David Seah - Design, Development, Inspiration, Empowerment

The Big Design Website Push

2010-03-16 18:49:07+00:00

SUMMARY: I haven't been blogging as frequently as I'd like, but there's a good reason: I have had to spend more time building infrastructure of a technical nature. However, I've also realized that this is a form of procrastination, and I'm acting like a Ph.D. student dragging his feet on his dissertation. I outline a few of the things that are helping me through, and share two new insights that are helping me push through on my new design website.

I've been pretty quiet lately as my available energies have funneled into the hard work of being anti-socially productive: I've had to spend a lot more hours focused on technical work that requires the solitude, and so I have limited the number of non-producing hours I've spent driving to visit people or write on the blog. However, I do make the exception when I'm figuring out what the next immediate step is. It's the age-old problem of maintaining context so I know the step I take today is built solidly on the step I took yesterday. I think this is as good a time as any for sharing where I am in the process.

To maintain the big picture, I am now using a portable report folder that has several places for sheets of paper within it:

This folder contains several things:

My latest Groundhog Day Resolution blog printouts, for easy reference and note-taking.
My Groundhog Day Resolution Tracking Form, slightly modified
My master vantage point printout
My Agency Process Diagram, for reference
A copy of my friend Gary's Summer 2009 "Bubble Chart"

Speaking of that last item, I was having coffee with Gary yesterday for our first two-week review of what the heck we have going on. I started sketching out my own bubbles:

The idea of the bubble chart is to isolate the core areas of focus in one's life. Some of them share areas of overlap; in my draft version of the bubble chart I haven't yet identified what the overlapping areas are, but they break down as follows:

Design Income
Passive Income
Community
Other People's Projects
Sanity-maintaining Overhead
Areas of Interest

Last week, I spent quite a bit of time forcing myself to launch new websites to serve as the placeholder for several of these bubbles. For example, I put up a skeleton framework for an Enhanced Printable CEO Website, where all of my productivity-inducing forms will live, in a more commercially-friendly format. I created an unrelated "world of spoons" content website, finally, to create an alternate outlet for writing unrelated to my main lines of inquiry here on the blog. Lastly, I forced myself to create a David Seah Design website where I will, at long last, formalize the kind of design work I'm seeking. I've been putting it off for years as I've weighed the pros and cons of the projects that have come across my desk, but now I am realizing I have been putting the website off out of habit like a Ph.D. student grown used to the academic life and dreading the actual writing of the dissertation. It's time to step it up and graduate! For me, that's really getting serious about putting my "design shingle" out there to build an entire new business entity.

In a way I've come full-circle. When I first started blogging in 2004, it was to avoid making a design website with the standard "who I am / what I do / clients / contact me" elements. The reason was I was sick and tired of the fake-it-till-you-make-it aspect of business, and sought what I now think of as "transparency" in my professional relationships. Blogging was my way of documenting what seemed to be catching my attention, which theoretically was to help me decide what kind of design work I would do. I also wasn't quite sure if I even qualified as a designer, and hesitated at using the label on myself. Now it is 2010, and I'm finding that my path has been well-defined. Now I think I can make that simple website and know that it is built on five years of insight building and experience.

To maintain momentum, I've made a simple shell on design.davidseah.com which I will now populate with the standard elements:

What I do
How I do it
What I've done
How to contact me

I'm purposefully keeping myself from dwelling too much on the aesthetics and gee-whiz factor of the underlying website, as that's a distraction from the tedious work of collecting and formatting old content.

I plan on focusing the rest of the week on content gathering. At minimum, I need to have enough of a statement so prospective clients know what they can hire me for. That would be maybe 5 recent projects and a list of services, so that is what I will restrict myself to in pass one.

Secondly, I'm still not exactly sure what my ultimate value proposition statement is, but one thing I've recently learned is that complete mastery is not a prerequisite for offering a service. The only prerequisite is a willingness to impart what I know to people who want to benefit from my experience. And, as new buddy Tammy commented to me recently, I don't have to be entirely responsible for ensuring that the product is perfect; I can trust that my clients are willing to take what I have and adapt it to their own needs. Both these insights represent a change in my mental model of clients; I had been used to working where the vendor-client interaction was presumed to be adversarial. I'd broken free of this mentality in some respects by applying more "human" values in relating to clients, but my production mentality had not gotten a similar upgrade; the assumption that I had to deliver as perfectly and trouble-free as possible had never relaxed.

