Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • Second Breakfast with Audrey Watters

    Second Breakfast with Audrey Watters

    In this season of interviewing special guests on my podcast (all part of the research for my new book) I get to talk to many amazing and inspiring people and I deeply appreciate their time and input. So it was a special privilege and pleasure to talk to one of my favourite writers and friend Audrey Watters .

    Audrey, Kin and I first met over a decade ago during my time working for ALT and organising events, and over the years we survived a couple of the more ‘interesting’ industry conferences on the edtech circuit together from Berlin to Reykjavík. As you will hear in the interview, I am a big fan of Audrey’s thinking and writing, although nowadays it’s less about edtech and more about dog walk moments, pancakes and running.

    So join me for a wonderfully rich conversation with Audrey as we talk about the culture of trying to measure everything from workout metrics to workplace productivity, and what it means to resist living life conforming to algorithmic templates.  Along the way, we chat about dog walking, making pancakes for second breakfast, avoiding a world run by Clippy and Audrey’s new writing project about AI in education. 

    Mentioned in this episode:

    P.S. Fierceness, kindness, hope

    Since we recorded the episode I have begun a new run training plan, an endeavour which I have blogged about many times of the past few years and which, for a whole number of reasons, have all ended after only a few weeks. But this time starting to run again feels different. I’ve found a new kind of inspiration as I was listening back to the interview whilst editing the episode. It’s a sense of fierceness, kindness and hope that burns brightly. This I take away from this inspiring conversation with thanks 🙂

  • Making spaces

    Making spaces

    This week took an unexpected turn: first, I decided at the weekend to (finally) dive into building a book nook. I received the kit (Sunshine Town) to create this a while ago and loved the idea, but until now it didn’t feel like a good moment to get started.

    But thanks to my new enormous sit stand desk, I felt in the right place to start unboxing and get building. Plus, I also had amazing inspiration from one of my colleagues at Reclaim, Meredith, who recently completed a similar kit and the result was absolutely amazing. So at the weekend I was happily building away, surrounded by a sea of small pieces, glue and paint. Audiobook on, tea at the ready. It was bliss.

    What I didn’t know then was that less than 24 hours later my office would move rooms… in a spontaneous effort to create a better space for the postgrad student in our home. Although shifting things around to make a new study space wouldn’t have necessarily meant moving my office, it was a great opportunity to get things arranged in a way that made the most sense given who is using which space when and how. Also, there was a chance to have a floor in the house on which every room has it’s own record player, and who could pass up such an opportunity 😉

    Cue a day of shifting book cases and wardrobes, dogs ‘helping’ and me not so secretly regretting the amount of vinyl records that seem to have accumulated on the first floor. Thankfully we have a lot of practice moving things (me being a fan of re-arranging my office…) and moving things around the same floor mercifully avoids lugging things up and down stairs. Needless to say, it was maybe not the ideal time to have trays of drying, tiny pieces of model kits around.

    A day later and a relative calm has descended. Hold my calls… I’m blogging… at my newly cleared desk and in my new office space (which I love). Posey the dog has settled in her new nook, surrounded by cuddly blanket and toys. The plants are gently adjusting to the changes in light and position, settling into their new home, too. My yoga mat is stowed in its new corner, ready for a calmer start to the day tomorrow.

    Even though so much of my work happens in the digital realm, with collaborators and clients who are continents away, it’s the books, records and stationary that make up the analogue foundation of my practice. And when that foundation is in disarray, I feel it across the whole spectrum of my work. So here’s to making this new space home, so that I can get back to finishing my book nook 😉

  • Mental Health in the Workplace

    Mental Health in the Workplace

    Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day and this year’s theme is “It is Time to Prioritise Mental Health in the Workplace” -World Mental Health Day is an annual awareness day observed every 10th October.

    This is a cause I have long championed, and I am glad to see this year’s emphasis on mental health in the workplace supported by a whole range of resources. I’ve linked to some examples below and each of these point to further resources for help and advice:

    WMHD Source Files

    Many of my coaching conversations are related to finding balance between wellbeing, both mental and physical, and the demands of a busy work life or a career transition so I doubly appreciate the emphasis on mental heath at work.

    Hybrid and remote working has a big impact on our wellbeing. Much of the resources for leaders and managers features above identify the need to develop skills in supporting mental healthy in hybrid work places, but there’s a lot yet to do.

    I’ve previously blogged about a whole range of approaches to supporting mental healthy in hybrid and virtual teams, from mediation and mindfulness to team building on the radio and celebrating small milestones.

    This week I am going to take a moment to check in with myself, and those around me. So in that spirit, I’ll leave you with an invitation to reach out. How are you?

    WMHD Source Files
  • A Dog Walk – Looking back at a year of Re-inventing Mondays

    A Dog Walk – Looking back at a year of Re-inventing Mondays

    Join me and the dogs for a walk as we look back at a year of re-inventing Mondays. This is a two part episode to celebrate my first year of running my own business and I share how things have been going, what’s been joyful and what’s been tough.

    I want to use this episode to share my thoughts on the first anniversary of my career transition which is now a year in the making. I remember so well when I first started recording the podcast a year ago to chronicle my adventures under the heading “Reinventing Mondays” and I sat in front of my desk looking at my empty inbox in which there were zero emails and my diary in which there were no meetings and I thought “Oh shit what did I do?”.

    I had no idea really what to expect of the year ahead. But now today I am looking back at the year and I know what it’s been like and I thought I’d share a little bit of my reflections, how I’ve been getting on, what has been fun, what has been tough and also how my kind of expectation from coming from a long-term kind of senior role into self-employment have worked out.

