.

Looking back to 2013, this entry makes me smile: June: Radio 4, Today Programme . Not particularly helpful for anyone other than myself, but it does bring back the morning I spent nervously sitting next to a very intimidating John Humphreys in the BBC radio studios in London. Similarly, in 2014 I went to the European Parliament in Brussels… noted in a similarly cryptic entry, but equally memorable for me. And although the 2015 link to an appearance on Parliament TV still works, many of the older links have rotted.

As we progress through the years the list of things I recorded each year becomes both longer and more comprehensive, particularly as I started to add links to blog posts on my own domain that contain a lot more information about a specific event or project. 2020’s entry is a bit shorter, but it looks remarkably ‘normal’ given everything that happened that year.

What do I use it for?

So, how is this useful?

Well, the practice of making the list and adding new entries to it is useful to me in itself. I could probably use a tool to compile this kind of information for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make the list.

For example, adding new items to the 2024 section of the list earlier today made me realise just how busy a year I have had so far, and we are only three weeks into it:

Mentoring: 1MM national mentoring programme, developing young adult leaders, Cardiff West Community High School, February 2024;
Course: Digital Wellbeing: Healthy Habits for Hybrid Working, University of Oxford, February 2024;
Talk: Supporting, developing and retaining hybrid teams Word of Learning Summit, January 2024.
Article: Re-inventing Mondays. Re-desiging my week to stop overworking. Fusion Magazine, January 2024;
Podcast: Guest on Springboard Women’s Development Programme, hosted by Maxine Redhall, January 2024;
Workshop: Leading Hybrid Teams. Senior Leadership Team Away Day, University of Edinburgh, January 2024;
Article: Are you returning to the office, five days a week? Exploring the future of hybrid working. Learning Magazine, January 2024

So on a regular basis, as I publish something or a new project gets scheduled or completed, I will update the list, add links and date each entry. Wherever possible I try to capture what I am doing in a blog post as I add it to the list, so that I don’t have to rely on external websites to retain the information.

Then, on a monthly basis as I compile my newsletter, I refer back to the list, and cross-check what else I may want to mention. This is super helpful for me and makes compiling the newsletter pretty easy.

I also use the list as an archive in case someone asks me what talks I have recently given or what papers I have published on a particular topic and I make use of it for reviewing my progress or performance.

It’s a kind of super power when it comes to things like annual appraisals or planning career development. It doesn’t take me long to answer the questions like ‘What have you done in the past year ?’ or make a list of articles I have published. That is magnified if I want to write end of year reviews or reflections.

It’s important to me to keep learning and developing and over the years keeping this archive up to date has become a natural process of my workflow, just as blogging or journalling have become part of my practice.

Tips for starting your own archive

If you are keen to start your own list, get started with literally anything. You could add a workshop you have run or an event you attended, or even books you’ve read. You could add projects you have been involved with or led, or papers you have published.

The key is not to worry whether something is worthy of being included, and to simply include everything. I find once you start making a list of everything, things quickly amount to more than expected.

Over time, as you practice keeping the list, the satisfaction of adding to it will become a good motivator for keeping going but initially it can be difficult to find the courage to get started.

You might prefer to keep your list private, which is completely fine. The reason I have mine on my blog is that I am comfortable working here and I use my blog every few days. It’s a convenient place for me to refer back to or to send people to, but I don’t think the page that shows my archive gets a lot of visitors.

For me however it is priceless, and it reminds me when I have low days how much I have achieved over the years. Maybe your list will do the same for you.

One consideration for me is that I want to do what I can to keep the data safe. That is why I don’t rely on a platform like LinkedIn to keep this information. In an ideal world I might update the information somewhere like that, a network where folk who consider working with me might more easily get an idea of what I have accomplished. However, although that would be useful, I don’t trust that the information will still be there in 10 years or that it won’t suddenly get reformatted or repurposed as platforms change. Thus, I keep it here on my own domain first and foremost, and I update everywhere else when I feel it’s necessary.

So, good luck if you are just getting started and kudos to you if you are already on your way to keeping that precious list of everything you’ve done.

