2021 Wrap Up

This is very much not a blog post about the struggles of working from home, or anything pandemic related — we’re all living that, every day. You don’t need to read about it, and I don’t want to write about it. Instead, this blog post is about the other stuff that’s happened this year.

The big work thing for me this year has been starting a new job.

In 2015 I started in the Home Office as a junior user researcher. Over six years, I’d been promoted several times and was doing a role I’d been striving for for years.

I worked with kind people on projects that we cared about. I had made friends for life over those six years. I understood the strategy and complexity of the space I was working in and I felt confident being there.

I considered the sort of work and organisational purpose that I felt would re-ignite my professional spark. It felt like fate that as these pieces clicked in my head, a job at Shelter came up.

The move to Shelter has been everything I hoped for, and more. There is no greater professional joy than working for an organisation that:

‘Making a difference’ is one of my core values; it’s shaped my entire career. But 2021 has been a year of realisation that I’ve been going about embedding it into my life in the wrong way.

I used to spend endless hours at work in the hope of achieving a positive outcome for users of public services. I would get home and read books about design before bed. I’d dream about ways to make services work better, and get up in the morning and go back to the office. It won’t surprise many people to learn that I burned out a lot.

It’s taken me a long while to realise this approach to trying to deliver value was counterproductive. It was no good for end-users when I wasn’t bringing my best ideas and energy to the services I was working on. It was also rubbish for the people I was managing — I wasn’t the reliable and attentive line manager that I wanted to be.

So this year has been the big realisation that I need to put my health and my work/life balance before anything else. If I want to be there for my team and deliver work that makes a difference, I need to bring a rested, collected and thoughtful version of myself to work. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

I used to read articles that said ‘work smarter, not harder’ and roll my eyes. I used to think they couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to be in my situation. But now I get it. I really get it.

Despite not knowing what was happening in the big, crazy world around me, I decided I needed some goals. I needed something to focus on and feel like I was working towards (perhaps because of the big, crazy world around me).

It sounds cheesy but goals should be big enough to scare you, and if something doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.

This year, my professional goals have focussed on defining ways of working or helping teams set themselves up for success. Achieving these goals has been down to using The 12 Week Year approach.

The 12 Week Year offers me a sense of reward in a working environment where work doesn’t get neatly wrapped up and finished all the time. It offers me the opportunity to reflect weekly. It gives me the motivation to block out time in my calendar to focus on what I need to get done. It gives me confidence to say ‘no’ to work that doesn’t align with my vision.

Taking more control of my calendar with my time blocks also helped me outside of my working hours. I set myself a goal this year to run 500 miles. I knew to make this work I was going to need to plan in my running and not let work overtake my personal time (as it can so easily do when working from home). I copied my running plans into my work calendar and 3–4 times a week, I got myself out into the fresh air, even if just for 25 mins. This way of planning meant that I ended up running over 800 miles this year.

My work calendar doesn’t just operate as a way to focus my time on achieving my work goals, it helps me see there is more to life than my work. It reminds me I’m a whole person.

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