Weeknotes #1 – The Joy of a first week
I’ve not written weeknotes before and I’ve always shied away from the practice for one main reason. I don’t like being told when to write. I need to let the story/subject come to me and when it does I’ll get it down on ‘paper’ in the moment.
I’ve decided to make an exception for the next 12 months. Mainly because this is my first year of being self employed and I want to treat it as an experiment. I want to try different organisations, try doing direct client work, have a go at running a business, work in different types of teams on different subject matters and try Joy’s methods and approach out for size.
I’m also going to buck the trend and write weeknotes on a Monday. Two practical reasons for this are I already run the Friday Joy series on a Friday and I’m currently working 4 days a week. But mainly I think writing on a Monday will help me internalise and remember the learnings I want to take forward from the previous week.
So here goes.
Last week
Last week was my first week back at work after a 2 week break between roles. It was my first week working with Lloyds Banking Group’s Innovation Team but also my first official week of running my new business Joy.
It was a real week of firsts. Working in a bank is new. Being a contractor is new. Running a business is new and working 4 days a week is new.
I can’t say much about my work at Lloyds but what I’m finding really interesting is being part of an innovation team. While there is obviously a big overlap between design and innovation, there are a lot of methods and approaches that I’m keen to learn about in the innovation space. I’m also really interested in how I can help this new team successfully fuse design and innovation to get the best of both worlds.
While the bank is obviously huge the Innovation Team is still quite small. It felt nice to be back in a small team. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and I’m excited to have every Tuesday in the office and a bit of structure back in my life. Being in ‘London proper’ and walking across London Bridge at 8:30am made me feel alive – a feeling I’ve struggled to find during the pandemic.
Being exposed to the wider design team and their work within the retail side of Lloyds was also really interesting. While I don’t really know what my preconceptions about finance were – I think they were smashed this week as what I saw was a bunch of good people doing work they care about to make banking services better for people.
Talking of banking, I was also invited to HSBC’s design team meeting to give my ‘Let’s talk about sex’ talk – a unique experience as I had to deliver it on an iPhone due to being without a personal laptop and banking laptops being so locked down you can’t access Google!
Friday was the cherry on top of a good week. I’ve never worked 4 days a week before and a lot of the time I will be doing 5 as I’ll have bit of Joy work on the side of Lloyds. But I felt that taste of freedom last Friday. Getting up later, going for a swim at 4pm and in between having lots of interesting conversations.
I had 2 conversations about delivering talks. One with the Design Council and another at an architecture conference. I’m excited about both but especially the architecture talk as I was originally bemused as to what I could bring – but a good chat in my fancy new indoor deck chair helped us get to the heart of a great focus.
The highlight though was a conversation with an amazing woman in Manchester who’s setting up a small charity to support teens living with brain injuries. She wants help with her brand, website and service offer. Her passion was inspiring but my overriding feeling after the call was ‘this is why I started Joy’ – to help people like this.
Three things to remember
In these early days of running Joy I want to be guided by my feelings as much as possible. To help me do this every week I’ll pick the 3 things that really resonated with me to help me take these into the next week.
- Being in London and being in an office with people makes me feel alive.
- Part of what I want to get from my time at Lloyds is better understanding innovation methods and how design and innovation can work together.
- Helping small organisations shape their offer in the early stages is why I started Joy. It makes me happy.
Have a good week friends. See you next Monday.
