Groundhog Day Resolutions 2025 Kickoff: Testing "Values-First" Productivity

⊕captionRoll initiative for 2025! This is my favorite nerdy necklace in blue, pink, and white 🏳️‍⚧️

If I am counting correctly, 2025 is my 18th cycle of Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDR), the pursuit of creative independence Creative independence in a nutshell: "making a good living through natural pursuit of creative interests".. When I first started GHDR, I didn't expect it to take this long, but in hindsight it's been a journey of emerging understanding of what really makes me tick.

In previous cycles, I've had extreme difficulty sustaining progress on the chosen goals for the year. I had framed this as an energy problem, theorizing that I needed a certain kind of interaction with like-minded people. However, this created a dilemma:

• To have energy to produce interesting things, I need to be around like-minded people.
• To attract like-minded people, I need to produce interesting things.

I've also tried to address my energy deficit by devising alternative systems that attempted to refine the systems of production. This year, though, I'm flipping the script by posing a question:

I have deeply considered reasonsSee Sri's Productivity Parameters 2025 for a model of how I think values, traits, needs, and productivity work together. behind this question, but in a nutshell it's simply that I've recognized that I'm an intensely values-driven person driven toward specific purpose, and thrive only when I'm engaged in meaningful ongoing conversations with others that have similar traits. I've tried to prioritize the "doing" up to now, because my analytic systems-based brain is good at that kind of thing. What feeds the energy behind it, though, are based on emotional needs that keep me aligned with values, purpose, and prosocially-motivated creativity.

This Year's System Goals

I guess I can call this Values-First Productivity... another way of expressing follow your passion? In a similar way, Groundhog Day Resolutions (as I've experienced it, at least) could be said to express the journey is the reward.

Fundamentally, I want to be mindful of metrics related to my starting inquiry statement:

• What deep, daily conversations I've had?
• What like-minded people have I had contact with?
• What shared purposes and collaborations have I managed to start?
• What tangible benefits and artifacts have been shared?

And I want to test the key hypothesis:

• Did creative independence materially progress?

For the first set of metrics, I'll likely track them in some kind of journal (format to be determined). For the key hypothesis, I'll define a set of this year's Strategic HorizonsStrategic Horizons are an adaptive strategy for reaching a speculative strategic goal, improvising methods for getting there. and identify the Project VesselsA Project Vessel is any project that we think will bring us closer to a Strategic Horizon, an endeavor meeting multiple pragmatic and long-term goals. that will sail towards them.

With that, I'll outline this year's Strategic Horizons and the Project Vessels that seem most promising for reaching them.

Strategic Horizons for 2025

The overall context for establishing Strategic Horizons is creative independence, using the inquiry statement Will deep, daily conversations with like-minded people naturally drive creative independence? as the guiding metric.

• Expressing Values / Sri-ness - The public expression of "Sri being aligned with a set of specific values and purposes", which helps with outreach to like-minded people.
• Cultivating a Sharing Community - This is active outreach to like-minded people wanting to create a network of shared empowerment and benefit.
• Creating Software and Digital Media - Benefits-producing work that can be sold and also attract like-minded people. In 2025, produced only through alignment with values.
• Online Sales - Transactional platforms where like-minded people without strict value alignment can still purchase works, providing an additional revenue stream.

Project Vessels for 2025

These are the specific projects that I already have going on. They are the actual tasks, powered not through willpower but by the warm wind of deep ongoing conversations.

• URSYS - The umbrella codebase I've been developing in Javascript to support freelance Learning Sciences grant work. It's evolved into an opinionated web-based system for expressing ideas and a repository of my own architectural ideas. Work here supports every other project vessel by enabling new capabilities.
• Game Tech, Graphical User Interfaces, Realtime Graphics - This is a research vessel to reskill myself in current digital media authoring. The past 10 years doing systems programming has taken a toll on my expressive media skills.
• Groundhog Day Resolutions Guidebook - I'd like to consolidate everything I've learned into a resource that I can share in book form. The GHDR Mastermind Group is already providing me with lots of energy to work on it!
• Knowledge Management, Digital Gardening, Publishing, Federation - This website is my de-facto notebook for keeping track of all my developing ideas. I'd like to increase the utility of what's posted here as share pieces, which are the currency of the attraction-style outreach I do. The larger this footprint of sharing, the more likely it is that I'll find like-minded people to commune with.
• DS|CAFE Community Evolution - The DS|CAFE Discord Server is evolving into the kind of prosocial-first action-based community that is my primary source of deep, motivated conversation. Creating materials, tools, and media that help nurture our culture of caring and support is an ongoing project.
• Ecommerce - Getting the physical and digital product production going again, and making a real alternative to using Amazon Marketplace. This is an especially difficult task for me to do, as e-commerce is a weird mess.
• Restarting Productivity Tool Releases - There are so many ideas that I have stockpiled. This is also a good to find products to supply the Ecommerce vessel.

It's important to note that I'm conceiving these as sailing vessels that move only when deep, meaningful conversation about them pushes them forward. This is more efficient than relying on my own meager pool of energy, which is like rowing a crippled ship in a dead sea against the current.

Values-Driven Productivity Metrics

Many people assume that being a systems thinker means you must like following systems, too. That's not really my case. I use systems thinking to understand and model to see opportunities and avoid discomfortMy fellow ASDers might relate to this.. The only context in which I like to apply systems thinking to my own work is when it's shared with other people, and the way it's shared has to be in alignment with my values and shared purpose...that is the theory, anyway!

My core values as described in Sri's Productivity Parameters are:

• Finding and packaging truths I find, so I can share them with people who might need them. Do my best to live by them.
• Practicing transparency by explaining the assumptions, context, and expectations behind my decisions. I want others to have the same data I have to make their own decisions.
• Being authentic by representing my ideas, feelings, values, and beliefs directly. Giving credit where it is due. Citing influences that have helped me.
• Promoting equality by devising functional metrics that I can hold myself to.

The metrics I'll be tracking follow from these practices:

• meaningful conversations had
• shared purposes recruited
• thoughts shared
• questions asked or answered
• new connections made
• replies made to other writers and creators

To test this year's hypothesis that pursuing deep, meaningful conversations will lead to improved productivity, I'll also track tangible artifacts that are produced:

• documentation written and published
• social media posts with responses
• software delivered
• new forms designed, old forms refreshed
• new business contracted
• entries added to digital garden
• new people met
• checks cashed from creative works

This structure is very similar to The Concrete Goals Tracker, so I may adapt this into a formal tracking tool for the year.

Emotional Governance and Oversight

In addition to meeting the needs implied by my core values, I have several neurological challenges that stem from traits associated with ADHD and ASD Level 1:

• the need for constant mental stimulation (otherwise brain just fuzzes out)
• time blindness (which distracts from focus and task initiation)
• need for externalized task cues (otherwise clarity suffers)
• communication at face value (leads to expensive misunderstanding)
• insensitivity to social signaling and status (degrades relationships)
• intolerance of inconsistency (disappointment and avoidant behavior)
• imaginative inner world prioritized over outside (results in isolation)
• need for systematic understanding (overwhelms/irritates non-systematic people)
• need to take time to deeply process outside experiences (otherwise stress rises)
• need to pre-plan, model contingencies, and reduce uncertainty (otherwise stress rises)

This year's hypothesis that living in alignment to my values will lead to productivity is possibly based in these behavioral traits. I'll continue to keep an eye on them, particular the last two traits regarding need to process experience and reducing uncertaintyI have a lot of ways to mitigate their effects effectively, but I can't avoid feeling the effects in the first place. It's automatic and not under my control. What I can control are my reactions through systematic mental discipline, but by the time this happens I have already lost energy and am operating in a deficit. It is particularly challenging to deal with without having the meaningful relationships of people around me. .

Establishing Beacons

To recap, I have a singular question I'm using to frame this year's Groundhog Day Resolutions:

Will deep, daily conversations with like-minded people naturally drive creative independence?

The deeper ramification is that my singular focus should be on having conversations. The alignment of these conversations is assumed to meet several criteria related to what my values and sense of purpose. I can think of this as a beacon that works as a navigation aid for me and like-minded others.

• My VALUES are detailed in Core Values, Traits, and Emotional Needs but for purposes of remembering, I just need to list them. Note these are practices, not just a list of things I think are important; I have a clear idea of how to express them already.

• My PURPOSE is harder to define, as I'm not looking for a reason to exist as much as I want to be doing things that feed my emotional needs and resonate with my neurological traits and preferences.

Launch!

So, that's the system so far. I have a bit of work to do for creating reference materials, but I'll tackle them as the need arises. The most important thing is to remember to be mindful of my values, traits, and purpose and seek alignment with them as a first principle, not a "nice to have". This will of course limit what life opportunities are available to me, but I'm hopeful that the tradeoff will be worthwhile.

For people who'd like to keep in touch regarding Groundhog Day Resolutions:

• I've started a GHDR Mastermind Group on the DS|CAFE Discord. There's a handful of DS|CAFE regulars who are participating this year in an act of prosocial co-creation!

• I'm also resurrecting posting on my original website davidseah.com, which still has a lot of information on it. Unlike this site, davidseah.com has a working commenting and subscription system, which makes it easier for people to keep in touch. I'm also starting to post on Medium to see how its community-oriented readership model might help with outreach.

Thanks for reading! Hope to have some good conversations with like-minded readers some day!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS