Weeknotes 109

I took a couple of weeks off weeknoting. The work didn’t stop, but the writing did. I’m finding the internet a difficult place to inhabit at the moment, there’s lots going on in the world that is hard to read about and even harder to ignore, and every time I’ve attempted to write about my week it felt pointless.

I don’t want to ignore the state of the world, but also I don’t want to write about it, so I stopped for a bit while I figured it out. I haven’t figured it out yet. But stepping back from social media, concentrating on what I can control and doing a bit of the old ‘put your own gas mask on first’ has helped. I don’t know if I’ll continue to write as regularly as before but I don’t want to disappear, so sporadic weeknotes for the near future is just fine by me.

This week, as well as continuing to work with the ecosyste.ms team, I submitted my first bid response. In agencies Business Development has always been something I dreaded, the process felt chaotic, I was uncomfortable proposing work I probably would never have to deliver and I hated the mental gymnastics of writing in someone elses’ voice. When I decided to start my own business I knew at some point I’d have to do business development but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

However, the experience has been completely different, writing for myself, with full understand and confidence in the approach I’m proposing, knowing the case studies because I was the one who was there meant the writing side came easy and I was able to focus on what the brief was asking for. It’s made me think an awful lot about bid writing in agencies, and how broken the conventional approach is, but I’ll forgive myself writing that blog post, life is too short.

I’ve also been working on a few new sticker designs, which I’ve finished and was looking for a reason to get them printed (what use is a stack of stickers sat in my office). As luck would have it, a reason to print them dropped into my lap late last week. I’ll share more when everything is confirmed but summer is looking exciting.

Watching

The Gentlemen on Netflix. Absolutely fine aristocracy meets criminal family – with surprising results! series. I needed something to switch my brain off to and this was perfect.

Listening

Mastodon. I’ve listened to Mastodon before, but only the odd single and had filed them under ‘pretty good metal for the gym’. Turns out I was so wrong. Their album ‘Blood Mountain’ popped up on Apple Music’s homepage and I was blown away. They are far more progressive than I thought, like Rush if they grew up on black metal and thrash.