David Seah - Productivity

Groundhog Day Resolution Review 3/3/2010: Getting Concrete

2010-03-03 17:05:10+00:00

SUMMARY: In my first Groundhog Day Resolution Review for 2009, I lay out a heady set of plans for the coming month, expanding on the themes from February 2nd to become more specific about what I want to do.

Huzzah, it's time for the first Groundhog Day Resolutions Resolution Review Day of the year! If you're new to this series, I review my past month's accomplishments (or lack thereof) on 3/3, 4/4, 5/5 and so on (10 times a year) to make sure I am following through on my resolutions. The days are easy to remember.

As I wrote in this year's kickoff on February 2nd, in my review of the past three years of Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDRs) I saw an overview pattern in my goal making, which was the desire to make a good living with people I like and respect. I like this phrasing much better than the way I expressed it originally:

OLD MASTER GOAL: To create with and be around people I like and respect, and make an honest buck

It's that last bit about the "honest buck" that bugs me. I let it stand because it was an accurate expression of what I needed to do: make money so I can afford to sustain myself and my community. It just feels so tacked-on, and it's even a little glib in a way I don't like. So let the record show that I've remodeled my master goal:

NEW MASTER GOAL: To make a good living with people I like and respect.

Last month, I also went so far as to create a master goal tracking sheet that put everything I've learned over the past five years about myself onto a single page. Paraphrasing heavily, this boils down to the following:

Building a mechanism to create the "good living": creating packages, recruiting people, committing to making 10 new products, and publicly offering it all on my website.
Continuing to be a part of other people's projects in my creative community, who are the very people I like and respect. At least that part is taken care of.
Staying on top of my motivators, demotivators, double-edged quirks, and self-limiting beliefs.
Making things. Being concrete.

I used the sheet as a tracking form just once, but I also pinned it to the wall so it's come in handy as a reminder of what's important to me. Looking at the list today, though, I see that I need to add a few more insights related to the hard part of making resolutions: that's following through with them!

First, I need to stop being lost by applying my project management skills to my own work. I think a lot of us have the expectation that our "life work" should be easier and breezier than our "corporate work"; working to improve our OWN lives, the reasoning follows, should FEEL the way our desired FREEDOM feels. That may be the case when we're there, but at the very beginning this is a falsehood. Work is work, and I've slowly realized that I have been too dreamy about it. I need to define DATES AND DELIVERABLES, and actively MANAGE CONTINUITY within the CONTEXT of WHAT WILL BE MEASURABLY ACHIEVED. Without that, you don't get anywhere. It's time to trade in my mentor cap for the project manager's hard hat.
Although I hate admitting it, building stuff feels hard for me, which is why I need to do project management and break the steps down across multiple days. I also need to give myself the time and the room to get the tasks done. This is difficult, because one of my major demotivators is my impatience with deferred payoff. This is pretty deeply buried, and it's only recently that I've realized that the many small-but-immediately-gratifying things I do are a form of productive procrastination. That explains my entire 2009. The pragmatic part of me knows deep down that the really GOOD stuff results from heroic effort, which means committing to the uncertainties of creative war. My creative war currently consists of building and expanding my website to accommodate product descriptions and listing, and I need to write up what they are to take a stand. I foresee wrestling with foreign database and server concepts, solving new problems with HTML, CSS and AJAX, learning new accounting procedures and starting a more scheduled review process. This is territory that I will have to battle for inch-by-inch, and it's just incredibly daunting knowing that I will be uncomfortable, ignorant, and confused every step of the way. It's the worst kind of deferred payoff, though I know from experience that when I look back to where I started, I'll feel pretty good about it. It's just so far in the future that I would rather, like, take a nap right now. Gotta push past that. I'm hanging up a picture of John Wayne on my wall to remind me.
Then there's getting down to brass tacks: making a commitment to specific tasks. It's one thing to say I'm ready for creative warfare, and it's quite another to say, "I'm going to TAKE THAT HILL" and start flanking it. Since I am not part of a squad, there's little point in flanking that hill, so I have to approach it directly. That's scary. I've got to be like Babe Ruth pointing at the sky when he stepped up to bat. My way is to get back to solid project management and leadership, and to trust in my own competence. As someone with a lot of imagination, knowledge, and experience, it's easy for me to imagine every way this can fail, and the additional guarantee of future discomfort and confusion creates a strong disincentive to start. In the past, I've pushed through this by accepting the burden of responsibility and grimly whipping myself into motion, but this time I'd like to try something different: imagining the best way things can happen instead of thinking of all the damn things that might go wrong. Heck, it's MY imagination, right? I should take hold of it and direct it the way I see fit. The job doesn't have to be grand and difficult and filled with images of machine gun nests and razor wire. That's me making a big deal out of something that isn't really that big of a deal. It's a WEBSITE and a LIST followed by SHAKING PEOPLE'S HANDS to seal the deal. It just has to be done. Once it's done, I can see if I can build out further.

I've gotten a lot of excellent general advice from my friend Gary, who has given me the mindset to think as an owner-producer instead of as a mere designer. I've also gotten a big boost from Stephen Smith at our knowledge exchange last week, where he showed me specific websites and examples that would help me leverage what I currently do with my design skills. The last thing to do is to create that list of products and point my bat at the sky like I own it.

I'm going to start with a set of three:

Website Section that Says What I Do and What You Can Get Here - This has been a long time coming. It needs to be reader and customer focused.
Build a Simplified Printable CEO Download Area - This is the basis for selling e-products based on the work, which has zero cost of production other than building the site.
Promote, Everywhere - I don't naturally like to promote myself, but it is necessary. I have things I can show people, which is a prerequisite for engaging people in meaningful discussion, but I must work on extending my reach.

Looking at this list, it's STILL abstract! What can I do to make them more tangible and less daunting? On the Google Wave with Colleen™, we were chatting about daunting steps and one of the tips she passed along was to (paraphrasing) cut the steps in half until they were simple enough to start. Let me try that with the first one:

Website Section that Says What I Do and What You Can Get ... yes, that's quite large, though it appears deceptively clear.

...divide in half...

Website Design ... some HTML and CSS, somewhere.
What I Do and What You Get ... this is a kind of list? I've already written something like that.

...simplify...

Place for Website Design ... at minimum, it's a URL naming decision that has SEO implications, but I'll go with the first thing that pops into my mind: a subfolder.
List of What I Do What You Get ... this exists, so I just need to collect them.

...simplify...

Collect the List of Things I Do
Collect supporting images
Create a page that works within the existing page template at an existing URL
Put the list up and link to the website
Get the content up within these constraints, and DON'T WORRY about redesign yet.

Hm, that wasn't so bad, once I took "redesign entire website" out of the equation. It's more important to have the information UP SOONER than three years from now. Following this style of reasoning, let me outline the Simplified PCEO Download Area steps:

Activate the "theprintableceo.com" website
Gather all the forms and subforms into one place
Create a very simple wide-aspect HTML template, based on the Agenceum templates I've been making
Get an e-junkie.com account via Stephen Smith's affiliate link, since he's the one who told me about it
Define a few e-products to download
Most importantly: DEFER the integration of this site into Expression Engine, because that's a very deep rabbit hole. Use static HTML in the meantime.

Now, for Promote Everywhere:

Gather mailing lists from everyone who's emailed me in the past year as source material
Start defining categories of people based on the emails and who I think they are, from only the first hundred emails so I don't spend weeks doing this.
Build many lists, and identify what each one would be good for
Create a message for each group, and a place where each group can go to get more info or act
Post a survey on davidseah.com asking people why they read or what they'd like to see more of
Create a schedule for promotion
Gather a list of places locally that might benefit from my offerings and services
Put paper and cards in people's hands directly

Yeesh, that's a lot of stuff to do in a month, but I'm going to print this out and put it up on my MANAGEMENT SHRINE WALL, right next to the John Wayne picture, to remind me what I should be doing.

Wish me luck!

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.

Groundhog Day Resolutions 2010: Kickoff

2010-02-02 18:26:24+00:00

SUMMARY: &It's time for the 2010 Groundhog Day Resolutions! I review the past three years of resolutions and create a 2010 master resolution that hopefully will give me a 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 16:30:43+00:00

SUMMARY: I attended a "Scrum Club" meeting to learn about agile software development methods and kanban, and noted the similarity to the GTD productivity system. Kanban boards are particularly interesting to me, as they make abstract processes more visible through the use of physical artifacts.