Subscribe to my free monthly newsletter!

[newsletter_form type=”minimal”]

Cover image credit: Photo by C M on Unsplash

25/01/2024

Blogging about keeping a blog (or revisiting the Neon Flaneuse).

It the end of the UK tax year, and I have spent most of this week on end of year paperwork. Fortunately, this blog post is not about that. Instead, I am returning to my favourite topic: blogging about blogging, or more precisely, blogging about keeping a blog. (The two are tangentially related, as my quarterly Director’s Report for my own business has a section about talks and events in it, which I was trying to complete when I noticed that, to my horror, I had yet to start the 2026 section of my archive page. So I fixed that as quickly as I could. Phew.)

I’ve previously written about why I think keeping an archive of my activities is so very helpful, not just for report writing, or compiling my newsletter, but in the longer term, to help me set goals, find strategies and reflect on my career journey. I’ve been working on a post about professional journalling, which I am hoping to publish next week as a follow up to this one, but this one isn’t really about writing, but more about having a domain, a home on the web, that I’ve kept and that I have added to for nearly twenty years. It really helps put things in perspective.

It also helps me sift and focus on what matters and what I am happy to leave where it is. For my purposes I don’t just want to have a record of everything I do or rely on automated processes or bookmarks. Instead I find great utility in the process of finding, evaluating and sifting the information. It’s like panning for gold. You sift through the water and find flecks of gold, gold dust that is then added to the vault and over time it compresses into bars (maybe that is overstretching the metaphor, plus my metal work memories remind me that gold bars are cast not compressed). You get my drift.

Often I learn things or see things I didn’t at the time of an event I spoke at or an article I wrote, and the process of finding the details, adding them manually to a page on my blog and then seeing the list grow each year is valuable to me (even though many of the links to things may break over time). What I gleam from the process increases my strategic and executive capabilities greatly and yet when I describe the process it sounds rather quaint. As if I haven’t discovered tools or services that could do all of this for me. I guess my sense is that I need to be doing it, to engage in the practice of sifting, recording and reflecting, otherwise there is no value in it for me.

There is a children’s book I am very fond of, it’s called Momo and it was written by Michael Ende (who also wrote The Neverending Story), in which a tortoise saves a girl from ‘grey men’ trying to take over the world with machines, and it’s the slow, meandering pace of the tortoise that renders them inconsequential (and thus invisible) to the ever rushing crowds around them. It feels like a very timely story to revisit. The process of keeping a blog, of adding to my own archive, is, metaphorically speaking, my version of the meandering pace of the tortoise, that which keeps me safe from the destructive rush of digital productivity and gives me time and space to think and imagine. Maybe it is time to revisit the Neon Flaneuse.

08/04/2026

Curiosity and the cat

Last week I went to see Gwen John’s major retrospective, Strange Beauties at the National Museum in Cardiff:

Gwen John: Strange Beauties is a once-in-a-generation exhibition, bringing together rarely seen works from Amgueddfa Cymru and collections from around the world to celebrate her 150th birthday. It is the first major collection of her work in over forty years. It tells Gwen’s story as it’s never been told before — revealing new ways of seeing her life and art and celebrating an artist whose vision still feels strikingly modern today.

I am not always a big fan of exhibitions of portraits, which was up to recently the only type of work by Gwen John I was familiar with, so I was surprised how much I enjoyed and got from the exhibition. Thoughts and ideas have been percolating in my mind, exploring how what I saw in the exhibition relates to my work and why I found it so urgently relevant now. Here goes:

Sketchbooks

Sketchbooks are a recurring topic which I have blogged about before, and I was intrigued to see several sketchbooks on display in the exhibition. In keeping with the era in which John was active, most of these were tiny, smaller than a postcard size, and her drawings and sketches were correspondingly small, often no larger than the size of a sticker or even a stamp. And yet, the acute skill of observation pretty much jumped off the page. The drawings themselves were rough skteches, but what was captured, what was noticed, was astonishing.

