Week 11

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.

  1. Finish and send a new business proposal I’ve spent a week blocked on

  2. Write up my part of a client report

  3. 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 rabbithole of LLM use. Good times.

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