I’m making up for lost time this week, after skipping last week’s weeknotes. The past two weeks have been nice: I managed to get up to Manchester to see my parents for the first time in half a year. Being in the countryside and being able to sit in their garden was a novelty: an east London balcony doesn’t quite cut it. I’d strongly recommend taking a week off, even if you think there’s nothing to do.

It’s been great being able to see friends and socialise (and drink) somewhere that isn’t a park – even if it’s freezing by 8pm. Signature Brew in Haggerston wins the award for being my first post-lockdown pint, with Strongroom coming in second.

I went to the new(ish) Monzo office on Thursday and had a surprisingly productive day. It was simultaneously great and weird to be back: seeing people I’d not seen in real life for a year, and seeing some people I’d never met in real life before. Turns out we’d forgotten how tall we all are.

It’s performance review season at work – it always take much longer than I remembered to write reviews for people who nominated it. Six months seems to be the perfect cadence for me to forget how long it actually takes… The only thing I’ve found that makes it less painful is to review others ‘little and often’ every few weeks, and then roll those together into a mega-review. Keeping a work diary has been a massive help (as per Crispin’s suggestion) with writing my own review: I set aside 30 minutes every Friday to write down some rough notes. It’s not quite the same as 5-15s, but “same energy”.

Other than that, there’s not much to report. I remain unvaccinated, despite asking the Francis Crick Institute if they had any spares on my way past the other day.

👋🏼