After finishing a year-long stint working for the Government Digital Service to deliver support to people during the worst of the pandemic, I took a month off.

This meant that I didn’t turn on a computer for most of that time, and certainly didn’t feel inclined to blog. A month ago I started working at Kaluza (lured in by Ovo’s Plan Zero approach to the climate crisis), and having just about got my head around what I need to do there, I have brain space to write words again.

With three jobs in three years, I’ve come to realise how much harder it is to reflect on my year-on-year personal development without an explicit checkpoint with a consistent third-party. Not only that, but I don’t do what I tell the people I manage to do and keep a weekly log of successes or problems I’ve overcome. This makes it much harder to keep a good perspective over time on how I think I’m doing, and how I develop in a role at a new company.

Making sure I do keep a record of achievements each week is something I’ll have to do pretty much immediately, probably through setting aside some time each Friday morning to ask myself the scrum standup questions at a slightly more abstract level. This should also help keep me honest when prioritising my daily work as well. I’ll probably use the Inkdrop Note Templates plugin to set up a standard way of doing this. Wish me luck 🙂