Weeknotes 37

Rest, friendship and coming through on deadlines

This will be a shorter reflection. I spent most of the week sleeping because I was so tired from the last few weeks so I wasn’t very productive, which I’m completely okay with.

What I did

I was so upbeat this week. The feeling of finishing a tough part of the troubled project and then knowing the long hours were coming to an end. My heart was so full from meeting all the Chayn faces. I had a lot of fun this week!

• I started the week by recalibrating myself from a stressful two weeks to the deadlines that had been pushed and prioritising the work plans of myself and the people who report to me. I had to review dozens of job applications for our Bloom Service Manager job.
• You can see I was in more of a goofy mood than usual because every time a good job application came through, I was screaming internally. And then I thought, why keep it to myself? So I decided to bombard Zoe with “omg”! Everyone in the Chayn Facebook group was amused (yep, I posted a screenshot of slack to Facebook). She told me next time she expects me to tell her we have won a big grant after that many OMGs. We’ve not had a single grant so far so everyone is panicking slightly!

• Spoke to LBC about this. The study looked at the Instagram direct messages of a few influencers to analyze the kind of abuse they receive.

• Tuesday. I had quite a few calls and I inducted a copyeditor freelancer to help us prepare our content for publishing. You’ll remember copyediting is one of my most time-consuming responsibilities which affects the entire organisation because people have to wait for me to do it, and it blocks everyone at some point. So we decided to find a few copyeditors to help us with projects as they come!
• Wednesday and Thursday I didn’t work much because my lovely friend and fellow “Founder and CEO” activist Seyi was visiting Manchester and staying with me. I told my team I’m unavailable for calls and worked around her schedule. We have been talking a lot and supporting each other since we first spoke just before the pandemic. And you guessed it, we have never met in person! My brave friend is taking a three-month sabbatical from her amazing organisation Glitch to focus on rest. She deserves it so much and I hope more Founders can get that kind of support! She gives so much of her time and energy so fully to the people around her. I am so happy she can get a little break. My team has been nudging me for a long time to do something like that and I’m planning more frequent time away in the later part of the year to travel to the US, Pakistan and Australia because my holiday allowance looks like this right now.

• Friday. As I didn’t work much on Wednesday and Thursday, I spent a whole day on Friday working on the organisational strategy and our impact measurement framework for Bloom. I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be. I ended up staring at a blank screen for hours and would space out. I’m not sure why so I gave up and decided to work on Sunday instead.

What I learned

• I love sleeping. I slept so much this week.
• I also love walks. I went on long walks and even though it was raining during the week, it cleared up during the weekend.
• It’s just so nice to connect with people outside of meetings. The time I spent with Seyi and some other activists in Manchester was so liberating because we were able to connect across fears. Often, I can be afraid to communicate via text because I’ve not built a history of tone with someone and I don’t know if they will be able to get what I’m trying to say in the way I want to say it. Being in the same physical space opens up a different level of vulnerability.
• I was telling Kim that I was bursting with energy over the weekend and she told me that it’s probably because I’m on that part of my period cycle (our periods have synced). I hadn’t tracked my activity levels before and it was so cool to learn this from her! It’s amazing how much we don’t know about our bodies.

Something else

Also, Thagyan from Coke Studio’s Season 14 has been playing on repeat on my mind.