(last edited on February 15, 2023 at 12:25 pm)
I had a disturbing thought in the shower this morning: do I really know how to build big complicated projects? Up to that moment I had assumed that I knew what I was doing, but in hindsight I am not sure that I really know what I’m doing. Many (if not all) of my major life accomplishments seem random rather than purposeful, and are of a smaller scale. On a related note, I had been feeling much the same way after doing my Groundhog Day Resolutions Review for March. Sure, insights were gained but not a lot seemed to happen ON PURPOSE or AT SCALE.
PURPOSE AND SCALE are on my mind now. I’d like my March to be a strong one, with more direction than I’ve had in the past. Do I really know to do that? I have the theoretical knowledge, of course, but I don’t think I really OWN that knowledge with the unshakable certainty that I have with other activities like, um, cooking a turkey dinner. I WANT THE CERTAINTY OF THANKSGIVING DINNER in my world building work! :-)
So I’ve decided to start each day by blogging what’s on my mind, and use this as a way of maintaining focus of immediate goals related to building with purpose and scale in mind. It also will be good for preparing mentally for my daily WHAT’S UP DAVE livestream on YouTube. And writing blog posts is a good thing for me also because it triggers the happiness of sharing in me, which adds to my energy!
How the Dailies Experiment will Work
I’m planning on doing writing every day (maybe also on weekends, but we’ll see) about what my goals are, and what I’m working on. I want these to be fairly short, and take no longer than 10-15 minutes to do. This challenge will go on to the end of March.
I want the posts to be short because I want them to be very fast to review. I’m thinking there would be a few checklist items to do every day:
- Review the ACCRUAL LOG spreadsheet
- Note what’s on my mind
- Find the continuity of making stuff from yesterday’s blog entry
- Pick some things for show and tell for WHATS UP DAVE
- Pick a target that’s related to making something BIG and AT SCALE from my array of projects
- Write the progress into the ACCRUAL LOG at the end of the workday at 6PM
For today, Tuesday March 6, I’ve already looked at the Accrual Bucket and see there’s nothing in it. On my mind today is one of several projects:
- The NetCreate project, working on HTML stuff
- Ecommerce-related marketing stuff, which I will have to review later today
- Hanging up stuff on the walls so the Living Room Cafe finally starts to look finished and lived-in
- Cleaning out the Basement so I can move stuff from the living room into the basement
- Heading to City Hall to pay property taxes
- Getting provisions to weather the upcoming snowstorm on Wednesday
- Building a “concepts” static site for davidseah.com for things like “Happy Bubble Time”; an ongoing reference work of things I’ve been thinking of.
The NetCreate project is most on my mind, so I think I want to put a chunk of time into that today. I need to learn some basic predictive text entry stuff that is compatible with React, which means I need to brush up on my understanding of React. I’d like to document what I’ve learned on the project Wiki so I don’t have to relearn it all again in the future. That will be today’s goal.
Ok, let’s see how this goes!
2 Comments
I’m curious as to how you’re defining
at scale? I feel like I understand a focus on working purposefully, but less so the scale component. Is it just making sure daily activity is moving larger projects forward or is it more than that?I know for myself that the day to day stuff overwhelms the bigger plans tasks, especially if I haven’t broken down the big plans into smaller tasks. (i.e. my plan for making music in 2018 gets little forward motion until I break it out into blockers (wire up the studio, block out regular studio time on the calendar) and habits (30 minutes banging on pads 3 times a week), and then smaller, concrete goals (make a beat a week of at least a minute length; read up on music theory: subject X )
I think you’ve got it; I’m not really using the term as it might commonly be understood. I’m using the term “scale” to mean something that’s larger than what I can comfortably hold in my head, and acting so I can make those things rather than staying comfortably small.
I find working on small things and making incremental progress VERY BORING, and yet working on large projects is also TOO ABSTRACT or INACCESSIBLE to my limited brainpower. Finding the will to just do the boring stuff so I can see the bigger stuff become possibility might be what I need to do.