(last edited on September 20, 2014 at 2:44 pm)
SUMMARY: The first week of the “silo-based” tracker approach went fairly well, but I’m well aware that this could just be due to the extra mindfulness that I was paying to it. The first week is easy; it’s the second week that you start to hit the beginnings of apathy. I do an informal analysis to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Finishing out Last Week
The first week scored 117 points, which establishes the baseline of comparison for this week.
I can see that last week’s highs were on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday due to actual work being done. The other days look like “recovery days”, where I’m doing the supportive work that will pay off in a creative project down the line. There probably is some way for me to tie that foundational work to a specific project in one of the silos, which is pertinent to the discussion on “how to measure creative process” that’s been going on in this post.
One area that failed was the Water Tracker, because I found it too difficult to keep track of how many glasses of water I was drinking.
For this week, I’ve cleaned things up and reorganized the silos:
The “Offerings” column is now merged with “The Blog”; these are, in hindsight, both about presenting myself through my website. I’ve added a “Life” silo, which are life-improvement things that are on my mind. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but it’s good enough for now. In the “Health” column, I’ve reworked the Water Tracker to track the number of 32-oz bottles of water I’ve drank (I have rescued an old Gatorade bottle to serve as the container), and also implemented a Gym visit counter for a low-intensity re-introduction to the habit.
I also implemented an HTML Prototype that uses my licensed web fonts from FontSpring and uses Unit Interactive’s Unify database-less HTML editing. Here’s a few screenshots:
Unfortunately, the web fonts don’t seem to be printing correctly; I have to dig a more to see if it’s even possible. Theoretically it is, but a lot of this web-font stuff is bleeding-edge in the world of Internet browsers and it doesn’t work. It would be AWESOME if I could define print-friendly CSS layouts with vector graphics like SVG…that would open up a world of online form-generation without using PDF as the go-between!
In the meantime, this HTML will serve as the testbed for some interactive prototyping using Javascript. I plan on converting it to HTML5 for the heck of it, since this is a supported platform for the iPad and that might be neat to support.
By request, I have also made a blank downloadable shell of the MGT, though it’s pretty ugly and I’m not sure how useful it will be to people. Download Draft 01.
And that’s what’s going on”! :)
6 Comments
Good points there Dave, especially about how the second week is where you hit “the dip” and start to feel some pushback in how the system works. Keep plugging away, I know you can do it. And I suspect that many of your readers appreciate this sharing as a way to help you do this, holding you accountable.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! I figure sharing the struggle helps people meet their own challenges. Plus, I find I really just like writing about what I’m doing. It helps my memory, for one thing, and it’s always interesting to see how people react.
Thanks Dave. I am fooling around with it already.
Hey Dave,
I successfully printed TypeKit fonts from Safari last week. I was a bit surprised at how well they came through. It was just the rendered @media=screen styles sans background images.
A blank slate template of this might be really nice for printing. I make these things all the time on sheets of paper with a pen, whether it’s:
I’ve got accounts on all sorts of web apps that let me organize things. Bug tracking software with tickets (Sifter in the past, Codebase currently). CRM tools with deals for prospects (Highrise). To Do apps (Things, OmniFocus, Highrise). I so often want to see these items lined up with visual weight and spatial relations. A Top Five breakdown would cover days of the week or open prospects.
I so badly want things in one screen that I’ll often go through bug tracking tools and copy ticket #s and details into a spreadsheet, grouped by functionality or URL. Try as I might, software is always high-level linear, and then just shows you 1 thing at a time. I want to see everything in one shot so I can evaluate where I’m at…Like a map.
I actually want to take what you’re doing and get it off the screen, where I freely add emphasis…or doodle.
Lynn: Awesome! Let me know how it works out. I’m still reading your last email…the long ones take a long time to reply to!
Mark: I wonder if I need to provide a separate @media=print for the webfonts to carry through. I was kind of assuming it would use whatever was defined overall. I wonder if the TypeKit fonts are set up with different permissions? But then again, many of the regular webfont print tests seem to fail on my desktop.
Curious to see hat you come up with for a dashboard system. I love dashboards! :)
I keep thinking I need to just bite the bullet and get a whiteboard in my office…