A couple months ago, my friend Sid was doing a video project for his phenomenally-talented musician friend Michael Bellar, so I took a couple of days to assist, bringing my Canon 7D Mk II to shoot coverage video while Sid roamed around doing handheld inserts over several takes. Michael took the raw footage back with him to NYC and passed it to his video editor, who cut the raw video the finished product which just came out today!

You can watch Michael perform his interpretation of D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint” by clicking the image above. This was my first time assisting on something like this, and it was a tremendous experience to just watch a musician of Michael’s caliber work a session, trying to hear what he was hearing. Also, it was nice to figure out how the video stuff on my camera worked!

Michael’s a great guy and a mesmerizing musician, so if you get a chance to catch Michael Bellar and the As-Is Ensemble in New York, New York, do it! He’s one of my very favorite musicians to watch perform!

The post "Friends Helping Friends: Michael Bellar Video Shoot" appeared first on Dave Seah.

To recap, last month I was obsessed with Resistance and Time, beset by feelings of slowness and wishing I was more competent. This month, the feeling has finally passed because (1) I got some hard stuff done for work and (2) I have a new way of thinking about Time that I’m calling “TimeSpaces” (or something).

I’ll get into that, the Living Room Cafe, and Tomatoes after the jump with a bunch of pictures. Details follow!

The Work in Review

I’ve been working on the UCLA/Indiana University programming project for about two years now, and in the past month I made a kind of breakthrough: I need to code this thing the way I want to code it. I’ve been trying to be very efficient with my programming time, not spending too much time doing more investigation than seemed necessary, not over-implementing features that had not been requested. But you know what? Writing code in this manner is a sucky experience. For me to be amused and engaged, I need to be writing code that I think has some GUTS to it. This is particularly important because there aren’t any other coders to chat with, and good technical feedback doesn’t come often enough to replenish my motivation otherwise if at all.

So what I did was split the personal investigation work such that the exploratory stuff was is for my Project 1401 game framework, and the billable work is for specific feature implementation for the team. I am much happier about it now, which means I am more productive. It is starting to get a little more fun because I am not constantly wearing the yucky “minimum cost” management hat all the time now. I’m fortunate that the long-time partner company I’m working with is fine with it, so long as the work is completed in time; they’re more concerned that I’m OK with it.

Thoughts on TimeSpaces

On the side I’ve been writing an essay about Time and how I feel about it. A key observation I had made a while ago was that I think about Time in a negative way: Projects take too long! Learning takes too long! Time and effort stand in the way of everything! Why am I so slow?

I haven’t been able to finish the essay yet, but I’ve come to a conclusion that (1) everything takes time, duh and (2) there is an appropriate expectation to have for every activity as far as time is concerned. It’s like each activity has a bubble of TimeSpace that runs at a different rate than other activities. For example, when I’m surfing the Internet researching something, I’m getting dozens of new inputs every minute and time seems to be productively used. Time runs really fast, or rather that time BETWEEN significant events flows very quickly with little effort. By comparison, time flows much differently when doing something “offline”: cleaning the living room, mailing a package, going to the supermarket, watering the tomatoes, etc.

I think my mistake has been to use the SAME timescale/timespace for every activity, and so everything that happens in the “real” world seems to move very slowly because my baselines for measurement is Internet Surfing Time and Dave Imaginative Thinking Time. These clocks run 100x faster than Clean The Cat Litterbox, Flatten and Gather Boxes to take to the Recycling Dumpster, and Cook a Real Meal time. My rule now is to give each activity its own TimeSpace, with its own rate of events, and not mix my expectations from a high-speed TimeSpace with that of a low-speed one. It seems to be helping.

Living Room Cafe: Chair Fabric Selected!

For the Living Room Cafe project, I finally decided on a couch! Or rather, an expensive furniture system from Love Sac called “Sactionals.” I’ve been down to the local Love Sac store every weekend to look at them, and during their 20 Year Anniversary Sale decided to bite the bullet (15% off). While I was trying to decide on the cheapest upholstery option, armed with my floor samples and paint chips, the store manager said, “Why don’t I just bring two of these arms up to your house and we can look at them in the actual light right now? I’ve got time” and I was like, “Wow! Ok!”

I had originally thought that their “Core Fabric Beige” (AKA “cheapest option”) would be ok, though another salesperson had suggested the Herringbone. The Herringbone, I thought, looked too coarse and too busy for what I had in mind. Since it turned out that the 5 series Sactionals were now all custom orders, we busted out all the fabrics and looks at them in the light. My mechanical typewriter, which was a lovely blue and gray, was an inspiration for a possible color scheme for the couches, and we were almost going to go with it until we remembered we hadn’t looked at the Herringbone in the light. So we dragged it out to do due diligence, and it turns out that it was indeed the best-looking option. We stared at it in silence, then admitted, “You know, that really does look really good.”

And so…Herringbone it is! It even goes with the cats; cat hair just disappears into it. I ordered two arm chairs, which can also be made into two armless sidechairs, an armless love seat, a long recliner, etc. The reconfigurability and ease of taking them apart is a critical feature for the Living Room Cafe. It’s lifetime-guaranteed furniture that’s built to take a beating, so I’m thinking maybe it’s not a HUGE MISTAKE. Fingers crossed.

Living Room Cafe: Table and Paint Update!

The next key color, as far as the Living Room Cafe goes, comes from the cafe tables. They are all done, and just need staining now. The woodworker, a retired VP from an aerospace engineering company, is making four 32×32″ table tops with hand tools (no power tools in his shop) to go with my 22″ commercial table bases. I need to get to a drill press to seat some 1/4-20 inserts and bolts into another piece of wood that will be glued-and-screwed into the tables. Darold, the woodworker, tells me that buying a drill press is a fine thing. Optionally, I can look into the local Makerspace, which might be the better thing to do.

The tables will be stained to match my dining room chairs, which are a kind of orange-red. With that color set, the wall colors now start to become clear.

I’m thinking of something now that’s a cool bluish gray, fairly neutral so I can put artwork from local friends up on the walls of my fake coffee shop gallery. I may designate another wall as a brighter color. I’m pretty confident that the floor, the dining room chairs, and the tables will set a harmonious tone. I may wait a bit more before I pick the color.