That said, it's going to be a week of framing my past work in today's new understanding. And although I know it's going to be tedious and I don't know how I'm going to solve the problem, I know it's not going to be all that bad once I get going. Still, it doesn't hurt to write a blog post to solidify my thoughts on the matter :-)

The Work of Being an Artistic Entrepreneur

2010-03-11 21:54:46+00:00

SUMMARY: Buddy Brad reminds me that making a living from one's "art" is hard work, but once you get something working you should continue to do it until it's exhausted. It makes sense, but there are a few mental hangups that I need to overcome as well. One is preciousness, and the other is perfectionism.

My illustrator buddy Brad Fitzpatrick left a timely comment on yesterday's post about staying focused on what works, in the context of being an art-based entrepreneur:

Find something that works and repeat it over and over again until it’s exhausted. THEN (and only then) move on to your next great idea.

Although this looks simple on the surface, it's fraught with unseen difficulties that I'm all too familiar with.

First, consider the act of finding what works. One barrier is that it can be incredibly difficult if you are the type of person that looks for meaning in what you do. The meaning becomes precious, and this preciousness prevents us from selling out. As noble as that is, it also is one of the curses that prevents us from making our own success. By comparison, the business-oriented mindset has a much easier time of it: just go see where people are going to solve their problems, and then you insert yourself into the middle of that value chain. Make a great big sign that says THIS WILL FIX YOUR PROBLEM, and apply a bit of insight into the human psychology of want to your materials, set a price that makes sense, and you have the beginnings of an actual revenue. The difficulty for me is to reconcile the "preciousness" of what I do with the "need to make a living". This is seemingly an intractable problem until you find a way to protect the preciousness while vigorously pursuing the almighty dollar.

For someone like me, it has taken a lot of a tremendous reframing of my value system to even think about making money in a way that doesn't feel like I'm somehow selling out or walking the wrong life path. I am tremendously concerned about disrupting the purity of what I'm doing. In the context of work, there is an additional value system that I have when it comes to selling something:

Whatever I do, it's got to work
Whatever I do, I have to understand WHY it works
Whatever I give, it has to be guaranteed to be useful
Whatever I make, it has to be imbued with my original
Whatever I claim to do must be 100% credible, demonstrable, and ready-to-go on demand
I should do everything in my power to prevent people from being mislead or having hopes falsely raised
Whatever I do or make has to be the best I can make it, original, innovative, and effective
If people don't intuitively understand what I've done for them, then I have failed to meet their expectations

I find it difficult to find fault with any of the above in principle. However, I know that there are very high levels of expectation that I haven't, which calls to mind the John Updike qote (truncated here) perfectionism is the enemy of creation.

The next part of Brad's comment is the idea of repeating something over and over again until its potential has been exhausted. As a seeker of the novel and new, this is the kind of advice I usually don't like to hear; by the time I finish something out, I'm rarin' to go on to something else. However, that means I'm probably leaving fruitful opportunities on the table. Creating new things is fulfilling for me, but the reward comes when we push to get that thing out in the world in a form where people can actually see it. I'm pretty sure that there's some way to reframe the "boring" aspect of this into a game, and I think that game is probably learning how to read revenue reports that result from one's business activities.

A Random Story, of Sorts, about Sentient Clams

2010-03-09 22:27:19+00:00

SUMMARY: In the interest of doing something different today, I tweeted a request for a silly idea to write about. This post is a collection of musings about levitating clams, in response to DIYSara's quick response.

Today, not quite sure what to write about on the blog, I asked the Twitterverse if they had any ideas of a hopefully-silly nature. DIYSara was the first to rise to the challenge:

Write about the quest of all fresh water clams to mutate into high beings that can levitate.

Awesome. I don't even know what that means, so I'm just going to free-associate for a few minutes. First of all, let me consider the implications behind the statement:

All fresh water clams apparently are possessed of consciousness, a fact of DIYSara's world that had escaped me previously.
Said clams are on a quest, which makes me think that clams are much more moral that I would have given them credit for. Quests are associated with crusades, and crusades are waged for higher principles. Is there some threat to fresh water clams? Is their habitat threatened by long-necked mussels and other invading mollusks?
The object of the quest seems rather advanced: levitation. I could take this literally or figuratively, but the end result should be some form of "elevation" from their previous status. Perhaps levitation is merely an extension of the clam's dream to move without legs, fins, and arms. I think clams propel themselves by flapping their shells to jet water, which is a kind of random way to go. Levitation would be a far grander, more controlled means of locomotion. I can just picture an entire group of clams, dissatisfied with their current locale, levitating grandly from their watery beds and moving like a school of fish. Would they levitate just within the water, or levitate above its surface?

