What I Learned Using Google Wave for Continuity
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.
Making a Groundhog Day Resolutions Tracking Form
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.
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Making New Products, Yankee Swap Style
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.
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Groundhog Day Resolutions 2010: Kickoff
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.*
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Kanban, Event Modeling, and GTD
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.
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Design Agency Process Diagram
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.
Recentering and Refocusing
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.
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Carrots and Sticks
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:
- The group would receive a bonus if a certain target production threshold was met.
- The group has been awarded a bonus, but if production falls below a threshold it will be lost.
What do you think happened?
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Six Aspects of Focus
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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Artistic Integrity and Profit
SUMMARY: I expand my "create then show" mantra to include the means of producing products and distributing them. Maybe this is the way to sell out with integrity.
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