A thought about weeknotes, why they’d be valuable for agencies and yet why they’ll never adopt them, follows below.
So I’ve been doing a bunch of research in recent weeks into the automotive market and its aspirations to move from product manufacture to service provider.
And these days CES is a car show. Almost all manufacturers are augmenting their tin boxes with digital services of some kind. But I’ve noticed two things.
First, all the initial predictions (circa 2015 or so) about connected vehicles predicted growing demand at a rate that never materialised.
Second, the considerable majority of those who have adopted them think the experience is bad.
The big consultancies that made all these big predictions don’t mention how off they were, but are now preaching that the future of automotive depends on selling subscriptions rather than tin boxes.
It still seems like a blinkered view of how automotive, or perhaps mobility, will move onwards. It’s as if everyone’s trying to solve problems that aren’t problems. Does anyone even want a self-driving car? Driving the thing is the good bit. I can’t imagine why someone would buy, insure, park and maintain a car and then hand off the driving to a computer. Seems entirely backwards. Anyway.
Onto other things.
I’ve also been doing some brand essence and positioning work again. Nice to be deep in the details of something like this. There are always many thorny contradictions through which to work.
Watched Get Back again. Glyn Johns is staggeringly glamourous all the time. Be more Glyn Johns.
I love Mastodon. Running my own instance is the right setup for me, but with the drawback that the federated timeline was blank. Then I discovered the FediBuzz Relay as a means of synthesising the buzz of a thumping great instance.
I have this nagging, malformed theory that Elon Musk might be the world’s greatest philanthropist: he’s used his fortune to cripple a toxic, abusable, politically-destablising and unregulated platform while there’s still time. Although he also keeps stacking up contradictory evidence. But maybe, I dunno, he’s bluffing?
Bass notes
I’ve been practicing on my new bass daily. I think you get further by practicing little and often, as opposed to a heads-down cram on a Sunday. I’ve been following the lessons that work has sponsored. It all starts with technique exercises. Feels less unnatural every day.
I can sort of roughly play Sweet Home Alabama to a recognisable standard. It’s the archetypal beginners’ bass lick: straightforward plucking pattern, not too many notes and plenty of time between the notes to move around the fretboard while that is not yet instinctive. Nice shootin’, Tex!
Why agencies don’t do weeknotes
Adland/digital/product agency people are not in the habit of keeping weeknotes. You might think it’d be a useful convention to introduce. But, I can tell you categorically that you should not waste an iota of consciousness or effort trying to do this: it’ll never, ever work.
Agencies talk of innovation and ideas and creativity and the future, but are starkly conservative. That leads them to sell talent by the metre as opposed to by the value it could bring: it’s a model so flawed that, like democracy, it’s a frustration there’s nothing better that could be implemented in its place. Well, there are other models that would work in theory, but it never, ever, ever works for real because clients simply won’t buy it. The only way clients will agree to buy agency talent is by the metre, and that is the fundamental cause of agency conservatism.
All that leads to one thing: timesheets. The gold, what little there is, is in them there timesheets. In every agency I’ve ever worked, there is a near-constant collective monologue about job codes, traffic management and timesheets. This reaches a head at the end of the week, as timesheets need to be put in. Typically, this administrative task enters the pre-frontal cortex on Friday at about 4pm, and then begins the labourious task of trying to reconsile whatever it was you did over the last five days.
Timesheets are weirdly taxing because they demand a fidelity of recall that doesn’t suit the way we remember things. Our memories are connected to the feelings we had. It’s easier to recall how you felt about something than what you did about something. This is what makes human memory so fallable. Change the feeling: change the memory.
Anyway, that’s the crux of why agency people don’t keep weeknotes: it’s the switch of mental mode. Timesheets demand a mode of logical guesswork that requires us to suppress all thoughts of what went well, what we learned, what was fun or how valuable something was. Then mode-switching back to emotional recall is just as mentally expensive. So, agencies will never, ever keep weeknotes. Even if there were some internal drive for it, it wouldn’t stick. Unless someone could construct an AI that you could feed emotional memory in the form of weeknotes and it could map the effort or value back to the billings. Hashtag free idea.
This all ladders up to the power imbalance between agencies and clients, as almost everything about agencies ultimately does. Clients aren’t at fault, but they do have the casting vote in any decision. It means there’s a constant downward pressure on price while general fannying about on both sides increases the cost of service. The squeeze in the middle causes the enthusiasm for reconsiling working hours regardless of value. Perversely, if clients insisted on receiving weeknotes like they do for financial transparency, they’d benefit enormously. It would encourage the agency to balance its collective attention between the money charged and the value returned. Anyway, won’t happen, don’t even try.
Perhaps to disprove all this, I like putting in my timesheets. It keeps me honest. The cruelty is that the work gets done largely outside the periods of time in which my timesheets record. All too often I’ll spend an unhealthy proportion of the ‘working’ day staring blankly at a problem or fiddling in the margins. Then at 4am I’ll wake with a solid idea. Then I’ll have to reach for the laptop to capture it, trying to make up the time lost fannying around during the day before the idea sailed in.
I’m careful to make my timesheets accurate, but there’s accuracy and then there’s accuracy. They could not feasibly reflect both the fannying-around time and the real, valuable work because it was impossible to predict where and when the lightning would strike when whatever project was costed up. I’d love there to be a line-item in the proposal for ‘fiddling around writing fairly unsatisfying bullet points on a PowerPoint chart while waiting for the magic to happen’. But clients wouldn’t buy that level of honesty either.
If this were a snappy LinkedIn post, this last bit would be a rallying cry for rethinking the model. But I’ve not put this here with any expectation it’ll change. Rather, by recording it, I never have to think about it again.
Hey. It’s me. Hope you’re well. A longer introduction to this little site will follow below. For wider context, I also wrote about my 2022.
Returned from a nice break in Bilbao and San Sebastian. The dead-zone between Christmas and New Year is one of my favourite times to travel: it makes a conscious something out of an unconscious nothing. It also encourages careful thought about where to go, as typical holiday destinations are set up for summer trade. But many places make for a worthwhile visit anytime.
The trip was dented by illness in the group, but nobody was going to miss out on the Guggenheim: a building more impactful than a few of the works it houses. It’s as if some highly-capable artists set out to explore spaces, perhaps to fight off their kenophobia, and then Frank Gehry had a ‘hold my beer’ moment.
Received a few hand-crafted Christmas cards: that’s something I should do next time, perhaps.
There are train strikes. Many train strikes. I fully support striking workers, but I’m also aware how privileged a position that is. If I had the kind of job that required me to somewhere specific every day, it’d be painful. Even so, I expect the strikes will continue and catch me on the days I do need to be somewhere. But people should be paid fairly.
Otherwise, work was a relaxed and easy start to the year, apart from one particularly exciting but heavily confidential handful-of-minutes meeting: I mark it here just for my own benefit.
Bass notes
I bought a bass guitar! The build-up to this has been long. 20 years ago I was in a garage band, occupying the role of bassist but playing temperamental, thunderous analogue synths. Eventually we each headed off into four different kinds of adulthood, but then last June they tracked me down and we started putting some songs together remotely. I’ve been recording the old bass parts using various soft-synths and guitar emulators, while also writing new ones on, of all things, my ukulele.
I bought my first uke ten years ago and found it much harder than people say (I’m mostly left-handed but decided to play right-handed after many years of embuggerance from other left-handed instruments). When I started to be… not terrible… I bought a lovely tenor uke and it sits by my desk so that I pick it up often. It proved easier to write bass parts for songs written on guitars using a stringed instrument, so that became the process. Then three months ago I decided if I could find a practical bass, I’d buy it and learn how to play it. Eventually I did, and so I am.
Work has some kind of ‘passon project’ budget per head, so they’ve chipped for a beginners’ bass guitar course. So gimme nine months and I’ll be playing Seven Nation Army or whatever.
A longer introduction than I intended
In some form or another, I’ve been diarising for years. In 1999, I started posting to my site every day using a handmade content-management system. It was blogging by an early, loose definition; probably now you’d call it public journalling or something.