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.

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.

Compact Calendar Change for Reported Easter Calculation Bugs

2010-01-17 19:41:48+00:00

This year's Compact Calendar added "automatic holiday calculation" when the year is changed in the Excel spreadsheet. Holiday calculations are terribly tricky, though, and a bug in the Easter Calculation was reported by Mike Kennedy with OpenOffice. The Easter calculation I'm using, he pointed out, assume date entry in a certain text format which is not universal. I went back and looked at it and saw he was right, though I couldn't duplicate the other reported bug. Anyway, I've uploaded a more robustly-coded version of original Easter calculation, which substitutes the locale-specific date string with the Excel DATE function.

UPDATE: After downloading OpenOffice and cross-checking the calculation with Google Spreadsheet, it appears that the cause of the bug is due to a difference between in how the DAY() function works for values under 61. So if you are using Excel you are fine, but OpenOffice users should probably use the EASTERSUNDAY() function.

UPDATE2: Here's an explanation of why Excel's DAY() function is buggy; it was originally to maintain compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3, which used to be the dominant spreadsheet.

In Excel 2007, Easter appears to be calculated correctly for the next five years. If you are outside the USA, you can re-download the ZIP file from the Compact Calendar Page for the more robust version of the calculation.

Virtual Terrain Maps IV: Inspired Guessing

2010-01-14 20:30:17+00:00

SUMMARY: I write about the experience of unintentional, high-quality collaboration leading to insights of how I know more than I knew, and that I should apply GUESSING more frequently because it actually works well as a starting point.

I've been preoccupied. I'm keeping busy with Agenceum work while figuring out how to position my services for 2010. I've also got a couple or surprising collaborations going on too with iPhone developer Al Briggs and instructional media designer Mary Wiseman. What's surprising about these independent collaborations is that I'm doing them at all; for all that I've said about how great collaboration is, I've always found it difficult to actually find collaboration partners. This time, Al and Mary made it easy by themselves suggesting collaboration and then proving that they had the ability to follow-through and be self-guiding. It's way too early to tell whether these new collaborations will succeed, but everyone involved knows this and is not making a big deal out of it. We're all happy to try, and the professionalism of these collaborators is making me sit up a little straighter myself. So far, we're just talking and emailing intermittently, seeing where the collaboration goes.

Even with the intermittent nature of our collaboration, I'm finding that this additional piece of scheduled work is adding a bit of stress to my life. I'm 80% sure it's the good kind of stress, but I also am thinking everything else that's on my mind. One way of dealing with it has evolved out of the Google Wave with Colleen™ conversation that Colleen and I have been maintaining for a few weeks now. This week is SLOW WEEK and I've been thinking of ways to SLOW DOWN, which is kind of tough because I think I'm already too slow. So much to do...how can I even THINK of going slow? But then I remembered that this whole Wave Experiment got started with a random tweet I made about not hurrying or waiting; if I go too fast, I screw up. If I wait, I lose opportunity and initiative. So I am trying to maintain mindful progress, and not freak out about all the things that aren't getting done. I have to trust that it works; there isn't anything I can really do about it anyway in the near term. Everything I'm doing all somehow factor into the same formula for success that I'm splashing around the laboratory of my daily life.

