Categories
management Organization

Bi-Monthly Rituals: The State of All the Things

At the end of last year, I somehow found myself as the lead of a team that was 4x as big as my previous one. Many things were different, but one of the big ones was changing from having one person on each platform who really knew everything that was going on… to having some […]

Categories
management Organization Programming

Why Do Standup

Share work before it happens – prevent overlap, raise gotchas. Foster communication and collaboration – offer help rather than waiting for someone to ask. Start the day with intention. Turns out, status updates are not the most useful aspect of standup.

Categories
life Organization travel

Start a Project. Kill a Project.

I have been enjoying everyone’s year in review posts, and reading what they hope to achieve over the next year. I love the enthusiasm and the new projects starting, but one thing I love even more is when I see people defining what they will do less of in 2016. For myself, I set my self a limit […]

Categories
Career Organization

A Small Focus Hack

I decided that my word for 2015 was “ship”. Part of this is that it’s easy to flounder in an unstructured environment (which I did a bit at the end of 2014). The way I decided to solve this was to give myself structure, and goals. How do you measure bigger milestones though? It makes […]

Categories
life Organization Programming

The Procrastination Project

There is something I’m working on that I’m really excited about, that if we have hung out in person I may well have talked about, but it has been going nowhere. So “I’m working on X” has really only been true if “work” is defined as “not getting around to and feeling really guilty about”. […]

Categories
Awesome Foundation inspiration

Awesome Foundation KW Meets Kwartzlab

This week we had yet another amazing pitch night for Awesome Foundation KW. It was a tough decision, but we decided to fund Kwartzlab’s “Hacky Halloween” project. I’m really excited about this project, and I think this paragraph from their blog post shows why: We live in a world of electronics. Learning a simple skill like […]

Categories
Career Organization

Decisions

Last week, in California, I met the amazing Meggin who leaves such astute and beautiful comments here. It was great – or terrible timing – depending on how you look at it. Terrible timing, because, one of the first things I said to her was: In a while I’ll spin this into a really positive […]

Categories
life Relocating

Reminding Myself As To Why We Continue, Despite Everything

It’s been a mixed week. Some successes – Awesome Foundation! Girl Geek Dinner! Getting my visa sorted! And then a number of things that made me wonder why I was bothering. Mostly stupid things, and you could say that I shouldn’t worry about them – but that is easy to say, and hard to do. […]

Categories
Awesome Foundation Relocating

Stepping Down from Awesome Ottawa

The last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an Awesome Foundation trustee. Yes, it’s putting our money where our mouths are; not just saying “that would be a cool project” but putting the money on the table to fund it. More than that though, for me it’s been about being […]

Categories
Organization Reflections Thesis

Fighting Incrementalist Tendencies

I originally posted Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist as a not-so-subtle hint to one of the dreamers in my life, and a reminder to myself to be aware of the downsides of being an incrementalist. And then Meggin left this great comment (emphasis added): I’m an incrementalist, through and through. […]