Author: Maren Deepwell

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.

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’s blog bavatuesdays
• ds106 Digital Storytelling
• Reclaim Hosting

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.