As I've been going through my finances for 2009 and 2010, the thought that I need to create packages to sell has kept bubbling to the surface. The bummer is that everything I was thinking of required significant time to design, develop, test, and then market. However, it occurred to me that perhaps I was being too precious about making products, a point driven home by an hour well spent browsing Regretsy (tagline: where DIY meets WTF). There you will find horrifying sweaters-turned-pants, bad photo compositing sold as "exquisite" art, and baffling mashups of hardware store odds-and-ends. Although my sense of design, craftsmanship, and aesthetics are stunned into silence by some of these items, I have to admire the urge to make, reimagine, and repurpose. I should apply some of that to my own situation: what do I got in the back that I can repackage and sell?
The mindset is like having a yankee swap of product. The idea of the Yankee Swap (or "White Elephant Exchange") game is that you find something used in your household to get rid of and package it up. You meet with several others who have done the same, and you proceed to draw numbers and pick presents. It's played usually around Christmas here in the States, as a fun and sometimes-vindictive way to save some money while (technically) exchanging gifts. There are many things that I have thought of doing on my website and with my design practice that I've been slow to implement or have rejected outright, as my gifting mentality is to give really unique and wonderful things tailored to the recipient. However, this is quite expensive in terms of time and resources.
There are things on this website that I could technically repackage. The Chain Mail Breaker, for example, or many of the tracking forms customized as a PDF workbook or daily planner. I could even distill some past writing into ebooks, or provide all the PCEO downloads as a simple all-inclusive ZIP file and charge some kind of download fee. All these ideas seem borderline-exploitive to me, but perhaps there IS value there that I find difficult to see. One thing that I've noticed at Yankee Swaps is that invariably, someone brings in a piece of junk that EVERYONE WANTS because it is legitimately awesome. I am not the arbiter of what's awesome or not, so I should just start peddling stuff. And perhaps I need to shake myself out of the "gift giving" mentality with everything and target those people who are looking for a quick and affordable solution to some problem without the desire to make a connection with myself and our community of eclectic productivista entrepreneurs. It occurs to me that at least 30% of the traffic here comes from search engines; those are people looking for something to buy/download that FIXES something in their lives.
So that's my thought for the day: how to package what I've already done in bite-sized, graspable chunks to bring in more revenue?
SUMMARY: It's time for the 2010 Groundhog Day Resolutions! I review the past three years of resolutions and distill my "operating principles" from lessons learned into a (hopefully) strong direction for the year.
Being a lazy-yet-practical sort of person, every year I wait until Groundhog Day to make my yearly resolutions. The rationale, which I explain in further detail in the original Groundhog Day Resolutions post, is that I need to rest from the holidays before I'm in the right frame of mind to make important decisions. So I wait. January's chilly melancholy eventually yields to ever-lengthened days, until at last on February 2 the emergence of domestic prognosticating rodents turn our attention to the green promise of a most-welcome Spring. Groundhog Day is, without a doubt in my mind, the finest day to look positively to the future.
That said, I have to admit that my past three attempts at achieving, as opposed to merely iterating, my resolutions has produced spotty results. Partly this is due to the awareness that my choices of resolution have been far too broad, and it's also partly due to the memory of writing-up the disappointments of my Groundhog Day Resolution Reviews. These reviews, designed to keep focus on resolutions throughout the year, occur on every month and one day after 2/2, so the easily-remembered review days are 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, etc. In many of my reports, I would discover new insights in the place of concrete progress. So it was with diminished enthusiasm that I reviewed the year-end reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009.
What I found, to my surprise, was that a lot of it seemed to fit together. Three years means three data points, and suddenly I can see how the journey and regular review have conspired to get me to the state-of-mind I am in today. That state of mind is it is time to build. In a way, this post is the culmination of five years of blogging insights.
But before I get to that, I want to review what a resolution should be.
So what is a Resolution?
