Work, birds, tech, munipoli

Hello!

Meant to get this out earlier today, but the weekend took a series of unexpected turns. All’s good now—on with the show!

• I’ve been thinking about work. Fortunately, plenty of other folks—with much more widely varied experience, y’know, working—have been kind enough to share those thoughts online.
  • Lara Hogan organized years worth of practical tips and reflections, mostly on management but also on work in general. I’ve returned to her advice on giving feedback a number of times, and look forward to exploring all these other categories of advice.
  • Mandy Brown argues that place of work doesn’t matter, while also mattering a great deal. The former, in that working in-person vs. remotely doesn’t have an inherent advantage for, say, mentoring and development of junior staff. The latter, in that different locations of work require different approaches to realize our goals—and that managers and leadership need to be intentional about identifying and working toward those goals, giving attention to where and how their teams work in the process.
  • Steph Gray uses a timeline to reflect on a long period of work (over ten years), with the poignant note that you can timeline “as a way of reminding yourself to feel pride”. (I found this after reading Steph’s post on the system he helped rig up to track The Queue, the long line of people waiting to visit the Queen as she lay in state.)
• Audubon has released a visualization of bird migration patterns, including a feature where you can select a location (e.g., the city you live in) and see the birds that migrate from / to / through that place. It’s mindboggling to see the distances some birds—including the tiniest, unlikeliest species!—travel in the course of a year.
• Vass Bednar sums up the quiet shift Canada’s biggest companies have made, into giants increasingly enabled by Big Tech style techniques (and workforces). Loblaw is, as ever and appropriately, the prime example.
• Ottawa’s less than a month from the 2022 municipal election, and the reasons to vote are plentiful.
  • One of the tricky things with Ottawa is that, for almost any issue, multiple orders of government need to get involved (with each order represented through different bodies, again depending on the issue). It’s easy to disengage as a result, not knowing who and how to press for change. But it’s undeniable that the municipal level plays a huge role—including in projecting an ambition for the city.
  • Consider the plight and impending closure of a neighbourhood bike shop (full disclosure: the shop I frequent!), which suffered in numerous ways, one notable example being a long-delayed property tax bill that arrived too late to qualify the business for the city’s pandemic property tax relief program. Municipal programs matter. (Yes, they’re hardly the only factor at work here, see also my note above about the jurisdictional complexity of operating in this city.)
  • By the way, advance voting is open.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas