My yearly theme for 2024
It’s time to reveal my yearly theme for 2024 that’s inspired by the Cortex podcast. I’ll also reflect a little bit on my failures with last year’s theme.
Read MoreIt’s time to reveal my yearly theme for 2024 that’s inspired by the Cortex podcast. I’ll also reflect a little bit on my failures with last year’s theme.
Read MoreI recently came across this blog post by Tony Stubblebine which seemed like something I should shamelessly copy. Paraphrasing from that blog post:
If I can’t find at least 52 highlights from the year then something is wrong with my life.
So over the last few days I’ve been thinking about what has gone well for me in 2023 (both at work and at home). It was a bit of a struggle to get to 52 items but I think this is mostly because I’ve left it until the last minute to make this list.
I will aim to repeat this list in 2024 and so I’ve set up a weekly reminder to help me capture thoughts throughout the year. So without further delay, here are my ‘52 good things from 2023’ which are loosely arranged into a few major categories:
I did make a conscious effort this year to listen to more music (to compete with the ever-increasing number of podcasts that I listen to). I’ve failed to listen to as much music as I wanted to, but I did improve on things compared to last year.
So this section includes five music choices:
I/O album by Peter Gabriel. I’ve always been a fan of Peter Gabriel and I loved his offbeat approach to releasing this album (one new track has been released on every full moon of 2023). The full album was released in December and it has become one of my most listened-to albums this year. Listen to the ‘In-Side’ Dolby Atmos mix with headphones on. How can someone’s voice sound this good at age 73?
Guts by Olivia Rodrigo. I marvel at how much she’s developed her songwriting talent at such a young age. I love how she adapts some of these songs for public performance. Her Tiny Desk performance of some of the album tracks should definitely be watched.
Hackney Diamonds by The Rolling Stones. A stunning return to form by a band who have found a new burst of energy in the twilight of their career.
Now and Then by The Beatles. To be honest I wasn’t expecting the Beatles to release ‘new’ music in 2023. While I think this is a poorer ‘song’ that the previous two posthumous efforts (‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’) I love how the fragile, incomplete John Lennon demo has been transformed into the finished arrangement. I wonder how much AI will be used in future to clean up other old recordings with hums and background noises that would otherwise make them unlistenable.
Wendlo. Wendlo are an Atlanta-based duo who I discovered at some point on Instagram. They specialise in short-form video versions of cover songs with the ‘twist’ that they are seemingly all recorded live at various rooms in their home. Their cover of You Make My Dreams (Come True) is one of the best things I’ve listened to this year. Their voices blend so well. Their hallway-recording cover of Maybe I’m Amazed is also worth a watch/listen.
Moving on from music, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was my film highlight of the year. It expands on Into the Spider-Verse with a new palette of colours and characters. Just stunning animation and story-telling
One of my challenges this year was to read a book a month (I appreciate that others might consider this a very low bar but I was coming from a place of just not reading much at all). I have accomplished this (though I did re-read two books that I had not read in a long time) and I was helped by the next item on my list. I’ve heavily gravitated to science fiction and time-travel in particular:
A quick look at some of the apps and technology that made my year a better year.
Kobo eReader. One of the reasons why I was able to read more than usual was because I purchased a Kobo Libra 2 eReader. Unlike Amazon’s Kindle devices, the Kobo can integrate with the Libby app which means I can rent eBooks from my local library (for free) and read them on my Kobo. It also integrates with Pocket meaning you can use it to read your ‘read later’ articles you find on the internet if you want.
Pedometer++ app. I recently unlocked a 15,000 lifetime miles badge in this app which reflects that I’ve been using this app a long time (since my iPhone 5S). In a year where my body has atrophied from a lack of proper exercise, this app alone is the reason why I’m not in a worse state than I am. This year I broken my record for longest streak of 10,000 steps per day and if I can make it one more week, then that will become a 365 day streak.
Finity app. For many years, ‘Threes’ has been the go-to puzzle app that I resort to when I have a bit of time to kill and want to play a simple game. This year that has been replaced with Finity which recently became available through Apple Arcade.
Ivory app for Mastodon. Because of Elon Musk I no longer post to Twitter/X. I have effectively left that app behind and spend most of my social media hours on Mastdon (I’m @kbradnam@hachyderm.io). Ivory is a brilliant app which I use in preference to the default Mastodon app on iOS.
Use of Focus modes on iPad, iPhone and Apple watch. I’ve really doubled down on how I use focus modes this year. When I enter a particular focus mode, my home screens dramatically change to only show me relevant apps for that mode. In addition to the default ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, I use:
Discovery that you can run Linux on a Chromebook. I started getting back into programming this year (after a long absence). I had a data-driven problem I was trying to solve at work and this led me to write a Python script that gave me the answer. When I realised that you can run Linux on a Chromebook I bought one as a little ‘programmers playground’ to (hopefully) help me develop my fledgling Python skills. This has been helped by…
…Using ChatGPT more. I hadn’t realised just how good ChatGPT could be for certain tasks. Needing to learn Python, I have found it invaluable for giving me the framework to write pieces of code. A useful skill for all of us in 2024 is ‘learn how to ask AI agents the right questions’.
