Reframing Chores as Ship Operations

⊕ show captionABOUT THE PHOTO // Today’s post is about operations and hospitality, as it applies to me as I try to reframe boring tasks into something more personally exciting. This photo is of a hotel buffet in Taichung, Taiwan from 2025.

In my April 2026 Groundhog Day Resolutions Report I noted the gap between what I wanted to do and what I need to do. More bluntly, I was avoiding doing the boring and unpleasant work that is necessary for running a business. Again.

I have been since thinking of how to cleverly turn boring work into something I actually have been doing while “productively procrastinating” on small website improvements and research into online communities. In the April Report, I had tried to connect those activities to my fascination with the hospitality industry and the excitement of ship operations. These are two interests that I’ve had since I was in elementary school. Perhaps by focusing on delighting others rather than simply checking chores off a todo list. And perhaps having a sense of mission beyond “just me” would feel more connected to purpose than the simple need to “have an online store”.

By the end of the April Report, I had convinced myself that this was worth pursuing, though it seemed like silly roundabout way to make myself do things.

In this report followup, I want to build the foundation of what this could look like. I’ll start first by describing what I mean by “hospitality” and “ship operations”.

What is my version of Hospitality?

The Hospitality Industry bring to mind hotels, small inns, theme parks, visitor centers, department stores, concierge services, and other situations where there is an organization that has made it their mission to provide for their guests to make them feel welcome. It of course draws from the idea of hospitality as a cultural value, the act of welcome people into your home and forming bonds over good food and shared celebration. This is something that is very close to my heart.

Operationally, I’ve defined “Hospitality” for myself as:

• Being prepared to recieve guests into my space so they feel welcome. The space is designed to be welcoming, and as host I am representing the space.

• To be prepared is to be able to provide a space where the highest level of support meets guest expectations. Beyond facilities, this requires consistency in training, clear standards, and excellent logistics.

• Consistent excellence and attention to detail is the salient aspect of the guest experience. When guests reciprocate positively through action or payment, we know that we’re on the right track.

What is my concept of a Ship?

Ships bring to mind stories of exploration and then connection, particularly during the age of oceanliners before jet transportation took over. The idea of a lone ship plying deep oceans or dark void of space, traveling from port to port carrying passengers and cargo, is something that I’ve always just liked. Ships systems, crew, and logistics serve a quantifiable purpose; competence and self-sufficiency are necessary to ensure success.

Operationally, I’ve defined “Ship” and “Ship Operations” for myself as:

• Maintaining the Ship as a “moving space” with one or more autonomous charters. The charter sets the Ship’s priorities, and these provide guidance for all Ship operations.

• Applying Hospitality aboard the Ship as a diplomatic function for guests, as it is in the Ship’s best interest to have good relationships with everyone.

• Having a Crew that takes pride in their service and training, demonstrating that superlative experience with an attention to detail ensures excellence in outcome. Crew are not guest servants. They are expert facilitators and educators, to both guests and to each other.

• Being the Owner/Director that chooses Expeditions to suit the Ship’s mission is the highest responsibility, and it serves the Mission. Interested people are invited to join each time-limited expedition. Some may decides to find a Role to fulfill, becoming Crew for a time. Others simply are passengers that want to experience how the Ship operates.

With those working definitions defined, I can now review what my business objectives have been in the past, and try to fit them into the framework of Ship Operations (which includes Hospitality as one of its functions).

Old Business Objective: Creative Independence

From 2007-2025 was my goal for having a financially sustainable boutique business. I called this Creative Independence, which had these key goals:

1. To be my own boss: mastering process, making money directly from work I produce under my own name.
2. To have the time, freedom, and money to operate my business without anxiety.

There were additional personal goals that described how I wanted to conduct myself as a business operator:

3. To act according to my values as a human being, friend, and maker in the pursuit of mastery and success.
4. To live according to my values with a community of like-minded self-empowered, positive-minded, conscientious and competent people.
5. To be respectful and mindful of others, while not being swayed from my path by their expectations.
6. To document the process so the path can be followed by others

Current Business Objective: The Independent Maker

A different approach arose last March 2026 as I was researching online communities that resonated with the how of creative independence. I liked the idea of being an independent maker, but there are several overlapping community hashtags that are not strongly defined#openweb, #indieweb, #indie, #socialweb, #webrevival, #cozyweb, and #smolweb are the primary hashtags I’ve been researching..

