The temperature is beginning to drop, we’re all starting to feel the bite of winter. You might have seen us joining meetings with fluffy socks and beanies on, and a hot cup of tea in hand.

Jon Snow from Game of Thrones saying 'Winter is Coming'

Managing our time to meet impossible workloads

Despite all the hard work going into prioritising, planning, and using the tools and policies we have now to challenge some of the requests made to us, there’s still much too much going on and many of us feel like we’re treading water.

Our wonderful manager, Heledd, has been considering new ways to plan the days and weeks better, to help her brain work better (worth a go?).

Alex and Paul are also busy behind the scenes, getting our backlog and planner into a better state to help our team stay on top of the neverending flow of work.

Jumping from working to thinking, then doing big picture digital strategy content, and dealing with important issues in the here and now, as well as reviewing job applications is all part of the job.

But this does involve lots of context switching, which evidence shows makes us less efficient and leads to burnout in the long run.

funny work meme

Is all the context switching making our brains more tired than they should be?

This article about strategic and tactical work resonates. In addition to context switching, bouncing between the strategic and tactical stuff tires us out too.

If you don’t have time to read the full article, see the highlights below:

  • Research shows it can take up to 9.5 minutes to get back into a workflow after switching between digital apps.
  • Nearly half of workers report that context switching is a drain on their productivity.
  • Context switching may have the biggest impact when you’re switching between tasks and topics multiple times over a single day.

But this type of thinking is important. There is also value in separating the ‘blue (thinking) work’ – the creative, thinking, strategic, brainstorming time and the ‘red (doing) work’ – the practical working side, getting things done, following procedures. Read more about the benefits of separating thinking and doing time.

To be continued… Heledd is keen for chats and tips from others about how they manage their blue and red time, as this week has felt a bit purple (and/or brown!)

Cybersecurity Awareness Month

The month of October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month and this year’s theme is “It’s easy to stay safe online.” This year’s awareness focuses on four simple steps everyone can take to stay safe online at work and home.

padlock on a laptop

In 2023, there are four key behaviours that are being promoted to internet users to help keep them safe from Cybercrime. These are:

The National Cyber Security Centre recommends using ‘three random words’ as a way to create passwords. By creating a password that’s made up of three random words, you’re ensuring your new password will be ‘strong enough’ to keep the criminals out, yet easy enough for you to remember when trying to log into your device or account.

You should protect your most important accounts (such as email, banking, social media and online shopping) by making sure you have 2-step verification turned on for each of them. This prevents hackers from getting into your account, even if they know your password.

Phishing is when criminals use scam emails, text messages or phone calls to trick their victim into visiting a website, which may download a virus onto your computer, or steal bank details or other personal information.

You can reduce the likelihood of being phished by thinking about what personal information you (and others) post about you, and by reviewing your privacy settings within your social media accounts.

It’s important to apply updates to your apps and your device’s software as soon as they become available. Updates will often include improvements and new features, as well as protection from viruses and other kinds of malware.

Best practice for busy publishing periods

We’ve been flooded with flood related content this week, and we’re working with the communications team to meet a variety of different deadlines.

The communications team have kindly shared their comms-plan with us, which has helped us order tasks according to priority (when they are due to be published) and keep us on track to meet these publishing dates.

person juggling lots of tasks at work

Exploring the connection between AI and content design

Sam joined a webinar on Artificial Intelligence for (content) designers.

As well as a dip into the history of AI, Kellie, an interaction designer from the MoJ, gave an insight into what it can and can’t do for content design professionals.

We saw how we could feed an imaginary (bad) service name into Bing GPT and tell it to create 5 alternative service names in line with GDS’s rules on creating a service name. It did this pretty convincingly and quickly.

It could also be useful for things like:

  • generating fake names for a prototype
  • generating fake images for concepts, storyboards and personas
  • ideas for wording in a tricky sentence
  • explaining something
  • finding examples of something

There was an interesting discussion about whether Large Language Model-based machine-learning algorithms are doing nothing more than predicting the word or mark most likely to follow the preceding word or mark. While it might generate a string that’s never before been written, it’s already topped out in the sense that it can’t do anything more than guess based on what already exists.

As we know, a lot more than looking at what’s gone before goes into designing the right solution to a user problem but AI is certainly useful for idea generation and prompting discussions.

Some reading for the weekend: A new design era: how AI can power greater human experiences.

pumpkins in a wheelbarrow

Other bits we’ve been working on…

  • This week, Paul, Andrew, Lucinda, Kim and Sophie had a meeting to review items that had been blocked in our queue over the years. This was the first meeting delving through the depths of the jobs board and discussing older tasks, and it feels good to have a clear out. We’re hoping this will help keep the backlog down.
  • Sam, Lucinda and Laura are preparing a presentation about their permissions project to to the alumni community next week
  • Laura is conducting an audit of the education pages, which means finding out which pages users are looking at and reviewing the enquiries coming into the Education team. We’re going to use this audit to (hopefully) improve the page and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for!
  • James and Sophie spent some time in Hotjar, reviewing feedback from our website users to investigate and apply user research findings to upcoming projects and work in the Digital Team’s pipeline
  • We’ve also been busy updating various webpages to ensure the content is accurate and meets our legal accessibility and Welsh Language requirements.