Hello?
I wish there were more songs like this that are funny, honest and self deprecating.
I wish it would stop raining for a while. Not for weeks, but just enough to get out in the sun for a while and feel like it’s summer. Feels like it’s passing me by (makes me say “my, my, my…”)
I wish I’d been more patient this week. Not to saintly levels or anything, but just enough to give people time and space to make their point before I feel like we need to move on and ‘get stuff done’. Making time for conversation really.
I wish I slept better. Waking up to feel really refreshed and ready to dive in and work at a sustained pace and feel like I’ve achieved something by the end of the day.
I wish I could dial down my emotions when I’m tired so that I can be more measured and deal with things better. Breaking down in a meeting may come across as being passionate, but makes me feel like I don’t have a handle on things. I wish that I could have told Steering Group how much I appreciated their support when it happened.
I wish I could wrap my arms around my team and tell them how amazing they’ve been this week; how proud I am of them, how I know how much pride they have in their work and how much I value that about them. I wish they didn’t feel that they have to make compromises to get the project over the line.
I wish we could have had more shared moments of “I’m feeling pretty good about it all” this week rather than swinging between moments of sheer panic at the scale of work to utter delight at the smallest thing being solved.
I wish we could have spent way, way more time together as a team learning how to use the new CMS rather than everyone being pitched in to have their own moments of discovery or learning the hard way.
I wish I was two people so that Work Me could just focus on that stuff and Non-work Me could get on with fixing all the other things that need sorting out. I wish that I didn’t have to leave everything to my amazing wife to cover for me while every spare hour went on work.
I wish this week could have been more about crafting perfect user journeys than it was just checking stuff works and fixing it. I wish I could travel back in time to tell Past Dorset “don’t structure the information architecture like that — you’ll regret it in 3 years time”.
I wish copy and paste wasn’t still the single most important skill I possess after 38 years in local government.
I wish I’d done more (better) discovery and found that thing I missed 4 months ago so that we didn’t have to run around to cobble something together now. I wish my mistakes didn’t have to lead to others having to work harder to fix them.
I wish I could take more pride in what we’ve achieved to date, working against huge odds rather than focusing on what’s still not right and needs fixing. I wish I could have more moments of stepping back and saying “oh man, that’s just beautiful” when I look it over. Because it is, actually.
I wish it was just over, or we’re six months in the future looking back and saying “that was intense, wasn’t it? But didn’t we just nail it?” I wish there was more time to Go Live and less time at the same time but there’s no time.