GHDR Report 0909: The Month of Motion

⊕captionAt the center of the current Sri Master Diagram for 2025 is this fortress-shaped core that summarizes what's most important to me as a person. Everything ultimately flows through this core.

Happy September! It's time for the 7th Groundhog Day Resolutions Report of 2025!

In last month's report, I declared August to be the Month of Change, noting that several long life chapters had closed. New chapters were beginning, continuing themes from the past strengthened by the insights from this year. Briefly:

1. I am returning to freelance design and blogging as the principle drivers of my daily "professional" work, which includes designing new productivity tools and getting back into online sales of physical and digital goods.
2. This time, I'm putting personal values in the driver's seat, putting analysis and logic in the support role. This better aligns with the way I think.

I also want to help bring back the good parts of the Internet by participating in the open social web. This is a movement to take back the Internet from companies like Facebook and TikTok that exploit and control our attention for profit, with no shame in creating social harm as its toxic byproductFor further reading, this brief article by Ben Werdmuller does a nice job of providing additional details..

To participate, I first needed to get my blogging technology working again.

Technical Challenge Accepted

The first step I figured was to change my existing blogging tech infrastructure so it could support the new federated protocols. I wanted my blogging system to connect with Mastodon and Bluesky, which are two services that use different federated protocols. I also wanted to get out of Wordpress, which was driving my old davidseah.com website and convert it to something more modern like Ghost 6.0, which required a lot of challenging under-the-hood technical changes that would take a lot of time.

Ultimately, it took three weeks to make these changes. I had to restore old local web development software I hadn't used in almost a decade and remember how it worked. I had to refamiliarize myself with the inner workings of my Wordpress theme and figure out why it was incompatible with the latest version of PHP. It was such a pain in the ass that I decided to brute force my way through it:

• Rather than convert the old Wordpress theme and keep davidseah.com running as it had, I created a static mirror of it and dumped Wordpress entirely. Good riddance!
• With davidseah.com now just a regular static html website, the server migration was very easy as I didn't have to do a lot of tedious PHP debugging and engineering.
• With the server migration complete, I now had a modern server stack that could run Ghost 6.0 and all the fancy new federated stuff.

Even taking the static mirror approach, there was a lot of time-consuming conversion work to ensure that everything continued to work while also removing the "dynamic features" like Site Search and Commenting. I then replaced the davidseah.com RSS feed with the one on my current site dsriseah.com, then used a service called EchoFeed to post new stuff to my BlueSky and Mastodon accounts.

All of this got done in August, fulfilling my critical mission goals for the month!

Plotting Next Steps

After finishing all that technical stuff, I was then ready to consider what to write about. I'm restarting chapters in freelance design, productivity tools, and adding software development and open social web initiatives. They all fit with the "Sri Core Values", but a pressing concern was loss of income due to the loss of the long-running learning sciences grants that had kept me occupied for nearly a decade. This would have to be replaced. Furthermore, I knew that I was severely socially understimulated due to a lack of local connections, and for my own mental health it would be important to invest effort into that.

Rather than try to plan this all in one marathon session, I worked in steps.

Step 1: Brain Dump

First, I just dumped everything out on a piece of paper, inspired by my 2009 and 2017 Master Vantage Point diagrams.

⊕captionClick to see it bigger!

This captured what was on my mind, and allowed me to see initial patterns related to my sense of self, my values, and the way I've changed since 2017.

Step 2: Expansion of Brain Dump

Then I transcribed the initial mind dump into a big Whimsical document, expanding the short notes into more detailed passages and filling-in missing details. I was able to see the overall patterns at work as "My path in hindsight" and "My path looking forward".

⊕captionSee the full-resolution document here

From this, I could then infer what my NEW DEVELOPMENT PATH might look like, which is the bottom section. In brief, it lists:

• My Core Directives - leading with emotion, supporting with logic, and truthfully expressing myself through authenticity, transparency, and curiosity
• My Community Development Goals for concepts like The Meadow and The Colony
• My Opportunities to practice core directives and community development

While this provided some clarity, it still wasn't anything like an Action Plan, so I continued to work through the process.

Step 3: Sri's Systems Cheat Sheet

I created a new map, intending to put Core Directives in the center. These are my deeply held innate values. Then, I started rewriting everything on pieces of paper and trying to see what patterns emerged.

⊕captionClick to see it bigger!

While this diagram is still evolving, I've decided that it's "good enough" for now. It's a cheat sheet that reminds me of how I function while also serving as a troubleshooting guide when I start to lose energy.

I can use this to derive a set of things to do that are actually result in meaningful work.

The Month of Motion

Now that I have my blogging setup working, it's time to start producing blog posts! But that means I need something to write about.

To help keep things controllable, I've decided to work on a few "silos" of independent activities that work within the constraints implied by my so-called Cheat Sheet.

Goal 1: Maintain Project Silos

The idea behind project silos is to chose a few things to focus on that produce some tangible result that can be shown and/or shared with other people. This month I'm starting with four:

• Engineering - Software projects that can be completed in 2-3 days. Strengthening my software foundation builds new capacity and also helps with credibility as an architect who can develop should I seek new contracts.
• Community Building - Getting the local "what's going on in Nashua" nerd zine going, calling on interested acquaintances to meet and see what emerges. This is the kind of fun group connection that I crave.
• Swirling - Allowing myself to do short half-day explorations of rabbitholes that are UNRELATED to any strategic goal, simply to learn while playing. This is critical for nourishing one's own heart.
• Blogging - Sharing the goings-ons above in frequent blog posts.

There are other things I could be doing, but I don't want to overload myself. At the end of the month I'll have an idea of whether I can handle a higher load or not.

Goal 2: Practice Physical Motion

A big part of the Month of Motion is to maintain physical movement. I am getting older and noticing that my metabolism is slowing down. This has resulted a spiral of doom where I don't feel like moving, and this lowers my energy further, which lowers my motivation to start things, and so on.

In the past, I've tried to find new ways to motivate myself. I've experimented with finding different sources of energy based on having frequent conversations with engaged coworkers and peers. What I'm trying now is simply moving without thinking about it at all. I feel better when I am physically moving. It never occurs to me that I can just move, and I've discovered that "unthinking" seems to help. Part of my lethargy may simply be due to thinking way too much about how everything and everyone is connected with me, and this is what leads to crashes. In fact, this kind of thinking may be a sort of rationalized worry that gives me the false impression that I have everything under control when in fact it just gives me a headache.

But I digress! That's the report for September 2025! We'll see how I do on my goals. Thanks for reading!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS