Weeknote 2025/24

June 15, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / 1 Comment

A red barge on the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam. It's a clear sunny day. — *Amsterdam summers are something else (Photo: me)*

Middle age has arrived, not with a crisis but with a calendar reminder. The quiet realisation that I’m now older than most start-up founders, Olympic athletes, and several government ministers. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

Between birthday reflections and packing for yet another work trip, it’s been a week of wrangling conference decks, academic papers, and coming to terms with the fact that my knees now make a noise when I stand up too fast.

This week at work

A week of contrasts. Juggling wildly different projects, which I tell myself is what keeps it interesting.

Finalised my slides for Intranet Italia Day next week, with a few solid practice runs
Helped a client plan how their leadership can actually show up on the social intranet — plus wrote quick-start guides for low-effort, high-impact engagement
Sat through a couple of intranet/employee experience vendor demos. One looked genuinely startled when I asked about things like functionality gaps, governance, or how this would work in an organisation with more than one type of employee. As if complexity were some kind of curveball, not the baseline most IC folks are dealing with.
Followed up on a series of workshops with a long-term client — great to see momentum building
Supporting our brilliant 300 Seconds speakers as they prep for Camp Digital (less than three weeks to go!)

Meanwhile, quietly ramping up a(nother) secret side project. More on that soon.

Also this week

Turned 45 this week. Officially middle-aged — not in crisis, just doing the maths. It’s the age where you realise that you’ve probably had more than you’re getting. Strangely, that’s a relief. Less to prove. More clarity. Fewer big swings. And the slow, inevitable expansion of the midsection.

A box of donuts with different icing and toppings — In the Netherlands, you bring cakes inn for everyone else for your birthday

A woman (me)with brown hair, holding a glass on Mimosa — In the Netherlands, you bring cakes inn for everyone else for your birthday

Because no one asked, here’s 45 lessons I’ve learned in 45 spins round the sun:

You don’t need to finish the book
Or the bottle
Lifting heavy weights makes you feel superhuman
If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time
Good lighting fixes many things
No one is thinking about you as much as you think they are
If you need to ask whether it’s worth the drama, it’s not
A well-timed “hmm” can save you hours
Good sleep beats any wellness trend.
You’ll never feel like going for a walk. Go anyway.
Pay attention to how people treat waitstaff
The hotel iron will ruin your top. Pack something that doesn’t crease.
Always look up. You’ll notice stuff and be glad you did.
Walk away. From the app. From the thread. From the man with a podcast.
Airports are emotional purgatories. Don’t make big decisions there.
Drink water, then decide if you’re really hungry
It’s OK to be the person who leaves early.
Wear the good outfit.
Cheap shoes are a false economy
You will regret trying to save money with a flight that leaves before 7am
A single “lol” can prevent a workplace argument.
It can also cause one.
Just because it’s urgent to them doesn’t mean it’s important to you (with thanks to the late David Pearson for the line “your bad planning is not my emergency”)
If you’ve packed contact lenses and your credit cards, everything you’ve forgotten is fixable
Never trust someone who says “I don’t do drama.” They are the drama.
Boundaries aren’t mean.
You don’t owe everyone an explanation. Most people aren’t even listening.
Sometimes the bravest thing is not replying.
There’s no award for most burnt out.
You can outgrow people without hating them.
Getting older is a win. Plenty of people don’t get the chance.
The red flag is never that subtle.
Skincare is mostly pseudo-science, except for good sunscreen. Factor 50 FTW.
Everything feels worse when you’re hungry.
You will never regret leaving a bad job.
But you will regret not standing up for yourself in it.
If a company says it’s a family, run.
You don’t owe anyone on the internet your attention
It’s OK to only give it 70% once in a while.
Confidence doesn’t come before doing the thing. It comes from doing it.
You can’t change people. Only your expectations of them.
Not everything has to be #content.
You’re not behind. You’re on your own route.
Compare your life to a LinkedIn post and you deserve the existential crisis that follows.
You can always make money. You can never make time.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting

This week’s descent into the rabbit hole: the Pentagon Pizza theory. Credit to the FT’s data editor, who noticed a spike in pizza orders near the Pentagon just before Israel’s recent strikes on Iran. Turns out: when staff start pulling long hours ahead of global mayhem, the local Domino’s gets busy. Forget Bloomberg terminals — the true indicator of looming geopolitical chaos is a pepperoni surge in Arlington.

📺 Watching

Caught Titan on Netflix — the docuseries that unpacks the doomed OceanGate submersible and the spectacular hubris that powered it. What starts as a story about billionaire adventurers quickly becomes a cautionary tale about ignoring experts, side-stepping safety protocols, and brushing off internal dissent.

If there’s a workplace moral here, it’s this: when someone raises a hand to say “this seems dangerous,” don’t label them difficult — listen. Whistleblowers aren’t the problem; they’re the last line of defence before disaster.

