• I blasted through a workout centered on lunges this weekend. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, or even six months ago.
• In an attempt to be a little more social I had coffee with local friend Joey. It was very nice.
• I'm out of the woods far enough on my coming presentations that my stress level has gone down. Now to practice, polish, and cut.
• My adjustments to "find maintenance" with my food intake have, with the help of nutrition coach Christine Imperato, seemingly been successful: I'm now hovering easily at around 200 pounds and know how to stay there at my current activity level. It's a good place from which to try a cut later, as an experiment. It's a good place from which to try lots of things.

• I involved the team in figuring out how we would rearrange ourselves now that we have new product priorities, and they came up with what I expect is a good solution without any teeth-gnashing at all.
• Conference talk #1 is nearly done, #2 is well-in-hand, and the participatory design exercises are coming along nicely.
• I've graduated to weighted pushups, "wearing" a 45lb plate.
• While a weights workout still leaves me with a sore knee, these bouts are less painful and last less time than in the past. I'm taking it as a sign that I'm pushing hard at workouts and am happy to give myself a little pat on the back for this.

• While the team is sad at the departure of a great employee, they are holding together.
• I made less progress than I had hoped on my conference presentation scripts, but more than I was in danger of making, and I'll take that as a win.
• I wisely skipped a workout in favor of a friend's birthday party, and it was good to see here and some old friends from a prior job. We fell right in as if we'd never been out. It was nice. I've been "bad at social" for a little while and it is nice to be reminded that I'm not actually bad at social, I'm bad at getting around to asking for and scheduling it.

I don't find it useful to ask users directly for the answer to a question of detail. For example, I hope I'd never ask a user what they think the order of columns in a table should be, or even if a table was appropriate for the data at hand.

If we ask a user a question of detail such as one of these we will receive an answer, and we would likely be able to fulfill that answer through design, but we would not have learned why; the resulting design would be indefensible, hearsay. It's akin to asking for and expecting a "sandwich order;" you receive a request you can meet but with no insight by which you could critique or improve upon the request. (This is a problem not just for designers but also for product managers.)

Rather, we should ask questions that help us understand better how the data will be used – where attention needs to be brought, what decisions need to be made, what activities encouraged – so we can come up with and offer a sensible arrangement of data, possibly so we can transform that data into information.

I skipped a couple of these since I was on vacation. One win of that period, though, is that the vacation was amazing, despite some RV plumbing mishaps (nothing gross). Here are some wins since then:

1. I disappeared for two weeks and my team at work continued to ably make progress without my help. Nothing caught on fire, no one got stuck, no one complained. It was heartening to read the scroll back in the team Slack channel and see them tackling issues, supporting each other, making good decisions. :feelsgoodman:
2. The Huskies look like a much better team than last year, as well they ought. Not a personal win, but this also feels good.
3. I started learning Norwegian via Duolingo. I feel a little like I'm succeeding through deduction rather than actually learning the language, but it's early yet.
4. I had a great meeting with a new Product Manager, and see real opportunity to help lead her product family into an interesting and more-obvious-for-users future.