Photography and Technology Stuff

In the world of Photography, I got excited about those old floppy disk cameras from the late 90s/early 00s. This is a Sony Mavica FD200 that I won off of eBay for $1.04 + $14 insured priority shipping. It was apparently a camera that had sat in a department store shelf for a very long time, so the camera is pristine. It actually can save images on a 3.5″ high-density floppy disk, up to four pictures per disk when shooting in its highest resolution mode of 1600×1200 pixels. AWESOME. You can hear the disk spin up and feel the disk drive head go chunk-chunk-chunk as it writes out tracks of data. It’s kind of hard to find floppy disks these days, but I was able to buy 30 still-wrapped Sony floppies for about $11.00, along with some old Avery 3.5″ floppy disk labels for printing. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this, but I’m thinking it would be fun to make some kind of weird art project statement about dead media technologies.

I also bought a new CompactFlash card reader; the PixelFlash USB3 Compact Flash reader is really convenient to have when copying CompactFlash digital media to my computer. I gave my old one to Dad since I had another reader, and immediately missed it. Fortunately the prices has come down on the PixelFlash readers; they were out of production for a while and difficult to find.

I also got an SSD drive for my old Macbook Pro 17, and spent almost an entire day trying to get it to install properly. I have the instructions written up for another article to save people some time. The new SSD does make the old MBP usable again…it is otherwise quite slow by modern standards, surprisingly so. How did I ever put up with it? A nice thing about the SSD is that I don’t have to worry about jostling the computer if I’m writing on the road; the old mechanical hard drives are susceptible still to failure if they’re bumped hard (I’d lost my previous hard drive to an over-excited puppy). The 17″ laptop might be my new coffee shop writing machine, as it’s nice and wide and fits on my lap really well.

Tomato Planter V3 Update!

Lastly, the Tomato Planter V3 design has KICKED ASS this summer. Since planting the tomatoes in mid-June some 50 days ago, do you know how many times I’ve had to refill the reservoir? THREE TIMES. True, we also had a lot of rain in July, but overall I’m really pleased with the water efficiency of the planter. It does what it’s supposed to do: keep the plant alive without over-watering it. I may cut down on the number of capillary wicks next year by half when I build a second planter, further controlling the problem of fruit that grows too fast and bursts their skin.

Alas, I did get hit with a new tomato disease. The first year I lucked out. The second year I got some kind of weird blight. This year I got a tomato fungus (actually, it might be the same one) and a bunch of black flies. The black flies went away when I removed the moisture-retaining lid. I didn’t spray the plant when the mold first appeared, not recognizing it early enough. Next year I’ll be ready for it.

Next Month

The month of September will be largely getting the UCLA/IU project done before I fly to Taiwan for a family visit. This is going to be kind of a big deal, me learning how to re-engage with a culture I am not very familiar with, and I’m a bit nervous about it. I also need to get moving on ETP Planners, which have stalled due to me being preoccupied with the UCLA/IU work, and get a bunch of household maintenance items taken care of before I go. It’s going to be VERY BUSY. Hopefully I will maintain positive spirits. Ooof.

See ya on October 10!

Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2015

• The original post about Groundhog Day Resolutions
• 02/02 - Kickoff - Setting Goals
• 03/03 - Resolution Review #1: ETP Notebooks, Video Games, and Living Room Cafes
• 04/04 - Resolution Review #2: Acquisition Mindset, Micro Thing Challenge
• 05/05 - Resolution Review #3: Releasing Expectations for Better Productivity?
• 06/06 - Resolution Review #4: Embracing Structured Productivity
• 07/07 - Resolution Review #5: Floor Installation and Dad Visitation
• 08/08 - Resolution Review #6: Embracing Slowness (or at least tolerating it)
• 09/09 - Resolution Review #7: A Month of Slow Movements
• 10/10
• 11/11
• 12/12

The post "Resolution Review #7: A Month of Small Movements" appeared first on Dave Seah.

Unlike a lot of game development books, the development diary is more of a personal record of what Shaun did in his 140 days. A lot of books will just give you the bullet points of the development cycle rather than detail the actual feeling of going through the experience. While the diary is tersely written, it doesn’t lack at all in character due to its liberal intersprinkling of tweets and personal observations.

It’s a pleasant book to skim, and I am finding it very comforting to follow someone else’s creative journey in such detail. He includes screenshots of pixel art in development, audio of the musical themes he composed, and observations on the game development process in context of his personal goals. You can get a sense of his mood every day through the tweets that align with each day’s work. Initial drafts of work are liberally shared. It’s all pretty great if you love looking at working process as I do.

The book itself is an eBook, which I read through the Mac OS iBooks app. I’d personally love to have a physical version of the book, but I don’t believe one is available. Each dated entry is from a page to several pages long, depending on the number of pictures available. I took a few screen captures above, though the official purchase site has prettier ones to look through.

One huge takeaway I got from this purchase: I miss simple journaling. Over time, my own website has gone from being the freeing personal journal that it once was to a content management system. It’s just not very fun to open up WordPress when there’s so much maintenance junk to deal with. I’m going to try to make a new, simpler blog and try to get back to the kind of daily writing just for myself. The main website is no longer just for me, and I think that is what has been feeling so awkward about it for so long.

Anyway, if you like process and seeing how one experienced independent game developer goes about his process, pick up Lift Off at his online store. Be warned that this is not going to teach you how to do anything, but it’s great for understanding what goes into making a game at a high level.

The post "Shaun Inman’s “The Last Rocket” Development Diary" appeared first on Dave Seah.

The post "My Computer Rig Interview on “The Sweet Setup”" appeared first on Dave Seah.

Getting back in the mood to work was challenging after a month-long visit from my dad, and I found myself newly aware of just how debilitating my expectations of speed diminish my desire to do the work. Observations (and more!) follow.

Last Months Challenges

Dad was visiting last month for four weeks; after he left on the 17th, I spent almost two weeks getting back into a work groove. This was largely due, I think, to feeling a bit depressed due to the house feeling so empty. I also was still thinking about how my daily routine had been so different when he was here, and wanted to keep some of that going. I have not proven up to the task, and now the house is once again swimming with empty Amazon boxes and unwashed coffee mugs. The refrigerator, once humming with home made food, is now sadly filled with quietly rotting vegetables, forgotten and unloved.

Why has this come to pass? I’ve been feeling particular resistance to doing anything that (1) takes more than a second of time or (2) requires searching for a solution. It is the epitome of laziness! And yet, I am finding it extremely difficult to shake. Possibly it is lingering depression from the empty house, but this resistance has been with me for a long time. Even though I KNOW IN MY BONES that EVERYTHING ACHIEVABLE AND WORTHWHILE is a result of being willing to invest the time in the search…I’m just kind of tired of it. My bones are getting old.

My resistance is exacerbated by my ongoing obsession with time. I tend to associate speed with competence, and competence is something I’ve always tried to find in myself ever since I was a small child wondering why I felt so dumb. While the Adult Me has moved beyond those feelings, I think the emotional triggers are still hardwired into my base personality. Seeking competence takes time and is hard work, and I associate it with feeling stupid. With the sheer number of projects that I have, the idea that each one of them takes more than a few seconds of time is enough to trigger that resistance. I don’t really understand why, but that’s what I have to overcome. Isolation only amplifies it, because without an external motivation source (family, coworkers) to inject a bit of shared need into my life, it’s quite easy to choose NOT to do, or to do something that requires no effort at all: watching YouTube, buying junk food, etc.

And yet, I dare dream of accomplishing so many things.

I know the answer is putting in the time to develop understanding and find starting solutions. Once discovered, it’s relatively easy to create a system with a bit of additional effort. I’m able to function right now by maintaining a fairly small load of work, but it aggravates me that I have to do that. I hate slowness, because I think it means that I’m incompetent, which I know not to be true though I immediately imagine people judging me. As an adult, I know that the very worst of the judging people are shallow-thinking self-entitled know-it-alls, so I’m able to suppress this imagination and choose my own standards. However, it still takes energy to overcome the negative thoughts.

But enough about that! It’s bumming me out, and I am essentially an optimistic person. The theory that goes with that, which I’m working on in an article, is that I need to embrace slowness instead of speed. Or if I can’t do that, then learn to enjoy slowness when it happens, though if that doesn’t prove possible then my final gambit is to accept slowness as just the way things work. When Dad was visiting, I learned to accept then enjoy the hours we spent drinking tea and chatting. This made me think that my days didn’t need to be 100% GO GO GO WORK WORK WORK.

Last Month’s Goals Review

I actually did make some progress on all four of my major goal categories, though it didn’t feel like a lot.

• For the stationery business, I put the ETP 75-sheet pads on sale because the quantity I had ordered a year ago had not completely sold out, and Amazon charges a hefty long-term storage fee for dead inventory. It would be cheaper for me destroy the units rather than keep them in the warehouse, so I’m selling them at cost. That is interesting because I’d never put something on sale like this on Amazon, so it was an opportunity to play with that. I also decided to try using a Facebook “Page Boost” to get more people to see the offer, as well as posting more on Twitter about it. I don’t really like promoting myself, thinking it might be annoying, but it’s an essential part of running a business. I didn’t work on any other products though; these are falling into the “gah it’s going to take more than 30 seconds and I don’t know what to do first” category of time-obsessed destructive thinking. I haven’t felt like working on them, and that is awful. On the other hand, working on a product when I am not engaged by it results in an awful product…or does it? Hm. I know that once I am able to clear my mind of manager-like thoughts (and this is one of them), then my work tends to just sort itself out.

• Paying Work and The Video Game Project are linked because they share the same base programming, and I got back into the swing of things a couple weeks ago by doing the embrace slowness thing. I think I have found a balance by “writing code the right way” rather than “writing code quickly to make project managers feel good”. Since I have a lot of flexibility in approaching the project, I felt it was ok to do it that way otherwise my head would be in that terrible place where TIME is looming over me without any concrete reason for it. The manager-like thought is, “do things as fast as possible so the deadline is threatened as little as possible”, but you know what kind of thinking that is? DUMB FEAR-DRIVEN THINKING. The smarter thing to do is write to immediate goals and assess the next quickest path, because the kind of work I’m doing is completely complicated enough that it’s difficult to foresee where the issues will be. Worrying about issues I don’t know about yet and the threat they represent to the deadline is a distraction. That is energy better spent on actually thinking about solutions.

• The Living Room Cafe is moving forward too. The floor was put in last month, looks beautiful, and is a pain in the butt to care for. With the 25 year-old carpet, dust and cat hair would just blend in. With a pristine dark-wood floor, not a day goes by without dozens of specks of WHAT THE HELL IS THAT accumulating. I spent a lot of time trying different cleaning approaches with commercial floor dusters, previously-unused vacuum cleaner heads for my old Miele canister vacuum, researching new vacuums, and so on. I also damaged the floor slightly by not replacing the casters on my old Steelcase Leap V1 office chair, and have stepped into a world of scratch repair kits and furniture modifications. I also bought a new air purifier to keep the dust under control, and this seems to be working well. Floor aside, the two other major Living Room Cafe initiatives are the tables and wall paint. I’ve hired a local woodworker to build four new 32×32-inch tops, and ordered four new 22-inch round pedestal table bases from the restaurant supply store in nearby Manchester. To pick the colors for the tables, though, I need to figure out the paint scheme, so I’ve started that process of going to Home Depot and picking up color swatches. After tables and paint, which should be done by the end of September, I’m going to get an S6-sized Love Sac Sactional Long Couch with two extra sides. It’s expensive, but the lifetime warranty, build quality, lightness, and ease of reconfiguration is a HUGE bonus; it is like buying 3 different furniture sets. I can easily turn the three-section couch into a loveseat+side chair, two side chairs and an ottoman, or three armless side chairs. And while I’m going to cheap-out on the upholstery and stick with the basic colors, I have the option of buying a new cover set (and they are nice) and redo the color scheme.

The Month Ahead

My major emphasis this month is paying work, because I need to finish some major systems for testing by the research groups as soon as possible. Early testing now will save us a lot of headache later. I am finding that about 4 hours a day is my limit on this kind of work if I don’t want to crash later in the week.

I have been finding myself slipping into a later-and-later sleeping schedule, and when I mentioned this to my doctor during my last blood lab (much improved thanks to Dad’s cooking of vegetables every day), he said it might be due to melatonin and computer use. Since this was affecting my work, I decided to give his advice a try and start going to bed much earlier so I could have a 5AM start day. I also installed f.lux, the screen dimmer that turns your screen orange as it gets later; the theory is that the blue light from a computer screen keeps fooling your brain into thinking it’s daylight, and the normal sleep cycle never fires up until you are mentally exhausted and keel over. This indeed is what I’ve been experiencing. I’m writing this post in bed right now at 1030PM on Sunday, winding down in the orange glow.

I also finally bought my airline tickets for a trip to Taiwan in October. That sets a hard deadline for having the system done. It also adds travel preparation to my list of things to worry about. I’m most concerned about losing weight (so the airplane ride isn’t uncomfortable) and immersing myself in Chinese language so I have some chance of understanding what’s going on when I get there. My friend Alen recommended Melnyk’s Chinese, who is a Russian guy but speaks really clear Mandarin. His lessons are also topical to common situations, and oriented to Western. I figure I can listen to them every day.

Last but not least, health and domestic chores. After Dad left, I’ve fallen back into my slovenly ways, and junk is piling up again. When Dad was here, there was a reason to keep everything clear because we sitting down to eat every day after Dad cooked a meal in the kitchen. This is related to my time-aversion laziness, I think. The solution may be just accepting that it takes time to actually live a life, and that’s a lesson I have yet to really take to heart.

In a nutshell, this coming month is all about feeling good about time as a commodity that must be spent. I’m not even saying spending the time wisely, because in my case that leads to hesitation and overthinking. I want to develop an immediate and impulsive wish to spend time on whatever pops into my mind as something to do. Crazy? We’ll find out.

That’s the plan so far. See you on September 9!

Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2015

• The original post about Groundhog Day Resolutions
• 02/02 - Kickoff - Setting Goals
• 03/03 - Resolution Review #1: ETP Notebooks, Video Games, and Living Room Cafes
• 04/04 - Resolution Review #2: Acquisition Mindset, Micro Thing Challenge
• 05/05 - Resolution Review #3: Releasing Expectations for Better Productivity?
• 06/06 - Resolution Review #4: Embracing Structured Productivity
• 07/07 - Resolution Review #5: Floor Installation and Dad Visitation
• 08/08 - Resolution Review #6: Embracing Slowness (or at least tolerating it)
• 09/09 - Resolution Review #7: A Month of Slow Movements
• 10/10
• 11/11
• 12/12

The post "Resolution Review #6: Embracing slowness (or at least tolerating it)" appeared first on Dave Seah.

I’ve had this blog for about ten years now, and I used to write about all the little things that interested me through the day with little care about the “quality” of each blog post. As my comfort and courage grew, I wrote longer articles about deeper issues of both a professional and personal nature. These have been helpful for my own personal development, and from the emails I’ve received I believe a few others out there have also found them helpful in framing their own challenges. However, a few years ago I started to believe that I should be more SERIOUS about the craft of writing, and became rather self-aware of how I was NOT doing it. The net effect has been to reduce my output, and writing has become a chore that I indulge in every Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day on 2/2, 3/3, 4/4, and so on until December 12. I’ve missed writing about the little things that make me happy, and this is a shame.

It hasn’t been all bad, though. I’m learning to get comfortable developing articles over a period of time, rather than forcing a 1000-word post article in a few hours. In other words, I’m starting to get comfortable with my relationship with Time, finally learning to accept slowness in the creative development process. I’m really impatient by nature, though you wouldn’t think so seeing how LONG it takes me to do anything. On a meta level, that self-cutting sentence is an example of how I tend to believe that everything takes way too long to do.

Part of accepting slowness is embracing smaller steps, which I’ve known for a while; the NEW INSIGHT is that SHARING those smaller steps is probably OK too. While not complete, at least something is happening. This is a lesson I learned from watching my Dad during his visit. He would take time to develop a project, be it refining his cello bridge setup or potting orchids, over a period of days. He didn’t worry about how long it was taking or whether there was a right way to do it. He also took the time to have lunch and dinner with me every day over a pot of tea, and he would share his daily triumphs and setbacks with me. They provided both the scale and context for his larger projects, and also for mine. Now that he has returned home to Taiwan, I’m left only with my large projects. It is difficult for me to assess their true scale and difficulty without those daily shared cups of tea.

The post "Writer’s Life Block and Learning to Accept Slowness" appeared first on Dave Seah.

In the meantime, this is a pretty good opportunity to stock up on the luxurious paper stock I use in these pads in full-size. While they are glue-topped pads, they’re easy to separate and punch for use in your binding system because they have extra margin at the side just for that purpose. Circa, Arc, or even three-ring binding should work fine. The reviews have largely been positive…thanks for your support, everyone!

At the time of this writing, there are 250 units left on Amazon USA. Grab them here before they run out!

The post "ETP 75-sheet Pads on Sale for $9 (normally $12)" appeared first on Dave Seah.

Previously in Groundhog Day Resolutions…

In last month’s Groundhog Day Resolutions Review, I enthused about my dabbling in structured procrastination, an approach to being productive popularized by John Perry that happens to fit quite well with my own proclivities to work on whatever happens to catch my attention when facing a multitude of possible projects to work on. It’s another way of feeling better about what you’re doing, and in that sense it’s weirdly similar to the ultimate goal of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy: “Relax”. The GTD system is designed to provide relaxation by providing a methodical approach to keeping track of everything you need to remember and do, and when diligently followed it’s a genius process. Being somewhat more lazy, I find John Perry’s approach more amenable; I think of it as Keeping Doing Stuff and Let God Sort Out the Rest. Less tracking and less worry equals something quite similar to relaxation, though arguably it is the procrastinator-practitioner (me!) that reaps that reward rather than the team as a whole. Your mileage may vary.

That said, the month of June was to be one where I exercised purposeful execution of tasks that I felt I should be doing, exercising my executive functions because sometimes you just have to do what you’re supposed to do for the good of the team. As I wrote last month, I had set up so “should do” tasks, which I will repeat here:

• The Stationery Business
• Paying Work
• The Video Game Project
• The Living Room Cafe

At the time I had made that list, I wasn’t aware that my father was interested in visiting me in June instead of July/August, so I’ve had to rearrange my plans quite a bit. The report follows.

What Got Done

While I’d hoped to put a lot more effort into the stationery business, my paying project work, and the related video game project, my priorities were shifted by two major events: the unexpectedly swift arrival of the hardwood flooring I had selected for the Living Room Cafe Project, and the unexpectedly-swift-but-welcome visit by my 86-yo father from Taiwan.

In the first week of June I finalized my selection and scraped up the money to put down the material cost down payment. Since it’s a busy time of year, I was ready to wait for 2-4 weeks until the wood came in, after which the installation would be scheduled and there would be another 2-4 week wait. I figured I had at least a month. Nope. The wood came in almost right away, and the installation was available in the following two weeks after it had a chance to sit in my living room for a week to acclimatize. Great!

