This is my first attempt at getting back on the weeknotes bandwagon and doing some accountability, after some pondering in Weeknotes debug.
To recap, these are the things I planned to do.
- Finish and send a new business proposal I’ve spent a week blocked on
- Write up my part of a client report
- Finish reading No Bullshit Strategy, then finish a proper 1.0 version of our business strategy
It went… pretty well, I think.
I didn’t manage to finish the proposal, but this is probably fine because I’m talking with the client next week and everything will probably have shifted again. I came to the conclusion that one of the reasons I found it so hard to get started was that I realised that I have never written a formal (or even semi-formal) business proposal before, so this is new territory that feels like it shouldn’t be. Carry-forward for next week: figure this out, then do it, then template it.
I did write up everything I could for the client report. Not surprising, as researching and writing is my happy place, although it’s nice to be a contributor rather than a collator for a change.
I didn’t read No Bullshit Strategy, but I did finish a 1.0 version of our business strategy. I’m happy with the result and I’m also fine with not having read the book first. I figured it made just as much sense to read it afterwards and see if it helps me do a new version. So I’ll consider that a win.
Two out of three isn’t bad. It’s also probably worth me noting where I went off-plan.
I spent a lot of the week thinking about and using ChatGPT. I had a brainwave about how it might help with some very tedious text-munging tasks I’d been putting off for literally years. It worked: I was and remain impressed. But then, not being able to resist the urge to finish up something that I thought would take hours rather than week, I fell into a rabbit hole of LLM use. Good times.
Media
- Book: How High We Go in the Dark. January is probably not the best month for books about pandemics, but this is good.
- Article: The digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag. Despite my positive LLM experiences this week, I am also totally down with this Garbage Day article about how AI Art is a big “why”.
- Music: Cybotron - Enter (aka Clear). I had somehow never listened to this end to end, despite being a big Juan Atkins fan. From a Pitchfork retrospective review: “Like William Gibson, who was writing Neuromancer while they were recording Enter, they pulled this off by building a future that inspired other people enough to make it a reality.”