GHDR Report 1010: The Month of Building

⊕ show captionAbout the image // All plans start with a happy cat sitting in the middle of organized chaos (pssst: the cat is meeee!)

Happy October 10! I'm pleased to say that after a month of motionThis is the eighth of ten Groundhog Day Resolution Reports for the year!, I'm ready to move into a month of building. There are a ton of things to do to reboot the design business with topical writing, making and sharing new design work. On top of that, I want to restart the physical stationery goods production too. It's going to take months before I see any benefit from this work, so I'd better get started!

Recap: Reviewing My Overall Goal

It's taken a couple of months to get here, performing the emotional labor of untangling feelings from logic into clear themes. My goal is return to blogging and design after ten years of doing Javascript development. There is both a yearning to do this and a practical need to make a living.

The general parameters for my business reboot are distilled from my emotional labors into a tidy triad of directives:

• make a self-sustaining creative space
• with a great culture of inclusion
• based a foundational set of personal values.

I think this will server as the infrastructure that will help me become a beacon that draws like-minded people into my orbit. It's also the vehicle by which I can enter the orbits of others, creating the opportunity for profitable collaboration.

In sales-y terms, the culture and values that I am expressing are the basis for creating a "sales funnel" through which I can find a particular audience that resonates with what I do. In sales, the goal is revenue (which is nice) but in my case it's actually meaningful connection; my hypothesis is that it is this kind of connection that results in revenue as the natural byproduct of doing cool stuff with talented friends.

Report: Progress since September 9

The Month of Motion was about preparing myself to make tangible stuff: articles that could be read on the blog, new designs that could be downloaded, and physical products that could be sold. That said, I felt uncertainty about my abilities since it's been quite a while since I've been in design and production mode.

After a bit of waffling on what exactly I should do about it, I split the worries into two separate concerns: Strategic Task Selection and Production Skills.

The First Concern: Smart Strategic Task Selection

Strategic Task Selection answers the question:

and its corollaries

Because the answers to such questions are unknowable, this creates paralyzing uncertainty because there's the expectation that we should know. What's important it to replace uncertainty with certainty, and the way that I've learned to do it is to take a step in any direction that seems like it could give me an answer. This has taken me an embarrassing number of years to learn, as my brain likes to complain a lot, but I think it works because when you take a step, you see the world from a different angle. Take enough of those steps, and you'll have enough data to make an informed guess whether the path you're on is going to go somewhere.

When doing creative work of any kind, especially the first time, it's important to keep this in mind. While rebooting my design business draws on my old skills, it's a different world now and I have different conditions for how I'm willing to work. This is going to take time.

That said, I wanted to reduce the amount of wandering as much as possible, so I reviewed what steps I had already taken. The Master Vantage Point diagrams provided this history.

After refining the current Master Vantage Point map, I created operational maps more suitable to task managementSee the journal post Making Operational Diagrams for Motivation for more details.. There are two diagrams that I think will help maintain clarity in the coming building frenzy.

Diagram 1. The Activity Bingo Board (ABB)

⊕ show captionDiagram 1. A collection of contexts for categorizing or generating project tasks. It can be viewed larger on Whimsical

This diagram describes the 12 active project contexts that contribute to either rebooting the design business or creating the specific community space I am architecting. It includes other categories for group collaborations (yellow), artful aspirations (light green), and the unavoidable impulsive projects that still produce useful stuff (fuchsia).

The ABB serves several functions at once:

• it's a memory jogger to think about WHAT to do
• it's a sanity check to ensure what I'm doing is strategically-aligned
• it's a keyword list that will help me organize my project data

Diagram 2. Sri's Busy Busy World

Sri's Busy Busy World is named in honor of children's book illustrator Richard Scarry. I had two of his books as a little kid, Busy Busy World and What Do People Do All Day. They had diagrams of how airplanes worked and how bakeries made bread, and I loved them.

⊕ show captionDiagram 2. A fanciful diagram showing how my motivation to do tasks are intertwined with my emotional core. Click to expand.

This diagram was made to show how the sausage is made in a manner reminiscent of the Richard Scarry books mentioned above. Eventually it would be nice to redraw this as a colorful illustration, but for now it's GOOD ENOUGH.

Here's what's in it:

• Tangible goods are in the upper part of the page. They're the things I make that directly contribute to the viability of my design business.

• Sri's Emotional Core is in the center, which is the source of all my energy. It's highly variable, which makes my output unpredictable and is a limiting factor that I have to account for. When I can keep emotional core stable and happy, that helps have a good day of work. It's important that I don't overstress is.

• ELBS-based Production is at the bottom of the diagram. It's acknowledges that the machinery is not that reliable, and relies on external energy and emotional energy to run.

Energy is the scarce resource. It's sourced either from meaningful human interaction or internal positive energy. My production ability has been starved of this energy for decades, which is why my strategic goal is so important. Here it is again from the top of this post:

• make a self-sustaining creative space
• with a great culture of inclusion
• based a foundational set of personal values.

