David Seah - Design, Development, Inspiration, Empowerment

Making a Groundhog Day Resolutions Tracking Form

2010-02-09 02:20:51+00:00

SUMMARY: Over the past week or so I've identified many personal tips and insights that will help 2010 be more productive and goal-focused. To ensure that I can be reminded of what needs to be done every day, I made a personal tracking form / cheat sheet to help keep on task.

This past weekend I spent a lot of time reviewing my current situation, qualitatively weighing my sense of progress against my sense of achievement. The net evaluation? I'm not satisfied. I didn't beat myself up too much, though, since I know I'm actively trying to reorient my work-related identity from Designer to Producer of Goods. One critical insight from the weekend session: As a Designer, I was focused on getting more design work. However, as a producer of goods, I should be applying my design sense to the creation of awesome products and get them out into the world...thanks GaryC for that mental nudge. It's a subtle shift in emphasis, one that I hope results in improved clarity. This month, I'm going to start testing that hypothesis.

Getting a Grip

In my recent posts on packaging what I've already designed and kicking off the 2010 Groundhog Day Resolutions season, I've identified a whole boatload of principles, insights, and rules of thumb that I've gleaned over the past five years of blogging. One recurring problem, however, has been in the spotty focus on GHDRs day-to-day. This is something I believe I need to fix right now.

The GHDR (Groundhog Day Resolution) focus is met incompletely by two existing forms I've made:

The Emergent Task Planner deals with daily "must get done" tasks. However, since it is "emergent", it is by nature a reactive approach. While things do get done, it's not a form that enforces the adherence to a strategy; the implicit assumption is that there's already a strategy in place to guide your daily to-dos.
The Concrete Goals Tracker is a higher-level form that is more suitable in principle, but it's designed to create strategy-supporting habits, not implement a specific strategy directly. The design works because it relies on a mechanism that harnesses our natural desire to see our actions in a positive light similar to being a "spin doctor" or rationalizing our behaviors. In this way, we can theoretically condition ourselves to be on the lookout for favorable opportunities where we didn't before. I've attemped to adapt the CGT a couple times before, once in this lengthy resolution-making process article from 2009 and another in this general New Year's Resolution process. Neither approach I found to be particularly interesting, though.

I decided to make a new form that is essentially a cheat sheet containing everything I believe is working for me. Although it is highly personalized for me, I think there are probably some ideas here that may serve others.

The basic premise is pretty simple: print out one of these for every week or two, and keep track of what I'm making to fulfill my stated Groundhog Day Resolution Master Goal:

To create exciting start-up kits with people I like and respect while making an honest buck.

There's a place where I can keep track of what I'm doing, but the bulk of the sheet is stuffed with reminders and tips of how I will actually meet that goal. In educational terms, I believe this is called "scaffolding"; any educational theorists out there reading this can give me a hand here.

I'm going to try this form for the next few weeks to see if it helps me maintain a sense of clarity and purpose. You can download a printable PDF to assess for your own personal resolution-making activities. It's not an official supported form release, but it may become part of a Groundhog Day Resolution package in the future. The next challenge, actually, is to remake my portable desk/notebook that neatly complements my online communication tools. Otherwise, I won't have a place to physically look at every day! That's an essential factor in making paper forms as part of the daily workflow.

Making New Products, Yankee Swap Style

2010-02-04 17:03:38+00:00

As I've been going through my finances for 2009 and 2010, the thought that I need to create packages to sell has kept bubbling to the surface. The bummer is that everything I was thinking of required significant time to design, develop, test, and then market. However, it occurred to me that perhaps I was being too precious about making products, a point driven home by an hour well spent browsing Regretsy (tagline: where DIY meets WTF). There you will find horrifying sweaters-turned-pants, bad photo compositing sold as "exquisite" art, and baffling mashups of hardware store odds-and-ends. Although my sense of design, craftsmanship, and aesthetics are stunned into silence by some of these items, I have to admire the urge to make, reimagine, and repurpose. I should apply some of that to my own situation: what do I got in the back that I can repackage and sell?

The mindset is like having a yankee swap of product. The idea of the Yankee Swap (or "White Elephant Exchange") game is that you find something used in your household to get rid of and package it up. You meet with several others who have done the same, and you proceed to draw numbers and pick presents. It's played usually around Christmas here in the States, as a fun and sometimes-vindictive way to save some money while (technically) exchanging gifts. There are many things that I have thought of doing on my website and with my design practice that I've been slow to implement or have rejected outright, as my gifting mentality is to give really unique and wonderful things tailored to the recipient. However, this is quite expensive in terms of time and resources.

