Category: things I like

Re-inventing Mondays… 2 months in

It’s been a month since I last updated on my progress with the new chapter in my working life, free-lance working life, and my mission to re-invent my week, starting with Mondays.

Unfortunately, as I type this, I am still recovering from a cold, and so podcasting is on hold for this week and instead I get to write this blog post. Blogging is, still, where it’s at.

Beach/work balance

One of the goals in my strategy for my business for this year is to achieve a better work/life balance. I am not sure how common a goal that is for a business plan, but my thinking is that work/life balance is one of the key goals of my career change. Being a CEO made work/life balance hard, partly because everything that goes really wrong eventually lands on your desk and partly because running an organisation always involves a crisis or three. Over time, you find strategies to set boundaries, but ultimately it’s a responsibility that is part of job and it’s hard to leave that behind even when you are not working.

Although I loved it, one of the reasons why I chose not to pursue another CEO role is that I want to give myself the chance to explore a life with less responsibility for a while and to see if I can find a work/life pattern that is better for me in every sense. When it came to it, sitting down and trying to define what that would look like in practice, I didn’t really know what the answer would look like.

Over the past couple of months I have come up with a practical metaphor: beach/work balance. To me that means that I am prioritising getting to the beach during the week every other week, and my partner and the dogs and I can enjoy a couple of hours where we love being the most.

It’s a good measure for how much my life goes to plan, and how much scope I have to plan in an afternoon or a morning away from my desk and for it to actually happen, too.

The picture at the top of the post is from last Friday, when we managed to get to the beach an hour before sunset, watching the wintery sunset as the week wound down. For me, that’s a huge win.

So, at least for now, beach time is one of the indicators that help me assess whether I am finding the right balance.

Doing enough of what gives me joy

I don’t want to give the impression that all my days are spent doing yoga with my dog or going to beach. Far from it. Since the start of October I have been working hard and I have been doing a lot of hours.

In these first two months I have been dividing my time between working as a consultant and a coach, doing both paid and pro bono work.

It’s been great to continue the work with ALT and AmplifyFE, a partnership project around a growing network of 2,700 professionals in FE and Vocational Education for which I am the Strategic Lead. Alongside the day to day work on the project this past month has been a busy one of travel and talks for AmplifyFE, including launching new research.

I’ve also continued my work with Reclaim Hosting, where my official title is now Asana Overlord. I love working with Jim Groom and his team on strategy, business development and team coaching. Alongside the work we do which is focused internally, I get involved in some of our community activities, which are hopping into festive mode this month. Karaoke for Christmas? Yes, please!

The work I do with Reclaim is closely related to my interest in hybrid working, and this past month I have done a lot on that front as well, running a session for Oxford University, delivering my second free and open hybrid working course and marking a year since the publication of my Open Access book on the topic.

Coaching groups or teams has become a much greater part of my practice than I had anticipated, and I have some new projects in that space planned for early 2024 which I am excited about. In the meantime my coaching for individuals is also continuing to develop.

Coaching is a fantastic tool that I hope more people, particularly those of us who are juggling a lot whilst also achieving a lot, will make use of. I know just how hard it can be to find time and funds for professional development. That’s why I offer 10% of my coaching sessions pro bono and over the past month I have been able to offer pro bono sessions to four new clients.

Auditioning days

In the midst of working on a lot of different projects and with a whole host of people and finding time for the all important beach visits, I have noticed that I have started to reflect a bit more on what I enjoy doing the most. Subconsciously, I am ‘auditioning’ days, checking in with what I want to do more of and what I will say no to and refer to colleagues instead.

When my former mentor Margaret and I discussed my free-lance venture, Margaret said something that really stayed with me. She said that it’s easy to re-invent your job without noticing and that it’s even easier to forget to say no when opportunities are on the horizon. Feeling the precarity of giving up a permanent role and worrying about where money to pay the mortgage was going to come from, I didn’t really get it at the time. Don’t get me wrong, the precarity is obviously still very much on my mind, but I find that being a CEO and being responsible for the annual turnover and salaries of an organisation was good preparation for managing income generation for myself as a free-lancer. There are always risks.