Numerous other questions come to mind. Is there a Clam Leader? Where did the quest come from in the first place? Is there a hidden agenda? Why levitate, and not evolve useful hands with opposable thumbs? And let's presume that the quest itself is deemed achievable in the collective consciousness of all fresh water clams. Could it be that clams believe they are descended from UFOs observed in the isolation of fresh water streams and lakes? Are all clams part of a fragmentary consciousness that is tenuously held together in a network of linked minds? The theory that speaks to me is one that there is a Prime Clam, and there is a fragmentary history of the Prime Clam that is thinly-held in the consciousness of fresh water clams bubbling to themselves around the world's river and lake beds. The Prime Clam, it is believed by all freshwater clams, descended from the sky and seeded the prehistoric oceans with life, though "belief" is perhaps too strong a word. It's a kind of belief that is subconscious, a kind of dreaming awareness that lurks beneath the day-to-day drudgery of being a clam, much the way a house cat dreams of being a mighty hunter as it sleeps, paws twitching as he relives his grandest ancestral moments. When the clams are sleeping, they dream of rising from the Earth once more and taking to space to seed another planet with life from the bottom up.

Comments? Let's jam!

Two Days in the Life of Dave

2010-03-05 06:12:45+00:00

SUMMARY: Jeff Ngan, fellow blogger and online friend, pays me a surprise visit in my home town, and we confirm that yes, we are destined to be buddies.

A number of years ago I was looking through the latest round of inductees to the 9rules Network, then a growing community of blogs hand-picked by the people who ran it. I clicked past many of a site, impressed as always by the quality of content, but not particularly moved. That is, until I came across Jeff Ngan's blog Equivocality. I don't quite remember exactly what it was that caught my eye; perhaps it was the carefully crafted prose or the meticulous attention to meaningful visual details, that caused me to read a little deeper. I was struck by the quiet power of the voice behind the writing. I've been a fan every since.

A few days ago, Jeff emails me that he's coming to New Hampshire for some training on behalf of his company, and he recalled that I lived somewhere there. How far away did I live from Nashua, where his training was to take place? As it turns out, I live less than five miles from his hotel, so we got to spend some time hanging out in person, and I'm super glad that we got a chance to do so, because I was able to confirm what I suspected: we are destined to be friends. He's detailed his experience in two photo-laden blog posts: New Hampshire Day 2 and New Hampshire Day 3, if you'd like to get a little glimpse into my world as seen through the mighty red-ringed lens of Jeff's Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR.

JellyCast!

2010-03-04 20:12:24+00:00

Last week, Sid and I were at the local Jelly and I decided to test our mobile podcasting setup. We did a quick test to see it everything worked (it did), and for the next 20 minutes the studio director and I had a fun conversation about my terrible diction and how to improve it. And as always happens at the Jelly, the conversation detoured through the French language, music, and recollection of foreign lands. If you'd like to hear it, check out JellyCast! Language Lessons at the Nashua Jelly, freshly posted in our Podcast blog.

» DOWNLOAD MP3 AUDIO

World Domination 101.5: Trudging through the Desert

2010-02-22 04:56:09+00:00

SUMMARY: I thought I didn't get anything done last week, but after listing everything that happened it's apparent that I'm actually pretty active. What creates the feeling of non-productivity is not the general lack of continuity, but the lack of measurable distance traveled on the metric that is most on my mind: funding all the things that I do every week that make the journey interesting and exciting. In this article, I lay out the services that I think are viable offerings for 2010 and how they relate to my mission.

I've been preoccupied by maintaining continuity on my so-called "desert journey" to find productive fulfillment. As I was going to sleep last night, I tried to recall just what I had done last week, and I couldn't recall one thing. A quick flash of despair was followed by a steely resolve to see myself through to the end. Fortunately, I also have been Doing The Wave with Colleen™, which as a byproduct results in copious activity notes. I just went through it and made a list of what I did, in roughly chronological order from Sunday to Sunday.

