Week 4
![Week 4](/content/images/size/w1200/2025/01/anne-nygard-OJzEnupZWGM-unsplash-1.jpg)
Yeesh. The pace of things at the moment, right?
The weekend in Paris seems a distant, happy memory.
Everyone I know in consultancy land is flat out with ongoing client work and trying to reel in those Q4 numbers. It’s a bit wild.
This week has been a lot of that. A lot. And I’m still not sleeping well at all.
But the flip side is the pace of our renovation work. We were looking at being in our new offices in early Feb and given that is about a week away, it’s just not going to happen. We’re beyond frustrated at the glacial pace. We are weeks behind where we should be. Some of that is down to suppliers and some of that is down to our builder dropping the detail on a bunch of stuff.
We also now have the added complication of an injured dog back in our lives. We think Dilys jumped off the sofa and landed badly on Wednesday night. She seemed to make a recovery and the vet looked at her the next morning and also thought she was fine. But by Saturday afternoon she was not using her ramps and showing other signs that her back was bad. So back to the emergency out of hours vet and yes, the vet found a spot at the bottom end of where she had surgery that was causing her pain. So she’s drugged up while we wait to speak to our vet again on Monday and push for another referral down to Bristol Vet Specialists for an MRI to find out what is going on there.
We’re devastated. After all we’ve been through with her and we’re back looking at a 4th round of IVDD. Heartbreaking for her and us.
We need to rearrange our lives again to always be here for her, carry her between inside and outside and upstairs and downstairs. We need to stop people knocking on the door and over exciting her. We’ll get her pram out from storage so that we can at least get out with her in the pram and not become complete hermits again. My mental health can’t cope with that.
This week at work
It’s been a lot. Too much. The lack of sleep, the pressures of delivery and biz dev was honestly too much this week. My ability to emotionally regulate was nearly non-existent. The downside of ADHD.
I was not the Ann I aspire to be. I’m not happy about how I’ve been and that kicks off cycles of shame that are a lot to manage.
But the good:
- We finally got the final pieces in place to progress our discovery with Public Health Wales and direct user research starts next week. The team are ITCHING to get started.
- We had a great playback session this week with the client and the SRO for the work. Great to see an SRO involved at this level - and committing to attending our future playbacks as well.
- Public Health Wales are a joy to work with. It’s great to be talking regularly with Dafydd James and Iain Bell again.
- Handover of one of my other clients to another senior partner colleague is going well - there’s so much to understand and get to grips with. We’ve divided up now between in flight project delivery and challenges and the new pieces in mobilisation and that need proposals. So at least we have some focus.
- Booked my travel up to Llandudno to take part in the delivery of CDPS’s Future Leaders Scheme in early February. Looking forward to seeing some old friends up there :)
The less good
- my involvement with our work on a health board directory of service project has suffered this week with all the demands on proposal and bid writing. But I’ve blocked out big chunks of time next week to get into the detail.
- So much bid work that I don’t have capacity for right now. Working with others to try and find some cover on this.
- We didn’t win a thing we bid for and we had some weird feedback that we need to pick through. Always disappointing
- the utter lack of time this week to get to the client facing work.
- pushed to my limit this week and very nearly made a BIG decision. Ledge averted.
Challenges for next week
- people keep booking over time in my diary that is clearly marked out for focus time and I need to rigidly say NO next week.
- I need to handover and let go on a few things to reduce some stress.
- I need to get out at lunchtime for walks regardless of the dog.
The garden
I had my gardener in this week. Well, his team of 3 who have been a number of times now and love my garden as much as I do. They do the heavy lifting for me - moving matures plants/trees, pruning and retying all my roses, etc. But they are all also trained horticulturists so I know I can trust them to put things in the right places and make decisions without me.
I’m really happy with what they did this time, big movement of some big, mature cornus to better places, adjusting where other plants sit as a result and splitting out a mock orange and putting pieces of it in different places. It feels like the back bed has so much more structure and interest. Just one big gap in that bed to figure out.
And they recut a bed and made more space so now I have to figure out what can do in there for shape and structure. I think it’s going to be a bush shaped magnolia stellata.
They’ve also cut all the upright willow along the length of the stream. We can now re-weave all those willow whips into the smiling. Planning for the final length of spiling will start in the next few weeks.