Eventually a public diary stopped being a good idea: as the web’s population grew I found myself needing to censor more, which increased the drag. I packed it in after six years or so. Revisited it a couple of times but by then social media was in full swing, so having some random little diary didn’t have its original social benefits. Lesson learned.
More recently I ran a newsletter for three years: something I’d wanted to commit some effort to for a while. The newsletter was strictly not about me and things I was up to, but I wrote a couple about mental health from a personal perspective, as well as some others that were inspired by wherever I was that week. I can see why people try and monetise their newsletters, although that was never of much interest to me. Recipients had many kind things to say about it, but it takes substantial time and effort to put together a weekly newsletter of any quality. Again, lesson learned.
So after that, I fired up a new blog, doing.digital, focussing specifically on digital-era human behaviours. Thinking about this stuff is basically my day-job and so the blog has a formal-ish style. Not quite right for rough notes and underbaked reflections. But I always enjoyed the discipline of getting stuff down on a regular schedule, which led me to firing up this little site so I can record and publish some weeknotes of sorts.
There’s a couple of weeknote conventions I’ll have to bend. Weeknotes are method of team communication, usually with a known audience. One of my work environments hasn’t adopted this open style and I don’t want to wait in vein for that kind of change to come about. I’ve wasted too much of my life waiting for these kinds of shifts when I should’ve just cracked on. So I’m using the rough format just to structure some early-definition blog posts.
Second, there are plenty of things I do in my week that shouldn’t be public, for reasons I’m sure are the same in everyone’s jobs and life. There will be omissions and obfuscations—perhaps enough just to remind me what it was, but not enough for anyone else—and leave it at that.
There are years we’d rather forget, and them some we wish to cherish. 2022 has been a significant and transformative year for me, particularly considering the two or three that came before it. Here’s some of the things that happened.
First, a brief primer on my mental health. For 15 years I’d been taking carbamazepine to manage both bipolar and epilepsy, but I was approaching the age beyond which its sustained use is not advised. It had done a good job on the seizures, but had little impact mood-wise. I shan’t dwell on the darkness, other than to say that for more than six years I have tracked my mood daily from -5 (the most extreme depression) to +5 (the most extreme mania). A typical person would usually fall between -1 and +1. This scoring is referenced below.
In 2020, during lockdown, I relocated from London to Birmingham. This offered much better (faster) access to mental healthcare. With the blessing of my neurologist and neuropsychologist back in London, a consultant psychologist had slowly added low doses of lamotrigine to test for contraindications. The National Health Service is a many splendid thing; we must fight for it.
January
My mood was pretty low at this time; averaging -2.3.
But, made the excellent decision to travel to Costa Rica as a bit of a firebreak. Utterly staggering. An unforgettable trip. And if I were to forget it, I can fall back on about 6,000 photos. By far the best lodgings (perhaps of my life) were with a lovely American couple–Keith & Joe—running a handful of casitas on the side of a mountain in thick jungle. Truly charming and welcoming guys, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again.
February
Seemed like the right time to conclude 💥BLAST!, a newsletter I’d been writing. 150 were sent out over three years, and recipients were kind about it. The circulation was low but its readers were loyal and engaged. An amazing amount of work, though. A well-researched and carefully-written weekly email takes much more effort than it appears.
There was a caravan/campervan show at the NEC. I’ve been slowly converting an old delivery van into a camper myself, so went to check out the competition. Two observations:
Factory-built caravans and campervans are incredibly expensive. There were none at the show I could afford to buy, even if I wanted to. I found a small dinghy, but nothing more.
There was only one camper that was impressive enough to be desirable, but at least 10 times as expensive as mine will have been.
Mood: averaging -1.6. The epilepsy and bipolar consultants have finally reached a consensus on a target lamotrigine dose, but it’d take a while to get there. Increased the dose by 25mg per day this month. Once topped out, there’s the challenge of slowly titrating down the medication that’s kept me more-or-less seizure-free all these years.
March
Mood: averaging -2.2. Pretty low. Increased lamotrigine to 250mg per day.
Started looking for a little property to buy as investment. Didn’t take long to find a little granny flat in fair condition but needing all-new interior, as these things do. Had an offer accepted and began the process.