Completing my mirrored keyboard and mouse setup at home and work. I have a work laptop + keyboard + mouse provided by my employer. They are, predictably, all pieces of hardware made by Dell. Yuk. I can’t live like that. At home I use a Logitech K380 keyboard (in black) and a M720 mouse. Both of which can be paired with three devices (work PC, iPad and Chromebook). For a long while I was taking them into work on the two-days a week I work in London. I then bought a second-hand M720 mouse to keep at work and this year I found a cheap used K380 keyboard on eBay. This also is kept in my locker at work meaning that I have the same setup at home and work and no longer have to carry anything back and forth. Sidenote: I use the extra buttons on the mouse to act as next/previous tab shortcuts in web browsers and Excel…this saves me a lot of time!
Successful completion of two big change management IT projects. I led the upgrade of our website from an older version of the Sitefinity CMS to a modern version. This required jumping over half a dozen major releases. So lots of things could break. I also led a project to migrate the off-brand email addresses used by our bulk email platform to an on-brand set of addresses (i.e. email addresses that end in @rcpsych.ac.uk). Like many good IT projects, if you are successful then hardly anyone notices and people wonder what all the fuss was about. Apart from some minor bumps, I was successful with both projects.
I became a productivity ninja. At the end of 2022 I had a ‘learning day’ at my place of employment (all employees spend the days taking various training courses). One of the training courses I took was run by an outside agency and was all about becoming a ‘productivity ninja’. We were given a free eBook version of How to be a Productivity Ninja: Worry Less, Achieve More, Love What You Do. I put off reading this book until the middle of this year. It might sound hyperbolic, but this book has changed my life…well, my work life at least. Most of the information in the book are things I’ve come across in the past, but reading them all in one go resonated so much with me. My stress levels at work (which had been high) have now gone. My ‘second brain’ now captures everything I need to be doing and that has taken a weight off my mind.
Learning day presentation. One year later after that revolutionary learning day, I was asked to present something to others where I work. So I ended up running two 1.5 hour sessions on ways to improve web content. My talk title was ‘Sorry I didn’t read it: 10 reasons why people are completely ignoring your presentation…and tips to help address this’. I love giving presentations - which I sadly don’t have much opportunity to do in my current job, and so I thoroughly enjoyed working on this (and hopefully it was well received).
Identifying the people who generate a lot of work for us. My team approves website updates submitted by others. There are over a hundred staff members who are trained to use our website and the number of submissions has steadily been rising over the last few years. I realised that because the website generates an email (with the submitters name in) for each update, I could export all of those emails to a text file and then write a Python script to process the information. This has let us - for the first time - clearly see which individuals are contributing to more of our workload and this in turn has enabled us to make some changes to reduce our overall workload.
Created FAQs. In addition to approving website updates one of the other things my team does is to answer general enquiries to our ‘Web team inbox’. Like our website submissions, these have also been steadily rising over time. So this year, I decided to create an extensive set of FAQ items (almost 100 at the time of writing) which we can point people to. This will hopefully save us a lot of time in dealing with repetitive enquiries in future.
My wife. My wife is exceedingly generous with her time and attention for other people. I have been a beneficiary of this in 2023 (as in other years) but I feel that this year she has gone above and beyond when helping her friends, family and colleagues. She always put other people first and volunteers her time unselfishly.
10 year old’s artwork. My eldest son has been into drawing for the last few years but this is the year where his passion, and his talent, have really exploded. Almost every day he runs into a room to show us his latest drawing. I was touched by the David Tennant-era Doctor Who Christmas card that he drew (and painted) for me.
5 year old’s 500 word story. My youngest son submitted an entry for the BBC’s 500 words competition. This was mostly dictated into his iPad with me and his mum acting as editors (mostly to correct typos and occasionally make some suggestions for him). We submitted the story and recently heard that he has made it past the first round!
80th surprise party. My side of the family are not especially close but it was lovely that we could all get together this year to surprise my mum for her 80th birthday. She walked into a restaurant with one of my brothers only to discover all of her children, grandchildren and partners/spouses. This might be one of the few times that all of her children and grandchildren have been together.
Heringsalat. My father-in-law is German and so we celebrate Heligabend on Christmas Eve and he always makes a wondrous herring salad. It’s one of those things that tastes amazing partly because you know you will only be eating it at this one time of the year.
Sticky toffee pudding. My wife makes an amazing sticky toffee pudding which I ate far too much of this Christmas.
Ambleford. Both boys had birthdays at Ambleford this year. This is just an amazing outdoor venue which has a mission of being a ‘school of rural skills’. They also host kids parties in a brilliant environment where kids can do things like archery and then learn to make their own bow. Both boys loved their parties so much we are planning to return in 2024.
Trip to Hastings with boys. During school holidays my wife and I juggle child care responsibilities (if they are not in any organised activity). Occasionally one of us will take the boys on a day out somewhere which can be a mixed bag (largely depending on the mood of the boys and how much they bicker). Occasionally, we experience one of those magical days where the kids enjoy everything, the parent on duty enjoys everything, and where they sleep in the car on the way home as they are worn out. I had one such day in April where we spent the whole day in Hastings. This included playing mini-golf, going for walks on the beach, and then finding a cool park to hang-out in.
Star Wars surprise trip. In April I also took my eldest boy on a surprise trip to see a Star Wars exhibition in London. The exhibition consisted of fan-made Star Wars props and costumes. He loved it and it was just a lovely day with him in which we also did some sightseeing around London.
Volk’s electric railway. In May we took a family trip to Brighton. This was ostensibly to visit the world’s oldest electric railway because my 5-year old loves anything to do with trains (and buses, trucks, tractors etc.). The electric railway was fun but we also randomly happened across a delightful children’s street parade that was part of the annual Brighton Festival.
Trip to Folkestone. In May I took my train-obsessed 5-year old on a train ride to Folkestone. It was a beautiful sunny day and it was just lovely to hang out with him and go for a walk on the beach.
Superhero video. I occasionally try to make little fun video projects with the kids. In May I filmed some footage of our 5-year old acting as a superhero.
Taking my kids to work. Yet another daddy plus kids outing. In June, took them to see where I worked and my eldest got to shake the hands of our College President! This trip also included a walk up the Monument (something I wasn’t sure if the 5-year old would endure) and they still had energy enough to take a trip up to the top of Tower Bridge.
Family holiday to Le Touquet, France. Our short family holiday to France was simple, relaxing, and enjoyable. Fresh bread from the boulangerie each morning and then time on the beach every day.
Hannover new town hall. We also had a short family trip to Hannover, Germany. The highlight for me was ascending the elevator to the top of the ‘new’ town hall) (it opened in 1913). To reach the very top the elevator has to travel in an arc alongside the dome of the town hall. The elevator also has a glass floor.
Trip to Whatman Park. The boys love parks and playgrounds and so I’m always on the look out for new place to take them. In August - on one of the hottest days of the year - I took them to Whatman Park. They enjoyed the boardwalk walk amongst the trees. I enjoyed the DNA sculpture.
Bexhill Museum. Managing to just fit this in 2023, we took a quick family day trip to Bexhill-on-sea and visited the small, but perfectly formed Bexhill museum. If you are looking for dinosaur footprints, period costumes from the last 200 years, model railways, and a steam powered car…then this is the place to come.
A mixed-bag of things that didn’t neatly fit into the above categories:
Trip to Berlin. I had a long weekend in Berlin this summer. It was my first time visiting and despite getting very ill and needing to take a COVID test (it was negative), I had a fantastic time exploring the city.
Public transport in Berlin. I’m breaking this into a separate category as I was so impressed by how easy (and cheap) it was to get around Berlin by public transport. I was particularly impressed by the BVG app(s) which I was able to set up on my phone before I left the UK.
Cinema Love Song LoFi edition. During my PhD I was in a band and we played several local gigs. I enjoyed writing some of the songs we played and this year I woke up having dreamed about a song that I had written (‘Cinema Love Song’). I decided to try to play the song that day but was shocked to realised that I no longer remembered all the chords. It became my mission to work out how to play it and then I tried recording a ‘LoFi’ version of it using Garageband.
Architecture tour of London. I love architecture and so I spent one Saturday following a self-guided tour in the City of London which focused on new London architecture. It was wonderful.
Ikea store under construction design. Such a simple thing to do for Ikea’s latest store in London, but so delightful (picture is included below).
Playing Ol’ 55. I’m a terrible singer who can barely hold a tune but that doesn’t stop me trying. One week this year I developed a real throaty cough that made my voice very gravelly. That gave me the inspiration to try recording a Tom Waits song.
British Museum. I realised that I hadn’t visited this museum for something like 20 years so spent an afternoon wandering around (but mostly admiring the Great Court).
Weald of Kent Tractor Run. Every December, a local young farmers group organises a ‘tractor run’ which sees something like 100 or so tractors drive around some local villages and towns. All of the tractors are lit up like Christmas trees. It’s all to raise money for a local air ambulance charity.
Travel insurance. In 2022, our youngest son fell ill when we were on holiday in America. He had to spend a night in the ER but was fine in the end. At the time, we didn’t have to make any sort of payment and just gave over our travel insurance details. Eight months later we heard from the hospital telling us we needed to pay $20,000 and that our insurance didn’t cover us!!!This has finally been resolved (our insurance did cover us) but not after a lot of back-and-forth phone calls between our insurance provider and the hospital in America.
Tower Bridge / London Bridge public art. My twice-weekly commute takes me from London Bridge station across Tower Bridge. I always appreciate the views and enjoy the frequently rotating public art sculptures that feature in this area.