There are things on this website that I could technically repackage. The Chain Mail Breaker, for example, or many of the tracking forms customized as a PDF workbook or daily planner. I could even distill some past writing into ebooks, or provide all the PCEO downloads as a simple all-inclusive ZIP file and charge some kind of download fee. All these ideas seem borderline-exploitive to me, but perhaps there IS value there that I find difficult to see. One thing that I've noticed at Yankee Swaps is that invariably, someone brings in a piece of junk that EVERYONE WANTS because it is legitimately awesome. I am not the arbiter of what's awesome or not, so I should just start peddling stuff. And perhaps I need to shake myself out of the "gift giving" mentality with everything and target those people who are looking for a quick and affordable solution to some problem without the desire to make a connection with myself and our community of eclectic productivista entrepreneurs. It occurs to me that at least 30% of the traffic here comes from search engines; those are people looking for something to buy/download that FIXES something in their lives.

So that's my thought for the day: how to package what I've already done in bite-sized, graspable chunks to bring in more revenue?

Groundhog Day Resolutions 2010: Kickoff

2010-02-02 18:26:06+00:00

SUMMARY: It's time for the 2010 Groundhog Day Resolutions! I review the past three years of resolutions and distill my "operating principles" from lessons learned into a (hopefully) strong direction for the year.

Being a lazy-yet-practical sort of person, every year I wait until Groundhog Day to make my yearly resolutions. The rationale, which I explain in further detail in the original Groundhog Day Resolutions post, is that I need to rest from the holidays before I'm in the right frame of mind to make important decisions. So I wait. January's chilly melancholy eventually yields to ever-lengthened days, until at last on February 2 the emergence of domestic prognosticating rodents turn our attention to the green promise of a most-welcome Spring. Groundhog Day is, without a doubt in my mind, the finest day to look positively to the future.

That said, I have to admit that my past three attempts at achieving, as opposed to merely iterating, my resolutions has produced spotty results. Partly this is due to the awareness that my choices of resolution have been far too broad, and it's also partly due to the memory of writing-up the disappointments of my Groundhog Day Resolution Reviews. These reviews, designed to keep focus on resolutions throughout the year, occur on every month and one day after 2/2, so the easily-remembered review days are 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, etc. In many of my reports, I would discover new insights in the place of concrete progress. So it was with diminished enthusiasm that I reviewed the year-end reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

What I found, to my surprise, was that a lot of it seemed to fit together. Three years means three data points, and suddenly I can see how the journey and regular review have conspired to get me to the state-of-mind I am in today. That state of mind is it is time to build. In a way, this post is the culmination of five years of blogging insights.

But before I get to that, I want to review what a resolution should be.

So what is a Resolution?

So what is a resolution? I really was not sure, so I applied everyone's favorite high school essay shortcut: look up the definition of resolution. After a quick skim of the Wikipedia article, I believe the general idea is that you're making a serious promise to make permanent change in your life, standing resolutely in the face of guaranteed difficulty, to better yourself. This is a pretty popular idea; according to research by John C. Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, some 50% of Americans make a New Year's Resolution. However, only 1 in 5 make it stick for more than 2 years. Wikipedia further quotes a UK study of some 3000 people in which the surveyed rate of success was only 12%.

Though the numbers are grim, there ARE ways to improve the odds. There appear to be around five habits practiced by successful resolution keepers:

they break big goals into smaller, realistic steps
they ask for and receive support from friends and co-workers
they reward themselves for successes
they maintain a positive attitude, focusing on the good of the new habit instead of the loss of the old habit
they do not blame themselves for slip-ups

In other words, these habits help ensure that there is adequate and constant feedback from both the self and from other people, and that a positive attitude suppresses self-punishing thoughts in favor of the counted blessings of the new habit.

In the construction of this year's Groundhog Day Resolutions, I'll need to make sure that I hit all these points. In a way, I've approached them intuitively; the act of even writing about my GHDR experiment is a form of externalization of feedback, and the regular monthly reviews provide needed time for reflection and re-adjustment of strategy. I've also followed the "positive attitude/not blame myself" approach to some degree, because it's part of my Printable CEO design philosophy. However, I have never asked for support, nor rewarded myself. And I haven't been good about breaking the BIG goals into small, realistic steps. I believed that I should focus purely on willpower and self-discipline; this apparently just increases the chances that I'll fail. The smart thing to do would be to use ALL of the habits to ensure success. It may feel like a failure of character or ability to NOT just will myself through it, but perhaps what's more important is that I actually get some stuff done.

That said, I still need to know what my big goals are in the first place. That requires a quick review of my past GHDRs, as depressing the thought of revisiting three years of that low-yield effort may be.

As it turns out, it wasn't all so bad.

Resolutions of Years Past

Here's the quick recap:

In 2007, I decided that I really wanted to make money from doing what I love, which I figured was writing and making stuff. That became one of three major focuses; the other two were creating a sustainable social network and sell a product. None of these really came to fruition in 2007, so they were extended through 2008. I came up with a few more specific resolutions, but none of them came to pass and I essentially gave up. However, one things that did come out at the end was a master resolution: Seek truth, make it visible to others as part of what drives me.

In 2009, already weary of the process and working on a large museum project at the same time, I didn't even start the resolution definition process until April. The first two resolutions were restatements of my 2007 resolutions: write about what catches my eye, create that which illuminates and achieve financial independence through what I create. I knew it wasn't going to be the "fast track" to money, but it was the way I decided I wanted to do it. A little later that year, I finally noticed that the more I worked with other people on their projects, the better my own projects seemed to go. That lead to a new directive: Be involved with dreams that are larger than myself.