📚 Reading

This week’s book-writing milestone: a shiny new library card for the University of Amsterdam. Great social sciences collection, and a Proustian flashback to my dissertation days in Senate House. I’m loving getting stuck back into the communication theory I studied two decades ago — proof, perhaps, that a media degree is more useful than its “Mickey Mouse” reputation suggests.

A had with shiny pink nails holds a University of Amsterdam library card

This week’s highlight reel of academic page-turners included:

Technostress and internal branding (spoiler: it’s bad for you)
Digital comms in Industry 4.0 (less sexy than it sounds)
Digital internal communication: An interplay of socio-technical elements (it’s still the people, not the platform)
How to measure internal comms satisfaction (thrill! suspense! Likert scales!)

🎧 Listening

Caught the Happy Mondays at the Paradiso, and it was brilliant. I’ve seen them twice in recent years, both times in bigger venues, but there was something magic about seeing them up close in a packed, sweaty room. Bez was fully Bezzing, limbs everywhere, powering the crowd with vibes alone. Shaun Ryder barked out lyrics like a man reading a gas bill under protest. It was chaotic, feral, and all the better for it. No polish, no pretence — just joy at full volume.

Bez from the Happy Mondays, on stage with maracas

I’ve also been spinning the new Pulp album (in delicious blue vinyl). It’s gloriously familiar; simultaneously novel and like pulling on an old, comfortable jumper that somehow still fits perfectly. Jarvis sounds as sharp and sideways as ever, and the whole thing hums with that unmistakable mix of kitchen-sink melancholy and disco sleaze.

Connections

No one this week. Honestly, was people-d out after last week.

Travel

This week the wheelie bag and I are off to Milan, then London. I have a little spare time in both so shout if you’ve got time for wine.

This week in photos

Sanctum exercise in an atmospheric candlelit church

Weeknote 2025/23

June 8, 2025June 8, 2025 / Sharon O'Dea / Leave a comment

*On stage at LumApps Bright Paris (Photo: Andrew Hesselden)*

It’s been 13 days since my last weeknote and, somehow, I’ve crammed in a month’s worth of work, two cross-border events, several metric tonnes of confetti, and a minor brush with academic despair. I’ve danced under a disco ball in a museum, communed with inflatable robots in a laser fog, and read so many journal articles on “organisational sensemaking” that I briefly lost the will to live, then found it again in a footnote citing Habermas.

I’ve had days where I felt like a confident grown-up delivering keynotes and running strategy workshops, and others where I stared at a blank slide titled “Relevance at Scale” for so long I started to question whether anything in this life is ever truly relevant, let alone scalable.

Anyway. Here’s what else I’ve been up to while trying to outrun both burnout and late capitalism with a portable ring light and a decent day rate.

This week at work

It’s been a blur of conferences, client sessions, and the slow, creeping suspicion that time is folding in on itself. Conference season is in full swing, which means I’ve been knee-deep in decks, speaker notes, and trying not to visibly malfunction when someone asks me to “slow down a bit” — a request I find almost physically impossible once I’m excited and mid-flow.

First up was a thought leadership webinar for Cerkl on personalising comms at scale. Conveniently, it ties into a chapter of the book — distribution, personalisation, targeting, and relevance — so I got to test-drive some of our thinking in the wild.

Then came the European leg of LumApps Bright, where I gave the extended ‘director’s cut’ of my Chicago keynote — same themes, more depth, this time with added self-depreciation about my bad French. I also ran a roundtable on understanding employee needs, which turned into one of those lovely sessions where people are honest, energised, and insightful. DEEx and comms folks continue to impress me with their blend of grit, grace and spreadsheets.

There was also a UK client workshop — part of a series — and pleasingly, we can actually see momentum building between sessions. Progress. Real, tangible, post-it-note-covered progress.

*I asked Copilot to edit this to remove the text on post-its, for client confidentiality. It did, but also edited Jon to be a completely different person. Go figure.*

And with Camp Digital just around the corner, I’ve had prep calls with our brilliant first-time speakers. I can’t wait to see them in action — and to be the overly proud backstage goblin cheering them on.

Also this week

Went to Vincent op Vrijdag, the Van Gogh Museum’s monthly late-night opening — this time a joint venture with the Stedelijk, letting you do a cultural double-header with drinks. I saw the Anselm Kiefer show across both venues (big, bleak, brilliant), then stayed for the part where you dance under museum lighting and feel like a very sophisticated art heist is about to unfold.

Caught the Flaming Lips in Utrecht performing Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots in full — a retina-searing, glitter-drenched fever dream of lasers, confetti, and inflatable robots. Wayne Coyne, framed by a giant inflatable rainbow, looked like a man who’d seen the future and decided it needed more sequins. Utterly bonkers. Utterly wonderful.