It got me thinking about how much a painter like Gwen John has to develop the ability to be present, to be observant and to be curious. To pay attention to the world around her in order to notice, in order to see and capture those subtle moments, a shift of the light, a curve of the neck, which later gets translated into paint. It’s a skillset that is becoming harder and harder to cultivate and maintain nowadays, and something that I often work on in my own practice and in my leadership coaching.

When I was at art school, most of my tutorials were about me and my tutor looking through my sketchbooks from the past couple of weeks, discussing bits that stood out, or considering which ideas to develop more. In many ways those tutorials (and the formative assessment they provided) taught me to respect the process, to value my practice, as much or more than the eventual output, and that training continues to inform the way I work and my leadership practice still. Gwen John’s work was deeply inspiring in that respect and made me reflect how it’s something I work on again and again with emerging and even established leaders and teams, and a precious skillset well worth nurturing.

Series

One of the other things I found astonishing about the exhibition was the sheer quantity of artworks that the curators had brought together. Gwen John is not a famous enough artist that you see many rooms in general museums dedicated to her work, and her paintings are usually quite small in size, which makes them blend into a general collection rather than stand out, at least to the casual observer.

However, in this exhibition there were rooms and rooms filled with her work, which often included paintings in a series all about the same or similar subjects. My favourite of these was a series of five paintings called “Convalescent Girl” which showed a young woman sitting with a book, in slightly varying poses, and with slightly different light or angles. The long contemplation of the same subject, and immersing one’s practice in it in order to observe “strange beauty” is where the exhibition finds it title.

It probably doesn’t sound particularly amazing when you describe it like this, but it was incredible to see work develop, different shades, different light, a slightly different way for the hair to fall across the face and so on. It wasn’t that the earliest painting was just a sketch and the last one the final product. No, each of them brought something new or different to light, and each of them contributed to the overall series.

It made me happy to see these series, and how much they articulated the curiosity at work. It takes a lot of practice to be that good at being curious, curious enough to want to explore something quotidian so deeply. It was incredibly calming to look at these series and relax into being curious myself.

In a way that series of paintings, all of the same girl in more or less the same pose, is the opposite of how we meet images or information online, in an endless scroll of novelty and hooks designed to prompt us to click. This was the same image over and over, giving you permission to linger. Permission to slow down and just be present. Which is another skill I value highly.

Cats

I hadn’t come across Gwen John’s drawings of cats much before this exhibition, and there was a whole wall dedicated to them here: in a long line, one after the other, there were drawings of cats, sitting, lying, sleeping. Some in pencil or charcoal, others in watercolour. They were playful and messy and beautifully observed.

They were also a lot of them and in the museum shop I saw a huge poster of just cat drawings including many that weren’t on display. Preserving those cat drawings, like the sketchbooks, gave you a different perspective to explore and reminded me of the effort many of us go to preserve our digital practice in our blogs, on our own domains, in archiving what we post and keeping track of how and when.

Its a niche in the digital realm, to keep your own archive, and one that becomes more and more valuable over time as you can see patterns and build habits. One line drawing of cats alone wouldn’t be particularly interesting, but a whole collection of them, produced over a long period of time, and ranging across different media, that suddenly becomes something different.

It’s interesting to me how much any one of these drawings would probably seem unremarkable, but a whole body of work coming together reflects a practice we can respect and revere. Just like a single blog post may not feel like it matters, especially if no one reads it, but a practice that grows over years and decades becomes a life’s work, becomes something to be proud of.

I left feeling deeply inspired and hopeful, and with much food for thought for my own practice. Thank you, Gwen John.

Image source: Gwen John drawing of a cat lying down

16/02/2026

Conference post #ReclaimOpen25

I’m taking part in the Reclaim Open Conference this week, and my contribution is for the blog-a-thon. If you’ve landed on my blog for the first time, howdy! Welcome!

I’ve been blogging here since 2008 and I also send out a free monthly newsletter and host a podcast about hybrid working and leading in distributed organisations. I work as a consultant and coach with non-profits and small organisations, mainly in education and technology.

If you are a returning visitor, great to see you!

Here is my conference post in full, and a big THANK YOU to Bryan Mathers who captured the visual thought for the session and created this lovely image that now heads up the post!

Blogging as a professional practice superpower

A really common issue for leaders in Higher Ed and elsewhere is worrying about “is it just me who is struggling with this?”. When everyone works from home and all you see is a carefully curated or blurred background with a professional, well-groomed headshot framed by a flattering camera angle, it can be hard to get a sense of how others are coping day to day and easy to feel that you are the only one who is struggling.

I think this is where blogging can not only help, it can become a professional practice superpower.

Open practice in a leadership position is different from sharing things like new publications, or blogging about exciting projects. Many professionals in leadership roles maintain public profiles or a web presence like a blog. What I’m interested in is not necessarily about having a blog, but about the practice of blogging in itself.

The process of getting whatever you want to say in a post and press publish.

It’s about the joy of blogging, the sheer exuberance of having a space, a domain, to make your own. A vault or a personal archive as I’ve blogged about before.

It opens up a space to share the practice of leading, of managing people, not just the end results – and the reflective space it opens up can be incredibly powerful.

There are however some barriers to blogging, especially in a leadership role. When you are everyone’s boss, it’s not always easy to maintain an authentic space on the open web. So I use a couple of strategies to blog about my professional practice, specifically:

Choose a format that works: I vary how and where I blog, from my main WordPress site to voice recordings.

Modify how openly to share: from public, to semi-private to fully locked-down depending on topic.

Keep a list for the long term: I could use a tool to track projects, publications and other activities for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make and update the list.

To conclude, I also want to share one more strategy that I have found particularly useful over the years, which is to engage in conversational blogging, or co-leadership conversations. There are a range of conversational approaches that I have used to create the space needed to reflect together and blogging can be a great tool for that, too.

Thanks for reading my contribution to Reclaim Open 🙂

The year in blog posts… 2024

Over the last couple of years I have started to round up the year with a final post of blogging about blogging. Last year’s post told the story of the 72 posts I wrote in 2023, and this year I am sitting pretty on… well, read on to find out.

Back in June I took stock halfway through the year, and found that I had I published 35 blog posts in the first six months of the year, slightly fewer than over the same period the previous year (43), but still an average of six per month. March was the month with the most posts (thanks to lots of things to say about open education) and June was the month with the fewest (thanks to a deeply relaxing two weeks away and offline).

Since then, I have added another 30 to the total, which brings me to 65 blog posts for the year!

Hat tip by @visualthinkery is licensed under CC-by-sa. Remix by Maren Deepwell.

Blog OR DIE! (Hat tip to Jim Groom)

Now in this era of digital productivity, when the pressure to keep all your personal tracking graphs and dashboard trends pointing ever upwards, publishing fewer posts this year than the year before may not look – I am not actually sure what to put here. After all, what, I wonder, would “blogging success” actually look like?!

Let’s just say that for me (and as this is MY blog, it’s me who sets out measures of success), this year has been one of fabulous blogging. I have enjoyed it, I have indulged in it and I have kept my practice alive and kicking!

Over the summer, in the run up to the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, Jim and I had a conversation in which he came up with the slogan “Blog OR DIE!” and we ran with that as the plenary session of the event (and a lot of fun that was, too). Ever since then, the phrase has been stuck in my head as a battle cry for what I want my professional practice to be… and I have found in it both inspiration and motivation to keep going.

So thank you, Jim Groom, patron saint of indie edtech, for reminding (not just) me how important it is to use the voice we have and the domains we own, to shape the open web.

January (6)

February (6)

March (8)

April (5)

May (6)

June (4)

July (6)

August (3)

September (5)

October (4)

November (5)

December (7)

Thank you, dear readers and fellow bloggers, for another year of blogging – #4life.

19/12/2024

Reflect, reframe, regroup. Inspiration for when life is messy.

I struggled to find a title for this post, because describing what it is about will lead to expectations it is not likely to meet. This post is about how to stick with things, be they new habits or intentions, plans or commitments.

In my work as a coach I often read and share books about habits and how to stick to them, and there is a huge wealth of information out there about how to be more productive from the ever popular Atomic Habits by James Clear to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and so on. I go through phases of finding one of these titles or authors that really chime with me at a particular time in my life, and I love their approach for a while, find the inspiration I am looking for and… move on.

