SUMMARY: I'm increasingly thinking about how to adjusting my daily busywork such that it becomes revenue generating work. I review what I have been getting done, and realize that most of my tasks are not focused in this way.
SUMMARY: I made friends with the amazing Colleen Wainwright recently to start using Google Wave as a collaborative "do not hurry / do not wait" accountability tool. Here's what I've learned so far.
SUMMARY: Over the past week or so I've identified many personal tips and insights that will help 2010 be more productive and goal-focused. To ensure that I can be reminded of what needs to be done every day, I made a personal tracking form / cheat sheet to help keep on task.
SUMMARY: I've been thinking about making and selling products to support myself, and I am trying to find the "low hanging fruit" that I can start selling now. The challenge reminds me of the "Yankee Swap" game that many of us play during Christmas.
SUMMARY: &It's time for the 2010 Groundhog Day Resolutions! I review the past three years of resolutions and create a 2010 master resolution that hopefully will give me a direction for the year.*
SUMMARY: I attended a "Scrum Club" meeting to learn about agile software development methods and kanban, and noted the similarity to the GTD productivity system. Kanban boards are particularly interesting to me, as they make abstract processes more visible through the use of physical artifacts.
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.
SUMMARY: I've been feeling that there are too many things going on, diluting my efforts to make significant progress. But how do I pick what to focus on and what to ignore? First, I acknowledge that I am feeling uncertain about some aspects of my current work, getting the negative out in the open so I can have a good look at it. Then I synthesize the list of things to focus on for now that alleviate those fears through recommitment to principle.
I came across an article on The Economist about how the threat of less is a better incentive than the promise of gain. Researchers ran an experiment at a Chinese electronics factory, offering groups of worker one of two deals:
What do you think happened?
SUMMARY: Getting started on Wednesday, I'm just not feeling the focus. When I get stuck I usually just write something to get my brain working; writing helps me linearize my thoughts, which helps me visualize what's wrong and what can be done. This time, I become aware that there are six different challenges that I've hazily grouped under the focus label.
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