Yesterday, in the spirit of slowness and saving money, I decided to make rolled sushi Futomaki instead of buying it somewhere. Trader Joe's had some asian cucumbers, and I had the nori (seaweed sheets) and rice vinegar at home. I dimly recalled Mom showing me how to make it sometime before going to college; her version of it had a filling made of fresh-picked cucumbers, sweet omelets cut into strips, and caramelized canned tuna fluff. Theoretically, I had the knowledge to recreate it! So of course, I just decided to wing it and see how close I could get. The memories of my mother close at hand, I spent about 90 minutes cooking the rice, seasoning it, toasting the nori, pickling the cucumber, making the sweet omelet, and then wrapping it all up into the rolls. And they came out...TERRIBLE. The recipe on the vinegar bottle suggested a proportion of 1/3rd cup to 3 cups of rice, but I had started with 3 RAW cups of rice, which I suspect resulted in at least 6 cups of COOKED rice. The cucumber was too salty despite my rinsing. I didn't put enough rice down and the rolls fell apart when I cut them. The taste was not as I remembered; I have had better Futomaki at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets. Despite this "failure", I was actually rather exultant, because the basic technique had worked from memory. I had just made some errors that are easily corrected next time around, now that I knew what to look for and what to measure more carefully. I trusted my knowledge over my memory of procedure, and no one died. And I think being able to trust my knowledge over memorized procedure--heck, memorized ANYTHING, including to-do lists--is somehow important to The Success Formula. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I guess I am learning to explicitly trust my "inner knowledge" in more things. Inner knowledge is about principles and truths, not procedures and facts. I'm naturally drawn to principles first, because I need them to organize procedures and facts in my mind. Most instructional material, however, skimps on the principles because the content creators either don't understand or care. And most consumers of instructional material don't want to understand or care either; they want the minimum effort necessary to get a result. There's nothing wrong with that, mind you, but I am a student of an advanced school of laziness: I want to know the minimum set of principles that describe all results. And to really know that, you need to know where the principles come from. You need to know their "true names", because labels are often misleading when you are just starting to learn something.

A supporting breakthrough occurred last week, while I was trying to understand the fundamentals of a new content management system (CMS) called ModX Revolution. I need to have a simple CMS to help streamline the creation of simple website, so I picked ModX to start with. After spending several futile hours attempt to grok the system from the documentation/tinkering alone, I started to resort to more extreme measures. First, I outlined every piece of jargon I found (e.g. "snippets", "chunks", etc.) on index cards and tried to group them by concept. As I discovered what linked to what, I wrote notes on the relevant cards. This didn't actually get me much farther in making sense of "what fit to what" beyond a superficial level, but I decided to write a blog post about what I had figured out about ModX on the Agenceum site as a kind of consolation prize.

As I struggled to explain the ModX concepts to an unknown audience, I realized I should start with a model of how I thought it should work. Once I had that, I realized that I could just map what I knew about ModX onto it, and suddenly it fit together. I knew more than I did, but I had relied on the documentation to tell me what I knew. In other words, I had the expectation that the documentation would eventually reveal to me how it all fit together. The extensive docs rather admirably do try to explain it all, but like much technical documentation it fails to define a basic model as a reference. I don't know WHY most documentation neglects this; I suspect this is because a lot of developers learn how to code by trying out examples and modifying them to internalize how it works, kind of like learning to walk by falling down a lot until they find a few things that work. The good programmers take their internalized knowledge and fly.

But I digress: I used to think that my need to establish a framework was a weakness because it took longer for me, compared to others, to get results. However, it can lead to immense breakthroughs, and I imagine I can cut the time-to-grok down by applying the framework immediately EVEN IF I DON'T KNOW HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK. That shouldn't stop me from guessing how it should work. This is a counter-intuitive approach for me because I went to engineering school for 6 years, and I am not in the habit of acting on what I do not know for sure. In fact, engineers are conditioned to build a safety margin just in case what we know ISN'T SO; we design for 120% of the worst case even if failure isn't critical, and a minimum of 200% when catastrophic failure carries meaningful repercussions. My mistake is applying this cautious attitude to understanding other people's systems, when guessing is probably the best thing I can do when documentation and textbooks inevitably fail.

Perhaps this is what my friend Senia meant by You already know. And then there's the twisty bit of advice I got from the TV show The Unit: what would you do if you knew the answer? In my case, I don't want to just know the superficial details: I want to grok. Quoting Wikipedia:

In an ideological context, a grokked concept becomes part of the person who contributes to its evolution by improving the doctrine, perpetuating the myth, espousing the belief, adding detail to the social plan, refining the idea or proofing the theory.