    And as I’m walking next to the river at the moment it’s a beautiful autumn morning and it’s a fantastic metaphor for how the year has changed things given that I’m not sitting at my desk, not staring at a screen and instead I’m watching the dogs sniff around trees and bushes as we walk and I hope that you forgive me the less than ideal audio quality of these episodes. I really wanted to give myself a chance to think out loud with you in a way that I usually do because reflective walking and checking in with myself as I take the dogs out in the mornings has become a really big part of my practice and it’s a lovely space to think much more conducive to seeing how things are going than sitting at my desk staring at a screen.

    So let’s take stock. How has the forest year been going? Have I been enjoying it? Have I been meeting my goals? And what if I’ve been missing if anything about the past? … enjoy the listen and look out for part 2 🙂

    This episode was recorded on a dog walk and the audio quality is mixed.

  • In conversation with Jim Groom

    In conversation with Jim Groom

    This month I had the best fun on the podcast in conversation with special guest Jim Groom. We talked about being a robot in a co-working space, teaching Slack to make jokes and building a blog studio in Trento Italy! Here is one of my favourite moments from the conversation:

    Maren: Reclaim Slack is very special! It’s partly how you use it, but it’s also all these little touches. I’ve never seen somewhere that has quite so many little jokes hidden in Slack. Sometimes I type messages into Slack and the pre-programmed bot comes on and makes jokes. The first time it happened, I was completely stunned, Jim. I just looked at the response and I was so surprised that it had made a joke. I got the joke because it’s an internal team joke and I’m familiar with everyone now to understand the context. But like all these sort of small things they’re really hard to get right. They don’t come out of the box, do they? They are like little bits of love and joy that you just kind of programme in over time.

    Jim: I agree. I mean, yes. One of the jokes is when someone writes anything and it has the words ‘lock in’, the bot comes up and says, lock it in. When you say ‘yeah’, the bot comes back and says, YEAH! with a big exclamation point. Then there’s even more esoteric ones that come out if you do very special things. It’s almost like Easter eggs in the video game, right? I think that’s it. The joy is in the details and the magic dust is maybe in those details, too. …

    Jim: The difficulties of ‘doing online’ [working] for so long was your other question. … Like I feel like I could never burn out online. But everybody works differently like that. And I think obviously having a real sense of the limits because they’re there and we went through some rough times as a global experience over the last three or four years that really brought that into focus. I don’t have a solution to that. Again, I love my work, but I’m not a very smart worker. I’m not a very efficient worker. I’m a very passionate, dedicated, consistently present worker, but sometimes not very healthily for my own balance of work and life. But I’ve been working through that this year in particular to try and pull back a little bit and get a sense of how I can find balance. But I guess my problem is I enjoy my work too much. I enjoy the people I work with and I really built my identity around it. So it’s hard for me personally to let go. I’m still just an old school Reclaim Host-er.

    If you, like me, are already a life-long fan of Jim’s work, you are in for a special treat, and if you are just discovering the wonderful world of the bava, this is a perfect introduction. Enjoy!

    Show notes

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Jim Groom, formerly Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington, has been working towards the idea of Domain of One‘s Own as far back as 2008 and has been dreaming of this opportunity for years. In the Spring of 2011 he opened up a digital storytelling course called “ds106” for anyone to take openly online and hundreds of people participated and continue to give back to that community. In Spring of 2013 he joined a group of hackers and thinkers at MIT to think about how an online framework could allow people to seamlessly syndicate the work they do across the web in a space of their own both on an academic and personal level. In Fall of 2015 he went full time with Reclaim Hosting and has not looked back since. #4life⁠

    This interview is going to feature in ⁠my upcoming book⁠. Get in touch with me if you’d like to join us for an episode and contribute to the book.

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  • Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    At the moment I am working on a new short bio to put on my social profiles. It’s not a task I relish because I do a lot of different things and work with a number of communities, so whatever I put will alienate some and attract others. It’s one thing I miss about being a CEO, as at least those three letters took up very little of the character count 😉 . Now that I am my own boss, I am not quite sure what to write. I also work increasingly with folk in digital and workplace wellbeing outside of academia, and to them the title ‘Dr’ is more likely to translate into the assumption that I am a GP or Psychotherapist… which sometimes leads to interesting conversations… .

    So I am trying to transform:

    I work with edu orgs + non profits as an independent consultant & coach. Author, speaker, podcast host, houseplant enthusiast, runner, dog person.

    into something a little more, well, something I like better.

    Which brings us to the final few words in the current bio, namely that I am a dog person. I don’t describe myself as a dog parent, but I certainly love the two canine companions that live with us, and I view them as very much part of the family.

    I mention being a dog person in my bio to share something real about myself, something that’s a big interest and part of my life. Having a dog was a childhood dream of mine and when I was little I begged and borrowed dogs from kind families on holiday, which I proudly walked around the camp sites.

    Now that my dream has become a reality, I am so glad to have the fun that dogs bring in my life. I love waking up in the morning and witness the bouncy morning joy that comes with two labradors who can’t wait to have breakfast, share morning tea and cuddles. Our dogs are definitely morning people.

    As a home and hybrid based professional, I also appreciate the extra motivation that dogs bring to my work/life balance. From getting in a couple of miles of walking each day to getting up from my desk regularly to check in with them, open the garden door and so on. Together we attend online conferences… meetings… and get through long, productive days at my desk.

    In that sense, mentioning being a dog person in my bio and posting the occasional pictures of them on my blog is a useful shorthand for folk who don’t know me and can provide an easy topic of conversation, too.

    So, where does that leave my bio? Here’s my current best draft:

    Meticulously informal coaching & courses for established and emerging leaders. Education and adjacent spaces, hybrid working, digital wellbeing, unconventional career paths. Author, podcast host, fan of writing letters, dog person.

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