In the meantime, in a family-wide email I had detailed everything major that was on my mind, and soon afterwards Dad inquired if it would be a good time to visit. “Sure!” I said, as I always enjoy Dad’s visits. Since I was planning on visiting Taiwan later this year, I figured he might come up in the fall and then we could fly over together around September, but Dad booked a flight about two weeks later and arrived on June 18th, overlapping the floor installation.

This confluence of events created a number of dependencies that I had not considered. When Dad is visiting, my sister’s family comes and stays with us during the weekends. With Dad visiting, the guest room they usually stay in is occupied, which means that I have to use my room as a guest room and sleep on a couch downstairs. However, I also had to completely pack-up the living room, dining room, and my office so the floor installation could proceed, and somehow find the space to PUT all that stuff. That meant I had to also clean up the basement to make room for about 8 shelves worth of books (20+ boxes), the shelves themselves, the dining room table, and the futon couch that I would have used as a bed.

I’m not sure how it happened, but it all got done. There was one weekend that my sister couldn’t come visit because there was no place for them to stay, but other than that it went pretty smoothly. I just had to move my living room, dining room, and office twice in the span of two weeks up a flight of stairs. As a result, I didn’t get all that much done in actual work, but this is the result:

BEFORE

AFTER

I think this is a major milestone. The next step, which I’ve already initiated, is to talk to a local woodworker about having four tabletops made. At that point, the Living Room Cafe would be technically “ready to open”, creating new opportunities for coworking.

Everything Else

Dad’s visit is the priority, of course. We haven’t been doing anything very active, as Dad is still recovering somewhat from his back surgery several months ago, but he’s been spending a lot of time tinkering with the cello, showing me how to eat sunflower seeds properly, and cooking up all kinds of vegetables so we can eat healthy. I’ve been observing his observations too:

Things that Dad Approves Of

• Dad on my Joseph Joseph Folding Colander. “Very clever to save space. Please order two of them, one for me and one for a gift.” Sadly, they are no longer easily found in the United States, though I scrounged one from a third-party seller on Amazon (I don’t recommend it).
• Dad commenting on the brand of frozen Chinese dumplings I get, made by Chinese Spaghetti Factory in nearby Boston. “In Taiwan, it is hard to find quality frozen dumplings, but we can just go buy them fresh on the street. This is very good, though.”
• Dad upon sampling fresh-ground coffee brewed with my AeroPress. “Very strong and good. I can tell the difference”.
• Dad on my choice of rice, the “hybrid” brown Nishiki Haiga rice. “Very good. I like it very much.” We have been eating it a lot.
• Dad on my soy sauce, Kimlan Aged, which is a Taiwanese brand: “Very smooth and good. You can tell the difference.” Soy sauces tend to be very regional, and Taiwan has its own tradition of soy sauce brewing separate from that of China, local tastes perhaps echoing perhaps Japanese colonial influences. The aged soy sauce is the way it should be according to MY taste buds, and apparently Dad agrees.
• Upon sampling my stash of Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Spice Tea, he immediately requested 4 tins to bring home as gifts for relatives in Taiwan.
• Lobsters! My sister bought some freshly-steamed lobsters from the supermarket and treated us (excepting me, since I don’t eat lobster). He was very happy. He commented that in Taiwan, the lobsters come pre-sliced, so he had to brush-up on his American lobster technique.

There are a few more that slip my mind, but in general I think he’s enjoying seeing what I’ve been up to. He really likes the floor too, which is great, and also he got to see version 3 of my tomato planter come together:

I’m planning to write this up in more detail, but I think Dad was entertained watching me build this thing. It’s not like anything he had seen before in his many years of growing plants (he’s quite skilled at it), so it took him a while to grasp what I was doing. We went to the garden center together and picked out a tomato plant to put into it, and he carried it in his lap as we drove home. Watching him gently carry the plant, I had a sense of what it might be like to see Dad with a grandson, and I felt a little domestic pang of something resembling regret at not starting a family. So Dad has to settle for bonding with my cats, which he is surprisingly adept at:

That’s Kate, the skittish cat that rarely lets people approach her, let alone SEE her. She’s taken a shine to Dad, apparently. I’ve never seen her do that to anyone else other than me. Of course, she scratched at Dad when he moved too quickly getting out of the couch, but still…amazing!

The Month Ahead

Dad will be here for another couple of weeks, and then it’s back to the old routine. Now that the floor is done and I’m adjusted to the new routine with Dad, I am planning on refocusing on the paying work. I think I need to break myself of the belief that I need huge blocks of time to jump into programming work, or come up with some way to be more productive at it. I think a lot of my resistance to it may be psychological; I dislike programming in a vacuum without anyone to talk to, as it feels like I’m locked-up in a box. However, because of the increased socialization I’ve been doing online, I’m feeling like it’s less of a trap.

In the Groundhog Day Resolution Review scheme, July is something of an optional goals month, since Summer has a habit of derailing my desire to work on self improvement. I’m going to take a middle-of-the-road approach and maintain focus on family and projects, but not fret too much about it.

So that’s the plan! See you on August 8!

Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2015

• The original post about Groundhog Day Resolutions
• 02/02 - Kickoff - Setting Goals
• 03/03 - Resolution Review #1: ETP Notebooks, Video Games, and Living Room Cafes
• 04/04 - Resolution Review #2: Acquisition Mindset, Micro Thing Challenge
• 05/05 - Resolution Review #3: Releasing Expectations for Better Productivity?
• 06/06 - Resolution Review #4: Embracing Structured Productivity
• 07/07 - Resolution Review #5: Floor Installation and Dad Visitation
• 08/08 - Resolution Review #6: Embracing Slowness (or at least tolerating it)
• 09/09 - Resolution Review #7: A Month of Slow Movements
• 10/10
• 11/11
• 12/12

The post "Resolution Review #5: Floor Installations and Dad Visitations" appeared first on Dave Seah.

• As I wrote about recently in trying out structured procrastination, I’ve tried increasing my workload so I can artfully procrastinate by working on other things. This actually seems to be working, weirdly enough, in increasing total output.