Lasagne recipe. Occasionally I like to cook a meal that takes a long time to prepare. The recipe for lasagne that I use necessitates a long, slow approach. One step alone is to infuse the milk that you will use for the béchamel sauce with cloves, bay leaves and an onion for over an hour.
Remembrance day parade. Like every town and village in the country, our town organises a remembrance day service which culminates with a march up the High Street to visit the war memorial where speeches are made. Walking up the main road with so many other townsfolk felt very moving. A real sense of community.
Jigsaws. Once a year we take a short break in some farm cottages that we’ve been going to for a few years now. They have a room between the cottages that is just filled with games and jigsaw puzzles. My wife and I get a bit obsessive about trying to complete such puzzles. Simple pleasures.
Taking EV to France. On our trip to France this year we took our EV across the tunnel. I already get range anxiety in the UK so it felt a bit more stressful in having to plan around the charging network in another country. Thankfully, it went pretty smoothly thanks to Lidl having very reliable charging stations.
Bob Boilen’s final show on NPR. When I lived in America, I religiously listened to the All Songs Considered podcast. This podcast was responsible for me purchasing so much music when I lived there. The main host, Bob Boilen, was such a lovely avuncular figure who so clearly had a love of so many different types of music. Over the years, I’ve not listened to the show as regularly though I still subscribe to the podcast. In October I was surprised to see the episode description say Bob Boilen’s farewell show. After 23 years he was stepping down. I was genuinely shocked by this. I just assumed that he would go on forever. After his co-host (Robin Hilton) introduced lots of songs on the theme of ‘goodbye’, it was down to Bob to play out the show with his final pick. When the opening bars to George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ started playing, I just found myself in tears. I’ve never met Bob but I feel that he has been a major part of my life and I was just sad (in a good way) to hear that he was retiring.
At the turn of the millennium I was finishing my PhD in Nottingham. During that time I was in a band (the Sunflowers) and we had a lot of fun writing songs, playing local gigs and recording a couple of albums.
I played rhythm guitar in the band and very occasionally sang (badly, it has to be said). I also wrote quite a lot of songs. One of my songs which I was really pleased with was called ‘Cinema Love Song’ and it was released on our second album (‘Heliotherapy’).
The genesis of this song was formed from my observations of people in the cafe of the Broadway cinema in Nottingham This gave rise to the content of the opening verse as well as the title of the song. After the opening, the lyrics revert to my standard song-writing theme of the time (self-pitying loneliness). The song was probably written in 1999 or 2000. Here is the original recording (note this is not me singing):
Fast-forward 20 or so years and I found myself - for some unknown reason - dreaming about the song on New Years Eve 2022. I woke up and realised that I was unable to remember the lyrics to the later verses. This troubled me greatly…though I don’t know why I expect to have immediate recall of song lyrics that I wrote several decades ago!
I immediately played the original on my phone and then spent the rest of the day trying to work out how to play the song (I have long since lost any record of the chords or lyrics).
It took me a couple of days to finally work out all the chords and - on a whim - I decided to have a go at re-recording the song in a LoFi style (because that’s what all the kids are listening to, right?).
So here are two versions of the song recorded over 20 years after the original. One with (badly sung) lyrics and one as an instrumental.
Enjoy (or not as the case may be)! I’ve provided download links for my two new versions. Maybe this will be the start of a reinvention of other 20-year old songs?
After four and a half years as the Digital Strategy Manager at the The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), I am moving on to pastures new. My new role — at The Royal College of Psychiatrists — will probably feature in some future blog posts, but for now I wanted to reflect on my time at the ICR.
In particular I want to look back at three broad areas which have seen some notable changes while I have been at the helm of the ICR’s Digital Team. For some of these I also want to provide some explanation as to why things needed to change.
I’d like to extend my thanks to the amazing members of the Digital Team that I have worked with over the last few years, including several wonderful interns. They have all helped implement many of the changes that I talk about in this post.
We have made lots of small changes to how our news items, blog posts, and feature articles have appeared. These mostly include adding more things to each article:
This can clearly be illustrated by comparing a typical recent news post with one from 2015. The goal of these changes was to make the content richer, more useful, and more engaging.
The last item on the list above — consistently tagging content — has enabled the development of dynamically updated landing pages for specific cancer types or research themes, e.g. brain cancer and genomics. This means that the small act of tagging content as we go, means we can aggregate content in different ways at a later date.
Another important change for our editorial content is that we applied to have it treated as a source of news by Google. This resulted in ICR stories not only showing up prominently in Google News, but also they can sometimes be included in the main Google search results for relevant queries:
This change led to a significant increase in traffic to the website from Google and is probably one of the biggest changes from the last few years that has hopefully attracted new users to the website.
We now have comparative data points for almost 1,200 pieces of editorial content. This has been achieved by logging how many page views each news item, blog post, or feature article has received in the first seven days it has been up on the website. We also have categorised each piece of content in a systematic way (e.g. research news items vs institutional announcement news item vs cancer awareness month blog post etc.)
