Tl;dr: All the (work) busy-ness and it’s set to continue.
For Monday 2nd November – Sunday 8th November 2026.
At work:
Things have really kicked up a notch, and this month is set to be just so.
- Deep listening project: presented at a steering group meeting, had meetings about branding and visual identity, collated the usual weekly update. I still want to do a deep dive for several hours into this, but right now I’m doing the urgent top of the pile stuff.
- Designing a partnership workshop: still supporting the client conversations and helping them respond to waves of the unexpected, to shape the design and delivery of the day. We’re on iteration 2 of the session outline, because new needs have come to light.
- Catchment partnership project: the new project manager is keen to move things on quite significantly so we have been dreaming up a stakeholder engagement event for the new year, that will build relationships and invite more people to get involved, while sharing the findings of the pilot to date and shaping future developments. Exciting times.
- Board away day: attended a service user voice group to gather some insights that will inform the discussions on the day, and ensure that community voice runs through all the proceedings. Wrote a participant information sheet to let everyone know what to expect on the day in terms of pace, content, and my facilitation style.
- Strategy co-design project: starting to receive data and insights from various teams across the organisation, and responses to engagement surveys – also scheduling 121s with key stakeholders.
- Team reflection and learning day: proposed a session outline and costs, my proposal and plan were accepted, I arranged 121s with team members.
- Co-production workshop: 90 mins session as part of a dementia conference, focusing on the practicalities and troubleshooting for people actively doing co-production and coming up against system barriers and challenges, and trying to transform how they work to support dementia patients and their carers.
Deliverables this week:
- Co-production workshop at a dementia conference. The feedback in the room was broadly positive, I’m awaiting the collated feedback from the organisers.
Development this week:
- User testing with young people: had a scoping call with a client we did work for last year, looking at testing some approaches and materials with young people on a specific public health topic website. I need to draft a proposal and run it past colleagues, over the coming week.
At home:
- No Welsh because I had a migraine-ey kind of headache, and also because I was tired and discouraged and hadn’t done any catching up of the two sessions I missed before half term, and now it’s getting even bigger of a gap (4 weeks now aaaaugh). How do I come back from that. Overwhelm!
- No HIIT, it was pilates week, and work has taken up all my brain and all my hours anyway, or nearly. Did 2x pilates (1 clash with a client meeting on Monday). Went bouldering on Sunday and it was hard and frustrating. Still good though, but I felt the limits of my upper body strength acutely. No swim, the times didn’t work out and everyone was away.
- Did a little mission at the weekend dropping off Diwali sweets to friends in west Wales who are further away (than I am in Cardiff) from delicious festive treats.
Hwb – defnyddio fy Nghymraeg (hub – using my Welsh):
Weekly Welsh homework to find something to talk about in class (in Welsh ofc).
- WHAT TO DO, WHAT TO DO (my brain is in meltdown about all of this).
Photo by Egor Komarov on Unsplash