• There seems to be a balance I maintain between unplanned-but-productive work, critical-path-necessary work and maintenance-type work/chores. Doing the unplanned-but-productive work seems to generate the momentum so I want to do the critical-path work; I can’t do one without the other. Maintenance chores are done based on how immediate the need is, and I have stopped worrying about them. Interestingly, I have also been a bit more relaxed about PEOPLE too. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe being less stressed about the future helps my attitude, and knowing that I’m making progress on random stuff makes me feel good.

• The Living Room Cafe is proceeding. After months of deliberating on the wood, I went with the textured Makaha Wave dark hardwood and paid the $3200 materials down payment. I thought it would take months, but the wood is HERE now, and they’ll be delivering it thiscoming Tuesday so it has time to acclimatize before installation the following week. I packed up the entire living room (including my office), and right now they are removing the carpet and old baseboards. My Living Room Cafe Pinterest Board covers some of the upcoming details.

• Dad is paying an unexpected-but-welcome month-long visit during this time too, so we’ve been drinking a lot of tea and keeping ourselves busy with small projects. It’s great to spend so much time with him.

• I am WAAAAY behind on answering emails and posting, unfortunately. Once the floor is installed and everything is set up again, I’ll likely get back to it.

Work has been ongoing, albeit slowly, with all the other activities going on. With the increased activity load, I think I’m starting to regain a sense of what “realistic progress” is on a given type of work, and as a result I’ve been feeling more positive and relaxed about process. Before, I was always thinking I should be faster faster faster, thinking of the future achievement more than the work at hand. Largely this was because I was working to other people’s timetables, and when I started working more on my own projects I had retained that desire for the fastest and most optimal approach. Part of maturing as a creative independent, I think, is truly accepting your own timetable based on the terms you know will work.

The post "Summer Update" appeared first on Dave Seah.

In this month’s Groundhog Day Resolution Update, I want to talk about a different model of being productive, which involves embracing my imperfect procrastinating butt and redefining what productivity means in this context.

Accepting Procrastination

One of the key insights behind structured procrastination is recognizing the essential characteristic of a procrastinator is not to do what’s important, AND that this is not something that can be fixed with the wave of a hand. And really, it’s not the most awful of traits either. As Perry points out, a structured procrastinator can be quite productive because of all the other things they accomplish in the act of avoiding the “important” work.

This idea resonates with me quite a lot. As much as I wish I wasn’t a procrastinator, my history suggests that I have always been this way. When I was in the first grade, my grades were terrible because whenever I got an assignment from the teacher, I would just stuff it into the back of my desk. I didn’t realize that it was something “important” until my parents asked me about school, and I told them what I was doing without any sense of having done something wrong. Ok, maybe that’s just anyone being a first grader, but as school life went on, I found homework and lectures very tedious and arbitrary. Whenever I learned something, it was because my attention was hijacked by curiosity, or I had become enthralled with helping my friends do something super-cool as an attention-worthy challenge. I suppose I inadvertently had the time to learn by minimizing my effort on homework assignments, spending the rest of the time exploring computers and trying to understand how they worked. At times I would be enthralled by a a writing assignment that involved creating systems. College and graduate school largely provided me with the opportunity to access more information than I had before, and my grades were good in classes that I found useful and terrible everywhere else. In graduate school, I did come to appreciate the value of discipline and hard work because I respected the people around me, but did poorly in replicating it. In the workplace, I eventually found that I could shore up my management skills, after not being very good at it, by learning to see what really was inside the hearts of people and then applying my technical understanding to making it real. It’s served me fairly well in a rather eclectic journey from an English Major aspirant to Computer Engineering student to Computer Graphics art student through Video Games, Graphic Design, and now…whatever it is I’m doing. I guess the word I’m looking for is, “unemployable” ;)

But I digress. For all the advancement I’ve made, I still innately resist doing what ‘should’ be done.. The response is wickedly visceral, immediate and unstoppable. My brain feels choked of oxygen, and lethargy swiftly casts the pallor of death over the day…unless I choose to do something else. If I’m not mindful of it, then I’m merely distracted, but if I am then it’s a battle between demons. I’ve occasionally come up with ways of tricking myself into being productive, which compensates for that initial wave of negativity, but these tricks only work once. After that, my brain quickly evolves an immunity to them. I have over the course of my life discovered the sure-fire ways to rouse me to action, but the conditions that make it possible require external resources that are not always available to me; more on that later.

This month, rather than try for the umpteenth time to “fix” the response, I’ve decided to embrace it and see what happens. Procrastinators, after all, are REALLY GOOD at finding OTHER work to do; if that work can still be useful, then one can be productive accidentally on-purpose. The alternative is to keep trying what I did from April to May: reduce the number of responsibilities I have down to the absolute minimum, so I have no choice but to work on them. Apparently this is a rookie mistake; as John Perry says in his structured procrastination essay:

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

Ouch. That is TOTALLY what happened to me.

Part of “embracing procrastination” is the willingness to shed any guilt, shame, or regrets that I might have about it. There is something about my brain that resists the command to do what I am “supposed to do”, even when it’s ME that’s setting the goals. It’s automatic, immediate, and powerful. And that’s how I am. It is OK. Breathe! Accept!

TAKES THREE DEEP BREATHS

Ok! Having accepted myself, this is a good time to remember that there ARE ways around my procrastination. There are basically three conditions that have to be met:

C1. I am in charge of the project, and I have made a promise to deliver by a certain date. C2. I am communicating face-to-face with people on a daily basis, and they are equally invested in the work as I am.
C3. Someone really DOES need something from me, and they are at risk of experiencing some form of pain if I do not deliver as promised.

I’ve found that all three of these conditions MUST BE PRESENT for me to initiate action quickly and without delay. Unfortunately for my personal projects, the conditions are all external motivators, and are not generally available when I want them. If I try to apply them in the personal context, this is what goes through my head:

• Regarding C1: When I’m in charge of my own project, I feel I can break the promise to myself because no one is getting hurt. And it wasn’t really a promise, right? More of a fuzzy goal?
• Regarding C2: Communicating with myself isn’t that interesting, though it’s a useful proxy. I write a LOT when I’m doing work, often in a journal form, because the conversational flow keeps my mind somewhat engaged and writing is really easy for me. However, communication with other people is energizing, while writing for myself depletes energy in exchange for clarity. It is a limited resource.
• Regarding C3: Many of my personal projects are not immediate “needs”, falling instead into the “would be nice to have” category. Even the ones that I know will bring me money, resources, opportunity. It’s just too abstract to feel immediate and compelling to me.