However, what I am learning at the moment is that I need to manage my capacity carefully and to not commit to too many things just in order to hold my financial worries at bay. Instead, I am looking for things to do that are the best fit, and stretch me in ways I find rewarding.

It’s a privileged position to be, and it’s an opportunity I don’t intend to squander. This is my time to evolve in my working life, and the sense of reinvention that comes with that is very precious to me. Over the past twenty years I have gained a lot of experience and skills and I am very good at many things. Right now, I am becoming better at figuring out where I can make the biggest difference and what I find most rewarding. Every day is an opportunity to figure it out.

One of the things I am planning to do is a day out later this month, to give myself space to think and plan for 2024. A retreat for one, if you like. If you are interested in having one of those for yourself, look out for the next blog post 🙂

Thanks for reading and thanks to all who’ve helped me along the way .

Listen

All the podcasts about my fresh start in order:

Listen to Leading Virtual Teams on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify

Enjoyed this post? Get my free monthly newsletter directly to your inbox.
[newsletter_form type=”minimal”]

08/12/2023
Festive Karaoke. Reclaiming online fun…

I love being online, and I love the communities I am part of online. As someone who relies largely on the internet to sustain long distance relationships with family and friends as well as collaborating with work colleagues on a daily basis, I am very invested in my corners of the web.

It takes a lot of effort however to keep those spaces good spaces to be in, on platforms like Discord and Mastodon, as well as this blog – my own domain for the past twenty years. In one of my favourite blog posts of the year, my partner Martin Weller reflected on the fragmentation of social media landscape to the tune of 70s disco tracks.

For me, the ‘secret sauce’ that keeps the network I am in truly fun, inspiring and genuine is the work happening in and around open education. From the OER Conference to working across various Open Education initiatives and group publications like this one from earlier in the year (Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices). For me, for the past 10+ years that usually involves the folk from Reclaim Hosting, the people who help you (and your students) get – and keep – a domain of one’s own. Incidentally, I have been digging into the archives and came across this gem of a post, from 2014, in which Jim Groom recounts how:

…we are still hoping to team up with Audrey Watters and Kin Lane to start realizing the vision behind “Reclaim Your Domain” as an extension of the Reclaim Hosting environment. Not just commodity hosting, but a space to synch, archive, and own your social presence around the web, while at the same time developing crucial web literacy skills.
Over 1000 Reclaims

Domains have been reclaimed, and ten years into the making there is no sign of letting up – Reclaim is thriving through technology as well as community. The community bit is the part I am especially excited about, and getting to work with the team that makes a packed calendar of events happen is a privilege as well as a lot of fun.

So this month, as we near the end of 2023, there is a whole host of activities to get involved in, as well as a very special session of festive karaoke, which is happening on December 22nd!

You’ll be able to watch the show on Reclaim.TV or listen in on Reclaim Radio… and if you let us know that you’d like to join us, then you can sing your festive favourites to your hearts content.

Me, I live in fear of karaoke, and unfortunately there’s a lot of evidence of how true those feelings are on YouTube. However, there must be a song by The Cure that I can co-opt as “festive”, and I am really looking forward to joining in, and reclaiming a bit of online fun before I head off into the holidays.

See you there!

05/12/2023
Reclaiming Halloween Radio
Earlier this week I got to join the folk from Reclaim Hosting for a spooky radio extravaganza! Across a couple of different timezones and radio stations, Reclaim Radio and DS106Radio, we ROCKED the airwaves.