This has produced a rich resource which has been able to quantify how our content has improved over time (as well as tracking how our output has changed over time). The categorisation has also enabled us clearly compare the success/failure of content in a like-for-like manner (e.g. policy-related stories can be compared to other policy-related stories).
If you don’t have a way of quantifying whether your content is good or bad, then it is very hard to make meaningful changes without being able to measure the influence of those changes.
For social media, I developed an internal metric to measure the monthly performance of our social media posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. This metric ends up being a very large number which mostly captures the reach of our posts but also factors in engagement on social media platforms.
This involves calculating the reach of all posts on each platform in any given month, and then increasing that number by the engagement rate of posts on that platform (there’s a few other things going on as well but this describes the essence of it).
The real utility of developing metrics like this is in being able to look at trends over long time periods.
This internal metric was complemented by registering the ICR to be tracked by EduRank, an independent social media benchmarking service for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
It was pleasing to see that my internal metric related well to our monthly EduRank ranking. It has also been pleasing to see that as a smaller HEI — with very few students — we typically ranked in the top 25% of the more than 200 HEIs tracked by EduRank.
We launched an Instagram channel in late 2016, which has now grown to have almost 2,500 followers. This platform was subsequently recognised in 2019 as being one of the top ten cancer centres on Instagram.
We also launched an Apple News channel, making the ICR one of of only two cancer research organisations to have a presence on this platform (or at least as far as I can tell…the other one is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute).
On our existing social media platforms we have embraced the use of infographics and I have occasionally tried making short animations to try to succinctly explain some details of our big news stories. Here is one of my favourite ones about an artificial intelligence approach that tries to predict how cancers might evolve.
We flirted with using Storify for a time to collate together all of our social media — and the resulting media coverage — around our big news stories. Storify is no more but Twitter Moments has been a good substitute (a recent Moment looked at how ICR staff were coping with working at home).
We have also launched a series of email newsletters providing another route to share news and updates from the ICR.
One final innovation that I will highlight here is the change to creating short videos with ICR scientists at conferences. Modern smart phones can produce completely acceptable video quality, especially for use on social media. If you add a cheap (as little as £10) lapel mic, you can record suitable quality audio too.
I have recorded several of these videos at conferences and have always been able to edit them (just using iMovie on my iPhone) and then publish them to social media on the same day they were filmed. E.g. here is the ICR’s Professor Ros Eeles captured at the NCRI 2019 conference last year.
On the topic of the NCRI conference, I’m insanely proud for spotting the opportunity to have some fun with the big #NCRI hashtag sign that was set up during the conference. Couldn't miss this opportunity for some ICR branding!
It’s been an exciting time at the ICR and hopefully some of the changes that I have helped introduce will continue to have a positive influence for a while longer. However, the nature of digital platforms is that things are always in flux.
An approach that works well today may become irrelevant in a year’s time. There will be new social media platforms in future and existing ones will continue to evolve. Legal frameworks — such as those that relate to GDPR and accessibility — are also drivers of change across the digital landscape and organisations have to be responsive to changes in the law.
It feels hard to know exactly how we will all be using websites and other digital platforms in the near future. It is safe to say though, that things will be different and I very much look forward to finding out what lies ahead!
I was recently interviewed by 46 questions For Scientists who have a remit to "Make science inclusive by highlighting those that do it". Although I am no longer a scientist, they seemed keen to include people who represent 'science-adjacent' areas (such as science communication).
The questions were fun to answer. If you were wondering, they went with 46 questions as that is the number of human chromosomes (23 pairs).
This blog post is repurposed from a very long Twitter thread (which became a bit unthreaded)…
Over the last week, I have seen several discussions on Twitter about the implications of sending emails outside of standard working hours, particularly on weekends. The simplest form of this debate boils down to ‘Don’t do this’. However, there are many counterarguments, many of which are valid.
Most notably, it is increasingly common to have teams where people work flexible hours and work outside of standard office hours as part of their contract (I’ll leave aside the even more obvious case of teams that are internationally distributed).
A second common argument for sending emails during evenings and weekends is that people are catching up after busy days/weeks and evenings/weekends are the only time they have to actually send emails that need to be sent.
I have some sympathy for this argument as I know only too well what it can feel like to have a day full of meetings, leaving no time to actually take forward action items agreed at any meeting.
There are a couple of important areas which I think have not really been covered in these Twitter debates.
Firstly, I’m assuming that some (but not many) businesses may have policies in place that clarify expectations about email use. This should really be considered a part of general workplace culture. If a policy is in place then the issue is whether people are adhering to it.
Sending emails late at night can create an expectation to others that they are also expected to work late…especially when emails are from people higher up the chain of management.
I bet most senders of such emails don’t ever *intend* to create such an expectation, but if this is not clearly stated then it feels like it does generate a sense of pressure.