So these conditions are not going to be useful in tackling my current work, with the exception of my paying project where I can collaborate in real-time with my colleagues over regular Skype meetings. That leaves structured procrastination as a strategem.

Applied Structured Productivity

The key behind structured procrastination, as I understand it, is to arrange to be productive when you are procrastinating. For that to happen, I need to change my definitions.

Here’s a standard definition of productivity that I pulled out of my butt:

Productivity is producing the results you have set as a goal in a timely, efficient, and predictable manner.

Sounds so rational and wonderful! Too bad I can’t have it. Instead, let’s try:

Productivity is producing useful, tangible results that have value now or in the future.

The difference between the definitions is the elimination of timeliness and predictability. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the procrastinator is UNRELIABLE, though I’m sure some people would disagree with that. If one defines “reliable” as “producing something when they promise it”, then the procrastinator can be reliable if they never promise or never commit to delivering something by a particular time! It’s called “being impeccable with your word”. Though it sounds weaselly, I figure so long as one has produced something of value in the past that is STILL paying-off, it’s OK. One of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, was a terrible procrastinator from what I’ve read, but he did OK. That’s really what I want, a kind of “fruit orchard” model of productivity, where one walks among trees of all generations and types every day, seeing what’s about to drop and feeding what seems to need feeding. This is a pleasurable alternative to the “factory assembly line” model that we hold up as an example of progress. Another author, Neal Stephenson, summed it up as “making stuff up and cashing checks”. YEAH!

The Process of Effective Procrastination

To kick off the process, I made a list of starting insights, hypotheses and principles.

• GIVEN: I automatically resist what I am “supposed” to do (important tasks) if there is no compelling social context for it.
• GIVEN: When I am resisting important tasks, I procrastinate by doing something else interesting.
• INSIGHT 01: (from John Perry) If I reduce my set of available activities to only the important tasks, the only recourse is to sit on the couch and do nothing productive (this insight is from the Structured Procrastination essay)
• HYPOTHESIS 01: Given Insight 1, if I increase the number of projects and people I am involved with, would more opportunities to create arise because there are more tasks to avoid?

Seems plausible.

• INSIGHT 02: I often procrastinate by satisfying my curiosity. I’ll call these secondary tasks, and keep track of what they were.
• HYPOTHESIS 02: Perhaps the secondary tasks will actually add-up into something that resembles productivity.

Also plausible. I was ready to give it a try, but also wanted to keep track of what I did. Perry notes in his book that he likes to celebrate things that get done, no matter how small. Upon reflection, this is something I like too. It may be that my desire to have a great team is less about competence than it is about having people to celebrate with. Since I don’t have people around to help me with this, I had to look for another solution.

My Trello setup has worked well in the past, so I resurrected it (it had laid dormant for about a year), and reorganized it. Instead of using a “left-to-right task progression” approach, it’s now arranged roughly by “importance” (split into a number of sublists), “priority”, and “what got done”

On first glance, this might just look like a medium-sized todo list, but it’s not. It is a guilt-free memory board. Remember what I said about embracing procrastination and dropping shame and guilt? I WAS NOT KIDDING.

Here’s some details on how I’m using it:

• I’m treating it as a way to remember things I wanted or might do someday without shame, guilt, or other forms of self-recrimination. It doesn’t do me any good to think that way. If I thought of it as a to-do list, I would curl up in a ball and cry.

• Likewise, the prioritized list is there to remind me what I “should” be doing, but procrastinatory forces will push me toward one of the other lists. This is structured procrastination applied.

• Finally, if something pops into my mind and I do something that’s not on any list, I add it to the DONE column and add a + in front of it. This is also structured procrastination, which recognizes that we like to feel we’ve accomplished something and celebrate it.

So how did it work in practice?

If the theory holds, the “should do” list should create a repelling force that drives my attention onto one of the receiving sublists. Here’s the “should do” list for reference again:

• My Video Game Project
• Creating more Stationery Products
• My Living Room Cafe Project
• Billable Work

It’s fascinating that as I look at this list that I KNOW are ALL COOL projects, I still feel my brain rejecting the very idea of working on them just because they’re things I “should” do. This reaction is so dumb, but yet it’s there. And as you might expect, I hardly worked on them. In hindsight, the work that DID progress (living room cafe project, billable work) happened because I happened to make face-to-face contact with the people directly involved. Personal interaction drives my work, apparently.

So let’s look at everything else. Thanks to the Trello board, I can look back at my past four weeks of what “got done”, which results in the following:

MAINTENANCE DONE: Major car repairs, rebuild and mirror Windows 8.1 workstation, backup system image for easy restore, setup iTunes libraries, upgrade virtual machines for code development, get snow tires swapped, brought the garden hose to the second floor deck, cleaned up cat litter area, break down boxes in bases and take to dump, started gym, paid medical and printing bills.

LIVING ROOM CAFE PROGRESS: Went to the flooring center three times, checking out samples overnight. Picked floor sample, worked through estimate, consolidated money, booked the work and made down payment. Researched furniture. Acquired packing boxing. Started packing boxes of books to clear living room for pending installation.

CURIOSITIES RESEARCHED: bed desks, compact grills, current standing desks, Medium as a writing channel, Alain de Botton and the nature of Fulfilling Work, buying ISBN numbers, small hatchbacks, AI steering behaviors, contact lens monovision selection, magnetic screen doors, spicy noodles, Scoville heat ratings, control systems (PID), Apple II FPGAs, Tuft & Needle mattresses, Roost 2.0 laptop stand, NoFilmSchool website, Gregory Ciotti, sub-irrigation planter updates, Enjin templating. Wrote some notes on mmorpg design, using Git, and designed a character sheet.

BOOKS READ: Read “The Art of Procrastination”, started “The Art of Asking”.

FOOD EXPERIENCES PURSUED: Marinated three kinds of chicken, tried Momofuku soft-boiled eggs, got into Samyang Spicy Hot Chicken noodle challenge, tried three kinds of cinnamon tea.

MEDIA CONSUMED: Saw “Age of Ultron”, “Mad Max Fury Road”. Watched “The Blacklist”, “Agents of Shield”, and “Community”.