So what is a resolution? I really was not sure, so I applied everyone's favorite high school essay shortcut: look up the definition of resolution. After a quick skim of the Wikipedia article, I believe the general idea is that you're making a serious promise to make permanent change in your life, standing resolutely in the face of guaranteed difficulty, to better yourself. This is a pretty popular idea; according to research by John C. Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, some 50% of Americans make a New Year's Resolution. However, only 1 in 5 make it stick for more than 2 years. Wikipedia further quotes a UK study of some 3000 people in which the surveyed rate of success was only 12%.
Though the numbers are grim, there ARE ways to improve the odds. There appear to be around five habits practiced by successful resolution keepers:
- they break big goals into smaller, realistic steps
- they ask for and receive support from friends and co-workers
- they reward themselves for successes
- they maintain a positive attitude, focusing on the good of the new habit instead of the loss of the old habit
- they do not blame themselves for slip-ups
In other words, these habits help ensure that there is adequate and constant feedback from both the self and from other people, and that a positive attitude suppresses self-punishing thoughts in favor of the counted blessings of the new habit.
In the construction of this year's Groundhog Day Resolutions, I'll need to make sure that I hit all these points. In a way, I've approached them intuitively; the act of even writing about my GHDR experiment is a form of externalization of feedback, and the regular monthly reviews provide needed time for reflection and re-adjustment of strategy. I've also followed the "positive attitude/not blame myself" approach to some degree, because it's part of my Printable CEO design philosophy. However, I have never asked for support, nor rewarded myself. And I haven't been good about breaking the BIG goals into small, realistic steps. I believed that I should focus purely on willpower and self-discipline; this apparently just increases the chances that I'll fail. The smart thing to do would be to use ALL of the habits to ensure success. It may feel like a failure of character or ability to NOT just will myself through it, but perhaps what's more important is that I actually get some stuff done.
That said, I still need to know what my big goals are in the first place. That requires a quick review of my past GHDRs, as depressing the thought of revisiting three years of that low-yield effort may be.
As it turns out, it wasn't all so bad.
Resolutions of Years Past
Here's the quick recap:
In 2007, I decided that I really wanted to make money from doing what I love, which I figured was writing and making stuff. That became one of three major focuses; the other two were creating a sustainable social network and sell a product. None of these really came to fruition in 2007, so they were extended through 2008. I came up with a few more specific resolutions, but none of them came to pass and I essentially gave up. However, one things that did come out at the end was a master resolution: Seek truth, make it visible to others as part of what drives me.
In 2009, already weary of the process and working on a large museum project at the same time, I didn't even start the resolution definition process until April. The first two resolutions were restatements of my 2007 resolutions: write about what catches my eye, create that which illuminates and achieve financial independence through what I create. I knew it wasn't going to be the "fast track" to money, but it was the way I decided I wanted to do it. A little later that year, I finally noticed that the more I worked with other people on their projects, the better my own projects seemed to go. That lead to a new directive: Be involved with dreams that are larger than myself.
By the end of the year, my Groundhog Day Resolutions had coalesced into a set of principles:
- Communicate with a variety of people in a variety of ways. Be interested! Have real conversations with them! Do it face-to-face, and through online media.
- Create tangible new things every day, then show what you've made to those people you're talking to.
- Be involved in other people's dreams that are larger than yourself, with people I like and respect.
These are external principles that seem to serve me well, and they have been stated for the past five years of my blogging in various ways. It hasn't been always easy to maintain the momentum, particularly when it came to creating everyday. However, late in 2009 I had formulated two additional principles, which are curiously-contradictory:
- Just do is about doing something that changes something about the world, and then quantifying its effect. This is the action-oriented, metrics-based approach to productivity we're familiar with. This is the direct approach.
- Just be, by comparison, is more about observation and context than action. The change in the world, come from the cycle of observing what is happening, and then reacting to it as part of the mysterious flow of it all. This is a more artistic approach to life, and the surprising thing is that the world also changes just by your being in it.
Finding the balance between "just doing" and "just being" is helping to unlock my creativity and productivity. With this settled for now, I started to realize that it was time to step up; from this came the series of (My) World Domination articles in late 2009, which mapped out the terrain before me, what I had for resources, and a growing sense that it was time to plan a journey to one of five destinations I describe as "business opportunities". That's what's been on my mind for the past few months.