Here is a description of what I’d like my version of “independent maker” to be:

My Ideals

• Our consumer relationships are personal and direct, authentic and genuine, with clear boundaries
• We establish clear expectations to scaffold mutual respect in all transactions
• We maintain creative autonomy over what goods are made
• We accept the realities of unexpected consumer response to what we make
• We own and control our supply, fulfillment, and sales channels
• We scale production within the capabilities of our small team
• We seek economies of scale through collaboration with other small teams

My Ethos

• Both makers and consumers are agents seeking mutual benefit with authenticity and transparency
• Do the least harm in the pursuit of our desired benefits
• Believe that sustained success comes from diligence in craft delivering excellent experience
• Believe that fair pricing and living wages are the foundation for genuine good faith negotiation

My Considerations

• Minimal dependence on capitalist gatekeepers
• Minimal use of specious credibility indicators such as “hype” and “scale”
• Acknowledge that our ethos is not shared with the majority of mainstream consumers

The Old Business Metric: Goods and Services Focus

Both The Old Mission and The Independent Maker put the emphasis on my unique goods and tools as the direct creator or revenue. In this framing, there are several obvious steps:

1. I make it easy for people to find and try my stuff that creates more opportunity for them to become customers.
2. The growth strategy is spreading the word so people can can find out about them.
3. The easier I make it obvious what the value proposition is, the more compelling is the call to action.
4. By capturing personal data or subscribers, I can maintain regular contact with previous consumers of my work. Growing a pool of satisfied customers for repeat business creates a foundation for stable growth.
5. The more consistently I produce material that meets any of the above criteria, the more the customer base will increase, creating a virtuous circle of production and consumption.

Operationally speaking, the chore list looks like this:

• increasing online commerce options for customer engagement
• providing enticing product descriptions and listing
• writing instructional guides
• writing promotional material
• running workshops and classes
• seeking collaboration with others in the space

All very reasonable, logical steps. This is Marketing 101. But also, it makes me feel a little sick. Here is where my brain refuses to cooperate. While these are time-honored and battle-tested strategies for running a successful product companyI don’t want to diminish how difficult it is to balance all these steps, especially for more than 5 years. It’s easy to describe the steps, but requires incredible talent and stamina to run this kind of operation., my brain inherently finds it distasteful.

When product is the focus—even my OWN product—my brain doesn’t engage at all. It’s only now that I’m starting to understand why:

Performing marketing operations to move product—even product that I design and make myself with the intention to provide genuine utility—feels like a step away from that.

The Innovative Experiment: Focusing on Hospitality

In the early 2000s I worked for tiny digital web agencies in a senior design role. I liked the technical stuff of the Internet, but I eventually developed an allergy to marketing because it felt so inauthentic. Our main job was to help companies convince other companies that they were polished and professional. I started freelancing shortly after this realization, choosing the uncertain path of freelancing to find out what I really wanted to do. That was a bit over 20 years ago.

I had forgotten about my allergy to marketing. Apparently, even practicing it for myself triggers a strong reaction! The alternative?

I am optimistically thinking yes. In fact, all the marketing basics are based on establishing trust, and I believe there is no better way to establish trust by being consistently authentic, transparent, and curious with the people you meet. It’s not a foolproof 100% success strategem, but over the long term it is the foundation of so many wonderful things. My version of hospitality is the desire to channel genuine desire to meaningfully help people have a good day. My love of Ships is based in the delight of seeing experience, knowledge and resources applied to get people to where they want to go, fully provisioned and supported in their own mission.

Looking at this from another angle, my actual product is the sharing of those activities. Hospitality and Ship Operations are the narrative context, the stories I want to help come to life with other positive-minded, self-empowered, conscientious, curious, generous, and kind people. The sharing activity is the catalyst the produces goods and services that can be packaged and exchanged.

In other words, the point isn’t the goods or expertise. That’s the old way! By sharing my knowledge and packaged resources:

That is the new operational focus!

