#42 Bank Holiday, Blogging and Reviews
Weeknotes — Monday 4 May—Sunday 10 May 2026
Summary of the week
A bank holiday weekend. Catching up on several months' worth of blogs. Testing out a new bike on the Monsal Trail. Prepping for a debrief on past workshops and a personal strategy review.
Dot and Dash
Bank holiday - Love a bank holiday. Normally I use them to catch up with work. But I am going to welcome the pause. The day when most people potter about, catch up on small things, and let their brains decompress a little. Well, for anyone who knows me, that is not quite how it went. I spent the weekend catching up on around 42 sketchnote blogs I had fallen behind with, working through what I have been doing over the past few months.
Quarterly Review of Strategic Plans
Working on a review workshop to go through both of our strategic plans we set out last year. Both myself and Alice set up quarterly reviews in advance to see where we are going and the direction we are taking. Rather that leaving our goals to go array over a year, we can course-correct and amend our plans considering how our businesses are going.
Going through the backlog of blogs turned out to be a useful exercise, a kind of audit that fed directly into my strategic review this quarter.
Seeing it all laid out gave me a much clearer picture of where my focus has been. Despite all the work on the conference, I have got my goals done, with only a few outstanding ones, and others I replaced with not being that important yet and rescheduling them later in the year. Strangely, I left out May for any goals; it would seem unknowingly needed May to be a calmer month of resting.
App update
My weekly accountability goals for the Cooper project, a new thing that I am doing with Rose every week. This week is getting the MVP working again after a bug got it spiraling on the onboarding. Now that it's fixed, I need to work on the happy path for the usability testing. Plus, I need to get a pilot test done on the research to test out the MVP and make sure that the tech works. And if it doesn't the I have a clickable 'prototype' I can switch to.
IAF Volunteer work
There is something really satisfying about making time to debrief properly. Penny and I met this week to reflect on the visual workshop we delivered at the conference. Looking through the feedback, with what landed, what we would develop further, and what surprises emerged. I still have a backlog of mentions on LinkedIn to catch up on, and honestly, I'm still taking time off from socials. But now and again I see someone sharing something they took away and watching them embrace visuals in their own work. That is the warm, fuzzy feel good feeling I love, which makes it all worthwhile.
We are having an IAF meet-up of meet-up hosts this week, sharing things we can do for our own regional meetings. Connecting our meet-up hosts together for peer support and community building, we all run regional gatherings, and we all do things differently, all driven by what the community needs.
Riding a bike?
I haven't ridden a bike for over 8 years. The last time was a bike hire in New England during the fall, where I tested out an electric bike for the first time and loved it. Other than the slight mishap I had when I tried to boost going round a bend and over a bridge on a river where I nearly ended up in. I hired a Brompton and loved the sunny bike ride along the Monsal Trail. Great way to test out a cute little bike, which I have adored ever since my housemate had one.
One thing I am building is doing fun stuff, so it's not centred around contract work, app development, and community building, and I know I have to protect my creative space to do fun things. This came out of my coaching last year, to embrace my creativity more.
I'm taking part in Yes You May, a Puttyverse challenge where you can pick something or several things to explore something new, or to follow something you are curious about. This is going to be completing my pragmatic portraits course and learning to draw more diverse portraits. Love the Putty verse community and missed the playfulness of everything in that community. It was great to pop online again and meet other putty peps. I've been working through Emile's Renaissance Business training to find this over-arching theme and thread to bring all the strands of work I do together.
I wonder... I wonder what a debrief would look like if you went into it looking at it from an appreciative inquiry angle, or taking a what surprised you, rather than what went well or badly?
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