The Second Concern: Rusty Skills in a Changed World

My second concern was that lack of recent experience with creative tools. I've been almost 100% focused on Javascript coding and have not exercised my design skills in this work. A lot of things have changed in the past ten years while I was working in the Javascript Code Mines:

• Digital Tooling has Changed - I had dumped Adobe Creative Cloud (after 30 years!) because the company kind of sucks now, and so I am now using alternative software. I haven't worked with them extensively so I'm a noob again. This will extend production times initially.

• Online Conversation Spaces have Changed - The Blogosphere is long dead, long live the Blogosphere! I'm fed up with shareholder-driven social media companies that strip mine our humanity for profit, so I want to move to decentralized networks like the Fediverse and the so-called the open Social Web. These networks are new and janky, still in their infancy. Straddling both the old social media while being part of the growth of the open social web is another learning challenge.,

• The Product Landscape has Changed - I was one of the first people to offer downloadable productivity forms. Now they are everywhere! It's going to be a challenge to figure out how to stand out in this new landscape. Combined with the change in online spaces, figuring out where to set up my virtual shop and how to market it is an upcoming challenge. For now, it's important to just make some products and see what sticks.

Warming Up with Personal Challenges

I formulated smaller challenges to test myself in tightly-scoped production challenges. To keep it interesting, I invited people on the DS|CAFE discord server to join in.

• The Daily Sharepiece Challenge - Each day's goal was to do something small (could be done in a few minutes) that was tangible (could be held in hand or seen by eye), and sharable through a link or an image. I framed this as practice for taking a first step and seeing that this can lead to tangible progress. With a supportive group like DS|CAFE, I hoped that this would demonstration that being messy with one's progress is not only expected but worthy of celebration.

• The 5-Day Personal Challenge - The following challenge was to pick something that you could work on several days in a row, under the same conditions as the Daily Sharepiece Challenge. I saw this as a way to demonstrate how continuity in the small was valuable and worth doingFor related thoughts on the value of practicing continuity in small amounts, see the note on 15 Minute Blocks. I decided to tackle music composition for my five days, as it is on my Activity Bingo Board (upper-right).

Despite the intended "smallness" of these challenges, they were still very time consuming, requiring between 1-2 hours minimum. What I gained from this exercise was that I remembered that this works and could apply it to the upcoming mountain of production tasks ahead of me. I won't tackle the mountain all at once, applying the insights re-learned during my challenge run.

and

I think this will work because I now trust myself to connect what I make with people around me. Having something to share simplifies the transaction considerably by applying principles of show don't tell and meaningful conversations.

What will the result be, you ask? I have no idea. I take a step, and see what happens, and form the next step based on what happens. When you put something into the Universe, it's much more likely to send you something backI often refer to The Universe as an entity that is somehow aware of me. Others might just call it "the real world" or "the numbers game" or even "God" depending on their context. For me, I'm just using "The Universe" as shorthand for thinking about what is OUTSIDE of me that I don't control, but nevertheless affects me.. I am pretty confident that I can make something that isn't total garbage and is complete in itself. What I don't know is whether the Universe wants it. I won't know unless I take that step.

Next Up: The Month of Building!

Alright! I've got planning maps, passable production skills, and am ready to forge this new path by leading with my values! I hereby declare October 10 through November 10 as The Month of Building!

The Month of Building focuses on creating the tangible artifacts that will give credibility to my design business reboot. To facilitate that, I'm going to use the challenge format that faciliated The 5 Day Personal Challenge except for 30 days like I did in 2013 and 2014.

As I implied above, I'm not making any specific plans as to WHAT to produce WHEN. The methodology of task selection is emergentThe idea of emergent productivity is something I've played with for serveral years. The basic idea is that instead of plodding down a set of steps, you instead used your intuition and experience to do something you want. . Here's the brief:

Methodology

The Month of Building is 30 days of pushing to release "sharepieces" related to the design business reboot.

• Use the Activity Bingo Board to select strategically-relevant areas to work for the day.
• Apply Daily Sharepiece format: something to share at the end of each production day.
• Use Sri's Busy Busy World to retain awareness of my energy levels. This will help me avoid burnout.

While maintaining production, I'll likely get sucked into building support tools to help with blogging, publishing, and what not. This is Emergent Productivity so it's hard to predict, but it'll probably be useful...right? Right?

In any case, I can foresee efforts made to:

• Create derivative helpers from Master Vantage Point that help with production management.
• Document experimental processes into ongoing experiments.
• Continuing to develop standalone software infrastructure modules.

Let's Go

Not much more to say. I'm ready to start the Month of Building with a 30 Day Challenge.

I'll report on my progress at least five days a week, allowing myself to rest on the weekends.

Thanks for following along, and see ya online!

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