The Leap of Faith

Getting down to nuts and bolts of financial sustainability, here’s my logic:

When people encounter me and my work, a certain percentage of people (“fans”) will want to reciprocate the caring that they receive. This is a virtuous cycle of good will that circulates between creator and fans, which is the proven foundation of Creator EconomySpecific examples: Freddy Wong of RocketJump, Jack and Natalie of Pomplamoose, Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, Scott Kurtz of Player vs Player, John Allison of Bad Machinery, Dan Shive of El Goonish Shive and Non-Profit Organizations alike.

If I can create economic exchange as one way for fans to return my acts of caring, then I will have a sustainable system. And because the exchange is based on caring by both parties, this could be increasingly motivating!

Reframing Everything

Okay, that was a lot of preparatory discovery work! Let me propose a set of new directives to follow. I think it will take a month to see if all the above blathering has any substance to it.

Motivation, Reframed

There are two aspects here:

• I like doing acts of hospitality and logistics because I like imagining how future guests and crew will be delighted. I’m someone who inexplicably delights in delight, enjoys joy, and loves love.
• I have an allergy to marketing, so let me not do marketing. I want to have fun running a ship that welcomes people to come aboard and go to interesting places.

The Hypothesis: by directly connecting this imagination directly to the delighted/joyful/loving narrative of operationalizing it into an actual ship that hosts people, I may be able to reduce the friction I feel when doing “boring marketing tasks”This is also an attempted dodge around Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), which I talked about in March 3rd Report. The other name for PDA is Persistent Demand for Autonomy, which my motivational hypothesis is operationalizing into the form of an independent vessel..

Metrics, Reframed

The metric changes from “tangible goods produced that leads to connection” to “acts of depicting care and caring”. This is human connection PERFORMED. The desire benefit is trust earned over time, which can take many forms.

Skills, Reframed

My desire to share is expressed through explanation and sharing what I make in an open iterative process. This is the heart of what I called Explore • Learn • Build • Share (ELBS), which has a strong teaching component. This is a process I know well, and I have passable media production skills to do this by myself.

The results of an ELBS cycleExplore•Learn•Build•Share is my iterative creative process that emphasizes learning over production efficiency. Works well when you are learning how to do something at the same time you’re trying to build it. is often something that can be packaged, and this can be framed as something with trade value. A responsible ship operator will ensure that whatever is packaged is added to the ship’s inventory for use in future mission/trading opportunities.

Mission, Reframed

Instead of waiting for people to want to swirl with me, I can simply swirl as I have in the past. Through blog posts. Through commentary. Through livestreaming. Each of them explaining, building, and sharing the best things.

The Practice, Reframed

I think this simply means sharing through as many channels as possible along with my interests.

• My relative strengths are sharing process and the results of things I try. Those are the known ones
• The mission is independent making, and collaborating to build uplifting structures
• The culture is that all the animals are happy productive friends working and playing together
• My interest in hospitality and ship operations innately serve the mission, and are applied to the mission and culture contexts as a series of expeditions, cruises, short runs…

In operational terms:

• The ship’s mission consists both of the overall strategic goals and the shorter expeditions that have smaller focused goals.
• Expeditions themselves consist of smaller strategic campaigns and task-level daily sorties.

In personal terms:

I think the magical insight is about the flow, which makes sense because I like the idea of swirling and flowing. That means motion and being in the moment!

Simply “producing goods” is NOT swirling OR flowing!

Swirling and Flowing are live acts of caring.

• This is the nature of hospitality. It is only experienced in the moment of interaction.
• This is the nature of a ship. It is truly alive when it’s on the move and fulfilling its mission through its many operations and crew members pulling together.

In community terms:

My most childlike self wants to see a silly dream to become reality. I want to tell the story how all the animals became happy productive friends, working and playing together, growing and exploring and sharing their experiences in delighted mutual support. They thrive and prosper. The world becomes a better place.

This is the Way of Sri. This is what I want to operationalize and share with everyone. I have knowledge, skills, and expertise to draw on.

The Challenge Ahead

Will I be able to operationalize this version of GHDR? That’s the open question for 2026. This is a restart. Stay tuned. Wish me luck.