By the end of the year, my Groundhog Day Resolutions had coalesced into a set of principles:

Communicate with a variety of people in a variety of ways. Be interested! Have real conversations with them! Do it face-to-face, and through online media.
Create tangible new things every day, then show what you've made to those people you're talking to.
Be involved in other people's dreams that are larger than yourself, with people I like and respect.

These are external principles that seem to serve me well, and they have been stated for the past five years of my blogging in various ways. It hasn't been always easy to maintain the momentum, particularly when it came to creating everyday. However, late in 2009 I had formulated two additional principles, which are curiously-contradictory:

Just do is about doing something that changes something about the world, and then quantifying its effect. This is the action-oriented, metrics-based approach to productivity we're familiar with. This is the direct approach.
Just be, by comparison, is more about observation and context than action. The change in the world, come from the cycle of observing what is happening, and then reacting to it as part of the mysterious flow of it all. This is a more artistic approach to life, and the surprising thing is that the world also changes just by your being in it.

Finding the balance between "just doing" and "just being" is helping to unlock my creativity and productivity. With this settled for now, I started to realize that it was time to step up; from this came the series of (My) World Domination articles in late 2009, which mapped out the terrain before me, what I had for resources, and a growing sense that it was time to plan a journey to one of five destinations I describe as "business opportunities". That's what's been on my mind for the past few months.

Resolutions for 2010

2010 is about leadership and making a financial vehicle to see me to the end. 2010 is the first year I have, thanks to Google Wave with Colleen™, an actual end game. This is my resolution:

To create with and be around people I like and respect, and make an honest buck.

I think everything flows from that. We shall see! I'm choosing four goals that I think will contribute:

Create a package for each of the five destinations that can be sold on Amazon or offered as a service.
Recruit people who are interested in being part of Dave Seah caravan.
Expand the product line from 1 to 5 things by the end of the year.
Offer it all (and more) on the website.

All the other operating principles are in effect as well, which will improve my chances of making it:

Be part of something bigger than myself.
Make and show new stuff, every day.
Keep the conversation alive and interested with everyone who will participate.
"Just Do" or "Just Be", as the situation calls for.
Strategize in small steps. Measure by tangible results.
Be brave enough to ask for help.
Reward myself on the journey in recognition of progress
Maintain focus on the positive, not the negative
Don't punish myself up for slipping up. Lead forward!

Ok, 2010! Let's get it on! The next review day is March 3, 2010.

Kanban, Event Modeling, and GTD

2010-01-28 16:30:28+00:00

I first heard the word Kanban at a presentation of the local Scrum Club. Scrum, if you're not familiar with it, is a team methodology to create working software QUICKLY through short production cycles called sprints. This is in contrast to the waterfall model of software development, which defines the entire process from concept to deployment as a series of blocks that follow each other on a march to the end. Waterfall, in my mind, is like starting with one giant boulder of time, from which the team must carve a working model of a city in as efficient a manner as possible to conform to the blueprint. SCRUM, by comparison, is like starting with many pebbles of time and working those individually into functioning buildings one-at-a-time; the finished city evolves one working building at a time. This isn't a perfect analogy, of course, but in general the first approach requires much more care and diligence to make work while wasting time backtracking, while the second approach risks less by avoiding backtracking and using smaller rocks of time.

Anyway, getting back to the story, at the Scrum Club meeting[1] Kanban was described in terms of Scrum...and I can't remember a word of it, so I didn't look it up. Then a few weeks ago, I read the word "kanban" again in Google Wave with Colleen™, but didn't ask about it...I just assumed it was another Cool Colleen Thing that I would understand in time. But THEN, a few days ago, Stephen Smith commented on my recentering and refocusing post, mentioning how he's using his kanban board to organize next-actions and other GTDish detritus.

Board? Did someone say BOARD? Let it be known that I am a friend to ALL BOARDS of ALL SIZES and USES!

And that's when I finally actually looked up kanban on wikipedia, and found that it means, literally, visual card/board. You know, like index cards. I love index cards. As I skimmed the wikipedia article, it became clear to me that kanban embodies something I've been reaching toward in other ways, such as the Storytelling By Design series I grappled with back in 2006. My essential realization was the idea that physical props have the ability to effect a chain reaction of events, and by designing those props we could do quite a lot to effect change in people and the world. In a way, that is what kanban seems to do in the manufacturing process. By providing physical cues like cards, balls, or whatever objects are used, actions are triggered on the factory floor that help the entire system run smoothly. My impression is that it's not unlike event-driven programming, made physical.

Anyway, my fellow index card nerds, you might want to check out Stephen Smith's Personal Kanban post over on his blog to see what the index card board looks like in the context of GTD. I'm going to have to look more into kanban, because I suspect there are ideas in there that can help me flesh out my Storytelling By Design theory.

[1] You can find your local Scrum Club chapter at their website.