Out in the van, with the ceiling, walls and bedframe all installed, the carpentry turned to fiddly little jobs such as ply-lining the ‘garage’—the large space below the bed accessible through the rear doors—boxing in the rear wheels and so forth. It was a fine balance between making it solid while taking up as little space as possible.
April
Mood: averaging -2.3. Still increasing lamotrigine steadily; by this point at 300mg per day. Not far to go.
In 2000 I co-founded Lumino, a healthtech/femtech startup. Spent a day doing a video shoot for its first product, which we’re calling a fully-functional prototype but is already consumer-grade if not medical-grade. Figured out how best to run a day’s shooting via a teleprompter. Got some great product demo shots. Then spent a week editing and grading, and also a week composing and producing a soundtrack. This is the true joy of a startup: doing everything.
The snooker world championship is the best thing about my Aprils, which was lucky this time around as I’d caught Covid. The virus had left my by the final, but the longer symptoms lingered for another three months.
With the ply-lining done, the van’s mains-voltage electricals started to come together: I installed a small consumer unit to accept either an hook-up or, in future, a feed from a big battery via an inverter. The cable runs had all been installed in the walls for months, so it was a positive to get all the loose wiring tidied away.
I also made all the doors for the overhead cupboards in the shaker style. To make as light as possible, they’re made from a thin softwood frame with a 5mm plywood insert. The inserts can be removed to aid decoration later: they may be wallpapered, or something.
May
Mood: now averaging -1.8. Have now reached 400mg per day of lamotrigine which is the magic number. Some side-effects, which may be from taking big doses of two drugs at once. Not a massive improvement in mood at this point.
I’d been looking to cut back my hours on the startup while the clinical work, to which I add little value, gets done. Got approched about a job in Bristol, which was on my list of possible places to settle down. I had no intention of spending one moment more in Birmingham than was absolutely necessary, but also I didn’t want to move to yet another rental property. The job was interesting and I was a good fit. I got to the final two but they appointed the other guy. Afterwards, they took the time to call to take me through their decision, which was classy.
With the cupboard doors complete, I installed them all with little gas struts to hold them open and spring-loaded clips to hold them closed. The effect is transformative: closing over the cupboard carcasses feels much more like a functioning camper.
June
The flat purchase fell through. After the surveyor reported an issue with the structure of the garage; the seller went totally silent for 13 weeks. So it was best to leave them to it.
Mood: averaging -2.1, and it was time to begin titrating down the carbamazepine, by 50mg per day every couple of weeks.
Began a group therapy thing for bipolar people, via Zoom. Nothing I hadn’t heard before, but keen to show willing.
The band I was in two decades ago suddenly popped up via WhatsApp! So via the magic of current-era communication and recording technology, we began collaborating to resuscitate the old material and perhaps explore some new songs too.
Began an interview process at an agency, coincidentally in Bristol. I’d spoken with a few London agencies but the roles were fairly dull and the remuneration wouldn’t justify a move back to the smoke. But Bristol is viable.
The van sailed through its MOT again. Finding a good garage is like finding a good dentist.
July
Mood was averaging 0.8; a marked improvement. By this point my carbamazepine dose was down to 100mg/day, which is below the effective dose. As I’d not had a seizure or aura, it was a good indication that the lamotrigine is now doing the heavy lifting.
Completed the Bristol agency interview process and accepted a role as lead strategist at Great State, an agency I’d had my eye on for years. I fitted myself out with a less temporary home-office setup and bought a massive screen. Never thought I’d become an ultrawide guy but now you’d have to wrestle it off me.
There was a litter of fox cubs living in the garden. Several fence panels had blown over during the winter, and the landlord steadfastly refused to do anything about it. So the foxes moved in under one.
August
Mood was averaging -1.1. Compared with where things had been over recent months and years this was a massive victory, and most likely the result of finally switching out carbamazepine for lamotrigine. Amazing stuff.
Did a workshop for the University of Cambridge Social Ventures Incubator on brand development: took a lot of prep but really good fun on the day. Will likely repeat it.
It was very hot, even for August. A couple of days demanded the windows to be covered up. It was so hot that it melted the hardcore tape I was using to fix things over the window.
