Weeknotes 006
What a week. My first week of freelancing was both very different and extremely familiar. The work I’m doing, the day-to-day activities are the same, but I’ve had a big shift in my mindset and a renewed energy. Plus, read to the end to see how my experiment with LinkedIn posts went…
I spent the first few days onboarding with my client, and the latter delivering some work. We’ve set ourselves an ambitious deadline to get something published pretty quickly, to benefit from the coordination of comms with another organisation. I’m not usually one for the kinds of stress that short deadlines bring, but one of the biggest frustrations I had with consulting were the times when it felt like it wasn’t possible to launch anything, so the contrast of this situation is exciting. I’m confident we’ll hit the deadline with some great work too, so that’s a bonus.
The piece of work I’ve focused on first is a branding exercise, and I honestly forgot how much I enjoy branding work. Finding the right metaphors, typefaces, iconography, and choosing to make specific visual references and nods in details that no-one may ever notice. These are skills I’ve long neglected, but judging by the feedback on the work so far, I’ve not completely lost.
I took delivery of a new chair. Office furniture is not the most exciting purchase, but after working from home for 11 years now with a fairly basic chair I’m kicking myself for not investing in my comfort sooner. The difference I’ve felt in the two days with the new chair is really surprising.
On the less-bright side, I’ve found myself several times in the week missing the feeling of having a team behind me. The TPX design team was over 100 strong when I left, and Slack was usually buzzing with people sharing work and chatting in-between things. I’m going to start looking for some proxy for this, maybe a slack or discord to hang out in during the day. As well as that, I’m going to open up some coffee slots in my calendar at the start of each week, and maybe stick a post up on LinkedIn or Bluesky and see if anyone takes me up on a quick social chat over lunch.
Finally, I posted my week notes to LinkedIn last week with the idea of having a little experiment. I’d heard that not posting the link in your post, but in a comment would result in more reach. Let’s dig into the stats and see…
Compared to the week before, LinkedIn tells me my post impressions are down 28%, and my own website stats appear to confirm this, my total site visits down a whopping 55%. Now it’s entirely possible last weeks’ weeknote wasn’t very interesting, and after five weeks people’s interest is dwindling, but even so, that’s enough of a drop to call the experiment a fail. I’ll just stick the link in the post like I always do.
LinkedIn stats showing a big drop in impressions this week
Listening
I’ve broken the cycle of nothing but Dinosaur Jr. (although I’m still listening to a lot of Dinosaur Jr.) my gym playlist randomly shuffled some of the new Idles album, which had entirely passed me by, but am now enjoying massively. I know Idles get their fair share of criticism in the music press over how authentic they are, but they can shred a tune.
Watching
I’ve been rewatching This Country, it’s even funnier the 5th and 6th times.
