Saturday, February 3, 2024.
It's the second day of the February 2nd bootstrap into some kind of plan. Today I reviewed some of the past posts in 2022 and 2023, discovering some typos. I also found that I had never made indices for 2023 posts. So I did a some cleanup:
- Added missing indices to 2023 and 2024 GHDR posts. This makes it easier to jump around.
- Edited 2023's March 3rd entry to improve clarity. It was very rambly.
- Rewrote yesterday's 2024 February 2nd entry for clarity. It was also very rambly. Moved a lot of asides out, added better headers, and clarified the point of this year's Strategic Horizons more confidently.
- Found photos of sketches I had made of "The Colony", and added to the entry to give it a bit more visual interest.
The rewrite of the kickoff post added several callouts that are important for this year's process. I'll repeat all of them:
Build "The Colony", a place for nurturing camaraderie through shared interest and effort.
Find every opportunity to explain the governance model for The Colony and its benefits.
Bootstrap GHDR by starting with hypotheses and adapt next step to findings.
These become the focusing directives for the year, and in time I'll add them to some poster to help stay focused. What's really on my mind right now, though, is what direct action can I take that contributes directly to colony development during this bootstrapping period?
What can I do today in the next 15 minutes that moves The Colony toward reality?
This new questions reminds me very much of The Concrete Goals Tracker, which is a form that tracks the time spent doing essential activities that result in tangible deliverables that you can literally show to someone. If you can justify what you're doing in terms of making the "real thing", it counts...but you only get the BIG POINTS when you are receiving actual money from your efforts. Perhaps the creation of similar forms would be helpful for The Colony. I could imagine a version that is like a Connect Four that helps colonists create chains of reinforcing action...but I think that would be a distraction during the bootstrap period.
Instead, I spent some more time on refining this Whimsical diagram that I'd made yesterday as a scratchpad for thinking:
I'd like to turn this into an actual poster using Affinity Designer so it's easier to create documention based on it, but that can wait. I think what I'd like to do on February 4 is identify a first step I can take that's related to one of these five areas. The most likely candidates are in Collective HQ which has stuff like: vision statements and chartered rules. The first order of business might be to create a documentation storage area in the cloud, along with some project management tracking logs.
Let's see how that goes tomorrow!
INDEX of GHDR 2024 POSTS
This year's single goal is Building The Colony!
Made a simple "functional area" diagram using Whimsical to help gather my thoughts.
I converted the Whimsical doc from yesterday to Affinity Designer.
Created new subsite at /the-colony/
Wrote stream-of-consciousness "vision statement" for later cleanup
Convert stream-of-consciousness into a "phrase cloud" for further deconstruction
Artifacts of The Colony: Pebbles, Seeds, and Rings
Created a "refined phrase cloud" grouped into five categories, based on boot 05's work.
Extracted "foundational" statements from yesterday, but they didn't leave a strong impression. Punt "why" to tomorrow's post.
Created a "Selfishly Sri" printable assessment to gauge outside interest.
Reducing scope from Colony to Outpost.
Desired results are distilled down to two main ideas, which will cover the next couple of months.
A slow start to the year, as I focused on paying work for most of the month. Set four directives to achieve this mont
The set of analysis notes that I authored with ChatGPT4 to refine my understanding of "prosocial motivation"
New goal is to start connecting with future chatty collaborators, as my brain runs on "prosocial motivation" and meaningful human connections.
Delving further into my "predominantly-prosocially motivated" profile (PPMP), and how to turn this into action given the dilemma of "needing the energy from a group to start a task" being at odds with "needing to start a group so I have energy".
The task of "talking to someone in-person about PPMP-based community" didn't happen. Happily, I had several empowering insights along the lines of wealth, doing what is good, and accepting myself that I think will help with that.
A new approach to "reduce uncertainty" instead of "pushing through" tasks, I take the time to define the mission and audiences more carefully.
Change of emphasis to All The Animals Are Friends as the anchoring concept for communicating my ideas!
Recognizing the seemingly-impossible task of doing tasks that no one else is looking at with me, I recast writing as the primary goal. Without the camaraderie of connection, I just am unable to motivate.
August sucked. I had no energy or drive. Perhaps I need to prioritize my own communications and work needs for once.
September was really low-energy and sluggish again. Rather than worry about sustainable systematic productivity, I should just admit that I'm lonely and let productivity handle itself?
The depression of September faded as I visited family in California. I theorize 6 "rules for surviving loneliness".
An unexpectedly productive month as I applied several of the "rules for surviving loneliness". My outlook for 2025 for personal productivity feels positive.