The van carpentry had reached the stage building the surface across the width of the van from the floor up to the bed. Once done it’ll look like simple cupboards. In practice, it was a complex build as it doesn’t touch the floor and so had to be constructed in suspension.
September
Mood averaging -0.9, so now firmly in typical range. I had started to feel like a real person and it was bloody excellent.
Went to see a Derren Brown live show, and then an audience with Tim Peake, on consecutive nights. Both bloody excellent.
Gained a goddaughter! Bloody excellent.
I’d been heading down to Bristol regularly, staying over in one of the Premier Inn. One drowsy morning, I managed to smack my toe while clambering into the bathtub for a shower. By midday it was black and angry. That evening I fiddled about with it and learned, the hard way, that it was probably dislocated. It calmed down in a couple of weeks of hobbling around.
We did a company jolly to the Crystal Maze Experience in central London, as the queue to pass the Queen’s coffin had seemingly enveloped the whole city. I thought I’d like it, but I loved it. It was camp as Christmas, and a good crowd of people.
On the same London trip I found, finally, a pair of glasses frames that fit around my deceptively wide face.
October
Mood averaging -0.7. Right in the pocket.
In 2019, a handful of months before the pandemic, I was best man to the loveliest couple on the planet. It’s fair to say the first three years of their marriage had not been as they had expected. The last time I saw them, between lockdowna, we sat six feet apart on their patio, eating Deliveroo. Anyway, I treated us all to brunch and a spa day. A nice easy time: I think it did us all some good.
Started building the frames that will become the bench seats either side of the van. One contains a shower base and both conceal all manner of pipes and cables and whatnot, so it needed a lot of careful planning. As with all the most difficult components I took a day or so to build a CAD model. The finished thing is rarely as accurate as it was on the computer but the process exposes all the watch-outs and potential cock-ups in advance, before I start sawing up good timber.
November
Mood: averaging 0.0! Equidistant from dangerously low and all-out mania, just like a real boy. I can’t overstate the significance. In 2020 I was signed off work for months. Anxiety, paranoia, joylessness, fatigue, visual and auditory hallucinations, all that. Staring into the void, as they say. It took months but a good care plan can be transformative.
I’d not had a break since January, so took a week in Marrakesh. Stayed in a charming riad with a hot-tub on the roof, so divided the time down on the mad, buzzing streets and up on the roof enjoying the sunshine. The normalising of my mood is strongly evident in the photos. Many of my travel photos capture me in wonderful places looking empty and forlorn. Not so this time.
I talked myself out of buying a new phone, and instead found a way of mounting a wireless-charging battery on the back of my existing one: that warm and fuzzy feeling of being a sensible and discerning consumer.
December
The trade unions were rightly ramping up on strike action, so the trains were all over the place. But I was fortunate enough to be working hybrid and more-or-less flex my trips between Bristol and Birmingham around the strikes.
Mood: averaging +0.1. Perfect. Life-changing.
I bought and put up a Christmas tree. It’s probably been a decade since I last did this. It didn’t seem worth it while I was too low to enjoy it, and/or everything seemed to be in a state of flux. I was typically fastidious about choosing and arranging its decorations. My trees always used to be blue and silver but this time I’ve drawn inspiration from pomanders (and/or Terry’s Chocolate Orange) and gone for orange and chocolate. It is resplendent amongst piles of crates containing all my possessions (as in Raiders of the Lost Ark) awaiting a permanent home in which to be unpacked..
After spending a long while in the Covid waiting-list backlog, I finally had an endoscopy to take a look at my angry sinus: the upshot was to just keep managing it with the steroid I’ve been using for four years or so. The QE Hospital in Birmingham is a marvel of efficiency.
Great State threw an exceptional 20s-themed Christmas party in Bristol. I don’t think I’ve been to a better work do, which is probably high praise from a teetotaller. Making my way home, through a train strike and also Christmas shopping madness, was challenging. Worth it, though.
Went to see Peter Kay as he kicks off a run of arena shows. What a great night out with 15,000 friends.
In all, a good year. Good in the sense that it saw a more positive trajectory emerge from the difficult years that preceded it. Onwards and, as they say, upwards.
