Overall, this month was… mixed. I felt like my brain was stagnant; not going to any bad places but also not really going to any good ones. Logically I know that’s my own fault for retreating into distraction-land rather than doing anything new or spending time with people. I have annual leave at the start of Nov, which I’m hoping to use as a bit of a reset button.
Fun
Music/Podcasts
On the 12th I ended up having a new-music day; I had intended to buy some newly-released albums on my radar today, then realised that I had missed some interesting ones that released in August and September. My “Inbox” in MusicBee briefly hit 500 songs, so it was time to pick some of the albums in the Inbox and decide whether they should be moved into my main library or if I didn’t like them as much as I expected. Every album I listened to that day – Better Days, disparity, Dead Silence, and Easier Said Than Done – went into the main library. My favourite new album this month was definitely Totorro’s Sofa So Good, however.
Data
I spent one day having a podcast-tidying spree on MusicBrainz. The task I set myself this time was to tidy up the episodes of No Such Thing As A Fish and Lateral that I added under the old rules for podcasts so that they reflected the improved rules for podcasts. For some reason I forget parts of the podcast guidance each time and need to look it up afresh whenever I return, and even then I doubt I’m doing parts of it correctly. This is weird for me, as normally detailed written instructions are my preferred way to understand things. My guess is that its because of the lack of concrete examples: it would be helpful for me to have confirmed-correct examples of every level of detail for an episode of some podcasts – the release group, the release, and the recording of the same episode – to remember how they fit together and which elements don’t need to be included at all three levels.
Games
Microsoft’s Game Pass re-work meant that the Ultimate tier contains more features and subscriptions, with a corresponding price rise. As Danny and I won’t use those extra features, paying the higher price isn’t logical, so we’ve cancelled our shared Ultimate sub. For now, I’ve dropped down to Game Pass Core, and I’ll see how often I find games that I want to play that aren’t accessible at that level before changing tiers again. So far I’ve found 4 games on my installed “I’ll play this eventually” pile which are no longer accessible, although one of them is Coffee Talk Episode 2, which I’m 99% sure I would buy anyway based on how much I liked its predecessor.
Work
Last month, a secondment for a 1-day-per-week Band 5 role in my team became available. I went for it, but was unsure about how successful I would be, as the full role contained three strands of work and I wasn’t sure which of these strands would be the focal point of this smaller role. If the data-quality aspect was the most important, my chances were pretty good, but if line-management was the most important part then I was out. The latter option was the true one so, while I was briefly disappointed, I quickly realised that not getting the role in its defined form was the better option for me. Also, the person who did get the role is very well-suited for it, and the people that she’ll be line-managing already like and trust her, so it worked out in the end.
I had my fair share of being an idiot this month. Firstly, I made an error with a patient referral that meant one request for a visit for them didn’t happen on time. Luckily no harm was done because I caught the error on the day that the request should have happened, so quickly informed the nurse in charge that day and got the request booked in for the next day. However, I was still rattled by my error, because it meant my error-preventing system hadn’t worked. After thinking it through later, and going back to my journal from that day, I figured out the problem; I had taken over referral processing straight after coming out of 2.5 hours of meetings, and had already been having the kind of anxiety-led day that meant I felt unable to ask anyone else to cover for me so that I could refocus. I had tunnel-visioned enough that I couldn’t see the logical option, which was stupid of me!
Secondly, I got more wound up than I should have about a new process not working as expected. The addition is a really good idea in theory, but when I asked straightforward (to me) questions about what options people should choose in certain situations, the answers I received clashed against each other, and revealed that the formerly logical-seeming process had been implemented in a way that would cause more data issues than it claimed to solve. This meant I had many more questions! My frustration in this case was partly from the annoyance of “this was so close to being great”, and partly from the knock-on effects for clinical staff, especially temporary staff, who will be put in situations where, in terms of data quality, they are literally unable to do the right thing. (At least this stuff is behind-the-scenes and not directly affecting patient care.)
On a more satisfying note, I’ve finally completed my side-projected of upgrading the spreadsheet that the therapy teams use to get an overview of how many people are being seen by the support workers each week. While it was originally a relatively smart spreadsheet that had conditional formatting, data validation, and an auto-updating results table, it was initially designed with all of these elements on the same page, which had led to most of the smart elements being degraded or accidentally deleted over time. However, it was so useful at its “quick overview” role, and so central to parts of the team’s work-day, that no-one wanted to change it. I proposed minor changes, starting with about separating out the data from the results and the validation to prevent breakage, which the therapy lead was all for. She then thought of some additions, such as colour-coded icons to track how long people had been on the caseload for, and extra information columns that the team would find useful.
Both teams are now using the new board, mostly successfully. However, I have a couple of aspects to repair/tweak once I’m back from my annual leave, as locking down some columns to protect their formulae has prevented sorting and filtering on adjacent columns, which slows down some tasks for the people who use the spreadsheet most.
Miscellaneous
I had my flu jab on the 7th through work, which was both very efficiently-done and very lacking in side-effects. I also gave my 17th (successful) / 20th (credited) blood donation on the 31st. I was hoping there would be vampire jokes, but unfortunately there were none; logically this makes sense due to the potential for people to find it upsetting rather than funny.