As a promise to myself, I’ve started 2022 with the best habit I developed last year - thinking for an hour over breakfast.

As I promised (to myself!) , I’ve started 2022 with the best habit I developed last year - thinking for an hour over breakfast every working day. I write my ideas, thoughts and hypotheses on serviettes and then decide what's going to be discussed with other members of the team or that I will look into further with testing or share with a client.

I can't tell you the day that I actually started doing using serviettes as as I can't remember - it may have been some time that I didn't have a notebook to hand I would say. However, the reason I've kept it up is that it's a trigger now for my body to start thinking (as distinct to anything else at all). Also, there is something transient about a napkin. I find that anything that goes into a notebook needs to be implemented and ticked off. A napkin creates a different canvas for thinking - it can be discarded afterwards right away. It's easier to think freely if you don't have to commit to doing what's on the napkin. As my editor told me at Penguin, don't write and edit at the same time - there's time for both.

Here are my results:

Week 1:

Monday: Consider the full, comprehensive rewrite of the Active Peers AI home page. It's ready to go live this week.

Tuesday: Write 8 complete rigorous case studies for Active Peers AI. They're now on the site.

Wednesday: Discover a feedback feature request, roadmap, and changelog app (that we’ve now used with over 50 users).

Thursday: Read a research article from the British Educational Research Association (BERA)  to get other angles for understanding our clients’ problems.

Friday: Think through the new L&D Solutions page for Active Peers AI with Thursday’s article. It will be planned to go on the site in the next week.

Week 2:

Monday: Muse over a new Instagram Live idea for SavvyTeenAcademy that we have tested and implemented since then.

Tuesday: Think through the new Solutions page for our Active Peers AI Event Facilitators. It's now on the site.

Wednesday: Review the entire process fully for our Active Peers AI group that we facilitated later that day and is now on a cloud doc so that everybody can access it. This is a working document that is now very helpful for both the operational staff and the technical team.

Thursday: Appraise the best way that we could support a potential customer by designing interactions between their members to learn from each other and build robust business relationships from a different perspective. We submitted that to them by the end of the day.

Friday: Crawl through the feedback received from our Active Peers AI group on Wednesday in anticipation of meeting our next group in Hong Kong. We implemented those changes by the end of the day.

Week 3:

In the second fortnight in January, I had ten more "thinking breakfasts" and here is what they had in store:

Monday: refine my thinking for a tailored ThePositiveEconomist Blue Monday session we delivered to an organisation's staff focusing on the reasons why people don't achieve their goals and how to overcome them.

Tuesday: Think back over every nuance of an Active Peers AI session we ran in Hong Kong and what we can learn from it. We've since built and tested one key change they suggested and are meeting the client next week to show them the difference.

Wednesday: trace five user journeys through Active Peers AI from a CRM perspective and put them to our provider for simplification and implementation.

Thursday: finalise the list of questions for Carol Glynn, my latest guest for "Fantastic Female Fridays" at VectorVest, Inc. The full episode is available at https://lnkd.in/gr3CNp_W .

Friday: consider how we could build a customised Peer Learning Prompter at Active Peers AI. We're testing a prototype of that this week.

Week 4:

Monday: muse over how Active Peers AI could help both a new Women's Network in an Irish company (i.e. establish an authentic forum for ideas sharing) and a conference bringing together sports clubs all over America (structure an optimal way that tacit knowledge would be exchanged and overcome silos). Both proposals are sitting on our respective contacts' desks.

Tuesday: problem-solve a way to get a workflow where Active Peers AI could work natively in Zoom without ever leaving the platform. We tested this multiple times and had it optimised by Friday.

Wednesday: explore the hypothesis that the various generations are treating ESG investments and technology differently for my latest episode of the ESG & Tech show with VectorVest, Inc. The full show is available at https://lnkd.in/gD-gN-Mh

Thursday: contemplate every aspect of ThePositiveEconomist session with Clare McGee Innovate NI, Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council and Invest Northern Ireland before an action-packed delivery!

Friday: build a new feedback interface for Active Peers AI using Airtable Interfaces to iterate on what we have, show Liting Zhou and the Innovation Partnership team what I think could be better, and ask for their critical analysis as to whether it should be put on our technical roadmap.

Let's see what appears over the next two weeks of serviettes at breakfast!

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