Made a WordPress Theme. It's based on this blog's look-and-feel, which runs on Expression Engine and therefore was not available in modern WordPress 2.9.x form.
Designed one more screen for the Secret iPhone App I'm working on with Al Briggs.
Received my digital printed 2-sided sell sheets from Digital Lizard out in Idaho. Good quality, great price! 20% of the cost of Kinkos!
Showed the sell sheets to several people, who thought it was a cool idea and have taken it on themselves to pass it along. Neat!
Read about the differences between male and female metaphors.
Signed up on Mint, and imported all my financial data from all my accounts into it.
Cancelled the Collective group meeting due to crazy snowstorm. Good thing, too...very bad driving conditions.
Thought about packaging, owning the means of production, and distribution.
Sent out invites for an upcoming "strategery" day I'm having with fellow productivity blogger Stephen Smith. It's the cute, down-home version of strategy, which is the kind I like!
Got a few blog posts done, but not as many as I'd hoped.
Looked more closely at Vimeo, which I'd known as the place to upload high-resolution videos, but not as a repository of motion graphics portfolio reels. Good for inspiration.
Did some meditation to figure out what was really bugging me. Got a good night's sleep out of it.
Pondered how "The Dave Brand" compared to "Dave", and whether I was comfortable with making that distinction.
Manchester, NH Jelly at the Archimedes Space, and stayed to watch "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". As a bonus, I also got to complain about Jakob Nielsen's website.
Determined that I didn't actually have an actionable roadmap, so started to define one.
Got my monthly haircut, and also a Nick's Super Beef with BBQ Sauce, Mayonaise, and Horseradish. An amazing experience.
Rewatched ALL 26 episodes of Cowboy Bebop, which is still an incredible series.
Started researching international shipping for the ETP pads.
Read about "Imposter Syndrome" and "Lack of Sense of Entitlement" issues, which I believe may be one of my psychological barriers to doing more.
Great conversation with my high school buddy Duncan, who gave me the insight that the "ease" of an action does not necessarily correlate to the amount of effort expended, and hence value is not correlated to easiness. This was a psychological barrier to me charging money for what I love to do.
Nashua, NH Jelly at Studio 99, where I listened to two Jelly newcomers talk about their projects: Tammy Hildreth who founded Network for Work and is on the board of the NH Women's Leadership Institute, Beth Eisenberg who has a very cool Floating Gallery concept to connect businesses, artists, and community. It felt like mini-SXSW!
Elise also told me about her 10 Minute Practice Rule; she doesn't make herself practice if after 10 minutes it isn't working. And I helped Sid set up his lights for a photo shoot later in the day, acting as his stand-in and secretly observing how one goes about setting up a location shoot.
Great conversation with Gary, who helped me make an important connection between "making stuff" and actually doing something with it. His long-time manufacturing experience and entrepreneurial perspective is just what I needed.
Prepared the guest room for Robert, who's visiting from NYC and wants to go through programming bootcamp under my baleful eye. I don't know anything about ASP.NET, but this is as good a time as any to look at it. We're looking at fundamentals first, and have a pretty good playbook for absorbing a new computer development environment relatively quickly.
Made a new web template and updated my CSS Notes. I'm starting to get a feel for the web design stuff again, which is probably a good thing.

The Review

As I look at the above list of things, I am surprised by how much there seems to be. At the time I was doing each of those tasks, they didn't seem substantial or particularly meaningful, but looking back they actually all fit into some master plan. And this is a pretty typical non-billable week for me.

What bothers me, I think, is that there's no sense of distance traveled to the destination; all of this stuff is useful in some sense, but it feels like I am passing the same landmarks over and over as I make a great wandering circle in the desert. Breaking the events of last week down into categories:

Inspirational or Inquisitive ... no immediate payoff, but certainly possessing future "pay it forward" potential.
"Packaging a Service" Related ... supporting potential future sources of revenue, figuring out how to sell.
Social Networking and Organization ... the potential for future collaborations of any kind!
Asset building ... fixing processes and "tangible" design works into a form that can be distributed.
Figuring out where I am and what's next ... trying to keep motivated and moving in the right direction.

What I need the most this week, I think, is a very clear and simple plan to generate the cash flow to keep my caravan operating. That means creating assets/services for sale, show them to people, and create marketing/sales support materials. That's the distance I can measure that counts right now. Continuity is important to maintain sanity and to see what I've done--without the Wave Experiment with Colleen, I would not have known that I did get stuff done last week. I can see that this largely takes care of itself. The continuity I need to maintain NOW is that of generating and maintaining cash flow to fund my natural proclivity to research, communicate, and make.

