Yet again it has been a month since I last posted, so I'm only doing about a quarter of the writing I'm aiming for. Well, the reasons for it are plain enough. Clearly 2014 is shaping up to be a bit of a hard slog.
I'm not afraid of hard work, and goodness knows it's all in a good cause. I just hope the expectation - that this year of hard work will mean less work next year, and the year after... - is a reasonably achievable one.
Yet again this is mostly my own fault. I have chosen to work with a couple of charities, and as in particular I'm on the fund raising committee for one of them I am doing a lot of leg-work in that area. It's enjoyable and I'm learning (and developing) a lot. But it's amazing how easy it is to fall behind with the reading and keeping the momentum going on projects. For example, to help with fundraising bids in the future I'm leading on developing and rolling out a research project on how effective the charity has been helping its clients. I love being able to capitalise on the skills I learned doing my research degree, but it's not a small thing to do.
Also work-work is busy. I'm in the middle of running elections to our Board and have just delivered a project for my employer, which is as many of you know a NHS body, to become an "accredited safe haven". What that actually means is complex but it required achieving 100% against a framework requiring some 200 pieces of evidence. I was highly doubtful we had the capability to achieve this, and was playing a political game of managing expectations for some time, but no - we did it!
Now that the organisation has been around for a year and things are ticking over it will be interesting to see how the workload goes. I spent a lot of time trying to get the culture and ethics right and I've succeeded in the sense that people are thinking of the things I want them to think about when investing in healthcare services (e.g. the patient!) but in a sense it is a pyrrhic victory in that I have to be a lot more involved in every piece of work. On the plus side I have the extraordinary privilege of working directly with patients and front line staff so I have the opportunity of subtly shifting the culture I my local area so everyone shapes and hears the same message at the same time.
Outside of this I'm starting to look for my next career move. For the first time it's as much about the money as anything else. A bigger pay-cheque helps smooth the way for our long-advertised house buy toward the end of this year. Until then it's hard work, hard job hunting and hard saving; early half of what I take home now is put aside for that time.
Next week we are on a holiday with some friends - a canal boat in Oxfordshire and the midlands for a week. It will be nice to have the break before plunging back into the thick of it.
Here's to 2014.