IMPROVEMENTS BOUGHT: New book ends in bulk for new shelf organization, mini charcoal chimney starter, chinese scooter repair manual, Game AI textbook 2nd edition, “Don’t Make Me Think” 3rd Edition, Harney & Sons Cinnamon Sunset tea from Target, magnet screen doors (returned 1), bought bulk packages of samyang spicy chicken noodles

WORK DONE: Forked Project 1401 (game project) into phase 3 of STEP project, wrote technical design document for phase 3, researched AI behaviors, met with researchers over Skype, build Isotyop prototype page for web client.

COMMUNED WITH: Joined digital independent group, increased participation in online game chat room, Arts Council monthly board meeting, Website Committee monthly board meeting, processed photos from local arts events, interview for Alpha Efficiency, reconnect with old friend, had a picnic, two-day video shoot for musician friend, joined online game fansite as moderator, built proof-of-concept fansite.

None of this was really planned, and on first glance, this looks like quite a lot of stuff. A lot of it was useful research related to projects of personal interest. I learned a bunch of stuff too, becoming passably competent in a range of subjects. More importantly, I didn’t feel terrible about not having done what I was “supposed to”, and this lack of negative feeling makes it more likely that I will do it. I would say that the “unplanned” to “planned” ration is 10:1 or higher.

Although I promised myself that I wouldn’t feel bad about being a procrastinator, I have to admit I feel a little twinge of, “I seem to be able to do so much! Why can’t I just do it on purpose?” I have no answer. It’s not the kind of thing that can be explained away by some smug non-procrastinator waving the “just do it” banner. That might work for them, and God bless them for it because we need people like that. But don’t try to make it seem that it’s any better or any worse. We’re all people with diverse gifts and idiosyncrasies, after all!

With Regards to Groundhog Day Resolutions

Before I close this post, I think it’s worth looking back on my original Groundhog Day Resolutions for 2015. They are quite different from what I’m doing now. Here’s the goals from the beginning of 2015:

Umbrella Goals (rewritten slightly):

G1. Eliminating Time-based Thinking G2. Reduce Possessions and Responsibilities that sap energy G3. Build full-time stationery business by end of year G4. Find will to create and share more G5. Build health and strength

Specific Goals that are on the top of my mind

• Personal Project 1401 Video Game Project (relates to G4)
• Paying Project Work (relates to G4)
• Adding new products to the Stationery Business, particularly the full-size notebook and marketing (relates to G3)
• Living Room Cafe (relates to G4)
• Dental and Blood Pressure (relates to G5)

What I think I’ve learned from this past month of “structured procrastination” is that the freedom to work on where my mind takes me is essential to my feeling of well being. In the past, I had thought that Creative Independence was going to be the vehicle to that kind of happiness, which made my goal of building a financial foundation to reduce my need for continuous work (aka the stationery business) a priority. Today, I’m leaning toward the idea that it is the ability to effectively harvest what I produce, even when it’s not what was planned or expected, that might be the long-term solution. If I can live my life like this and not hurt anyone, I think it’s OK. Here are some ideas that might prevent people from getting hurt by my unpredictable productive proclivities:

• Selling products as opposed to services, for example, is one way to be erratically productive and not inconvenience people.

• Paying people generously to do the tedious work that I’m not good at following is another way to do it, and I need to take advantage of that option more often.

• For those times when I do need to work with singular focus, making sure that the three conditions I mentioned earlier are in place. If I know those conditions can’t be met, I shouldn’t take the project.

An unexpected bonus from adopting structured procrastination is that I’ve accidententally completed Groundhog Day Resolution #1: “eliminating time-based thinking”. If you look at the definition I made for productivity, the lack of time references makes that happen. The original reason the goal had come about was because I’d noticed that the time I spent worrying about future efficiency took my attention off the actual DOING of things; the goal was a way to reset my attitude about time. Embracing procrastination seems to another way of doing that.

Possible Problems

The biggest problem with embracing structured procrastination is probably other people’s expectations. Embracing procrastination, or any “character flaw” for that matter, is not popular with the fix-it mentality of mainstream society. It’s a little crazy, creating a credibility problem if I were to advertise my services as a “designer/developer for hire”. However, it’s only a problem if I make my living from doing work for other people who don’t know me; if I shift to a product-based revenue (which is goal G3), that problem goes away.

A more interesting solution to the credibility problem is reframing the structured procrastination approach so it is predictable from another perspective. For example, rather than offer “predictability of time” as my main credibility metric, I could offer “predictability of quality” or “predictability of uniqueness”…something like that. I suspect that the truly great creative agencies, the ones that create great works of design and quality, are using approaches very similar to structured procrastination, and perhaps timelessness as well, as part of their creative process. The creation of original and compelling works doesn’t come from a factory model. With additional study and practice, perhaps I can learn how to build a bridge from where I am now to that place where I’m a creator at the very top of his game, integrating play with purpose, and learning to flow into work that is freeing rather than confining.

The Month Ahead

While I’ve enjoyed my month of structured procrastination, I’d like to push myself more on the “should do” tasks. These are, again:

• The Stationery Business
• Paying Work
• The Video Game Project
• The Living Room Cafe

I’ve found a useful technique is applying a 5-minute timer to see how far I can get on tedious tasks. Since I want to get them done quickly anyway, the 5-minute challenge plays into that desire. 5 minutes creates more of a sense of urgency, and since it’s short I don’t feel like I’m “trapped” as I do even with a fifteen minute timer, which I think of as the first block in a chain of work units. The cool thing is that I know if I just get started, my procrastination symptoms drop away and my curious/rational side takes over. Then, the minutes tend to spool off into hours of productive work.

Failing that, my fallback will be unapologetic structured procrastination. We’ll see how well that works out come July 7!

Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2015

• The original post about Groundhog Day Resolutions
• 02/02 - Kickoff - Setting Goals
• 03/03 - Resolution Review #1: ETP Notebooks, Video Games, and Living Room Cafes
• 04/04 - Resolution Review #2: Acquisition Mindset, Micro Thing Challenge
• 05/05 - Resolution Review #3: Releasing Expectations for Better Productivity?
• 06/06 - Resolution Review #4: Embracing Structured Productivity
• 07/07 - Resolution Review #5: Floor Installation and Dad Visitation
• 08/08 - Resolution Review #6: Embracing Slowness (or at least tolerating it)
• 09/09 - Resolution Review #7: A Month of Slow Movements
• 10/10
• 11/11
• 12/12

The post "Resolution Review #4: Trying Structured Procrastination" appeared first on Dave Seah.