I love radio as a medium to have fun for virtual teams. It’s super engaging, not screen based, it’s synchronous and at the same time gives everyone space to do other stuff whilst listening. It’s also, when you have a team as capable as this, a pretty easy thing to do 🙂

When we started planning for this, we offered different ways to get involved:
- Share your favourite halloween tunes and we’ll play your tunes
- Get on the radio with other Reclaim folk, chat about what you are working on, share scary stories.. And have fun!
- Get on the radio as a host, spin up the tunes and invite special guests to chat with on air.
Not everyone wants to hear their own voice on air after all, and the whole point of doing something like this is that everyone can join in and have a bit of fun without feeling that they need to commit to a whole hour.

Here is the programme we ended up with as a result:
- 8:00am ET – Halloween Tunes with Meredith
- 9:00am ET – Scary Special: Jim & Maren
- 10:00am ET – Pumpkin Hour with Maren & Meredith
- 11:00am ET – Halloween Tunes from the team
- 12:00pm ET – Old Time Radio Hour: the Scary Stories of Suspense
- 1:00pm ET – Radio Roundup with Amanda & Pilot
- 2:00pm ET – Halloween Tunes with Jason
- 3:00pm ET – Scary Tech (and Non-Tech) Stories with Amanda & Jason
- 4:00pm ET – Halloween Tunes with Taylor
- 5:00pm ET – Fright Night: Tunes from the Infrastructure Team
The weird and the wonderful

What I loved about the radio day was the variety of things that happened: from Italian horror movie soundtracks and The Cure to low-fi listening tunes, and from vintage story telling to news about what’s happening across the community, it was simply awesome!

Folk joined in as they started to listen to the programme, saying hi on Mastodon and Discord, and sharing pics and stories along the way.

I loved the radio shows on DS106 radio during the dark days of 2020 and 2021. Obviously my personal favourite was the Sunday Special that I was part of with Anne-Marie Scott and Tannis Morgan, but although a lot of fun was had, and at the time fun was a very scarce ingredient in life, it was very much radio of its time. Pandemic times.

I remember hearing Jim and his family broadcasting from Italy, and us listening here in Wales, feeling like we were able to connect despite the long periods of lockdown.

Our spooky Halloween radio show this week helped me reflect that whilst we still need to connect, and share and be present with each other, it is a huge relief to be doing so in context less dominated by the pandemic. We’ve learnt to value opportunities to have fun and be together more, I think, than we did before 2020.

Just like the excellent GIF game that makes the Reclaim Roundup a must read each month, the radio brought together all the weird and wonderful scary tech (and non-tech) stories and tunes for a day to remember.

What you didn’t see

Part of my work with Reclaim as I see it, is about finding pockets of space and time in which this team of people who work so hard and who practice such heartfelt care about all they do, from answering support tickets to developing new products, get to have a moment to take a breath and revel in their achievements.

Reflecting on success, feeling proud…, those things can be a lot harder to do than moving on to the next task, or pick up the next ticket. Just like in every other organisation I have ever worked with, here, too, is a never ending list of things to do. There is always pressure, always more that could be done, and new, exciting ideas on the horizon. I love seeing those glinting in the distance.

What I have also learnt, however, is that there is ALWAYS something glinting on that horizon, and ALWAYS a long list of tasks and that it’s up to us to make the time and hold the space to say “YAY! WE ROCK!” every once in a while.

I missed some of the Halloween fun (because timezones), but the next day I spent some time looking at the chat behind the scenes, the chat you didn’t see, and I was thrilled to see folk sharing photos of their front doors, ready for trick or treating, the chat, the banter and the GIFs. Those moments are what makes a team thrive, and they are what makes the memories that we will still recall long after the routine of weekly meetings is forgotten.

It was a privilege and an awful lot of fun to be part of our Halloween Radio programme, so you won’t be surprised to hear that there might just be some more in store come the end of the year. Maybe there will be an opportunity to make a song request, or send in edtech holiday greetings… whatever we decide to do – I hope to see you on the airwaves.

Enjoyed this post? Get my free monthly newsletter directly to your inbox.
02/11/2023
Happy Hybrid Halloween… or the spooky side of virtual working.

