Weeknote 48/2024
On Friday, I finished work for the year. I went out for Christmas dinner with my wife, Hannah, and now I’ve now got three weeks off until returning on January 6th. She finishes on Wednesday.
While 2024 included some really enjoyable moments, and I’ve enjoyed working with colleagues and collaborators, it has also felt harder than usual. I’ve heard a similar story from other freelancers, agencies, and cooperatives.
Is this more than a feeling, though? Has my thinking been clouded by a house move, having my temporary office in the utility room, the general state of the world, and trying to balance work with my studies? Perhaps. So while I had my spreadsheets open as part of sending my final invoices of the year, I thought I’d compare this year with last year.
One way to measure how the difficulty of this year from a work point of view is to look at how much I’ve made. I’m British enough to think it vulgar to share publicly the amount I earn, but it was interesting that my analysis showed only a 1.77% variation between what I earned in 2023 and 2024. What was fascinating, however, was that I worked 12.7% fewer hours this year. That’s a significant difference. I guess it’s mostly because I dedicated Wednesday and Friday mornings to my Systems Thinking studies.
Working less for about the same amount of money is living the dream as far as most people are concerned. The trouble is that I had a lot more expenses: I’m leasing a car through my business, I paid for two Open University modules, and I made some relatively-expensive technology purchases. Better budgeting required in 2025!
We’ve now delivered the NDLN horizon report on microcredentials and the Friends of the Earth article about AI sustainability principles. I co-authored both with Laura, with me taking the lead on the former and her taking the lead on the latter. We also did a bit of work with John preparing for the final stage of a selection process with Amnesty International UK for a partner to help them with their online community platform for activists. We’ll be running a workshop in January as part of that, so we did some planning.
I wrote a few posts over at Thought Shrapnel, one about our redesign of AILiteracies.fyi, shared the podcasts I’m listening to at the moment, and rounded up the most popular posts on the WAO blog.
Other than that, we had our WAO online Christmas party, to which we invited Anne and Bryan. We played some games, told some stories, ate some mince pies, and drank some Baileys. Fun times. Bryan’s coming up to visit me to go walking in the Northumbrian hills next week, which is great. It’s been a while since the rest of us met up, though. Hopefully next year!
I haven’t heard back from the two interviews for part-time roles that I had on the Friday before last. I’ve followed up with both, and they’ve said a decision is due next week; whatever the outcome, I think it’s always best to remember that hiring is a form of marketing. Both in terms of the organisation in general, and what the role could be like in practice. I someone I know telling me they’d gone through seven(!) rounds of interviews for a role and, sure enough, it ended up being a bureaucratic kind of place. In my case, I’m assuming that not hearing either way is a result of the December slow-down.
My son has been ill this week, we suspect with ‘flu. Unlike the rest of us, he didn’t have a flu shot this year as he was recovering from Covid and had a bad reaction to his last vaccine. It’s meant a couple of days off school and no sport. He’s still gone to support both his basketball and football teams, and thankfully still been able to get his coursework done!
My daughter seems unable to score from inside the box at the moment, scoring another 25-yard effort yesterday! Her team won 9-0 and the score could have been double. It’s not all unicorns and rainbows, though, as her match on Tuesday for East Northumberland involved another loss. It was against lots of her teammates who play for North Tyneside, so while it was expected, it was a bit galling. They also lost today against the boys but she played well.
Next week, as I mentioned, Bryan’s coming up to visit. I need to get some presents wrapped, and I’ve got around 35km left of the 1,000km running target I set at the start of the year. Other than that, I’m going to take it extremely easy and reject the temptation to start a new project.
This may or may not be my last weeknote of the year. After Christmas I may start writing an end of year retrospective as I did in 2022 and create a collage out of the year’s Guardian Weekly images, as I did in 2021.
Photo of this year’s Christmas tree bauble, bought a couple of months ago in the shop at Durham Cathedral