As another week comes to an end, I find myself pondering the nature of time. A bit deep for a Sunday evening, I know.

I had an old friend in town. On Friday it hit me quite how old… it’s twenty five years since a strange teenage adventure in which our friendship was formed (of which thankfully there is no photographic evidence).

So time, then. It’s got this curious ability to feel both fleeting and infinite. There are days when hours stretch endlessly, weighed down by tasks and to-do lists. And yet a quarter of a century can slip through my fingers like sand, leaving me wondering where my life has gone.

What I’ve been up to this week

My big focus was the formal kick-off of a new project. We’ve an ambitious timeline and we’re working with a platform vendor as well as the client to deliver it. There’s no sugarcoating it: this one is going to be intense. But it was reassuring that everyone involves is well aware of that, and of the need for rapid delivery and decision-making to keep up that pace. We’ve got this.

Our other big programme is starting to make sense too. Between us and the internal team we’re making sense of the landscape and what we need to do, pragmatically, to move forward.

Between both of those, plus an ongoing programme and a smaller piece of work I have been spread rather more thinly than I’d like this week. I feel like I’m not really giving anything quite as much attention as I’d like. I’m grateful to have other members of the team who are able to crack on with minimal input from me. But I’m glad Jon’s back on Monday. This has NOT been a quiet summer.

Some non-work things I did this week

As I said, my old pal Adam was in town over the weekend. We met in Hong Kong when we were 18, hit it off immediately and, along with a mutual friend had a few weeks of madness that was standard for Wanchai in the late 90s (and which no teenager would believe today). But he’s one of those friends who I can go years without seeing, then pick up the conversation like it was yesterday.

Someone responded to my last weeknote to say it sounds like I am good at maintaining and nurturing friendships. I hadn’t really considered that before. But I guess I am. I’m lucky that I have a wide network of friends I’ve collected over the years. Every single one is important to me. I’m not always as good a friend as I’d like to be, but maintaining friendships does take effort.

Here’s a tip I picked up from Jane McGonigal on deepening relationships with people you’re rubbish at keeping in touch with, or new friends you’d like to know better.

• Text a friend you’ve been meaning to get in touch with and ask them: “How’s your day going, on a scale of 1 to 10?”. The scale’s important as it encourages people to share the reasoning behind their score.
• When they respond, ask them if there’s anything you can do to move that score up by 1. That shows that you’re willing to make an effort for the other person. It builds and encourages reciprocity.
• More often than not the friend will reply to say just you getting in touch has moved the dial up by itself. But if you commit to doing a thing, then do it.

McGonigal explains this, and the science behind it, in this video here.

The hotel review no one asked for

The early part of the week I spent in the Scandic in Helsinki. On the whole I like the Scandic chain, with its combination of good design, decent service and city-centre locations. It’s my no 1 choice when I’m in Scandiwegia.

This one was SO close to getting it right, and yet… it featured two of my pet hotel peeves in one ostensibly stylish room.

1 This is not a desk

I opted to get a hotel rather than stay with my friend as I had a shedload of work to do either side of the weekend and needed quiet, private space to join Teams calls.

But while there was plenty of space it was somehow all wrong.

All I ask is that someone actually attempts to do some work at whatever you’re selling as an in-room workstation.

2 These are not helpful curtains

I need it to be dark to sleep. These were perfectly decent curtains, yet no one had considered that given the angle of the walls these were functionally useless against the midnight sun of the Scandinavian summer.

It was so bright I might as well have been outside.