It’s my third week as a hybrid organisation of one, and I am enjoying the new working routine! It’s very busy and also tiring to have so many new things to deal with each day, but it’s very much what I was expecting.

What I am missing at times is of course the colleagues I have worked with for many years, and in a more abstract sense, a bit of fun and interaction that comes with being part of a team. From the research I have done about hybrid working and virtual teams, I know that it takes a lot of effort and intention. So I set about making my own fun.

Regular readers will be very familiar with Posey, my dog, who for the past three years (well, nearly) has kept a faithful vigil next to my desk. Together we get through long conference days, difficult meetings, research reports and course design. And Posey is a dog who knows how to make her own fun. Sometimes just by rolling round on the carpet in the sunshine, or with her favourite cuddly toy.

But back to Halloween and hybrid working. In case the connection seems tenuous, I think Halloween is a good example of the kind of thing that in a co-located working environment is hard to miss. Cafes and canteens may have seasonal treats or pumpkin flavoured everything. There is likely to be talk of trick or treating… plans for the holidays and so on. Interaction like the ‘Secret Santa’ gift exchange is hard to replicate when you are in a team that’s distributed across the globe or when, like me, you are a team of one.

The ‘spooky’ side of home and hybrid working is that it can often feel quite lonely or isolated. Sometimes you don’t talk to another human being all day, and when you finally step away from your desk it’s dark outside. Days can easily blend into each other into one long grey slog.

Marking days like Halloween or a change in season provides me a bit of inspiration to have some fun, be silly and join into activities that I wouldn’t usually, and which can make my day more memorable.

This year, I am organising some radio with the wonderful folk at Reclaim Hosting, as part of my work with them. Get ready for Reclaim Halloween Radio on DS106radio come October 31st! I have some small decorations in my office as well, some autumn blooms and a small pumpkin and… fun tights to wear in orange and purple. Some of you may roll their eyes here, but those of us who appreciate those things will understand. In my mind, everything that helps inject some fun into my day is fair game.

Enjoyed this post? Get my free monthly newsletter directly to your inbox.

24/10/2023
Step away from you screen…

… and come walk with me. How about a day along the windswept West Wales Coastal Path? The title image for this post is taken at the tip of the St David’s peninsula around this time of year. Let’s have a day buffeted by autumn winds surrounded by colourful heather, looking out to the endless horizon. I would love to have a day like that today.

In reality, although that part of the Coastal Path is only just over two hours from my desk, I am much more likely to take a walk along the Taff Trail with the dogs today. Not quite as dramatic when it comes to scenery, but my daily miles are a wonderful daily escape, a practice for my body and mind that benefits my wellbeing as well as my productivity.

Walking is a big part of my life. It’s a necessity when you have two big dogs that want to cover 3-5 miles a day. It’s a hobby, as I walk, jog and run my way to greater physical fitness. It’s also where I like to think, reflect and have important conversations. Over the past ten years, it’s definitely become a kind of superpower that gets me through tough days.

I like walking on my own, with the dogs, with someone else, sometimes with headphones in, sometimes in my head, alone with my thoughts. During my postgrad years I developed an academic interest in walking, and some of my PhD thesis was based on ethnographic walking and a phenomenological exploration of place and landscape, so it’s fair to say that I’ve read quite a lot a about walking as a practice, as a method of enquiry, as a way of life.

It’s always inspiring to read of great explorations or long walks, spanning a whole country for example. My own walking has stayed at a much more quotidian scale. I don’t really care whether I’m taking turns in my local park, walking through bustling city streets or trudging along the Coastal Path. What is important to me, and what makes it work, is that I get to reflect and process whatever is on my mind that day. If I have the company of a coach or a friend (or most commonly my partner), I have the added benefit of someone else’s perspective and the principle remains the same.

