Status on Hiatus

I'm still on blogging hiatus because I've been busy with a challenging year-long interactive project. This is an enforced hiatus, not a vacation, and it's been driving me a little nuts. The plus side of my time away from writing: I'm learning a lot about relatively-modern video game development technology and authoring. The down side? I really miss writing and working on my own projects. However, this period of enforced time away from blogging has helped me see what I want to do more clearly.

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Freelance Referral Network Building

Today I got an email from someone looking for a referral if I was still booked through November (I am, on that museum interactive project). It highly irritates me that I don't have a good referral network of deserving people who share my values. Almost two years ago, I wrote about a different kind of freelance network that would be powered by circles of personal recommendation of the work, from which the nature of the person can be inferred. My theory is that as freelancers, we really have no idea what clients respond to, so we put together a portfolio of our "best work" and hope for the best. Frankly, it all starts to look the same after a while, and it's impossible to see the person behind the work because we assume that he/she is the same. I say show your most "you" stuff, and let people form their own impressions. If they like what you see (and this is hard to predict), they will act if it's convenient relative to their need.

Referring

When I refer someone, I insist on qualifying what I know about that person's work and character. I don't refer someone who I don't trust, and if there are areas that I think are important to the business prospect that I can not speak to from personal experience, I say that. Here are some of the things that I like to see in the people I refer, adapted from my original post:

• Defines tangible, concrete results.
• Is candid, real, and honest in establishing expectations right from the get-go.
• Tells you how much something will cost before the work is done, to the best of their ability. Sets the expectation that this may change under specific conditions without being a jerk about it.
• Acknowledges the sending and receipt of critical work and related dependencies (e.g. receipt of asset photographs, etc)
• Strives to understands the nature of your work and the context in which you operate.
• Is willing to learn how to speak your own language (business, art, etc).
• Teaches how his/her profession works as necessary or as asked...no secrets! Good clients hire for the person doing the service, not the service itself.
• Actively collaborates to deliver tangible results at every stage of the project
• Keeps your best interest as the priority, not maximizing revenue at your expense, at fair compensation.
• Takes appropriate protective measures in terms of contractual scope that are mutually beneficial, and/or requires mutual commitment through tangible action.
• Looks out for other's relevant interests in day-to-day operation.
• Delivers great product on time.
• Is a source of good ideas and brainstorming.
• Enjoys the process of communication through regular dialog.
• Accepts criticism and disagreement, and works with that to help bring the project back into alignment (any feedback is good :-)

I don't expect to see every one of these line items in the same individual, and goodness knows that I am not perfect in this regard either. However, these values are what I aspire to professionally.

Building

The original initiative petered out as I got involved in other projects, and I figured that the energy it would take to build the network exceeded my available energy. This is still the case, but I'm now thinking of a relatively lower level of commitment. Ask people for resumes. I just posted this on Twitter:

I need to expand my referral network: If you kick ass at whatever you do and have 3 examples of ass kickery to back you up, contact me!

I'm going to keep everyone's information on file and start the positive critical review process myself on the information provided. This is useful for me because I'll start to rebuild my rolodex of people to go-to for work. Secondly, I will make the review process public by posting my positive impressions of the work I get to see. This means I focus on possibility, not expectation. It's up to the hiring client to make a determination whether a given freelance is reliable enough to do the work; I merely want to see what people are doing so I can connect the right gigs with the right people. This is something I like to do anyway, so it will be fun. This is a sort of variation on word-of-mouth, designed to create short lists of qualified candidates as opposed to filtering through hundreds of people.

So if you're an ass kicker of any stripe, send me your information or post it in the comment area. I am not sure how this will all play out, but I think it will be informative in some way. Here's what you should do in the email:

• Provide your name and public contact information
• Provide links to your three best examples of your work, as you see it. And that means you pick three links instead of throwing the whole portfolio at my head. It'll be hard, perhaps, but this is about what YOU think is important, not some abstract demographic. Three means three.
• Tell me what you think you do. If you don't know, that's OK, so long as you picked what you think your three strongest bits of work are.
• Tell me the story of how you got into what you're doing. This is very important context for me.

What I will do is spend about 30 minutes on each set of links, and then I'll spend another 30 minutes doing my informal analysis of how I can imagine your work being used in a given situation. I'll then post it on the public wiki for my reference, based on when I can get to it and what people are asking me for. It will be visible to the public, but as I said I will be only posting the positive reactions I have. This is not a recommendation I'm making; I'm merely documenting possibilities. As I said, it's up to the hiring party to do their own due diligence.