Starting the Revenue Ball Rolling

Just to get the ball rolling on "creating assets/services" front, I'm planning on offering the following:

Professional Sounding Board: Need to lay a groundwork of understanding for a plan of action in the face of unknown variables? An hour on the phone or in person, followed by an hour of me distilling it all down on a comprehensive document, will go a long way toward clarifying your course of actions, and I'll take on just about any subject. This is like a guided question and answer session that results in the illumination of previously-unclear principles, assumptions, and dependencies in both process and motivation.
Task Coaching: For March 2010, a retainer of $250 will get you 2 hours of one-on-one time with me on the phone to figure out what you'd like to accomplish plus customized PCEO forms for you to follow for the month. All communication will be managed in a private BaseCamp project area, and I will check in with you to see how you are doing with my assessment on what's working and what could be. This is an experimental offering, for which I have 2 slots available.
Design and Web Consults: If you're interested in learning how I design productivity forms or how I have created my web presence, I can tell you how I do it if you book some hourly one-on-one time.
Simple Website Development: I'm developing "Internet Starter Kits" through my Agenceum design group, which are pre-fab websites that help get people get a modest-but-effective website online for the first time for a fixed price. They're designed to be low-cost, simple and self-editable without the use of a CMS, and I'm developing a library of support materials to explain stuff like "how to get a domain name", "how to pick a hosting company", and "how to write content". My goal is to give people what they need to be self-sufficient with their Internet presence, and be able to grow with it.
Interactive Development: Flash development used to be my bread and butter. I can't see a reason not to continue doing it, other than I'd like to have a project manager to jam with.
Information Graphic Design: Need information expressed visually and clearly with Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign? Yes, I do that.
Partnering in Digital and Interactive Media: I know an awful lot about digital media, computer graphics, blogging, community management, and interactive design. Not only do I do it every day for my own blog, I have quite a bit of experience working for game companies, web agencies, and museum exhibit designers. On top of that, I can talk programming all the way down to the hardware level. I'm looking for creatives, project leads, and business types who develop (or are interested in developing) any aspect of websites, software, and interactive media in the Nashua, New Hampshire area. I hate working by myself, so I want to get a few people in the room with me to make great stuff. Local people only...sorry! You must be willing to meet and work in person periodically.

So that's that. I've been holding off on listing any design service offerings as I've worked on the "what is my life direction" question. After the umpteenth time of doing this for the past six months, I'm at the point where there's nothing left to do but put it out there and see what happens. I also have the various products under development, but they are not generating significant income at this point. The income from services will help fund those longer-term projects. The going will be tough this week, as I'm facing a veritable sandstorm of social engagements and calls this week: all the more reason to maintain the line of cashflow continuity. Wish me luck!

It’s “Time to Money” Tuesday

2010-02-16 20:56:49+00:00

SUMMARY: I'm increasingly thinking about how to adjusting my daily busywork such that it becomes revenue generating work. I review what I have been getting done, and realize that most of my tasks are not focused in this way.

As I wrote yesterday, I am feeling the need to maintain more continuity here on the blog. Why? My days are so unstructured that it's easy to lose my sense of progress. That's not to say, however, that I'm not getting anything done. Since writing yesterday's post, I made a WordPress theme for new acquaintance and entrepreneur Greg Boutin, imported all my account information in the Mint bookkeeping and financial web app, paid for and picked up boxes of Emergent Task Planner pads for fulfillment, received print-on-demand output from Idaho for the Agenceum $500 photo websites and dropped 'em off at the studio, helped plan a summit I'll be having with Stephen Smith in Concord, helped design a poster for Sid's photography business, backed up all my critical databases, worked a bit on some iPhone application visualization for Al, signed up on location-aware social media site Whrrl, and wrote a few thousand words on this week's Wave theme. All of this moves me toward that place on the horizon where Things Should Be Better. However, as I review my list I'm painfully aware that I should measure each activity against the One Metric that will keep me from becoming another white bleached pile of bones heaped by the side of this long desert road. That metric is, as my buddy Gary calls it, time to money.

