This month’s Groundhog Day Resolutions review snuck up on me…the days have been flying by! I’ve been busy, but I’m not exactly sure if I’ve been productive. The funny thing is that this thought just occurred to me; it’s probably just the normal anxiety from possibly not having THOUGHT OF EVERYTHING, an old childhood personality quirk that occasionally surfaces.

As an adult, I can recognize the anxiety for what it is, and face it calmly. Let’s see what got done.

Last Month’s Review

As you may recall, last month is when I recognized that Explore Learn Build Share seemed to be at the root of my best and happiest work. This struck a chord with a few readers, who requested a downloadable version of the diagram.

What Got Done

I’m not exactly sure, but now that I have Trello tracking the movement of my projects, I can put together this graphic:

Each column is the “what got done” each week, archived every Saturday. I had to assemble this view by piecing together screenshots to give me an accurate view of what I did. This is the first time that I’ve had such a tool; if you’re curious, you can read about the Trello workflow I’m using.

Anyway, it looks like I can just summarize the past four weeks as follows:

• Server Move (this was extremely tedious)
• New Business Cards, concept to print
• R&D on various game, interactive-related technologies
• Website updates
• Process Journal theme update (looks like the rest of davidseah.com now)
• Client work

This seems fairly productive; the problem is that it’s somewhat unsatisfying. I started to address this feeling in yesterday’s post about potato salad projects. I think the lack of satisfaction is coming from lack of finished projects. This past week, in particular, has been a lot of waiting for servers to synchronize, status reports to come back, and so on.

I can’t help but notice that the number of finished tasks seems to drop as the weeks go on. Looking closer, I think this actually isn’t the case because the later weeks list more “something got done” tasks as opposed to “I surfed the net and learned about X”. Admittedly, though, the past two weeks have been felt less productive. I think it’s just that I need to see more things happening. I want those shiny resolutions and results, so I can move on to the next new shiny thing.

Processes to Build for September

I think this month’s theme will be SATISFACTION, which I think might come from the balance between two kinds of projects I mentioned in the potato salad post:

• Maintaining a positive attitude about shipping potato salad projects: they may be less interesting to me, but I am heartened knowing that people like potato salad and will buy it. If I can find some process improvement opportunities to create a packaged workflow, that would be great also; that adds interest.
• Trying new approaches to maintaining momentum on the epic projects that, while exciting and desirable, are very difficult because they are so demanding. For example, there are tactical strikes that move the project forward. I have a limited amount of energy, so these focused strikes have to create larger strategic benefits.

Specific targets for Potato Salad:

• ETP Planner
• Form Renaming and Instruction Sheets
• What I Do Description and Rate Sheet
• Form Variations Digital Sales
• Gear Posts

Specific target for More Epic Projects:

• XNABS2 Programming – my interactive engine concept that I can develop into exhibit software
• Modo 3D – Start to master this 3D program (part of the XNABS2 project, actually)
• Non-ETP Product –

So that’s the plan. I probably should print the above out and stick it on my wall somewhere.