bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

For years I’ve carved out a couple of hours each Thursday night to keep projects moving along. Whether it’s something I want to learn/explore/tinker with. Investments – due diligence/reading docs/sourcing etc. Or extra projects at work that I’m moving along. I call them Thursday night projects. Creative huh. Sometimes accompanied by a good whiskey 😀

But the thought is, usually on a Thursday I can squeeze a bit more in. Friday, you’re ending the week – and trying to work on something in the evening feels double hard then. So the ideas is to spend a few hours each Thursday, on a project, keeps it moving and means in the weekend you’re like, oh I have moved ahead on that! Which creates a nice sense of progress. And lets you enjoy the weekend. Should you want to dive in again, you can.

It’s also a great time each week, for those new years resolutions, or things you want to work on this year. You have some built in time. Does it happen every Thursday? No, it’s often a day of events, or long work days. But over a year, it’s not too hard to get 30-40 evenings in.

And it’s a nice thought, oh on Thursday I’ll spend a bit of time on that.

What’s on your Thursday night project list?

I attending the inaugural MeasureCamp New York in the weekend. It’s a kind of unconference, where the participants set the agenda. I haven’t been to one in at least 12 years?! They were popular early Web 2.0 era, as kind of a way to connect with this emerging digital community you were taking part in.

And post-covid, I think it’s the same thing, to get out and reconnect with the community. One aspect I like, is this is in the weekend. You kind of have to care about it, to get away for a day.

How it works is, there is a board, with session times & rooms. You simply take a card and put your session up. Typically eyeing up what else is on at that time, because hey you don’t want to miss out. Quite neat.

The best sessions tend to be those that are come up with on the day, based on demand/discussion or seeing gaps in the topics. These are often smaller groups and end up mainly conversations. And this environment is SO conducive for that.

And in New Zealand, more of them were like that, at least the ones I went to. This one though, folks were way more were prepared with some slick presentations (which is fine!).

I did a little session on ‘How to be more strategic’ pulling the thread on a recent LinkedIn post I did. If you speak with a wide slice of data & analytics folks, or peruse Reddit. Many are complaining about getting in modes of reactivity or being drowned with requests. And so sharing these, as a way to help elevate the teams.

The idea is to help give some tools or skills to get these teams to a better place. I pulled the slides together on the Path train on the way over. Thank goodness for Keynote. And managed to do a few tidy ups once I got there.

I promised I’d share the slides, here they are:

For future revisions to this presentation, I think I would, add more examples, build a template for the data brief. Expand on the reading.

Maybe some suggestions might be on an individual level getting mentors, or bringing in my coffee onboarding approach.

I would have loved to do a session on building machine learning models, or building analytics products, reducing cognitive load in analytics. But maybe for the next one!

Thanks to Jason Packer for getting it on my radar, I had completely missed it. If you get a chance to get along to an Unconference, give it a try, it’s a bit weird to start with but by the end you’ll have had a good time.