The benefit to you is that you'll get my perspective on your strengths and how I imagine it might fit with other people. People who have gone through this process with me have told me I should charge a lot of money for this service, but in this case you'll be doing me a favor by helping me expand my Rolodex. I can't promise that I'll get to everyone in a timely manner, but I will try my best to help people make connections.

Contemplating Career Directions

I had a long coffee meeting with Fred Schechter yesterday, an industrial designer based in northern California that I've been talking to on-and-off for the past couple of years. Industrial Design is one of those majors I wish I'd known about when I was applying to college; not knowing any better, I had gone into Electrical Engineering. Fred himself had originally started in Mechanical Engineering, but thanks to a chance conversation with a friend ("they have a MAJOR for making cool stuff???") he made an early exit and jumped to the world of product design. Anyway, we've been chatting about our mutual interest in making and selling our own products, and Fred's perspective on it from the industrial design / manufacturing side has been invaluable in fleshing out my next steps. He's an enthusiastic guy too, so if you're looking for someone to talk to about early-stage concept and prototyping for manufacturing, it's worth dropping him an email. Anyway, the conversation has helped solidify some thoughts on my personal career direction, so I thought I'd share them.

What Do I Do?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that I do, because it doesn't neatly fit into a simple category. Or rather, I don't want it to, which makes telling people what I do difficult. And if I can't tell people what I do, it's hard for them to imagine a way to work together. This is essentially a kind of marketing / branding problem, but from my personal perspective it is an aspect of my ongoing search for identity and how I relate to others; this is the million dollar question. It is what really drives my design process too. I suppose if I billed myself as a marketing or branding person, I would have to say that I'm NOT an operational or strategic manager (which is what a lot of people seem to do). What I like to do occurs before strategy so it can inform strategic planning, but it is not strategy in itself. What the heck is that called? I don't know, therefore I can't explain it.

For most of us getting started in the job market, we've learned to define ourselves through skills and years of experience (this includes education, which becomes less relevant as years of experience accrue). For "creatives", we add a portfolio that showcase the physical work we've materially contributed to. If your job does not produce artifacts like this, then you use position and job title as the lowest common denominator for placing yourself in context to the field with which you've identified; this implies you have relevant knowledge and experience. All of these "markers" of "job identity" work if you fit in the pre-existing system. I could fit into this system (I've tried several roles to date), but they have not fully satisfied me. For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out my niche, so I could adequately define something NEW that fit me well. I haven't thought much beyond that, but that's OK: I've learned to appreciate that chance encounters are pretty much the mechanism through which the Universe makes my life interesting.

In the conversation about making books, Fred helped me figure out a few attributes about my writing methodology from a more detailed perspective. Here's what I think I do from a blogging perspective:

• I am obsessive about documenting process meticulously and accurately. I hate bad docs, having been exposed to plenty of them.
• I scaffold my documentation with personal experience and context. I can safely use myself as an example without stepping on other people's toes.
• I am inclusive of my readers as friends as I document and relate these experiences. I don't like feeling like an outsider, so I try to be as inclusive as I can so long as it feels good.
• I always try to create original expression and new content, rather than just report on what others are doing. It's a personal value.
• I summarize and distill working principles as succinctly as I can, because that's what I find easiest to remember
• I maintain personal continuity in my writing, because I happen to find that kind of thing interesting.

From this, I could see how I could induce general principles of interest from my specific interests. For the past few years, I've been aware that I tend to write about these specific areas:

• Design
• Development
• Productivity
• Personal Empowerment
• Inspiration
• Sharing Personal Experiences

Repackaging these into general principles, I come up with this:

• Design Thinking and Concepts
• How People Work (from a process psychology perspective)
• Building Stuff
• Chasing Dreams and Making Them Real
• Creating Practical Process Guides with Useful Insights

It is interesting to note that my specific interests were inward facing: they are my activities and interests. The general principles, however, are outward facing: they include other people's interests and activities. For example, I'm very interested in what other people are doing with their dreams, and I'm happiest when I'm a part of that process of making them real. With the general principles, I now have the critical balance of perspective that I was missing.

And, finally I can see how I could spin this into a general consultancy specializing in making sense out of things. The skills I have---that is, the specific experience I have with design and development tools, new media development, interactive design, etc---are just tools used to express the general principles.

