On being sedentary

weeknotes

Apr 19

I tried a thing last week and skipped a weeknote, with the intention of squeezing two-in-one. Lesson learnt, because 14 days of lessons is a lot to lean on memory alone. So here’s a snippet of what my calendar looked like, plus some thoughtful commentary.

What the heck happened

Figma sign-offs on 3 big features, carrying Release 11. to 2 forwards!
Lots of time polishing, tidying and getting these flows into a more organised system of files (a fantastic obsessive-compulsive exercise)
Pulling together a service blueprint for one of our services: how payments will work with solution architecture
Workshop prep for a proposed ‘tactical’ solution as an alternative to retiring one of our payment solutions
On school… lots of headspace poured into my research approach for my dissertation
Steady progress towards my essay submission (proposal of RQ and methods)
Been restlessly sedentary all week since my hydrocortisone knee injections :(

What I learnt as a designer

Recently, I’ve been honing a lot of my craft and feeling the test of momentum. There’s been a lot of changes in the project (contractually and in scope) which has resulted to planning, designing and delivering all at once (probably not even in logical order). We’ve managed to sign-off on the flows we had worked on all the way back in December, and interrogating all the necessary updates to these features (in light of our new gateway service we had started working on this year). You’d think it’d be smarter to build the structure of a home before you start furnishing it, but unfortunately, reality doesn’t always agree with design.

Organisation has also not been our strongest suit, which we’re now feeling as a massive hindrance when working across 3 workstreams, 3 releases, and 3-ish features all at the same time. So I spent this week doing a lot of Figma housekeeping, and now I’m seeing everything in our shiny new system, it’s making me feel more excited to tackle future screens.

Headspace* (or lack thereof) is another occuring theme. Design is a collaborative practice, which means a majority of my day is spent in working sessions, huddles, and conversations to align with different people, etc. Sometimes this means I get very little time left to for deep work, and in reeling from my burnout-era, I’m trying to not resort to too many 5ams in hopes of getting concentration in whilst the world is still asleep (I say as I write this at 630am).

What I’m still figuring out as a human

*Re above. Plus a few more:

Learning to be OK with physical rest… especially when I’m injured
Being confident, even in the face of uncertainty (seek probability instead)
Taking ownership, even if decisions aren’t always mine to make
Communicating capacity, even if there’s always more to do
Maintaining momentum, even when motivation runs low

Run notes (Week X/?)

So much work and life has happened, yet not much running…

The pain in my knees has defeated me, and I only just managed to get my steroid shots, so made a difficult decision to move my race (intended for a week from now) to June. For the next 2 months, I’m hoping to do all the things I wanted to do but had running stand in the way, like boxing, tennis, F45, pilates, park runs/chill runs… I love fitness but being too rigid really took the enjoyment out for me.

Maybe these were my joints threatening me to chill the heck out, but I hope it doesn’t take a needle (or 4) for me to finally listen next time around.