Week 20: Treasure

My week has been dominated by house viewings. In ~10 days I’ve gone from not being sure whether I can afford to buy, to having an offer accepted on a two-bed flat near Whitechapel 😬 I’m fully expecting something to go wrong and this is maybe far too fast, but I love the place.

I’m currently applying for a mortgage and sorting a solicitor, it’s all very sudden, a little stressful, but mostly exciting. What’s not fun is trying to balance work with fitting in calls/viewings but hopefully this part isn’t for too long. I also hate having to pick up the phone to unknown numbers.

Relatedly we’ve been trimming down some of our belongings, we’ve slowly expanded into our current flat which is pretty big for central London (and far larger than most places in my budget), so there’s been no need or incentive to get rid of stuff for the last two years.

We cleared a lot of clothing storage space, partly via fabric recycling and partly because I bought some vacuum packs. Yes, I’ve become that person who vacuum packs winter jumpers to save space, and it was very satisfying.

Glynn and I have been working on a treasure hunt for our department social for over a month, and on Friday we ran it. It was a huge success, and I had a lot of fun doing it! Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and all the teams managed to complete it. The premise of a virtual treasure hunt is that each clue leads to another, and clues were hidden across department-wide emails, Google Drive, Slack, websites we built, and phone numbers (we set up Twilio responders). The original idea wasn’t ours, Alice ran one before going on parental leave which was also a lot of fun. We’re going to follow up with a blog post, which is a nice chance to collaborate with Glynn some more.

I’ve not been this pumped full of adrenaline in a while; speaking in front of 80+ people is still enough to turn me into a bag of nerves. Afterwards, I was exhausted but happy.

Our CPIO ’s review was “That was the most fun I have had at work in about a year”, which is exactly what we were aiming for.

In an attempt to better organise my work and personal lives, I started using Remember the Milk, a TODO list app. It’s been really helpful so far in planning out my week and I think I’ve been more prepared for things, which has reduced stress. What I’m enjoying about RTM is that it doesn’t try to do too much, so I’m not documenting large parts of my work in a place separate from my team’s Jira board or Google Docs (something I had an issue with in the past with note-taking apps).

I’ve been working at home for a full year now, which is weird. When we move I’m going to focus properly on making a nice working space, as I think even when the office opens I’ll still be working from home more regularly. A huge positive, if I get the flat I’ve offered on, is that the building already has Hyperoptic, imagine not having to tether to your phone all day every day!