So let me see how what I've gotten done in terms of actual revenue:

The WordPress Theme generates no revenue, since I did it as a barter against future advice from new acquaintance Greg Boutin. I had enjoyed our chat on Skype, figured Greg for a good guy to know, and went for it. The "two for one" or twofer is that I needed to review my CSS anyway in anticipation of a future site reorg, and the threefer is the experience working with the current WordPress theme architecture, which gives me the ability to offer such theme development as a new Agenceum low-cost business website offering.
Importing information into Mint generates no money, but is a necessary step. With Mint, I can finally visualize my financial picture so I can tell if I'm making money. Right now it is doing a fine job of showing me how poor that picture is, and that I need to reduce the amount of long-term mobility-stifling debt that's sitting on the books.
My Emergent Task Planner Boxes were already shipped to Amazon's warehouse, except for the two I picked up. All this generates potential revenue, so hooray for me. I have about 70 units I've kept for International Fulfillment from home. The twofer is that by figuring out a new fulfillment process locally, I can finally address the underserved European customers. The threefer is that having a new fulfillment process locally opens up new product selling opportunities.
The 35 double-sided sell sheets for the Agenceum $500 Photo Websites cost me $20, and give me the ability to leave a credible descriptive piece with my entrepreneurial friends. You can see what they look like here. So, there's some possibility that these will generate $250 of revenue for a website based on an existing template. The twofer is that this is the first time I've tested DigitalLizardPrint in Idaho as a print service provider, and the quality/price/turnaround for this first piece is quite acceptable. I'm more likely to use them for other small print jobs and mark up the price to make some profit. The threefer is that there are several other products that they offer (posters, for example) that are the basis of new information products at a lower cost, which makes bootstrapping this business much more doable given my limited funds.
The summit does not bring any revenue. However, it pulls together some local people that I've wanted to meet in the context of figuring out how to make money from doing what we love. Perspective is what I hope to gain. The twofer is the experience of pulling something like this together with someone else, which could lead to greater confidence in offering workshops or something that does generate revenue. I've heard that running trade and workshop events can be very profitable; it doesn't hurt to get some experience learning how to run one good meeting.
Helping with a poster design for Sid adds nothing to the bottom line, but it helps out my friend and now he can promote a little more effectively. As I hovered over his Macintosh calling out key shortcuts and other forms of Photoshop trickery, it occurred to me that one revenue possibility was to teach a simple Photoshop Workshop. That's the twofer. The threefer is realizing that I could use Camtasia Studio (which I tried out a few days ago, and was very impressed by) to deliver some how-to magic as well, though this may not generate revenue in itself.
Backing up Critical Databases generates no revenue, but is a necessary chore.
Working on an iPhone app is effort made now in the hopes of gaining future revenue. The time to money here is probably around 8-12 weeks. The twofer is that I'm working with someone that I actually seem to be getting along with. I'll actually need to spend some money here; I need to get a used iPod Touch for testing and familiarization with the iPhone way.
Joining Whrrl, after looking briefly at GoWalla and Fourspace, generates no money and sucks time from me. However, it does give me some experience with this breed of social media application, which I suppose is part of my job as the local technology/web guy for my group.
A few thousands words of Waving generates no revenue, but it keeps me sane enough so I can keep on task. The twofer is that I'm getting a lot of ideas and support, which may lead to revenue-generating insights. The threefer is that Colleen ROCKS, and it's really inspiring to see how someone else does it. It's hard not to feel a little small by comparison, but it's the kind of smallness that wants to burst into greatness. The trick is not to overwork or get too caught up in one's own personal demons at this stage. The fourfer is that a lot of what I've been writing in the Wave results in new blog posts, potential book material, or improvements in my own efficiency.

So, while each task has been rich in potential, only a few of them have a direct time-to-money path. I think for the remainder of this week, I'd like to get at least ONE immediate product in the pipe that can be sold right now. I have to add, though, that this focus on "money" leaves a slightly sour tinge in my mouth, but it's a necessary

What I Learned Using Google Wave for Continuity

2010-02-15 02:15:49+00:00

SUMMARY: I made friends with the amazing Colleen Wainwright recently to start using Google Wave as a collaborative "do not hurry / do not wait" accountability tool. Here's what I've learned so far.

I've been experimenting with Google Wave with new friend Colleen to figure out how to practically implement do not hurry, do not wait. We are about to start the 8th week of Waving, having explored the following 7 themes:

OPPOSITE WEEK - In which we do what we would normally not do, to try to shake things up.
MORE ROOM WEEK - In which we try to make more room, psychically and physically, for important stuff.
SLOW WEEK - In which we try to slow down for our own good.
SLOW WEEK II - In which we are going so slow, one week lasts for two weeks.
FIRST THINGS FIRST WEEK - In which we try to do the things that should be done first.
BABY SEAL WEEK - In which we look inside and protect what is there.
FOUNDATION WEEK - In which we evaluate the nature of what supports what we're doing.