Friendship-Focused Marketing, Take 1

I had a pretty good time at SXSW Interactive this year, largely free of the self-consciousness and second-guessing I had put myself through the first two times around. I don't know about you, but when I'm around thousands of talented, motivated, and smart people, I wonder just how I stack up. I'm old, maybe washed up, but I still have The Dream. Some tiny part in the back of my mind whispers that it is too late for me to have such dreams; I should settle down and find a good, steady career with great health benefits. Fortunately for me, that part of my brain is speaking Chinese, which I don't understand very well, so it's relatively easy to ignore as I blithely continue down my path toward wherever it's going. SXSW has become my yearly pilgrimmage to stock-up on inspiration and find new stars to guide me.

This year's SXSW was also different because I've had to introduce myself to more strangers. The previous two years, I hung out with groups of people who already knew me from online groups. This year, I hung out with mostly new acquaintances and got to know them the old fashioned way: by talking to them in person. I met a lot of new people just by sitting in the hall flashing my OLPC XO, through the core conversations, and through acquaintances I've only talked to at previous SXSWs. The impromptu situations that arise through the sharing a power outlet lead to the exchanging of cards. As I handed out my cards, I silently kicked myself because I knew my website was a mess. It doesn't really convey who I am succinctly or rapidly. Because my categories are all broken, it's whatever happens to be on the home page that will feed that first impression.

I found it notable that I was so concerned about how my website reflected on me, so I gave the matter more thought. Conveying who I am has always been really important to me, I knew, and it has colored the way I've presented myself to prospective clients. In fact, I started the blog as a deliberate attempt to avoid putting up a regular design portfolio / services website, having developed a severe allergy to crap marketing writing; I wanted to speak my thoughts plainly, not hide behind empty superlatives and ambiguous references to excellence. I told myself that maybe I would lose out on clients seeking "professional" designers, but at that time in my life reclaiming my sense of identity was much more important.

But why?

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Quickie Business Card Design 8: Return of Dot Story

Yes, South by Southwest Interactive 2008 is about to spring again in Austin, Texas, and I am again way behind on my preparation. However, I did finally decide to get business cards printed up beforehand, using Hotcards.com on the suggestion of the Twitterverse. I really liked the Hotcards website experience and the copywriting, so I am taking a chance on them, though it is pricier than some of the other business card services I've seen at $60/1000 plus shipping. Still, I have a penchant of putting my dollars where the user experience catches my eye.

Since this is the first time I've ever had the opportunity to print double-sided cards, I tried to put something together quickly. After a couple of hours of trying to put some Printable CEO-style graphics on the back, I remembered the old dot story concept on my really early cards. I never liked the way that design had worked, as it felt "all over the place" to me. With the extra room to play with, though, the dot story became viable.

Unfortunately, I thought of the "Structure / Story" tag pair after I had submitted the job to press; the cards I get will say "Structure / Design". This sort of works still, but it isn't as relevant to the story-based approach I take to design work. And, the alliteration sounds way better to my ear.

The front of the card is still the same general design I had from the previous round, though I have changed the text to reflect my incremental movement out of interactive and toward general design:

david seah - providing insight + ideation via information graphics and investigative design services

The text is broken with short lines, coor, and selected bold on keywords. It reads clunkily off the tongue, but it convey something. Not the greatest piece of marketing copy in terms of fluidity, but they may work better as conversational keyword starters. I'm not entirely happy with it:

Making these kinds of decisions can drive me nuts, as I'm prone to have long "should have / could have" internal conversations with myself. At some point, you just got to see how people react. Perhaps for my first double-sided card I should have used a cheaper service. Oh well!

Kickstarting a Freelancer/Collaboration Network

I've been putting this off for months, putting out a call for people who do awesome work, so they can meet other people who value the same.

"I'm too busy to design the right program," I hemmed.

"It needs to be just right, with a nice website," I hawed.

Well, waiting is for chumps! I need to meet people now, as in yesterday.

Freelance Network Prerequisites

What I don't like about most freelancing sites is that they're oriented toward job listings and database searches. Boring! What I like to see is the actual work, and hear what people have to say about it. And then I like to know how to contact them, or refer them to someone else.

So the approach I'm thinking is that of an interviewer, both in the job sense and in the journalistic sense. For that, we need a kit of our work in a succinct form. Once the kit is available for review, I would then evaluate each kit from the perspective of how I see the value, and how I would use it. I would then write this perception---which should always be positive---as a note somewhere on my own "kit page". The idea: by collaboratively creating and reviewing each other's kits, we not only get to know people's work, we also share how we can imagine using it under what circumstances. I think there's something positive to note about everyone's work.

Here's the kit checklist:

1. Pick three (3) pieces of your best creative work, code fragments, or what have you, that represents your professional best. They should be complete and self-contained source files and source code, if applicable. We are looking for a complete assessment, not a surface one.