Even if I don't know the details, technology, methodology, concepts, what-have-you behind something I want to learn, I certainly already have an idea of how I relate to the area of study. This goes beyond learning a few procedures and facts that produce the low-hanging fruits of personal achievement, useful and necessary as they are. There is a time and place for that. It's even probably most of the time and in most places. Greatness, though, comes from somewhere else entirely. I just need to get from HERE to THERE, and GUESSING is probably the best way to start when all other ways are unclear. CLARITY comes, once movement commences.

Yup, I’m Releasing The ETT Online to Creative Commons

2010-01-05 05:20:07+00:00

SUMMARY: I release the Flash 7-ish source code to the Online Emergent Task Timer under Creative Commons, after getting a couple of requests for it. Details follow.

Back in June, 2006, I released a prototype version of the Emergent Task Timer, written in Flash. This was alpha-quality code, meaning that it was designed to test concepts but was not actually feature-complete. Still, it proved to be pretty useful for the day-to-day, and I put enough features in it so that was useful. A particularly-nice feature was Flash's ability to save data in case you accidentally closed the browser window; back in 2006, this was pretty cool. However, I never got around to improving the interface to add features like scrolling and server-side data storage. After over three years of sitting on my ass (and more than a few requests), I've decided to release the source code under Creative Commons, specifically the Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license deed:

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

I have a lot going on, and I don't foresee taking the time to relaunch myself into the current Flash Actionscript environment. This codebase dates back to Flash 8 Professional using a blend of ActionScript 2 and timeline-based scripting to handle simple graphics state changes. While not as bad as some Flash coding practices common back then, it still might make your eyes bleed today. A thorough knowledge of AS2 MovieClips, Flash events, the Flash IDE, and object-oriented programming is probably mandatory to make sense of this code.

There are a few features we'd all like to see:

The ability to save data on a server
Additional lines of entry
Easy navigation of past days data

The internal data representation is based on unix epochs and hexadecimal strings, which should be friendly to databases. I am not, however, a server-side programmer or a database programmer, and I never got around to learning how to write such code cleanly. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who could write that in their sleep. With this release of the source code into the Creative Commons, I'm hoping to see someone add some new features. I'm also curious to see how people deconstruct and refactor my code, though it's been so long I've kind of forgotten how it works. I'm also curious to see what happens to the code as people have their way with it.

Download Source

You'll need Adobe Flash CS4 to open this file, since I did some slight editing to static text and had to resave it. You'll also need to be an experienced Flash ActionScript 2 programmer with an understanding of the Flash IDE and MovieClips. See the License Notes in the archive for more information.

» Download ETT Alpha Flash CS4 Source Code (ZIP 336K)

Enjoy! I'll be happy if I see someone make a meaningful change and shares it with the rest of us. Fingers crossed! Feel free to discuss approaches to modification and ideas in the comments here.

Mark Forster’s Autofocus System to “Get Everything Done”

2010-01-03 17:33:57+00:00

A reader pointed out Mark Forster's Autofocus System to me recently, and I think it's worth passing along. Autofocus is a methodology for handling the stuff you want to do by using a simple ruled notebook to maintain the list, and then trusting a set of rules for processing them into doneness. I know we've all heard that before, but there's a deeper insight and elegance in his approach that I really like. In particular, I like this insight of Mark's (from the what can I expect from the system section):

Focus on what is important. It’s very difficult to focus on what is important with one’s rational mind alone, because what your conscious mind thinks is important may not be what your subconscious mind thinks is important. What I’ve found is that looking back on what I’ve done I can see that the focus produced by the system feels “right” - right for me in my current circumstances.

In other words, it's the balance between your rational and subconscious that's addressed in the processing. You use your rational mind to add things to the end of your list in your notebook. You process a single page at a time, scanning line-by-line thoughtfully and picking what jumps out at you. You work on for as long as you like. If you don't finish it, you add it back to the end of the list. Stuff that ends up hanging around and doesn't jump out at you (what I might call the "meh" response) after the line-by-line gets purged and not re-entered...which I love. You could go re-enter it, but Mark suggests that you give it some time.

Anyway, the system tickles me enough that I'm going to try it this week. I've been feeling the need to build myself a brain box to get my head focused for January 2010, but perhaps it's my mental operating system that needs an upgrade instead. I'll probably end up doing both :-)

So check it out... there are multiple translations, downloadable booklets, and forums as well!