Design Agency Process Diagram

2010-01-27 06:07:22+00:00

In Monday's post I went through a process of recentering myself, and identified four areas to focus on and track. The trickiest one was DESIGN AGENCY, because there are a LOT of different tasks.

I just finished creating a "process diagram" that outlines a high-level roadmap of agency operations; just about any task I can think of fits somewhere the diagram. You can read about and download the PDF over on the Agenceum Blog, which is where I am running my "open design agency" experiment. Although this diagram is labeled for Agenceum, it really is for ALL of my design-related business activities.

Read more about the diagram on the Agenceum blog.

Recentering and Refocusing

2010-01-25 14:40:20+00:00

SUMMARY: I've been feeling that there are too many things going on, diluting my efforts to make significant progress. But how do I pick what to focus on and what to ignore? First, I acknowledge that I am feeling uncertain about some aspects of my current work, getting the negative out in the open so I can have a good look at it. Then I synthesize the list of things to focus on for now that alleviate those fears through recommitment to principle.

This past Friday I was feeling pretty burned out, and so mentioned I it in the Google Wave-enabled "Do Not Hurry. Do Not Wait" experiment with Communicatrix. Do you know what happens when two verbose bloggers start using Google Wave? You get a flood of insights and anecdotes, that's what! Highly recommended, if you can find yourself this situation! Checking what's new on the Wave has become my favorite daily activity, as it provides a place to maintain my own sense of continuity while seeing how someone else handles their day. It's entertaining and informative. I used to get this same sense of continuity from Twitter, but now I use it to see "what's going on in the world." As a result, my Twitter stream has become the antithesis of continuity and focus.

Anyway, on Friday I started a new Wave with Colleen™ with the theme of Recentering, Reducing, Refocusing, and Rebooting. It seemed to me that I had too many things going on delivering too little in return, and my impatience was rising. It's been three whole months since I identified my master vantage point, which gave me a clear sense of where I wanted to go in 2010. And in that master vantage point, I'd identified five destinations I wanted to reach, each representing a type of success that I am confident will be worth the effort. In the time since pointing them out, I've made some progress on all fronts--printed pads at Amazon, starting a podcast, collaborating with more people on future products, and starting Agenceum--but growth is intolerably slow. Perhaps my expectations are unrealistic (that wouldn't be a surprise), so I was thinking that I should narrow my focus to just a few things and not worry about the rest until I feel good about the progress. Given that my energy reserves are limited, that means I need to pour what I've got into fewer glasses. Right now I have what feels like a dozen half-empty glasses. I'd like them to fill faster.

dealing with dread

I had to admit to myself that this sudden impatience with my progress was driven by something I dreaded, though I wasn't sure what it was. Was it a fear that I was already failing? Was it the ever-increasing pressure of needing to book some revenue in the short term? Was it the feeling that I should be faster? As I grouched about these issues in The Wave, Colleen made the observation that (and I'm immensely paraphrasing, here) communication with myself had broken down. This I thought was a DAZZLING insight. It was time to have a talk to myself, and I never pass up a chance to do that :-)

So I drove to Starbucks (it's Sunday night now) for some coffee and light ambient noise. I then busted out an index card and allowed myself to have a good whine on it. It's a little embarrassing to share, but I am going to do it anyway trusting that you all out there don't presume that I feel like this all the time. This first step was my attempt to give shape to the "feeling of dread"; it's NOT a cry out for help and Kleenex®.

It took about 30 seconds to write out the first half of the card, which I did as a stream-of-consciousness exercise. What came out, I guessed, was the "who" I wasn't communicating with while on my forced march to happiness.

Is it going to be ok? am I on the right path? Show me a sign dammit! am I really alone? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a say in it? Am I just too scared? Too weak? Too untalented? Am I lovable by someone I can love? Will it happen, ever? Do I have to HUSTLE for love?

It's a litany of doubt, self-consciousness, and fear of being overwhelmed by the loneliness of the march. I hadn't expected, at the ripe old age of 42, to be making this march by myself. I had thought I'd be married by now, partnered with a kick-ass amazing woman that shared the sense of excitement of the quest.

After getting the fear down on paper where I could see it, my immune system kicked in, producing an unexpected burst of spiritual antibodies:

It really isn't about me.
I am as I am
I am responsible for only 1/2 of the connection
I'm shooting for that rare 2%
Who do I need on my personal Board of Directors for wise counsel?

I wasn't sure what these phrases meant, exactly, at the time I wrote them. I did know that I felt somewhat relieved at having restated some important truths. Looking at them again in the light of day, I can see that they are a kind of absolution from guilt. I'd accepted that my current state of existence is due to the way the cards have fallen: I've got to work with what I've been dealt (who I am), recognize that winning isn't entirely up to me (it's due to external factors too), and that my strategy has been to pursue something pretty damn rare (the 2% at the top). Impatient as I am, I'd sure like to know WHAT that rare thing is, and WHEN I'll find it, but I also recognize that I need some additional oversight and guidance; this is a huge admission for desiring-to-be-self-sufficient me. Not so coincidentally, I'd been at a board meeting for Float Left Labs earlier, where we were just discussing the need to expand the board. It made sense then, and I realized it made sense for me too.

creating bins to receive effort

With the doubt settled for now, I then wrote out what was most important to me; these would become the focal points of my effort to see more rapid progress. I blanked my mind and let the words come.

