Build 08/30: Activity Bingo Form Progress (part 2)

⊕ show captionRevision 05. Rank D quests are now at the bottom, and Rank C quests now represent small group projects. The intentions is that higher level quests are the most aspirational goals.

For today, I wanted to try to finish work by 3:00PM, including the blog post. I got started around 11AM, so that's a 4-hour block. I picked up from where I left off on DAY 06.

This iteration of the Activity Bingo Board (ABB) accomplishes a few things:

• resizes the boxes and typography to fit within the width of an A4 sheet of paper, as I'm anticipating making both a US and A4 size sheet for testing.
• normalizes the dimensions of the boxes to 88x24pt and typography to integer font sizes.
• reorders the rows so the undisciplined solo activites I do are the lowest rank D.
• create rank C activities that are for small groups, as this is a step up from doing things by myself.
• add checkbox areas that might be good for marking "bingo" squares.

Comparison

Here's the original version DR03:

⊕ show captionDraft Release 03 shows the grid elements overflowing the margins on a US LETTER sized page, and unnamed D-RANK QUESTS.

Here's the refined version DR05:

⊕ show captionDraft Release 05 shows the grid elements fitting tidily within the narrower A4 paper width. The bingo blocks have been modified significantly too.

I'm not entirely happy with the colors, because each one of my monitors previews it differently. I might actually have to buy a good quality inkjet printer to do color proofs on paper. Maybe one of those new tank printers? It would be nice to have something capable of use with a Cricut for making merch and special inserts.

Next Concept Step

Now I have a bingo board that's good enough, I can think about how it might work as a daily productivity form. There are several patterns that are baked-in to the board:

Aspirational Goal Ranking

I've been thinking about expeditions as part of The Colony concept I've been kicking around since 2024. I also really like the idea of quests that are undertaken by parties of adventurers. The Colony concept has been implicit in all the personal development work I've been doing since then; you can see it directly in the diagram under ColonyKit.

A common trope in Anime/Manga is the idea of ranked quests that are offered at the Adventurer's Guild. Each adventurer registered with the guild has a ranking, typing starting from F and rising to A then S.

In my version, the lowest rank is [D] and goes to [S]:

In the Adventure Guild trope erstwhile adventurers are constantly trying to rank-up, doing the lower-ranked quests until the Guild determines they've performed enough worthy tasks to merit a promotion.

I find this applicable to me in a couple of cases:

• I have come to realize that I am not that high rank in my productivity/mastery achievements, and so starting at Rank [D] seems appropriate.
• I have a theory that my personal growth was the best with others of similar skill level and interest. Like a study group in school, or your best friends who wanted to make a movie together with you. This maps well to the idea of forming small parties of similar rank, which is the aspiration of Rank [C].

My hope is that by tackling Rank [C] quests and partying-up, many of my energy deficits outlined in Making Operational Diagrams for Motivation will be addressed, making it possible to reach higher ranks.

A Game Board?

The Bingo Board activities have coordinates, and each activity block has a place to put a checkbox. This suggests that a tracking diagram could provide an additional sense of progression or accomplishment. The text at the bottom of the current form is a placeholder list of possible destinations on the diagram.

⊕ show captionPossible Destinations for a game board or tracking diagram.

As I mentioned in Build Day 06, this is a kind of funnel where people stumble upon my work through ENTRIES in search of IDEAS or SOLUTIONS. If their CURIOSITY IS PIQUED, then they may make their way to one of my DESIRABLE ACTIONS.

How to turn this into a game board or tracking diagram is a job for Future Sri!

BUILD CHALLENGE COMMENTARY

I'm finishing up this blog post around 4:00PM, which is an hour later than I wanted, but I still have more time to do home chores and a bit of self care. This is important for maintaining physical and well being so I don't burn out like last week.

BONUS ACHIEVEMENTS

I'm starting to get a better feel for Affinity Designer as a layout tool. There are a few annoyances so far:

• AFD doesn't have have true layers, just an object hierarchy graph) which makes it very difficult to organize complex documents.
• AFD's alignment tools don't have a convenient floating panel like Illustrator does, making it tedious to apply adjustments to many different selections.
• AFD lacks per-object transform within a selection. That means if you want to make a whole bunch of rectangles the same size, you can't. You have to subselect every damn one.
• AFD doesn't have select-by-typeface so you can change their type properties all at once.
• AFD has poor font management in its dropdown, and doesn't filter out system fonts. It makes font selection very finicky.
• AFD has poor text box bounding-box calculation of artistic text. I actually don't remember if Illustrator has the same problem. The example is something like aaccmm (no ascenders or descenders), vblm (ascenders), ppqac (descenders), and abcq (both ascenders and descenders). Each box is a different height, so using precise distribution of text by baseline doesn't work. The proper fix is to use Text Frames instead of Art Text.

In general, Affinity Designer seems to lack multi-object editing awareness in their tools, and it's making the kind of work I'm doing slower and more tedious than it could be. It is a pretty big gaping hole, in my opinion. To its credit, though, Affinity Designer is much faster and smoother than the last version of Illustrator I used, and in that sense it is a better experience. It's possible that these issues don't exist in Affinity Publisher; I'll have to check that out.