2. Write a few sentences about each of those pieces that describe: what you did, why you were doing it, what it was for, and how it performed in the field when other people actually started using it.

3. Put all the pieces and text on a website where it can be downloaded by anyone.

4. Provide some preferred means of contacting you.

The idea behind this is that people will hire based on what they can imagine being done on their behalf. To exercise that imagination, people need to see what you've done and draw their own conclusions. Guessing at what those conclusions might is a big part of marketing and self-promotion, but I know from experience that what people find interesting about your work is often something you never thought of.

Here's the review checklist:

1. Contact the person who's kit you've downloaded, and say that you'd like to do a quick IM, phone, or email kit review. Voice or face-to-face is better I think than text, but that's just me.

2. The goal of the kit review is to react honestly to things you like about the work and how you'd apply it in your own projects, while you are talking to the person. Hopefully you actually like the kit you've downloaded, so you will have good things to say. Since you're looking at the source files too, assuming you're familiar with its operation, you'll also get a sense of how that person works. I can tell a lot about someone's experience and level of expertise by looking at their work, personally. Most important is to listen to your gut: I like this. The person who's kit you've downloaded will understand how their work is perceived by others, which is immeasurably valuable to someone just getting started or trying to crack the freelance market.

3. After reviewing the kit, go to your own kit page and write up the kit review, with a link to the person's kit page. Say what you specifically liked about it in a few words. Be honest. And only review people that you would consider working with yourself in the specified context.

So that's what I'm thinking of doing...I had hoped to have my website set up for it by now, but I thought I'd just prime the pump to see who was interested. I don't even know what I'd put in my own kit page yet.

I'll formalize this a little more later, but in the meantime feel free to comment or suggest other approaches.

Some Thoughts on Recruiting

UPDATE: All future WoW-related posts will be directed to guild.davidseah.com.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I've been recruiting players for a World of Warcraft Guild, ostensibly as a business networking experiment. This is not a new idea, of course, but I'm still astonished at how well this might actually work.

As I mulled this over, it occurred to me that this was just the latest in a series of networking activities related to my freelancing efforts. Read on!

DEVELOPING A PRESENCE

As a freelancer, one of the greatest challenges is finding new work. Before I had a website, I relied on word of mouth through my previous work contacts, and this kept me fed but not much more. After I started blogging, word of mouth gave way to "I found you on the Internet and I like your stuff", which is a great way to get business contacts. It works because I write in the blog everyday frequently A LOT, and as a result I've amassed a collection of useful articles. This adds to my credibility as an individual who is serious about communication, design, and organization.

I think the credibility aspect of the blog works in three ways:

• Appearance -- The initial surface impression is that it looks clean and that I can put two sentences together.

• Personality -- I write plainly and conversationally, and my writing tends to mirror the way I present myself. The friendly emphasis on productivity, empowerment, and practical insight-making creates an environment that draws like-minded people.

• Content -- If I'm lucky, visitors stumble upon a post or photograph that strikes a chord with them on some level, and they explore further.

The main draw is, if I were to guess, Content and Personality. The main weakness in my website, however, is the poor organization that doesn't do a good job of channeling new guests to the content they will find interesting. It doesn't even do a good job of channeling people to the various useful bits of design I've already made available. I need to address this soon...the easier I can make it for people and search engines to casually explore the content I've created, the better the chances for creating a meaningful collision of interests that will lead to fruitful collaboration and co-scheming.

EXPANDING THE PRESENCE

While the blog is starting to work well for generating contacts, the other way of drawing people is by doing it in person at a festival like SXSW. I've also toyed with forums and Wikis, but the great problem with these tools is that they're not very good at providing real-time interaction the way you get at an actual event. Without that back-and-forth interplay, it's a lot more difficult to maintain a conversational groove.

• The Forum is good for lengthy discussion, but if reading the forum is not a regular habit for the reading audience, it dies out. It takes a lot of effort to keep a forum going, and it's mandatory that you have a few key contributors other than yourself.

  The forum has been great for meeting new people, but I feel bad for not keeping it as a nice, active place. I tend to concentrate on creating new content over reading websites and bulletin boards, which means I don't put the energy into the forum that it deserves.

• The Wiki, based on DokuWiki, has the potential to be a fun participatory project, but in practice it suffers from the need for someone to constantly say "It's OK to edit". Again, it comes down to having the momentum of someone other than the Wiki owner creating new content. I think a lot of people feel that they are a "guest" and shouldn't edit other people's work willy-nilly. Plus, editing a wiki isn't exactly a pleasant experience unless you're comfortable learning and working with embedded formatting codes. This limits the audience considerably.

