Recently in Personal Category

On the 31st of December, RBI made me redundant. The first week in January was the first time in my adult life I was without paying work. My future seemed more uncertain than it ever had before. A month on, how is life going?

Contract work

The satisfying news was that I was only out of work for about 9 days. Since early January I've been working with the NEXT conference team, helping launch and run their blog in the run-up to the conference in May. It's been a pleasure working with them, and I'm really looking forward to the event itself.

It's only the equivalent of about a day a week though, so I've been taking on other bits and bobs of work. I'm just finishing up a feature for a former blogger from my old job, who's now editing an aviation magazine. I've got some liveblogging work coming up during Social Media Week London for the talented Like Minds folks. And I'm in early discussions about two other pieces of work, and writing  proposal for a third. Which is all good.

Jobs

I've been in discussions about two full-time roles since late December. One of them, sadly, went into abeyance earlier this week - although with the promise that it might become a possibility again in a few months. I'm a naturally sceptical sort these days, so I'm not taking that promise too seriously. The other role is, well, a life-changing job, and, as such, one both sides in the process are taking very seriously. I have a strong sense of interviewing the organisation to see if I'd fit in there, as much as they're interviewing me to see if I have the right skills and would be a good match for the way they work. It's been a fascinating process, I've learnt quite a bit about myself along the way, and I suspect it'll be chalked up in the "win" column even if I don't get it. And it's likely to be a month or so before it's decided one way or another.

Decisions

The big decision looming over me is "do I stay contracting, or do I seriously hunt for a new job"? I'm torn, honestly. Consulting is a lot of fun, allows me to work with different people and on different projects, but does lead to me spending rather more time at home than I'm comfortable with. I've been out and about networking furiously to try and counteract this a little - and I've enjoyed it - but if consulting and contract work turns into my main source of income, I'll more than likely take a desk somewhere - probably Brighton - or work from a co-working space. Getting up, leaving the house, and going to work is a surprisingly good discipline that, believe it or not, I miss. But this year will see a lot of changes in my life, and I think that, in all probability, I should get myself into full-time work by the summer, if I can. The problem is that I'm a relatively senior hire, and I'm looking for a work at a very challenging time in the economy. Lots of people want to work with me right now - but very few of them are in a position to offer me a job. So, from my early optimism in December, I'm now getting a sense of how hard it will be to get the right role. It was very kind of so many people to say, or assume, that I'd be "snapped up" - but that hasn't been the case, alas.

Emotions

A wise man, whom I had lunch with last week, said that the biggest danger in redundancy in his experience was its effect on your mental health. It is, absolutely, a rejection by the company you were working for and that has a damaging effect on your confidence. And then you put yourself up for various jobs and pieces of work, and you get rejected for some of them. It's dispiriting and hard. I won't deny that. I'm glad that I've been taking on the contract work that I have, because it reassures me that I do have skills and knowledge that people value, and it's been a good bulwark against the corrosive effects of this situation. But I have good days and bad days. I have days when the future seems bright, where I see new possibilities opening up for me, where my working life improves over where I was a year ago. And on other days, all I see is the insecurity of income in a downturn, my age, and the relative newness of the industries and ideas that I've developed skill over recent years, and the patchy demand for them.

I had a rather lovely e-mail from an old school friend, saying that she respected the honesty with which I was blogging about my redundancy - and I've always thought we hide away too much that might be useful for people who are going through similar things -  so what can I do but continue to be honest? Being made redundant isn't easy.  It smarts. It kicks your confidence. It makes your future uncertain. But it also opens doors, allows you to meet and network with new people and explore different visions of your future. It's a roller coaster rise, and one I will probably be glad to have been on - eventually.

So... want to work with me?

If you're reading this, you probably have a good sense of who I am and what I do. Here's my LinkedIn profile if you don't.. If you think those skills could help your business, drop me an e-mail. I'm always happy to have a coffee with anyone.

The end of the year always seems to end up as conference season for me - which is no bad thing. A good conference sends you away full of ideas and enthusiasm for the coming months, and hopefully the current crop will see me intellectually kitted up for the challenges of 2012. 

I'd been awake for about 20 minutes before my iPhone blared into life; Wake Up Boo filled the bedroom, and I leapt off the bed to switch it off before my wife woke. As is my habit, I flicked the phone off airplane mode, and gave my e-mails a cursory look.

Oh, shit.

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I remember my first encounter with a Mac vividly. I was still in my teens - just - and in my first year of an English Literature degree. I'd been persuaded by a friend - whose name I'm embarrassed to admit I've long forgotten - to see what I could do to get the college magazine back on its feet after a disastrous year. There, sat in the cubbyhole that masqueraded as the magazine office, was a Mac. No hard drive, tiny greyscale screen. That tiny little box changed my life. We wrote in Word and laid out in Aldus Pagemaker on that little box. It did what we had several expensive typesetting machines and a handfuls of PCs to do back at Felix, Imperial College's student magazine. I had the power to publish on a desk, in one box. I was hooked.

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When the news came, years ago now, that Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer, I felt a chill. The last time I heard that diagnosis, it was applied to my Dad. The oncologist had looked each of us in the eye, and then handed me a piece of paper with the number 3 written on it. "Years?" I asked. "Months," he replied. Dad beat the odds. He made it to 9 months.

Within weeks of that horrible day, I had bought myself my first Mac of Jobs' second era at Apple: one of those much-mocked clamshell iBooks, in graphite. I bought it so I could work from Suffolk when I needed to, and my brother bought a digital video camera so we could capture some of those last, happy days. And so I discovered iMovie, and a new set of opportunities for creation, for recording and sharing opened up. Within a few months of my Dad's death, I was blogging, and using that to post the first pictures from my very first digital camera. 2001 changed my life in many ways, but many of those changes were mediated through that toilet-seat iBook.

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I'm sat on a train somewhere between West Sussex and London, typing these words on an iPad. (You know that whole "iPad is for consumption not creation meme"? I never got the memo.) It's given to very few to change the lives of millions in a positive way. It's given to even fewer to provide the world with beautiful, functional tools that change our relationship to both our own creativity and the creativity of others. Jobs looked at the digital revolution and dreamed of using it to do things better, to live better, to make things better. And he did that. What a life.

Thank you, Steve. I can honestly say that your work made my life a better place, and continues to do so every single day.