PETALS
Regular insights to the PETALS framework, created and hosted by Si Jobling

Weekly 5 - On & Off Weeks

This week, Si talks about the ebb and flow of on and off weeks, some of the distractions and bigger picture thinking of the project along with some thoughts on Carson Tate’s productivity types.

Transcript

How does it feel when you had a little bit of an unproductive week, but you can't place your finger on why? That's why Petals comes in. So this is the fifth Petals weekly with me, Si jobberry, talking about what's been going on with Petals with me on all the projects and hopefully something for you to learn from towards the end as well. So in the nature of all petals, let's do those scores first. Productivity 2. Enjoyment 3. Teamwork 3. Learning 2. Serenity 3. With an average of 2.6, which is down 0.4 on last week. And now it's time to explain why. So, as you can probably tell over the past couple of weeks, I've not been in my typical studio setup. It is getting renovated right now, so things are in flux and it's not really helping my productivity and focus space. I'm lucky, I'm very lucky that I've got some alternative spaces to work in. I've got the dining area and the living room as well. And it all looks very classic. That's our style. But it's not really helping me get in the zone. And because I'm between spaces, I just feel like I can't get my head in the game. The other factor I've realized in more recent times is the fact that we typically work with two week sprints. Like a lot of the software engineering teams. That's how we typically do our petal snapshots with all the teams I've done this with. And because we do this two week stretch, the in between week tends to be less productive, let's say. And it's always towards the end of the two week sprint where things finally fall into place. I'm curious how this turns out for other people though with having a two week cycle. Do you have on weeks and off weeks, do you have productive weeks and not as very productive weeks? That's why I like looking at it holistically over two weeks rather than on the in between times. But there are pros and cons as to using both ways. Let's talk a bit more about the project as a whole. Okay. As I say, we are in mid sprint, let's say lots of things going on behind the scenes. And because this is our side hustle as well, we obviously are trying to fit in all our commitments around typical day jobs as well. This past week I've been trying to take a step up and zoom out a lens or two so we look at the bigger picture. We've got this web app that we're currently building and we're going to ship in Q1. That's the plan. But at the same time, how do we publicize this once it's ready? We've got lots of platforms available to us now. I'm doing this weekly content on YouTube and the socials and podcast. We've got the marketing website at Petals Team which was thrown together very quickly in the early days. Again, I had a very short timeline. I wanted to get something live, but as I look at it now, it doesn't necessarily explain why what Petals is all about and what it's doing quite well so far. Plus I've got a newsletter of a couple of hundred people that are interested in Petals. I don't want to just send content for the sake of it, but I do want to make sure that I'm engaging with that audience and getting value for both the audience and for me as well. So I've been taking a bit of a strategic look at like the comms plan, what the whole product looks like and actually thinking about putting some OKRs around the whole project. You know, OKRs are really useful to kind of give yourself some metrics and goals to measure and actually work out what's a feasible. I've brained up to loads of ideas the other week and threw them out to the team to see what they thought. Naturally way too much bring it back. And even looking annually like that is a lot to process. Why are we setting for goals for Q4 when we don't even know what's going to be happening in Q1 and 2 and 3? So we're taking a step back. I'm just going to look at some okrs for Q Q1 which I will probably share with you in the coming weeks because I want this to be transparent and out there for people to hold of account. But I also want to make sure we're not setting ourselves up to fail. I want to give us some nice potentially achievable goals and then hopefully we can deliver them. It doesn't mean that if we don't we fail, but at least we're getting ourselves something to work towards. So as part of that bigger strategic thinking, I've actually been exploring alternative website stacks. At the moment it's built with Next JS and a lot of other front end tech which can be a bit overwhelming and complex for what we're trying to achieve. I'm thinking it might be sensible to go for more of an eleventy solution which is a lot easier to build and compile. We've all got a bit of understanding of how that works as well. So it makes it a little bit easier to contribute to the content. But before I get into the implementation I just want to take another step back. Look at the content I've got. Look at the content that's relevant to the audience and make sure that that is clear. I don't need a massive website of information overload. A couple of pages should do the job. But typically like what the hell is Petals? Why should I use it and how can I get started with it? That should be enough. But again, if you are following along with this, I really would appreciate your thoughts. What has a website got that is useful, what is not there and you could do with. And again, what sort of communication would you prefer? I've been doing a bit of housekeeping on the newsletter. It was quite interesting to see some of the new brands that are signing up to Petals, obviously interested in team health as a whole and how they can