I wrote the words first, each on its own card, then went back and annotated them. Here's what each one means:

COLLECTIVE - I've recognized that being an ego-less part of other people's proejcts is essential to ground myself. I'm not sure why, but the efforts I make to be helpful to others in a group opens myself up in ways that somehow end up moving me forward. Perhaps it is allowing me to learn how to receive help too, and by understanding this I can see how together we can thrive. Isn't that the point?
DESIGN AGENCY - I find it hard calling myself a "designer", but that's the closest label I can find that matches the set of skills I have. I've added "Agency" because it implies that there's an operation behind the art, consisting of workflow, project management, marketing, sales, etc. Some of this I talk about on the Agenceum blog, but I have not done all I could. I have a LOT of material that I can pour into a design practice that is, ultimately, comprised of people that I like working with. And, I have a good idea of how I'd like to measure progress for a small agency, having worked in a few small shops in my time.
HEALTH - I'm thinking of renaming this WELL-BEING, but the general idea is that as I begin the second half of my life, I should be in good physical shape so I can enjoy it. This is something my Dad tells me from time to time, and for a man in his 80s he's in great shape. Changing the name of this card to WELL-BEING would broaden the definition, including things like doing chores and budgeting better. In other words, treat myself right.
DAVENESS - I was surprised by this word but it popped right into my brain. It likely stems from the "I am as I am" statement I made earlier on my whining card. I'd also had the thought that Google Wave with Colleen™ had reminded me how unique everyone is, and that it can shine through even in a limited medium like text in the hands of a master writer like the Communicatrix. Even though I am not exactly sure what my most "marketable" skills are, I do know that the way I approach things resonates with a certain audience. It may be a very small audience, but it's the one that I like...thanks for following along, dear readers! I know that the more I share what I love and do ("Daveness"), the better the opportunities that come my way. I may not be perfect, but God has imbued me with "Daveness", and I've been entrusted to nurture it to full potential.

Next I have to create some simple means of tracking progress on all four focus areas. The most complex one is the Design Agency card; there are at least six agency roles, each with its own workflow and operational requirements. I'll be working on that a little later today; I think the format will be different than what I've created before, but we'll see.

Carrots and Sticks

2010-01-24 05:34:11+00:00

I came across an article on The Economist about how the threat of less is a better incentive than the promise of gain. Researchers ran an experiment at a Chinese electronics factory, offering groups of worker one of two deals:

The group would receive a bonus if a certain target production threshold was met.
The group has been awarded a bonus, but if production falls below a threshold it will be lost.

What do you think happened?

Apparently, the second deal was a more effective incentive. The article didn't say HOW much more, but it did mention that the result was sustained over time. Apparently, when we think something is already ours, we are motivated to value it higher than if it is something that we have to earn. I remember reading something similar to this in Stumbling On Happiness, though I'll have to reread the book to find the reference.

In the design of my productivity tools, I avoid punishing users for not doing something, preferring to use accrual as the means to encourage a particular behavior. The reason for this approach comes from an early experience during the World of Warcraft alpha and beta tests. There was considerable debate about how death should be managed. One camp said that when you died, you should lose some of your equipment as punishment for being lame enough to die; it was probably your fault, so by penalizing players you'd make sure they would be a little smarter. Everyone agreed, however, that dying in the game sucked. Eventually, the design team decided that death itself was penalty enough; you would lose time recovering your corpse, which pretty much killed your ability to finish quests at higher levels, and BOY did that suck. You would retain all your equipment, though eventually a "wear" was applied to so it cost money to maintain your equipment. As for more drastic penalties like loss of experience points? That seemed like too much, especially for the broader audience that Blizzard hoped to attract. It's interesting to think how loss of points might apply to an incentive tool...what I like about it is that it implies a sense of continuity without having to actually record it. All that is necessary is the idea that, "I earned these points" and harnessing the idea that you shouldn't lose them; therefore, you would have to act in some way to maintain a certain level of production. However, because there is no monetary value built-into the forms themselves, it's a difficult carrot-and-stick methodology to implement effectively. I'll have to think about it.

Six Aspects of Focus

2010-01-20 14:57:22+00:00

SUMMARY: Getting started on Wednesday, I'm just not feeling the focus. When I get stuck I usually just write something to get my brain working; writing helps me linearize my thoughts, which helps me visualize what's wrong and what can be done. This time, I become aware that there are six different challenges that I've hazily grouped under the focus label.

For once this month I'm out of the house before 10AM. I'm sitting at Starbucks easing into the day, a few pints short of a full night's sleep. When I'm in his state of semi-wakefulness, it's particularly hard to focus. So I'm going to talk about focus for a few minutes.