When I worked with my mentor Margaret we used to meet up every few months for a longer session, and we always tried to make it a walk. Between these meetings all our work happened online, via email or a phone call, but whenever I really needed to think something through, figure out a new vision for the next three years or confront a difficult situation in my role as CEO, we would walk together and talk it through.

Parenting books often suggest that the best way to have conversations with teenagers is not to sit around a table, facing each other, but to create a less confrontational atmosphere when you are side by side, driving in a car or walking somewhere for example.

In a work context, particularly if you work virtually, there’re many situations in which you face each other, or a whole screen or room full of people. You face each other, stare at your own reflection, at someone’s bad hair day and so forth. It’s not often conducive to focusing on thinking and reflecting. Screens are distracting.

Stepping away from the screen can feel hard. Technology is sticky, capturing our attention, and removing yourself from its constant nudges is a key reason why taking a walk is helpful. Walking is an embodied experience, you are moving through the world, experiencing it with your senses. All of which is helpful for getting a fresh perspective and to gain clarity.

Of course, it’s not often possible to head out for a whole day on the Coastal Path. More often, a walk around the local area has to suffice, and in my experience it works just as effectively. With a bit of forethought you can even gain some of the benefits of a walk indoors. Whenever I don’t have the time to actually go outdoors, and I have a call I really need to focus on, I put my headphones in, put the screen to sleep and pace up and down in my office. Sometimes with my eyes closed, sometimes looking down at the floor or nowhere in particular. I am still moving, focusing, and not distracted by screens. It does take some practice and discipline to make this work, and it’s much easier to give yourself the benefit of actually going for a walk, but on days when you have 10 back to back meetings it may be the only option.

I am really looking forward to exploring how to step away from the screen in my upcoming course on hybrid working. I am not sure if many people realise that walking can be a hybrid working superpower… but we’ll have fun finding out. Incidentally, I designed the course to be podcast based, focusing on audio rather than video content, so that folk who would like to walk along with me could do so as they work through the course. It’s free, so why not register 🙂

Some of my coaching clients, for whom I also offer walking sessions, really enjoy having a session talking on the phone whilst exploring their local park and pathways. And sometimes, when we are able to meet in person, we get to walk and talk together. Those are always the most exciting days for me.

I haven’t done any coaching on the Coastal Path as yet, but I have had many, many excellent conversations whilst exploring that beautiful part of the world. So.. if you are ever in South Wales or if you have a path near you that would make for a good place to think, get in touch.

Enjoyed this post? Get my free monthly newsletter directly to your inbox.

17/10/2023
Holiday debrief (in watercolour)

It’s my first day back at my desk today after a two week break, and I am happy to report that both rest and fun where had! It’s been a while since I had two weeks off, and my top tip for my future self is to do that more often. One week is never quite enough to really relax, and I loved the extra days before and after travelling to Crete that the extra week afforded me.

My partner and I did plenty of reading by the pool, mini golf, gym, lazy lunches and even longer dinners, enjoying the late summer vibes and Greek produce. Pretty much every picture has me eating or drinking or my face is hidden in a book. I took five books on holiday (I prefer taking printed versions abroad), and all were devoured.

My other activity on holiday was to take A LOT of pictures of plants, and to turn some of them into water colours. Having not done a lot of drawing for a while, and I really enjoyed the creative, easy practice of making a drawing a day. It was awesome to indulge in my love of plants, and to learn more about the local plants along the way.

Here’s a peek at the result:

Now that I am back, I’m busy getting ready for some new projects, including the next run of my podcast based hybrid working course. Join us from 20th October – register free now. Keen to learn a bit more about the story behind the course and how I came to be so interested in all things hybrid and virtual working? Listen to the story which spans from Germany to London in my art school years, and from Athens to Oxford as my work moved from Art to Anthropology and then Education, this episode sets out what I think is interesting about hybrid and virtual working, why it’s important and why now is the time to really find ways of working that work for you.

Enjoyed this post? Get my free monthly newsletter directly to your inbox.

06/10/2023