Resolutions for 2010
2010 is about leadership and making a financial vehicle to see me to the end. 2010 is the first year I have, thanks to Google Wave with Colleen™, an actual end game. This is my resolution:
To create with and be around people I like and respect, and make an honest buck.
I think everything flows from that. We shall see! I'm choosing four goals that I think will contribute:
- Create a package for each of the five destinations that can be sold on Amazon or offered as a service.
- Recruit people who are interested in being part of Dave Seah caravan.
- Expand the product line from 1 to 5 things by the end of the year.
- Offer it all (and more) on the website.
All the other operating principles are in effect as well, which will improve my chances of making it:
- Be part of something bigger than myself.
- Make and show new stuff, every day.
- Keep the conversation alive and interested with everyone who will participate.
- "Just Do" or "Just Be", as the situation calls for.
- Strategize in small steps. Measure by tangible results.
- Be brave enough to ask for help.
- Reward myself on the journey in recognition of progress
- Maintain focus on the positive, not the negative
- Don't punish myself up for slipping up. Lead forward!
Ok, 2010! Let's get it on! The next review day is March 3, 2010.
I first heard the word Kanban at a presentation of the local Scrum Club. Scrum, if you're not familiar with it, is a team methodology to create working software QUICKLY through short production cycles called sprints. This is in contrast to the waterfall model of software development, which defines the entire process from concept to deployment as a series of blocks that follow each other on a march to the end. Waterfall, in my mind, is like starting with one giant boulder of time, from which the team must carve a working model of a city in as efficient a manner as possible to conform to the blueprint. SCRUM, by comparison, is like starting with many pebbles of time and working those individually into functioning buildings one-at-a-time; the finished city evolves one working building at a time. This isn't a perfect analogy, of course, but in general the first approach requires much more care and diligence to make work while wasting time backtracking, while the second approach risks less by avoiding backtracking and using smaller rocks of time.
Anyway, getting back to the story, at the Scrum Club meeting[1] Kanban was described in terms of Scrum...and I can't remember a word of it, so I didn't look it up. Then a few weeks ago, I read the word "kanban" again in Google Wave with Colleen™, but didn't ask about it...I just assumed it was another Cool Colleen Thing that I would understand in time. But THEN, a few days ago, Stephen Smith commented on my recentering and refocusing post, mentioning how he's using his kanban board to organize next-actions and other GTDish detritus.
Board? Did someone say BOARD? Let it be known that I am a friend to ALL BOARDS of ALL SIZES and USES!
And that's when I finally actually looked up kanban on wikipedia, and found that it means, literally, visual card/board. You know, like index cards. I love index cards. As I skimmed the wikipedia article, it became clear to me that kanban embodies something I've been reaching toward in other ways, such as the Storytelling By Design series I grappled with back in 2006. My essential realization was the idea that physical props have the ability to effect a chain reaction of events, and by designing those props we could do quite a lot to effect change in people and the world. In a way, that is what kanban seems to do in the manufacturing process. By providing physical cues like cards, balls, or whatever objects are used, actions are triggered on the factory floor that help the entire system run smoothly. My impression is that it's not unlike event-driven programming, made physical.
Anyway, my fellow index card nerds, you might want to check out Stephen Smith's Personal Kanban post over on his blog to see what the index card board looks like in the context of GTD. I'm going to have to look more into kanban, because I suspect there are ideas in there that can help me flesh out my Storytelling By Design theory.
[1] You can find your local Scrum Club chapter at their website.
In Monday's post I went through a process of recentering myself, and identified four areas to focus on and track. The trickiest one was DESIGN AGENCY, because there are a LOT of different tasks.
I just finished creating a "process diagram" that outlines a high-level roadmap of agency operations; just about any task I can think of fits somewhere the diagram. You can read about and download the PDF over on the Agenceum Blog, which is where I am running my "open design agency" experiment. Although this diagram is labeled for Agenceum, it really is for ALL of my design-related business activities.
Read more about the diagram on the Agenceum blog.
