A six-month review!

I’m looking back at my last post where I lamented it being two months between posts. This time, it’s been six months, hasn’t it? I hope you’ve all been well and 2024 has been kind to you so far.

Over the last six months, I’ve started between five and ten drafts of blog posts and never found the time or energy to finish them. I have some great ideas – analysis of a phishing email (I can’t figure out how best to structure it), slow productivity (hugely close to my heart at the moment), my personal 2023 reading review (when I’m terrible at putting critical review of media into words), and some others.

I’ll start with a list of things I’ve been working on since the end of August! Quite a few of the work ones are big ongoing pieces of work and are still on my plate.

I think I should address the elephant in the room: I moved my blog from Medium to self-hosted WordPress. I thought it was a little hypocritical for me to be singing the praises of decentralisation, only to use a centralised, commercial platform. I’ve had some semblance of personal web hosting since I was 18 years old, so why not use it to self-host my blog?
- WordPress and its parent company, Automattic, have also created an ActivityPub plugin so WordPress blogs can be part of the Fediverse. If you’re using a Fediverse service such as Mastodon, you can also follow my blog at @kgm@blog.kellygreeningmoore.co.uk
Acting as a technical advisor for the automation project – my involvement has really ramped up recently now we’ve engaged a partner.
Trying my best to stay involved with the Windows 11 Intune workstream, but feel like I’m largely leaving that to my more than capable colleagues, and helping to protect their time by taking on other requests, queries and operational meetings that come our way.
- Also trying to make sure I remain available to my team. Some weeks are more packed than others.
Contributed technical knowledge to update a procurement process.
Helping with support of partner organisations where we provide the ICT support – a couple of these popped up with short time frames, but my team has done it as always!
Continued attending and contributing to our weekly cybersecurity meetings and fortnightly vulnerability management meetings.
- I also review a lot of news feeds during and outside work to try and stay on top of emerging threats. Just last weekend I had time to whittle my backlog in my RSS reader down from 174 articles!
Attended some excellent workshops from Microsoft that gave us advice on further configuration we can carry out to get the most out of our Microsoft licensing.
- We have also started thinking about licensing for the next financial year and how to get the best value out of the agreement.
Some recent things in the works like planned pilots of new Microsoft add-on licence functionality. I’m sure I’ll be contributing technical knowledge to those as soon as I have time to accumulate it!
New Teams is arriving fully at the end of March, replacing classic Teams, so making sure everyone is ready for that. Also continuing to assess New Outlook.
2024 reading challenge, of course. I’m currently at 9 books read, with two more on the go right now (and a couple of more reference-style books I’m dipping in and out of).
Had a couple of holidays with my husband, one adventurous and one very relaxing, where we also had time to spend with good friends. I had meant to document the former so that I could blog about it, but I’m glad the absence of this documentation means we lived in the moment.
- We also went to an e-sports event! Nintendo were giving out free entry tickets to the Splatoon European Championships and we figured out the logistics to attend it in Frankfurt.

Some other things I’ve done recently to try and improve my productivity and recall…

Time blocking my work calendar – remembered to do this one week before I forgot again! I do need to try it out again. I’m not sure if rigid blocks work for me. I probably need more “open collaboration” spaces in my calendar, or perhaps I could utilise “Bookings with me” for this to make sure my general working circle of colleagues in ICT and Digital have access to me.
Trying out Tiago Forte’s “Second Brain”, building my second brain for work OneNote. I know the spirit is to have an overarching system to hold every aspect of your life, but I do need a separate one for work for security reasons.
- At some point in one of the newsletters I received from either Forte Labs or Lifehack, a statistic I’m unfortunately not able to source said something along the lines of “we consume 74GB of information per day” – and I don’t mean technically. That’s emails, news articles, social media feeds, etc. No wonder some of us information workers are overwhelmed!
- I saw the perfect quote in a book this week to describe me – “Besides, she was terrible at speaking extemporaneously. That was why she liked writing.” Extemporaneous means “spoken or done without preparation” – I find it incredibly hard sometimes to recall knowledge on the fly, even though I know I have it. With the “second brain” system I’m hoping to have a well organised and searchable knowledge base to help me in both situations.

I should probably make my next blog on wellbeing so you can all be assured I’m not actively burning myself out. Until next time!

Articles and videos of interest:

Privacy Isn’t Dead. Far From It. – EFF (11 minute read)
Rest Takes Hard Work – TIME (6 minute read)
DEF CON 31 – An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification – Cory Doctorow (45 minute video) – fantastic if you’re interested in the state of the web (“five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” is so accurate I have to laugh) but you may wish to be mindful of his language if you are sensitive to swearing and similar, as you can see by the title. Apologies, I did not censor it here as I know this messes with screen readers.

Currently reading: (links go to The Storygraph)