Weeknotes 002
I made it back for a second go. Shocking. It’s been an odd week, I’m not quite done with the day job and I'm not quite ready to kick off the freelance lark, so it’s felt a bit in-between things.
I had a really good session with Kelly this week, she’s been helping me put some shape around the business, my offer, and is asking some hard questions to drive out a vision and strategy. We talked a lot about purpose driven organisations and what that means to how a business talks about itself and behaves (and how that’s not always aligned) and how the purpose stuff can drop away at the first sign off trouble.
For this reason I’ve been wary of the term ‘purpose driven’. I want to do good work, and judge work opportunities against an ethical framework of sorts, but I don’t want to limit my options so early on. Firstly because I don’t know what that means to a tiny new business, but also, as I mentioned in my ‘going freelance’ blog post, I don’t want to design out serendipity; basically I’d love to work on some weird stuff.
We settled on a goal of purpose driven projects, leaving the door slightly ajar for the wildcard organisations I hope are in my future. Is there something in helping the bad guys do good things?
I’m learning that building a business is making 1000s of choices, big and small, constantly but being able to work with someone who has experience doing this has been so helpful.
Talking of choices, I’ve been deep in what I think is best described as ‘business ops’ - setting up systems and services that will help support the day to day running of the business. Where we’ll host our email, where we’ll store documents. It’s exhausting. I asked on Bluesky if there was some sort of playbook and a few people shared links but they weren’t quite right, and Google didn’t help, it feels like there’s a gap in the market for a ‘business in a box’ type service. Someone get on it please. Not me, I’m too busy, making choices.
I did send my first invoice though! Felt like a big moment. Just a deposit for tiny bit of work locally, but it was nice to get the wheels turning.
I’ve got two full weeks and change left at TPX, and as I’m not the only one leaving there’s been a some sad goodbyes with a few key people, with unfortunately more to come before the end of the month. It’s been a privilege to call the likes of Amy, Amber, Leo, and Beth colleagues and I hope we find ways to work together again in the future. It’s a small industry so it’s likely. If anyone is looking for service design, or design research talent, I know some stellar candidates.
Watching
We’ve been pulling out some classics for family movie nights, this week it was the Wedding Singer, it didn’t quite hit all the marks, looking at it from a socially-conscious 2024, but is a very stylish and infinitely quotable movie with Sandler at his least irritating.
Listening
Barely any music this week, that usually means I’ve had lots of video calls and not much ‘head down’ work. I’ve been enjoying (enjoying probably isn’t the right word) the Last Podcast on the Left’s archive on dog walks though.
Attending
We took a jaunt down to London last weekend for the Taskmaster Live Experience at Canada Water. It was great fun, think a mix of escape room and taskmaster style tasks, hosted by your very own Little-Little Alex Horne. It only lasts an hour but the experience bit consists of a museum, where you can see the various piece of art and other creations from the show, as well as the chance to recreate a few iconic moments (don’t step on the red green), while you have a themed pint.