  The Wiki is turning out to be more as a supplementary "content development" zone for me, where people can make requests and additions. I think it could be developed into an interesting site in its own right, as a kind of "co-development" zone, but that's a lot of work also. I don't think it's what I need to focus on.

WELL, WHY HAVE A FORUM OR A WIKI IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Taking a step back, I need to ask myself why I started the Forum and the Wiki. Both of them were experimental forms of reaching out, but as I like to focus on new writing and new ideas, they end up being a kind of drain. However, I can see a pattern:

• With the Forum, the idea was to share our personal histories and dreams to find kindred spirits. People who were interested in both (1) writing the background story and (2) talking about the subjects I laid out would be, I reasoned, more likely to be kindred. This worked to an extent, and several interesting side projects blossomed developed. However, it's been difficult to maintain for me, because of the time involved. It's been backburnered.

• With the Wiki, the idea is to allow group shaping of ideas, together. There are a LOT of great ideas, some inspired by my work. Ideas, articles, and other content could be the binding agent of a community. With the Forum, it was more about our personal stories, but with the Wiki, it's about co-creating ideas. That may not seem obvious yet, as I haven't laid down any rules, but should I open source some components of the Printable CEO series it will be in some free-for-all form like this. Or, a more streamlined content management system.

• With the WoW Guild, I think the idea is this: build relationships by sharing virtual experiences with people of similar interests and background. The people who are going to join the guild will only have heard about it through this blog or through a related person; if you are a regular visitor you're likely to be compatible with other regular visitors. Add "business and social networking" to the raison d'etre of the guild, and I think we have the foundation of something that could be pretty darn cool.

SHARING EXPERIENCES

Skeptical? Here's some stories from this weekend:

• I was out exploring Stranglethorn Vale, a lush tropical jungle area teeming with giant gorillas, raptors, and panthers. Not only that, but the entire land is infested with surly trolls and pirates, and they make moving around off the main road quite dangerous. I teamed up with "Lansun", a Level 38 Night Elf Druid, and some dwarf hunter we came across named "Ironhorse" or something like that, to help collect some magical liquid from a particularly virulent group of mystic trolls...very nasty! Now, a group of three mid-level characters can, individually, handle one or even two trolls by themselves easily; it's when you have to deal with clusters of trolls and the roving patrols that things go all pear-shaped. It takes discipline, speed, and coordination to not get your party destroyed. Over the next hour or so, we figured out a strategy that made best use of our strengths while covering our weaknesses, creeping our way through the thickets and ruins trying not to take on too many opponents at once. There was one bad moment when the entire camp seemed to descend upon us, and we were wiped out. However, there were also two glorious moments when our careful planning gave way to a free-for-all. We covered each other magnificently, healing each other and handling the unexpected monster rush by the seat of our pants. When it was all over, we were drained but victorious. Just barely. There was certainly room for improvement (I blew a few spells myself), but we had bonded as a team. It kicked ass.

  I also learned a bit more about Lansun aka Jonathan, a Flash and ColdFusion developer. From that shared experience, I've come to know Jonathan a little better and recognize that he's a good guy to have in a fight. I certainly would consider him when I had a ColdFusion job come up now, just based on this positive in-game experience.

• Earlier in the weekend, I spent some time helping "Dirk Gently", a newly-minted Paladin, through the game. This is Hornbeck's character, a developer out in Oklahoma I think (I still haven't gotten everyone's name and real life profession straight...my apologies). It also happened to be Hornbeck's first time playing World of Warcraft, so I spent a couple hours exploring the icy mountains of Dun Morogh, frigid home of the Alliance Dwarves and teaching him what I knew of the basics of WoW combat and questing. We chatted a bit about work, and I enjoyed reliving those earlier levels through him. It was a good opportunity to remember how to play also, since it has been a couple years since I've played. Hornbeck picked up the basics quickly, and he's quickly rising in level. He also is having a good time.

• On Monday night, there were 3 or 4 of us online at the same time, and we hopped on the same IRC channel (WoW has an IRC system built-in) and met everyone for the first time. "Beetlebum" was helping "Rendellini", my Level 24 Mage, through the tedious and spooky quests in Duskwood. It's a dark, haunted place where ancient trees stand in a cold fog, the landscape crawling with giant black wolves, man-sized spiders and the shambling Undead. It is a desperate place under siege from the creeping infestation of dark magic, so I was glad to have the help of a friend to power-level me through the rather depressing sequence of quests. Having a few people on the IRC channel chatting about work and meta-interests was fantastic too; when my kitchen timer went off to announce the end of my play session, I was sad to go.

NEXT STEPS

Starting a guild is, as many people have told me, a lot of work. However, it has a huge advantage over the Wiki: it's interactive in real time, and you can talk to people in real time. This is hugely energizing; it doesn't hurt that WoW is a highly-polished and refined game, so it does not get in the way of having a good time. And remember: you can learn a lot just a few hours of sharing the same game quests. My challenge, with the help of guild offers that I appoint, will be to create an organization that creates more energy than it consumes for every one of the intelligent and friendly people who choose to join and stay.

We still need two more signatures before the Charter can be submitted and our Guild comes into existence. We're maintaining a temporary guild page where you can list yourself so I can find you online to get your signature. From the way things are shaping up, I'm feeling very positive about the direction and the possibilities behind doing this. I'm looking forward to see how this experiment unfolds. As I said in my earlier post, starting a guild in a game as deep as World of Warcraft is quite similar to recruiting people for a new company; the lessons learned here should be quite valuable.

I'll be on the Echo Isles server Tuesday May 29 from 8PM to 10PM Boston time as "Rendeihl" for signups. You can also jump in on the temporary chatroom by typing /join ddochat to say hello. Feel free to say "hi" to each other, and find out a bit about what you do...it is networking, after all :-)

Recalculating Productivity in a Freelance Entrepreneur Context

The streets are covered with a heavy blanket of premium throwing snow. Alas, there is no one to throw it at.

Because I had to move my car early this morning for the plows, I shot off to the coffee shop and did some planning. Yes, MORE PLANNING. I felt a prick of unease as I worked through my plans, and finally figured out what was causing it:

Was I spending too much time planning and not enough working?

The followup question was:

Well, what is working anyway?

It popped into my mind that perhaps I had unrealistic expectations of what a productive day would look like for someone in my position. When I started freelancing, I had the idea that finally, I can spend more time focusing on what I want to do. This is true to some extent, but what are the expected numbers behind this? Since I have a tendency (as do many people) to start with what I already am experienced with, that meant a solid 40 hours a week doing project work + project management, and then extra time on top of that doing whatever I needed to grow the business. Sounded reasonable at the time. The only time I achieved that level of productivity, though, has been when I've been full-time on a single project.

Now that I am moving away from pure "skills and services" and toward "products and process", my expectations should change as well. As a freelancer focused on offering design skills, productivity is measured by billable hours. As a freelancer / entrepreneur focused on products, productivity is measured by products made and shipped. My new revenue equation should ideally favor products created and sold, not just billable project work.

So my final question was this...

What does a productive day look like?

I had no idea, so I decided to apply the "If I knew the answer, what would it be" trick; here's what I came up with at the coffee shop:

• Took a guess at how a typical week breaks down: 2 days were production / billable, 1 day seemed to get caught up in administrative work, and 2 days were spent on blog and business planning (the time includes these blog posts). I winced as I compared the 2 days of billables to 3 days of non-billables.

• Summed up the hours in a typical idealized day: 8 hours of sleep leaves me with 16 usable hours. Subtract an hour for "health", an hour for breaks, an hour for lunch, an hour for dinner, 2 hours for TV/relaxing, and 1 hour for lunch chores, and I'm left with about 9 hours.

• Using the basis of the weekly breakdown as a base ratio, I figured that my DAILY work time for production billables were roughly (2/5) * 9 = 3.5 hours of billable work, (1/5) * 9 = 1.75 hours of administrative work, and (2/5) * 9 = 3.5 hours of blog-related work. Since I like working on the blog and related business, I'm going to further shift the hour breakdown toward 3/2/4: that's 3 hours of billables, 2 hours of admin/email/biz-dev, and 4 hours working on my own stuff.

• Using US$40,000/year as a baseline livable wage, and assuming 52 weeks in a year, the amount of revenue I need to bring in per week is around $770/week. For fun, I calculated $60K as $1150/week, $80K as $1530/week, and $100K as $1920/week. This is all pre-tax, so I'm counting on about 1/3rd of it going away.

• If I have 3 hours of billable work a day, that works out to 15 hours over which I need to make a minimum of $770 to meet my $40K/year baseline. If I can do that, then I am doing OK.

  Though I could easily calculate an hourly wage from this, they have the connotation of commodity pricing, which is not how I like to compete in the marketplace. If you're getting started, however, this is exactly how you would calculate your minimum hourly rate, adding 20-30% for profit, and more if you are in demand. There's a great writeup by Brian Fling on pricing that lays it all out very clearly if you are looking for more detail; it's the best writeup I've seen on the subject.

• If I assume that there are about 15 hours of work a week available, then I can use this to realistically schedule outside project work. I must admit that 15 hours a week seems painfully small and slackerish a number, when you hear stories of people putting 100+ hours into launching their companies. However, that's 15 hours of pure work; the rest of the time I'm spending during the weekend quite probably is spent thinking about the problems and doing other company-building activities. Frankly, I'm thinking about it all the time already.

• There is room for flexibility in the actual number of hours I spend during the week, but I think that this is probably a sustainable working baseline schedule to maintain my current progress. That's my answer, if I knew the answer. Of course I don't know for sure, but one way to find out is to live with this for a while and find out.

Remembering the Mission

Though I've spent quite some time above calculating base revenue and associated metrics, I don't want forget the real mission, which is to support myself while I build the next round of products and media. My real goal is to build an engine that can drive passive sustained income. In other words, those 15 hours per week of billable work are supporting 20 hours of product building every week. That work breaks down as follows:

• Website Improvements: to help people find the stuff they're interested in, and to create a place where they are likely to visit more often. How do you do that? By providing things that people want, in a way that's easy to find and use. The website is also what establishes "my identity on the web", and the more authentically it does that, the more likely it is to attract the kind of people I'd like to work with.

• Books & Products: Writing of some kind, for sale in electronic or printed form. As I wrote in yesterday's Groundhog Day Report, I'd like to see more income from actually making and selling things that I think are cool. There's a kind of framework that is coming together that I think could be awesome. But...I have to make them first. This is part of the plan.

• Collaborative Projects: There are a few things I'm working on that I'd like to bring other people in on: the Online ETT, for example. One of my expectations from collaboration is to meet cool people and acquire new skills and technologies from experienced practitioners, in exchange for whatever design experience I can provide. But I also may be surprised at what happens.

• Community Networking: Creating a positive energy field around all these entrepreneurial activities is one of the keys to my strategy of fun. One reason I'm writing about what I'm doing, though it may seem to some like "tipping my hand", is that I'm hoping like-minded individuals will feel hop on the vibe and contribute to this mutual co-prosperity sphere of self-empowerment. And, if I'm screwing up in my assumptions, I'm hopefully someone will tell me and save me some time :-)

The ultimate goal is to bring in significant revenue from the making and selling of products, not make a lot of money working 15 hours a week on excellent client projects. If I could do both, that would be a dream come true.

The Sundries

What about those remaining 10 hours of administrative time? That's replying to emails, looking stuff up for people, tracking down projects, doing taxes, and so forth. I need to spend the time on this otherwise I'll be in the hole again staring a huge pile of chores in the face (that's where I am now, actually).

Then there's those 40 hours of sleep and 35 hours of eating, relaxing, and living, not to mention the unscheduled weekends representing an addition 32 hours of whatever. Could be work, could be play.

Takeaways

Now that I have a sense of what the week could look like, I now have a baseline metric for evaluating my progress on the daily and weekly level. I did not really have one before, other than the list of "good things" from the Concrete Goals Tracker.

Now, I can book my time in the future with greater confidence that it will fit into my work-life balance.

Building a Talent Network: Thoughts

I've been thinking about the problem of finding good people, which for me is two-fold:

• Finding people with the skills and experience
• Finding people with the right "work chemistry"

I also have a soft spot for people who seek to empower themselves and find opportunities to learn. When I have the luxury of providing that experience, I'm very happy to do so. However, when I am responsible for delivering a product in exchange for money, I can get very grim with people about doing things the right way. This grimness is something I would like to avoid, but whenever you work with someone for the first time, you're taking a chance on demonstrable skill, experience, and chemistry.

The working world's benchmark tool for work compatibility between an applicant and a job position is the resume, and it's a container for other "standard markers" such as:

• the name(s) of skill(s) mastered
• years of experience in a skill
• the domain of application of that skill
• the corporate / educational credentials amassed
• specific achievements and associations with name recognition

An ideal talent network, from my perspective, would support both the educational/empowerment aspect (kind of like a school) and set concrete expectations for performance. Job search engines have adopted the standard markers above, which enables more efficient data mining to produce more statistically-likely candidates---not better candidates, mind you, but ones that might be what you're looking for.