However, I’m sure that it is hard to develop practical workplace policies that can address all of the myriad exceptions and complications that can arise around how email could and should be used in the workplace.
For instance, in my own line of work (communications), it is not unreasonable to expect to receive emails at all times of the week. We frequently issue press releases with midnight embargoes and work to promote such news on our website and social media channels.
More relevant to the field of communications is the fact that sometimes emergencies happen which necessitate important emails. Clearly, there are times when it is perfectly acceptable to send emails at any time of the day.
This leads me to my second point which hasn’t really been covered in a lot of the discussion I’ve seen. Why is the person sending an email late at night or at the weekends?
Are they emailing at that time because it is part of their working hours? Are they emailing about a critically time-sensitive issue or an emergency? Have they had a day full of meetings and are just trying to catch up?
If the answers to any of these questions are ‘yes’ then the email is probably justified. However, this leaves the occasions where people work regular 9-5 hours but frequently persist — out of necessity or enjoyment — in continuing to work.
I will admit to working out of hours for my own personal pleasure. I like solving technical problems and I love working with spreadsheets. So last weekend I spent time trying to better model website traffic in light of GDPR restrictions because I want to do this and I found it fun. However, I didn’t send any emails about it to anyone.
So I think excessive evening/weekend emails from people who have less of a justification for sending them is my real issue in this debate. Rightly or wrongly, such emails can create a sense of pressure to those receiving them.
It also sends signals about the wider organisational culture. Should it be accepted that people need to work a lot of additional hours to stay on top of their jobs?
To end this post, I want to offer five suggestions for ways to improve this.
If you need to work outside of standard hours, and that work involves email, feel free to write your emails but don’t send them (save as draft). Wait until you are next in the office before sending.
Use technology to help (if possible). Some email clients allow (or have plug-ins that allow) emails to be scheduled. Some tools offer the ability to flag certain contacts as VIPs, and then notifications can be configured to only alert you when VIP contacts email you (admittedly this is not a huge help if a VIP contact sends you lots of emails outside normal hours).
Prefix emails with suitable disclaimers to set expectations accordingly, e.g. “Catching up on a backlog of work tonight, please do not look at this until you are next in the office”. Alternatively, include such information in your email signature (h/t Kat Arney via Ben Kolbington)
More broadly, set clear expectations for your team/department, e.g. when new people start, explain to them whether they will or will not be expected to sometimes check (or send) emails out of hours.
Lobby your organisation. If multiple people feel burdened by the pressure from receiving late night and weekend demands, investigate the possibility of establishing a workplace policy that might offer some clearer guidance on the expectations of employees.
It's a completely arbitrary milestone but The Institute of Cancer Research — where I work as the Digital Strategy Manager — has now reached a social media audience of over 50K followers/subscribers!
This milestone — which happened at some point in the last few days — is calculated by combining followers/subscribers across different platforms so while it clearly doesn't represent 50,000 unique individuals, I'm still very happy with reaching this point.
When I started at the ICR (Jan 2016) I estimate that we had 12–14K followers. Back them, I was less diligent at collecting this data; if you don't manually collect it there is no easy way to obtain such historical data. Now I routinely collect data each week (spreadsheets are your friend).
Here's how the top four platforms have changed over time. Facebook and LinkedIn have been battling it out for quite a while but LinkedIn has emerged as the clear victor!
The sudden jump in Twitter followers last year was from a single news story going viral (deservedly so)!
Our other platforms (YouTube, Pinterest, and Apple News) are all in the triple-digit range for followers. However, Apple News is our fastest growing platform (admittedly easier to start from a low base), growing 173% in 2019.
As far as I can tell, we are one of only a few academic science institutions that has created an Apple News channel, and only the second cancer research organisation to have a presence (just search Apple News for 'cancer research' and scroll down to the list of channels to find us!).
Next stop, 100K followers! Though I'll also be happy to see Instagram reach 10K (this is when you unlock the power of adding 'swipe up' links to story posts!).
Sometimes I forget that I have this blog and I can use it to link to other blog posts that I’ve written! In the last month I’ve helped with a couple of Science Talk blog posts at the ICR.
At the start of December I co-wrote a blog post, with Sam Dick, to mark the end of the 100,000 Genomes Project:
And then today, with Rose Wu, I helped put together a new blog post that looks back at some of the exciting things that have happened — in and out of the lab — at the ICR this year:
It’s probably not every year that I’ll get to reference ‘Buckingham Palace’ in a blog post title!
Yesterday was LGBT+ STEM Day — the first ever day to celebrate and highlight the role of LGBT+ people working in the field of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM).
In my role as Digital Strategy Manager at The Institute of Cancer Research, it was great to be able to focus all of our social media output on this topic. I'm proud that the ICR is really committed to equality in the workplace.