A Quick Detour

First, though, I came across this wonderful example of mathematics improving on the Compact Calendar: Max Froumentin's Efficient Calendar. The "improvement" is to pack the days in the calendar so those pesky weeks don't break up the calendar, ensuring a never-ending continuous flow of days! This is just the sort of calendar that should be included in "Welcome to the Big House" prison welcome baskets and emergency parachute survival kits, because unlike the Compact Calendar it uses the beauty of mathematics to express the meandering, days-without-end ennui of life imprisonment and the pulse-quickening briskness of doom one feels when lost in the wilderness through the elegance of space-filling curves and L-systems. I love it! Snooping around the site further, I see that Froumentin also has a picture text-orizer, which converts a photo into a "type picture". It looks like it produces very nice results.

Where was I again? Oh yes, focus.

Focus on Focus

There a few kinds of focus that I think I'm confusing as one thing.

There's focus for the sake of improving my current situation, which is to make money while working toward greater financial independence through the development of products. This is the overarching goal at the moment.
There's also focus in the sense that I want to be mostly doing things that contribute to the overarching goal.
And then there's focus in being able to pick just one of the multiple project threads at a time, being sure that it's the right thing to do at the moment and that it's OK to let the other threads rest for a while.
Ideally, there's the focus that comes from being in the zone, when everything I need is within mind's reach, and I can simply produce with great efficiency.
I'm also continually trying to maintain focus so I can remember what I was supposed to be doing, or making it easier to be efficient without having to think.
And I'm trying to maintain focus of what the end game is going to look like, so I can steer myself more accurately in that direction.

That is a giant cloud of challenges. Staring at them, I realize that I've attempted to solve some of the problems already:

For the overarching goal, I write on this blog to help keep my mind on it. The Concrete Goals Tracker mindset helps as well: I evaluate everything I do in terms of whether a particular task moves me toward client work, product development, and/or financial independence.
Likewise for "mostly doing things that contribute"; I have a general sense that everything I am doing somehow fits together, and I only count stuff that people can see as being a tangible result.
Picking just one project at a time is something I'm working on; I'm applying temporary forgetfulness, which is when I stop processing new stimuli as the source of novel and interesting brain candy. I do this by actively squashing any thought that seems interesting or fun that is not related to the chosen project of the moment.
Getting in the zone, I'm finding, is often about just doing away with the other distractions and actively formulating a step-by-step inquiry. I actually write a little running monologue in a text file; a recent example can be found in my wiki notes on setting up Virtual PC on Windows 7 for Web Development. The advantage of this approach is that I can pick up where I left off by reading the continuity of my project process, and I have a comprehensive set of notes that can be distilled into a how-to.
For remembering what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm currently using Google Calendar for meetings, Basecamp for clients, and a notebook inspired by the Autofocus4 method for day-to-day to-dos.
As for the end-game...I haven't really figured that out. Yesterday's post on Artistic Integrity and Profit may be the beginning of that.

I've been playing around with the idea of focus cards based on flash cards, similar to the Task Order Up but designed more like a systems map with a YOU ARE HERE marker on it. The generally feeling I have is not having an exact fix on my location, productivity-wise, in the grand scheme of things. I have tools in place for productively moving, and I can look at my progress and feel good about that, but there's a voice in the back of my head that's crying are we there yet?

The Plan for Today

It's been about an hour since I started writing this post, and it's been clarifying. However, I'm not feeling a draw toward a particular project with an immediate payoff. That's kind of a downer. I know there are a couple of projects that I need to get done today, though, because I wrote them down in the AutoFocus4 reporter-style Moleskine. Fortunately I have it with me (I've been developing the habit of making sure I put it in the bag of the day). What jumps out is the iPhone application design I'm starting with Al Briggs, so I'll start with that and allocate a couple of hours. I have a meeting in 30 minutes, but I can probably bang something out using the text file monologue technique (incidentally, I use Google Docs for collaborative monologuing). As I look over the rest of the to-dos, I'm realizing that I don't have an "end-game" strongly visualized for them, so that's something to work on.

Ok, off we go! I'm feeling really tired, but there's a 50% chance that this is merely my brain trying to trick me into procrastinating more.

Artistic Integrity and Profit

2010-01-19 21:04:32+00:00

SUMMARY: I expand my "create then show" mantra to include the means of producing products and distributing them. Maybe this is the way to sell out with integrity.

Recently on BoingBoing, I saw this video of cult-favorite animator Ralph Bakshi at San Diego ComiCon (SDCC) on the subject of dealing with the shrinking animation industry. Bakshi, not mincing words, basically tells his audience to stop crying, get some guys together, and spend a year starving and making something. It's quite an inspirational video as a kick in the pants. There is nothing in your way, technically speaking, except your own ideas of how you achieve success. Bakshi is known for making provocative non-mainstream animation, and in the video he outlined his strategy back in the 60s-70s as looking at what Walt Disney was not doing.

