Weeknotes S6 retro

I’m trying to more regularly retro my weeknotes practice to see what it is giving to me and what I might want to change.

Quick stats

• 10 weeknotes episodes over 12 weeks
• 1 x quicknotes from One Team Gov breakfast
• 1 x post about UK Gov Camp
• 11 x One Team Gov blogs that I hit the publish button for (after some editing, suggestions and re-writing)
• Weeknotes styles (published last year) still getting a lot of love from out there in the world. Thank you.

Themes

1. Weeknoting has been feeling a bit lonely of late.

I think that might be because legends of weeknotes have moved onto their own platforms (Steve) or are taking a bit of a break (Ian, Louise, Dan). Maybe I’m not seeing everyone’s posts or know who everyone is.

I don’t do this for the claps but I have seen these trail off, the average for this series has been 77.5 per episode.

This series has also had on average much less reads than I’ve seen in previous series, averaging 40.8 per weeknote (dragged up by a couple of posts that have been much more popular than the others).

In S5 this reads averaged 50.3 and S4 was getting 63.8.

The most “fans” I’ve had has been 19 but it averages about 11 per episode. Those people are my core weeknotes community and I really appreciate them keeping up with my babbling.

That said, my most recent weeknote (episode 10) has had 4 fans to date.

There is significant potential that my voice is becoming boring or that I’m not deviating from my comfortable subjects. So that’s something to think about. Perhaps I should move to month notes?

2. Writing about real things is more interesting, yo

By far my most popular posts have been about UK Gov Camp,

Notes from GovCamp #ukgc19

And my super bonus feature episode which featured SDinGov,

Weeknotes S6 Ep08

In both instances my views, reads and claps were undoubtedly boosted by being attached to an established “brand” with its own audience and reach. I do think that my post about SDinGov may have been helped along by sharing my notes from the event (which would be useful to others) and the fact that I spoke there. I think my post about GovCamp chimed with people who have an interest in introversion, mental health or similar as well as people with an interest in digital gov.

3. Writing about real things is hard tho

It takes a lot of energy to weeknote and it takes even more time and space to muse for a full post on a set theme. I intend to write more about my work but that will likely be on our departmental blog.

4. I’ve moved from being more obscure about my work to more detailed

This feeling of being a bit lonely also mirrors my move from being a bit more obscure about my work to being decidedly more detailed.

I have a lot to talk about with my new role which is very much in the public domain in ways I haven’t encountered in previous roles. But it’s possible that that is interesting to a limited number of people and the more generic posts were more universal — I’m not sure about that — I hope not.

What next?

I’m writing purdah notes because there are interesting things and thoughts coming together for me at work. I’ll publish them all after the local elections in May.

I might change my weeknote to everytwoweeksnotes, if I can pull these into line with our sprints and show and tells then that might be interesting. I will muse on this.

Byeeeeee!