introduce it to their organizations. I've also been doing a little bit of housekeeping on some of the design assets. We've got a Canva whiteboard that we use and drop all our prototypes together but I'm also created a new sheet with all our brand assets. So we've got logos and fonts and color schemes all ready to hand that we have do have a brand style guide in Canva as well but I just want one place to go to get all the variations of like logos and icons that can quickly drop onto any social media that we've just inter signed up to. Finally, I have been a little bit distracted last week with a different side project. I'm not going to go to the details but the Six nations would be tournament started again last weekend. I've been building and running a six nations calendar for the last five or six years so we just need a little bit of love on that website. I've got the content up to date, tidied up, a few front end quirks. It didn't take a lot of time but it was a bit of a distraction through Petals, which I typically would focus on in that quality time. So I thought what I have been doing for the past two or three months is setting up regular calendar events on a weekly basis where I give myself a couple of hours every other evening to focus on side projects. So it's typically from 8 till 10pm And I put that in my calendar so I've got that on a regular pulse and a reminder and what I can also do is actually put in the summary what exactly I will be doing for that evening. So if I get an idea in the day, I can quickly update the title, what that should be. If I've got an idea the day before again, just update the next one and then I've got to focus for a couple of hours just to get that thing done. I found this really effective to kind of give myself the quality time to focus on side projects. Other people might find the same concepts quite useful, but make giving yourself that headspace to focus on something that you want to do and you'll quickly accumulate quite a lot of good quality time to do what you want to do next time for learning so over the past week I've been listening to a lot more content and reading a few things, but the one book that did catch my attention this week is Work Simply by Carson Tate. What Carlson talks about in her content is the concept of productivity types. It's a little bit of a play on personality types, and it's taking another objective view of which type do you fall into. Be careful with this, but there were a few interesting takeaways that I took from her book. The research was done at General Motors many years ago where they looked at these different productivity types. They did an assessment with loads of people. General Motors has a lot of people to do that with, and what they did do is identify four main types. They have the Prioritizer, the Planner, the arranger, and visualizer. The Prioritizer is quite efficient at getting things done. They like to use data to their advantage and prioritize more regularly to get things done. The planner loves making lists. It likes to organize that data, and they also like to do that in particular order. The arranger tends to use their instinct to make the next decision. They work well with others and they like to present stuff visually. Sounds a lot like me. The visualizer likes to embrace the people around them. They love to go into heated discussions, put some structure around that by gathering everyone's thoughts, but actually solve the problems as a collective and take on that challenge face on. Which one do you think you fall into? I'm not going to say you fall into one of them, but you might find yourself leaning towards one of them yourself. I feel like I'm more of the arranger. I like the fact that I can go with my instincts. I like to work well with others, and I love to present that stuff visually in a more suitable form. I'm not saying I'm perfect in any sense, but that's definitely one of my types. So there you go. A little bit more food for thought for you this week. Which productivity type are you and which ones do you work with? How do you complement each other, how do you challenge each other and how can you get better out of your team environment? That's it for this week. I want to wrap it up there, be back next week with hopefully some more useful insights for you. Hopefully feeling a bit more productive. The scores have taken a dip this week and I want to try to get a bit more done and bring it back on that strategy plan, get a bit more constructive stuff done and make sure that we're on track with our deliveries for Q1. We are nearly halfway through Q1. It's not looking great at the moment, but I reckon we could pull it out of the bag if we just get a bit more structure and hopefully I can focus a bit more over the coming weeks. Thanks for following. If you don't already, like, subscribe and follow and all that good stuff on all the socials, let me know which productivity type you think you are and who you work with and next week I'll bring you more insights on all things Petals.

This week, Si talks about the ebb and flow of on and off weeks, some of the distractions and bigger picture thinking of the project along with some thoughts on Carson Tate’s productivity types.

CHAPTERS

00:24 Scores 00:43 What's been going on? 01:54 Bigger picture project progress 03:59 Simpler tech for the (not) Next marketing site 05:16 Tidier Canva(s) for designs 05:44 Sideline distraction with 6 Nations 06:12 Regular side project time in my calendar 07:07 Productivity types with Carson Tate

SHOW NOTES

PETALS website - https://petals.team/ 6 Nations Calendar - https://6nationscalendar.com/2025 Work Simply blink with Carson Tate - https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/work-simply-en

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Si Jobling