What's appealing about this video is that it confirms what is behind my own progress: make stuff, show it to people. This is my mantra, and it's it's the reason I keep sharing all those productivity forms. By comparison, many people follow the mainstream mantra of get hired to make stuff. There is nothing wrong with that if you are satisfied making what you are told to make, but if you have creative aspirations it comes right back to those two things: making what you have the crazy vision to make and showing people your expression of that vision. And you don't have to be a freelancer like me to do that. The workplace is receptive too, if you have guts and have a credibility amassed from a solid record of production. It's actually pretty hard to get fired from a job for demonstrating a new idea, but the potential for embarrassment and political fallout keep many from even trying it.

I'd be closing this blog post right now, self-satisfied at making a connection between Ralph Bakshi and what I'm doing with my life, if it hadn't been for two recent experiences:

Last week, I had a really interesting chat with my friend Gary, who is a successful self-made industrial designer, about his continued befuddlement at what I'm NOT doing. He sees what I'm doing as the precursor to creating a line of products, which is something I'm taking my time with, but the really interesting observation he made was that I was a new product creator with a team of associates, not a solo writer/designer. I apologize to Gary for perhaps misrepresenting the specific tonality of his observations, but what I took away from it was yes, it is possible for me to create a package but I'm not doing it and I don't have to do it alone.
Talking to my bud Sid this afternoon about some of the comments on Bakshi's YouTube video, I made the observation that some of the naysayers who said Bakshi hadn't achieved anything near the kind of success that Walt Disney did were poop-heads, but they had an excellent point. Walt Disney created a package experience for a market he envisioned, and he built a business to make that happen. Can't take that away from him.

About an hour ago I realized that my mantra was incomplete. From the conversation with Gary, I realized that my intention to create packaged versions of my work were half-assed and incomplete. If I wanted to stop waiting for success, I would have to engineer it for a specific market. That would take my vision even further into what might be actual success. Then, if I am totally serious about this, I should follow what Walt Disney did and create the process to ensure that what I package makes it to the market; in other words, that's creating a business. It's a different mindset.

So I'm expanding my mantra into a two-step theory; consider this version 2.0:

Step 1. The way to artistic integrity through self-discovery is making what you envision and showing what you made to people in-person. If you keep doing this, you'll grow in unexpected and interesting ways, guaranteed. You can stop at this step if all you're looking for is artistic integrity and finding out who you are.

Step 2. The way to financial success through artistic integrity lies a few steps beyond: apply the experience you gained in step 1 to create a beneficial package for people and then find a way to reliably deliver that package to the masses. At a reasonable profit.

I've practiced Step 1 for the past five years, and have been wondering what was next. Now I know: Practice Step 2 with the same aspiration to integrity I did Step 1. What is interesting is that both steps are actually the same, except the emphasis is different. In both steps, you are "creating then showing". In Step 1, however, it's mostly about you building a body of work that is refined through exposure to a critical audience; from each iteration you typically gain a small percentage of new opportunities. In Step 2, it's mostly about you creating a "product" that is refined to meet a particular need, and then shown to a consumer audience whose needs are addressed; if your audience gets it, a certain percentage will buy.

In other words: Create and Show. Package and Distribute. Each complete iteration produces results that can be applied to the next one, which results in a refined product. Seems so obvious, but I had to learn this the hard way for it to stick :-)

Five Podcasts Down: Production Notes

2010-01-18 03:50:09+00:00

Back in October, I started a podcasting experiment with portrait photographer Sid Ceaser. We didn't have any specific goals other than to see what it would be like. Sure, I was excited for the chance to play with new gear and put some old software to work. And I was pretty sure that Sid and I would finally get some good rants recorded that could bottle the energy we have to prodding each other to make stuff. Figured it could be good stuff.

The Program

The format, such as it is, is just Sid and I sharing stuff that we've heard about for an hour. We turn on the microphones at the studio, Sid's working at his computer editing photos while I handle the recording, and we shoot the breeze. I then edit the material down into 30-40 minutes. When we have guests, the podcast is longer, stretching to about an hour total.

When we started, while keeping our invisible audience in mind. We seem to naturally try to explain references that people may not understand, though we don't catch every reference. We don't script or write any dialog, so what comes out is what we are saying off-the-cuff. Fortunately, Sid is very good at doing this while being entertaining, and he's a good balance to my tendency to wax philosophically. After doing five podcasts, we are starting to catch our rhythm. It helps also that Sid has listened to many podcasts before, and has gained an intuitive sense of how the format should be. As for myself, I don't listen to podcasts except for Wait Wait Don't Tell Me at the gym, so that's my standard for pacing. I lose patience with longer podcasts that take a long time to get to the point, so when I'm editing ours I have this mental image of a giant cane ready to yank us off the stage if we indulge ourselves too long.

There are a few problems with not having a script, like the way we "um" and "ah" a lot, stutter, repeat phrases, and use nonsensical grammar at times. When we started, I wanted to edit very minimally to keep the podcast as "real" as possible, but very podcast has a few pieces where we're grasping for words and it's aggravating for listeners to wait for us to get to the point. My editing philosophy for podcast 4 and 5 has been to edit for listener comprehension and clarity while retaining "the feel" of a natural conversation. To that end, I leave in as much of the ums and ahs as possible unless they produce confusion, which produces a final product that I think is faithful to how we talk, bad grammar and all, without forcing listeners to listen to long seconds of brain freeze. As both Sid and I become more aware of the demands of recording, we're getting better at controlling our lip smacking, repetitive stammering, and attempt to fill the air with noise. We've gotten some good tips from people on "slowing down" so we don't talk faster than our minds are capable of thinking.