Colleen's summary perspective on each theme is slightly different from mine, but the important thing is that we are practicing mindfulness each week to balance the forces that need attention.

After reviewing the past 7 weeks of Waving, I believe one of the greatest things I've gained is a renewed sense of continuity. Google Wave allows one to insert one's commentary into the conversational stream without re-quoting text as you would when replying in email. The in-context reply seems like it's a small thing, but it makes a ginormous difference in following long multi-threaded conversations. The Wave implementation not quite perfect, but it does allow for much improved conversation compared to email: you can review the thread as a flow of ideas.

Having experience a renewed sense of continuity in Google Wave, I'd like to also maintain continuity here on the blog as well. So, let's get down to it: this week I'm primarily concerned with the following:

A lot of what I'm doing to keep track of tasks feels antiquated, like using an old computer operating system designed to only handle programs, files and batch processing. This may be what bothers me about GTD; in some ways it reminds me of a mainframe operating system from the 1960s, requiring constant discipline to maintain lest the system jams. There are a lot of simpler, stand-alone methodologies such as AutoFocus that handle the most common tasks; this reminds me of the rise of 8-bit computers in the early 80s, with their smaller processing capacities. What 8-bit micros lacked in processing power was balanced by vastly more interactive control and feedback; over the years the core system has expanded to embrace interactivity. If I extend the analogy, I think the next level of to-do list management is to rethink tasks in the context of a "personal operating system". The elements are all here, but the design of my own operating system needs to be tailored to my unique I/O requirements.
Thanks to Colleen, I've a lot closer to identifying what it is I really want to do, a question of identity/purpose which also strongly correlates with the search for what sparks me and 'Daveness'. To now, I've found that there are "things that I can do", and "things that I think I'd like doing". I've tested both approaches with varying degrees of success. For example, I can do web development and interactive design and a high level of competency, but they ultimately are just skills. For things I've thought I'd like--working for the game industry, freelancing, blogging, forming clubs, and so on--I've found the interest is more professional, not motivational. In some cases, like when I taught some formal classes, I found the experience educational but not affirming. I think what I really want is to declare a mission statement that both is grounding and profoundly visionary, so people understand what I'm about. From this, I think my questions regarding "what to sell" and "what services am I offering" will be answered. I'm close. Real close.
I am in the process of shifting my mentality from "Designer" to "Creator". From there, I will ultimately become "Owner of Some Means of Production." This is a journey of increasing independence, with the goal of being able to create things of value in the world. I'm not used to thinking this way and I have not experienced what it's like to be an "owner of production", so learning how to make that honest buck is taking me some time. However, many of my goals require some financing, so I have an increasing sense of urgency.
Lastly, I'm thinking about how what I'm doing does not have a clear success path. I know, with a fair degree of accuracy, where I stand right now. I also know roughly where I want to go, because I can see it shining distantly on the horizon, but alas: there are no tracks for me to follow. I'm in a kind of desert, wandering as a reluctant Bedouin who intuitively stays clear of other people's roads which lead away from my personal destiny. Occasionally, I have come across a fellow traveler with whom I can trade, or I stumble upon a welcoming oasis and enjoy the respite, but after wandering for six long years I am finding myself more prone to fatigue. Having Faith in the Journey is one way to keep moving forward, so one can have the will to demonstrate it by putting one foot after the other and trusting that it will all work out. Science provides an alternative model, hypothesizing that the destination itself can be reached through careful experimentation, which draws us forward in rational action. And even if the original hypothesis should fall short, the data from your experiment helps formulate a NEW experiment that will get you closer. After having tried both the way of Faith and the way of Science, I have lost some confidence in them. However, the Wave is showing me that having fellow travelers in a caravan may be the way to keep my strength in the difficult middle stage, between where I am now and where I ultimately want to be. A hybrid approach is beginning to suggest itself.

Throughout this week I'll try to maintain continuity on these four ideas. We'll see how it turns out.

Making New Products, Yankee Swap Style

2010-02-04 17:03:41+00:00

SUMMARY: I've been thinking about making and selling products to support myself, and I am trying to find the "low hanging fruit" that I can start selling now. The challenge reminds me of the "Yankee Swap" game that many of us play during Christmas.

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?

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.