Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- weeknotes
- year
- born
- work
- life
- song
- london
All posts (101)
Looking out from my balcony at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Cairo, Egypt These weeknotes are over a week late. It’s been a busy time. After finishing up with work on Friday evening, I leapt straight for the ironing board to get a new set of work shirts ready for the following week. On Saturday morning, just after 6am, a...
Looking out at Millwall Inner Dock, 24 September 2026 A hectic week that, looking back, felt much longer than it was. Autumn is coming, making itself felt on Monday on my walk down to the train station; I kept swapping the hand I was using to carry a bag, burying the other one in a trouser pocket to keep warm. This...
Trying to work with an intermittent connection to the internet. The fact that Teams messages end up in a ‘failed to send’ or ‘failed to schedule’ state instead of being queued is very frustrating. Is a poor network connection an edge case now?
Finished reading Good Bye: Leading change better by attending to endings by Lizzie Bentley Bowers and Alison Lucas. I completely agree with the authors that paying attention to endings and ensuring that they are well-marked is important. There are some useful anecdotes and exercises in this book for anyone in a...
I’m at Album Club #187. I know Crash from when I was a kid, but have never heard the rest of the album.
I can’t remember the last time that I worked from home for two days in a row. It felt strange to leave my work laptop at my desk at the end of the first day, knowing that in the morning I would just pick up from where I left off. I guess I’m now fully acclimatised to mainly being in the office again. This week, we...
Whether you love it or hate it, I don’t think there is any denying that generative AI is an incredible technical achievement. I use Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot multiple times a day for all kinds of different things. But I’ve been struggling with questions about the technology that nobody around me seems...
In the middle of this week I got some clarity at work about the process we are following for a significant upcoming change. It put my mind at ease to hear that we’re doing all the right things. It’s still going to take some time, but I’m happy to know what we’re planning to do. This was a week in which I: Learned...
Looking back, I’d forgotten that Monday was a bank holiday. It certainly didn’t feel like a four-day week. We’ve known for months that the end of an era is approaching at work, but it still isn’t clear as to what comes next. So while there is plenty to do, and everyone is getting on with their initiatives, there is...
Finished reading Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. This was perfect to read just before bed to take my brain off to another time and place; undemanding but poignant. I love his writing.
With this many crisps, it can only be an Album Club. August has been a strange month to work through. The office has been quieter than usual as people have been off for their summer holidays. Unintuitively, the emptier the office is, the harder it is to concentrate, as your ears tune in to individual conversations....
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