Alongside the books there is an army of podcasts about the same subject, and I am guilty of adding to the genre with my own weekly episode of Leading Virtual Teams. Through my coach training I have discovered a lot of amazing coaches many of whom share their expertise on habits and productivity on their shows, and my favourite of these is Katie Linder’s podcast for Higher Education professionals, You’ve Got This. Katie led the coach training I completed and I find her particular mix of reading, writing, being creative and productive really appealing. Definitely a recommended listen!

But…

And yet, of course, there is a but… . Because life is messy. Life keeps changing, and evolving and however much the data we collect through the devices and platforms we use would like us to believe otherwise, moving forward is not always a straight, upwards curving line. And not every season of life can be productive. I recently read a wonderful book, Ebb & Flow by Easkey Britton, which beautifully explored the concept of periods of ebb in life as necessary and valuable.

That’s where for me conflicting desires arise: one the one hand I understand and appreciate that not every week, month or year can be super productive. Sometimes life just gets in the way. On the other hand, I am very used to pushing ahead with things or sometimes have a sense of being behind already, feeling frustrated and keen to make a change. At times like that, I use a couple of approaches to help find a path through the messy reality:

Reflect: Need vs. want

First, I find some headspace to reflect on what I need versus what I want. I think best when I actually write things down or talk to someone about it. Here are some prompts to think through this:

What do you want more of?
What do you want less of?
What would make things lighter?
What do you need to prioritise?
What do you need to finish?
What do you need to pause/stop?
What do you need to start?

Reframe: Essential vs. desirable

Next, I try to reframe the situation, to look at things in a different light. My own high expectations or sense of accomplishment is often the biggest barrier to feeling contentment, so my aim here is to be very clear with myself what is absolutely essential to accomplish and what is desirable. I often find that things drop off my plate once I can clearly articulate to myself what I really need to do, rather than all possible things I could be doing. Here are some criteria I use to sort things into the two buckets:

Essentials often are: time sensitive, external (i.e. someone else is waiting for this), income generating, high impact
Desirables often are: open ended, internal (i.e. only I wait for this to happen), unknown/low impact

Once I have sorted my long list of things to do into these two categories, I take a look at what I identified in the first step, needs vs. wants and check that everything makes sense. For example, if I have a writing project I absolutely love doing and it helps to get me out of bed in the morning, then it might move from desirable to essential. Likewise, if I find I have overcommitted myself and I need to say no to more things, I go over my list of essentials again to identify things I can finish quickly or stop all together.

Regroup: Grind vs. joy

Then, I look at the practicalities and set out to tweak things to prioritise joy. What that looks like may be different for you, but these starting points should give you a sense of what to consider:

Determine how many weeks stand between you and your next break. How long before you can take time off, go on retreat, travel or something else that offers a break from routine for you. A break, whether a change or a rest is essential to my mind. If you find there’s no let up in sight, take a moment and think hard about whether you can change that. What would it take to get a few days off?

Once you found out how long you have to go, add a countdown to your calendar or other app.

Then take a look at each week ahead of you. In my case I found certain days of the week in which I had much fewer commitments, so I moved things around to block out time for what I wanted more of (in my case creativity and time to get outside). I also took a look at what would be the hardest/busiest of times and started to schedule some time and activities around those days that would offer me some balance.

Time to rest, read, walk the dogs and so on.

I saw a post recently my a fellow coach, Mrs T, who coaches Headteachers, and in it she described how when days got very busy, her initial tendency was to fit in even more in any moments of calm. Fit in more tasks during breaks and taking work home in the evenings or at weekends. She then shared how nowadays her instinct is to step back and take a breath instead. I could really relate to that. When things get hectic, I used to try to be more productive, more busy still. The steps I have outlined above, to reflect, reframe and then regroup offer an alternative to being ever more busy. In that direction burnout looms.

I hope you find more pockets of joy. Even when life gets messy. Let me know how you get on.

Search results for: “vault”