Happy Friday! I've been working on my strategy to return to public design and blogging, and recently I started a new master vantage point diagram to help me visualize what's important to me. I have it in a "good enough" state to work from. I just need to, uh, "make it happen". It's been hard.
The Old Challenges
In the past I would have made a giant strategic guide and then tracked everything, but I've come to realize I just don't have the energy to do it by myself. So, I'm going to try using daily blogging about what I'm making every day. I did a similar Make a New Product Every Day challenge in 2013 and had found it extremely fulfilling. However, it was really draining! In hindsight, doing that "synthesis work" every day burned up nearly all my energy, so I wasn't able to maintain it.
Today, I think I've come to terms that the way I want to work just doesn't align with how I actually work. There is a complicated model that I think explains why this is, but the observable effect is simply this:
- I thrive on SHARED CREATIVE ENERGY, and can work really long hours when it's available.
- Without shared creative energy, I have at most about 90 minutes's worth of DISCIPLINED ATTENTION each day.
Since 2004 I've largely worked without shared creative energy, and I have 18 years of documented struggle. With only around 90 minutes of focused attention available each day, I have to be much more strategic in using itMy neurodivergent peers out there might recognize this as Spoon Theory..
Lightening the Load
I do have one secret weapon to aid me: my compulsion to write and share what I'm thinking with people. I write thousands of words every day, but largely on Discord across communities I share with people who enjoy the same things that I do. By comparison, I haven't been writing very much online.
The main reason I've been using Discord is that because I'm running several Discords, I'm always on it with people I know, and therefore the writing friction is really low. I stopped writing on my old davidseah.com website because I simply hated the Wordpress experience with all the security headaches, predatory paid plugins, and awful UX...high friction. When I switched to dsriseah.com for writing my Groundhog Day Resolutions reports, that removed quite a lot of friction for creating online the way I wanted, but it still lacked the feeling of talking with people I know that made it an attractive proposition.
A few weeks ago, I finished turning the old Wordpress site into a static archive, but repointed the RSS feed to dsriseah.com/feed, so now I can write blog posts again! This is both exhiliarating and also daunting, similar to how one might feel when despoiling a brand-new notebook with a first scribble. I really didn't know what I wanted that first scribble online to be, but decided that I should just write without thinking too much about it. But I wasn't sure WHAT to write about.
This morning, I realized that my compulsion to write and share actually is a form of SHARED CREATIVE ENERGY, but I'd mentally classified it as a "non-productive overhead". Writing comes to me so easily that I use it as kindling to start the fire under my ass so I get moving. The writing part structures words into meaningful sentences that crystalize into understanding. The sharing part is happy to burble at others. I simply like doing it. However, since no one was asking for it, I didn't see it as having value in its own right.
Well, that's silly! I should burble as much as I want onto my own blog!
Secondly, it's clear to me that just sharing what I like is one of the elements of community building, a major part of my 2025-2026 Master Plan which currently looks like this in draft form:
I've been stuck wondering how to operationalize this and take that first step. It's very similar to making that first scribble in a new notebook, but in this case there are a dozen different notebooks that all somehow link back to this document. Don't get me wrong, this map is really important as a personal guide that reminds me that I really do know myself well and have tested many techniques over the years.
I just have to be brave enough to make these scribbles, share them, and hope for connections. It's worked before. Hopefully it works again now that there is a growing awareness that we have to break the isolation that keeps us from seeing each other. Starting with things that I care about seems like a good way to say "hello" to the Universe again.
The Format
I'd like to keep the blog posts lightweight, but borrow from the 2013 New Product a Day challenge by having a daily sharepiece that follows my criteria for concrete deliverables:
- You can see it or hold it
- You can easily share it
This is my primal building block for productivity, dating all the way back to the first Printable CEO form. Rather than go into lengthy detail explaining it, I'll just see how this goes. I'm hoping that this is sufficiently lightweight as I apply gathering-style productivity to collect what I make every day.