It was particularly fun to be able to rebrand our social media avatars and banners:
I really enjoyed the opportunity to make a 'videographics' which played around a little more with the ICR's logo. The five coloured bars in the ICR's logo are spaced according to the Fibonacci series. There are, of course, six colours in the Pride rainbow…
At the ICR we are committed to equality and as a @stonewalluk Equality Champion, we are working to ensure a fully inclusive workplace. 🏳️🌈#LGBT #LGBTSTEMDay #LondonPride pic.twitter.com/9ogvzERUqp
— The ICR (@ICR_London) July 5, 2018
As I am now a professional science communicator and as I spend a lot of my time looking at trends and developments in website metrics and social media, I thought that maybe I should have a separate blog for any ideas I have.
There are only two posts so far, and I can't guarantee that I will post here very frequently:
For the second time in my life I am flattered to say that I have been interviewed by Front Line Genomics. The last time this happened was when I was a scientist…this time I feature in their 'The Short Read' segment where I provide some answers about what I'm up to now at the The Institute of Cancer Research.
Read the interview online:
I'm not quite sure why it has taken me just over a year at The Institute of Cancer Research before writing a post for the Science Talk blog, but that's what happened.
This blog post is all about my experiences at the recent Festival of Genomics conference in London, organised by Front Line Genomics — who once featured me in their magazine. It felt fitting to write about something so closely aligned to my previous life as a genomics researcher.
Anyway, here is my blog post if you are interested…I hope it won't take me a year before writing another one!
When I lived in Davis and when we were entertaining friends and family at Thanksgiving I would always try to entertain our guests with a postprandial quiz of my own devising. I would wait until the guests had eaten their fill in order to ensure their near-comatose state forbids them an easy escape.
Scroll down for answers…
The Latin name for Turkey is Meleagris gallopavo, and turkeys belong to the family of birds called Phasianidae, (Face-ee-ann-i-die). So which of the following birds are also in the same family and hence closely related to turkeys?
A turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. But this is not the only example of food items being stuffed inside other food items. The name for this culinary technique is engastration.
You will see five dishes listed below; four of these dishes involve meat, but one of them is a dessert dish. 1 point for each of the correct blank spaces that you fill in. Order of stuffing not important
Round 1: Is it a turkey?
The Latin name for Turkey is Meleagris gallopavo, and turkeys belong to the family of birds called Phasianidae, (Face-ee-ann-i-die). So which of the following birds are also in the same family and hence closely related to turkeys?
When I lived in Davis and when we were entertaining friends and family at Thanksgiving I would always try to entertain our guests with a postprandial quiz of my own devising. I would wait until the guests had eaten their fill in order to ensure their near-comatose state forbids them an easy escape.
In this quiz, all of the questions are in the style of cryptic crossword clues. The answers can all be made from the letters in the word 'Thanksgiving'. Some examples…
Clue: I just rescued one of King Arthurs minions from danger (6, 6) Anwser: saving knight
Clue: I have a list of 7 things: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride. If you had to remove one of those things from the list, what would you be doing? (6, 3) Answer: taking sin
Clue: An unforgettable singer without any Cole? (3, 4) Answer: Nat King
Okay so now on to the real questions. Scroll down for answers…
When I lived in Davis and when we were entertaining friends and family at Thanksgiving I would always try to entertain our guests with a postprandial quiz of my own devising. I would wait until the guests had eaten their fill in order to ensure their near-comatose state forbids them an easy escape.
In this quiz (scroll down for answers ), all of the answers sound a bit like 'Thanksgiving'. A couple of examples…
Question: What prison inmates might be doing today?
Answer: Shanksgiving
Question: One way of describing the gifts and other objects that are donated at Christmas?
Answer: Thingsgiven
You get the idea now? Okay so here ten more questions (the last one is particularly cryptic)…
On the occasion of my 45th birthday I thought it was time for a listicle to end all listicles:
A few weeks ago I performed a short stand-up comedy set as part of Science Showoff, a regular series of events which are billed as 'chaotic cabaret for science lovers'. Science Showoff is the wonderful brainchild of Steve Cross, who is to science and comedy what peanut butter and jelly is to sandwiches (well, American ones anyway). The idea is to make science fun, entertaining, and (hopefully), funny.
I love presenting and I've always considered myself to be someone who puts a lot of humour in my presentations and I always try hard to make my talks engaging. So Science Showoff seemed like a logical thing for me to do. However, there is a big difference between a science presentation with hints of comedy and a comedic presentation with hints of science.
In addition to having presented at a variety of levels (from lab meetings up to to international conferences) I've also played several gigs in various bands. So I'm not particularly nervous about the idea of getting up in front of strangers. Initially, the idea of performing stand-up comedy didn't really faze me at all, but as the date of the gig came closer, I felt much more anxious than I was expecting to feel.
The most challenging aspect of Science Showoff is that, as a newcomer, you get a 9 minute slot. This goes by very quickly and if you want to tell some sort of story with a beginning, middle, and end, there is very little room for making on-the-fly alterations.
I found myself rehearsing my material in more detail than I have for most presentations that I have given. There is very little room for 'chaff' in a 9 minutes! My original version of my talk probably ran to about 30 minutes and I had to just keep cutting more and more material to hone it down (maybe they'll end up as deleted scenes on the DVD version).