Selecting Topics

I had originally thought we would be talking a mix of productivity, entrepreneurial projects, and other experiences from freelancing for a universal audience, but we seem to be drawing from local happenings. While I think this limits the appeal of our podcast to a general audience, it nevertheless is "real" and I think over time we'll figure out how to balance it. Our audience currently is, if I were to guess, comprised mostly of Sid's associates. When I meet some of them, they recognize me as "the guy from the podcast, I can't remember your name", which is pretty cool in a way.

The topics we cover are drawn from the people we know who are doing cool things, and we like to share our enthusiasm for people doing any work at all that moves them forward creatively or artistically. We like that we get to talk about artists who are unknown to the public, and this has given our podcast a regional flavor.

Sometimes the topics get a little more serious, such as the struggle of the freelance artist and the difficulty of promoting the arts in smaller cities like ours. At other times, we break into sillier discussions about food or movies. When I'm editing the final mix, I keep in a bit of each to maintain the pacing and interest while informing the audience, but I try not to let it get too deep into "nerd only" territory where we debate nuances that a general audience wouldn't find interesting.

The Gear

We record the podcast in Sid's studio (photo above), using a motley collection of microphones plugged into my computer through an M-Audio FastTrack Ultra audio interface. Everyone gets their own microphone recorded on their own channel, which gives me the ability to balance the final podcast so we all are at approximately the same volume. I capture the audio directly into a program called Propellerhead Record, which is designed to be simple for everyday musicians to use in creating final mixes for their music without sacrificing expressive power. It's a nice piece of software from a company that's known for making rock-solid music software, and it's complete overkill for making a podcast. Initially, I tried to do things relatively simply by recording with GarageBand through a Yamaha Audiogram 6 audio interface. I wasn't planning on doing complex editing, and thousands of people use GarageBand, right? As it turned out, GarageBand can handle multiple inputs just fine, but is pretty awful when it comes to editing more than one track at a time; the tools are quite primitive. On the hardware side, the Audiogram 6 handled two microphones fine, but that was the maximum. As a USB 1.1 device, it was also limited in how quickly it could capture data when other USB devices were connected to the computer, and our first podcast recording was extensively marred by the digital dropouts that occurred. Rather than debug the hardware, I returned it and got the FastTrack Ultra, which is USB 2.0 and can handle 8 simultaneous digital tracks at once. By the end of the first podcast, I knew I wanted to have 3 or 4 people talking at once, so the added expense seemed worthwhile. As for the choice to edit with Record over something like industry-standard ProTools, I got a great deal on upgrading both my license of Propellerhead Reason from version 2 to version 4 which included Record. After a brief ramp-up period, I found that Record was able to handle my editing needs well. I have the option to go ProTools at some point; I made sure the FastTrack was ProTools compatible.

After the mix in Record is finalized, I convert it to an MP3 file using Sound Forge, another semi-professional audio editing tool. For encoding settings, I'm currently using 96kbps Joint Stereo with variable bit rate, because I like to retain more richness to our voices. Earlier podcasts were encoded at lower bitrates to save space, but they sound kind of tinny. After encoding the MP3, I run it through a program called MP3Tag, which embeds the podcast's "album cover" for iTunes. The resulting MP3 file is uploaded to my server, and a special RSS feed is created from the posts I make on the podcast blog site. This RSS feed is specially-formatted for Apple's iTunes store according to their specifications.

I'm still learning how to properly set up microphones and adjust levels. One major problem is handling plosives, which are those popping noises that come with P, T, and Ks. They distort the recording. There are things you can buy called "Pop Filters" that help prevent this, and there's also ways of positioning the microphone so it's less likely to happen. Microphones themselves are kind of mysterious. There are dynamic microphones and condenser microphones that come in different sizes, shapes, power requirements, and recording strengths.

The editing process takes between 6 and 8 minutes of work for every minute in the final version; for our last podcast of 52 minutes, I spent about 8 hours listening to, editing, re-editing, and tweaking the final mix from about 2 hours of material. It's important to me that the final mix sounds like a natural conversation; you shouldn't be able to hear where I made the edit. If it sounds like one long continuous conversation, flowing from topic to topic naturally, I've done my job right.

The Future

I know that we're going to keep doing them, perhaps one or two a month. The major holdup with doing more of them is the time it takes to do the edit; as we get better at speaking on-the-fly and making sense, the amount of editing required should probably lesson. I may do some side-podcasts for material related to this blog, but we'll see.

If you haven't heard the podcasts, you can check them out on the Sid and Dave UnNamed Podcast Site, where you can listen to it online or download to your computer. You can also go directly to the podcast page on iTunes if you have iTunes installed.