This week

Life

Well I kind of dropped that ball a bit… After a solid start to my attempted weekly cadence, travel, work and then the Christmas break kind of got in the way. But I’m back now!

A lot has happened in the last five weeks. It is probably best summarised as “silly season”. An unexpected highlight was an impromptu trip to Torrumbarry on the Murray for a couple of days of camping and water skiing on the river. I’m really more of an ocean person than a river person, but it was great fun and the kids and dog spent pretty much the whole time in the water. Turns out Bandit is a great swimmer! And a great herder of people in the water who he thinks might be drowning so need to be rounded up back to shore…

Training

I put in some solid hours over the Christmas/New Year period, which was great. But it still feels like hard work and progress (in terms of speed) is slow to non-existent. I guess this is what they call “getting old”, so everything takes a bit longer than it used to.

Especially recovery. Having clocked almost 1,000 km over the last three weeks I am really feeling the need for a break, so I am taking it very easy this week. Build phase starts on Monday!

My major training goal for 2017 (besides Three Peaks in March) is consistency. The last couple of years have been very up and down, for all sorts of reasons. So I started off January with the idea of a short easy run every day. This went well at first, but then my plantar fasciitis flared up, which makes the whole thing quite miserable. So now I’m taking a few days break from running and hopefully it will settle down again, and then I can get back to Plan A.

Work

A new year and a new challenge: how do we deliver “architecture” in a growing “agile” organisation that values autonomy and independence? How do we balance that autonomy with the changing forces and constraints that come with an increasingly large enterprise? I don’t know, but I need to figure it out.

Right now I am struggling with focus — it’s hard to step back from the daily fray and think about the bigger picture, so my first challenge in this new role is to learn to ignore (or delegate) most of the responsive tactical work and adapt to a more “strategic” way of working and thinking.

It’s also hard to make that thinking concrete and clear and communicate it to others, but at least I know the solution to that: write it down! We all know the old Guindon quote: “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” The corollary, of course, is that getting better at writing is a great way of clarifying your thinking. I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, but one I have made in recent years (in fact, the only one) is “write/journal more”. I have had pretty patchy success at sticking to it, but it’s only becoming more important.