I feel I made things harder for myself by deliberately choosing a topic which initially might seem bereft of any humour potential. My title was: 'Seasonality of Death'. When I first volunteered for this, I knew that I would be doing a slide-driven presentation but I dramatically cut back on how many slides I would normally present and I chose slides that were strong on visuals and kept text large and legible.
The result of my efforts is included below. I'm pleased with how I did, especially with respect to the timing of all of my content. I'd certainly consider doing this again if the opportunity arose and I think it is a great exercise in making you think about all aspects of your presentation skills.
Thanks again to Steve Cross for the opportunity.
When I arrived at the UC Davis Genome Center in January 2005, I started a job as a postdoctoral researcher. Over time, I became an Assistant– and then an Associate Project Scientist. Throughout my 11 years at UC Davis, my primary focus was on research science: using bioinformatics approaches to investigate a variety of genomics projects.
However, my job titles became a poor reflection of what I actually ended up spending my most of my time doing. Increasingly I spent time managing & organising projects, training & mentoring people, and communicating about science. As I detailed in my exit seminar, there were many different hats that I ended up wearing:
Science communication came to dominate my activities at UC Davis and I also realised that a) I really enjoy this (more than research science!) and b) it's something that I am good at. Away from work, I decided to write more about science on my ACGT blog (333 posts since June 2012), I helped create a web comic devoted to science outreach (The Take-Home Message), and I found some time to teach courses on using Twitter for a local non-profit.
We have known that we were going to leave Davis and return to the UK for quite a while and so I made the decision that it was time to make all of these secondary activities the primary focus of my new job. For the last few months I focused on looking for work in the fields of science outreach and communication. This also involved switching my computer's spell checker back to British English as 11 years is long enough to 'go native'.
So today I can (finally) reveal my new job which — at the time of writing — I will be starting in about one hour's time! My new role will see me become the Digital Strategy Manager for the Institute of Cancer Research. The ICR is one of the world's leading cancer research organisations and was ranked first in the Times Higher Education league table of university research quality.
The ICR has been driving forward cancer research for over 100 years. Aside from the varied research programs, the ICR trains several hundred PhD students, works with industry to develop new drugs, and — as a charitable organisation — has a variety of fund-raising programs and campaigns. This multifaceted nature is something that presents many challenges for how the ICR has to communicate their work to all of the different stakeholders. This challenge was one of the reasons why I was attracted to this role.
There's an irony that my wife has just left a cancer research institute in Davis and now I am starting work at one in London. I'm sure I'll have many questions for her in the coming weeks! I look forward to learning a new vocabulary of cancer related terminology, and will try my best to learn how to pronounce names like 'abiraterone'.
My new role puts my science research career behind me and formalises my new journey into the world of science communication. I look forward to helping bring you news about the great research, training, and other activities that occurs at the ICR. I plan to continue blogging about science in my free time, and will continue my 101 questions with a bioinformatician series on my ACGT blog. I imagine that the blog content will evolve somewhat and maybe I will find myself writing about the challenges (and rewards) of being a science communicator!
It's been an incredibly hectic couple of months as we have made a big transition in our lives and have left Davis, California to return back to the UK to take up new jobs in London. For almost 11 years we have enjoyed our jobs at UC Davis and the reason we ended up staying so long was partly due to all of the great friends that we made there (the sunshine and opportunities for travel also helped).
Selling our home, our cars, and most of our worldly possessions was not exactly what I would call a relaxing way to end our time in America. Especially when this came on top of saying so many goodbyes to our Davis friends, finishing up our work-related projects, and making plans for everything else that needed to be done.
We just managed to finish everything before we headed to SFO for our flight home (many thanks to my friend, and former boss Ian Korf for driving us to the airport). Our last week in Davis was spent in a hotel living out of our suitcases and we will be living in somewhat of a spartan manner until the possessions that we didn't sell arrive via a container ship.
Arriving in London has also been a busy and frantic time. Arriving on Christmas Eve, our 2.5 year old took most of a week until he adjusted to his new time zone (on Christmas Day he woke up at 2:00 am and was very much awake for the next 7 hours). I'm glad that I've kept one active bank account in the UK…this has helped things somewhat. However, it turns out that it is hard to sort many things out unless you have a printed utility bill that confirms that you live at a specific address. In any case we have sorted out the essentials: internet, mobile phones, and a doctor (I think I have those in the right order).
We've visited the UK for most of the years we lived in Davis, but it is very different to be back here again as residents. We admittedly have become somewhat Americanised. Not just in our tendencies to use American words, phrases, and spellings…but also in our perception of various things. Just as everything in America seemed so much BIGGER when we first moved there, now everything in the UK seems so much smaller. Washing machines — to pick one example — seem impossibly tiny and toy-like.
A few other thoughts on life in the UK after 11 years away:
I start my new job tomorrow…more on that in another post!