The problem with standard markers is that they don't really say much about the person in the first place, and so the second stage of the job process---the interview---comes into play. You've made the first round of cuts, maybe you had another in, and now you have to say a few things about yourself. Then you may get a chance to talk with other team members, maybe take a few tests, work on a starter project, and if all goes well you're a "fit" and you're invited to join the company.

What I'd like to do is bring the interview process into the talent network building. The forums with its required background essay submission was the first step toward this, and though they've died down in activity recently (my fault for not being more active in posting and promoting). What I've learned from the rest of my life is that people respond much better to things they can see and experience directly; the closer you can get to that (and there are so many ways), the quicker people can make an informed decision.

Rather than standardize on markers like "flash actionscript", "java", and "web development", I'm thinking of using portfolio pieces as the main organizing principle. And because I'm interested in passion and an ability to think and communicate, this is what I think would be in my portfolio:

• One example of a significant snippet of code -- showing how I approach programming, and what I consider excellent. Actual source code, with estimated time to do it.

• One example of graphic design -- showing my design process, and how I approach a design problem by example. This would be an actual Illustrator file, with the estimated time taken to create it.

• One example of photoshop screen design -- demonstrating what I think is important in pixelwork, color, and organization for myself. This would be an actual Photoshop document.

• One example of animation -- demonstrating how I like to think about motion, sound synch, staging, and timing. This would have to be a Flash source document, and possibly some of the source media.

• One example of writing -- something I've written that I particularly liked for whatever reason. This can probably be the writing itself.

• Each piece would have an brief illustrated essay or video download that explains what's important to me.

I want to work with people who value thoughtful process and can make their own decisions whether my process jibes with theirs. By creating a set of concrete artifacts that can be inspected in some detail by someone competent in the field, I'd hope to bypass the hit-or-miss resume-scanning stage. I think that this approach could scale to a network.

There are some other advantages:

• By requiring network members to provide examples of their approach, it becomes possible to browse the artifacts themselves and find compatible approaches.

• Skill level is pretty obvious when you can look at the source files and ask questions about them. There is some opportunity to game things here by supplying "ideal" versions of your work, but I think the honor system and self-policing might work.

• For people who are at an earlier stage of development, the source files with the illustrated essay/video provides an educational opportunity, and it makes our expectations clear on the individual level. Find the person who impresses you the most, and become a student of their process. The network becomes a resource in itself.

In essence, this is a kind of merit-based system, except the standard of merit is based on individual preferences. By providing concrete examples of work, we provide reference points through which those preferences can be expressed as a selection.

So that's the core idea: show-and-tell talent networking by freelancers, for freelancers. I will likely make a page somewhere on my site with my own samples there to see how ot works out, though I'm not sure I'll get to it before SXSW. I also don't think all freelancers will find this approach very compelling or useful, but on the other hand they probably aren't the people I'd want to work with anyway :-) I guess I'll see what happens!

Flickr and Moo Mini Cards

I have a paypal account that I use as my "research" fund, and the latest purchase is these Mini Cards from Moo. They were all the rage last year, when Moo was offering free sets of 10 for a limited time. Since I have a bunch of pictures now in my Flickr account, I thought I'd give the service a try.

Moo is based in the U.K., so my $20 order of 100 cards took a few days to get here via Royal Mail. The cards themselves are quite small, 2 3/4" by 1 1/8" inches, or about the size of a squattish stick of gum. They're nice and stiff, coated with that nice matte finish...very nice. They all come packaged in a sturdy plastic box.

I printed these via the Flickr photo sharing service. The Moo printing option allows you to pick 100 different pictures so they're all different. Since SXSW is coming up, I thought I'd have a bunch of these on hand to give to people in case they needed my mobile number; the conference was kind of nuts last year with all the people running around, and I've been thinking of ways to make it a little easier to keep track of everything. This year I plan to be prepared!

The flip side of the card has some customizable contact information, and a URL to the actual photo. They're a bit pricey at 20 cents per card. It would have been cheaper to get some custom printed business cards of comparable quality online (it's shocking how cheap this is now), but I wouldn't have been able to get a different photo on each card on such nice paper stock. Plus, the experience of picking a card itself will become part of the fun. When faced with a selection, how will people decide what to pick? What will that say about them? If I were to break up the 100 cards into 10 groups of 10 photos, I might be able to make some kind of psycho-analytical tool, maybe create a mini card game of some kind. These mini cards have a powerful totemic presence that's very tempting to apply in a creative business context.

Anyway, the Moo Minicards get a thumbs-up for me! I believe they're only available with Flickr photos, so you'll need an account (free ones are available). You can browse my flickr account to see what I've been doing over there, if you haven't clicked on the photos in the sidebar before.