In last week’s report:

• Recognized that I have too many schedule-interrupting commitments.
• Accepted even with my reduced goal list, I am still trying to do way more than I can handle.
• Accepted the reality of my distracted brain. I can’t change it, so let me work with it.
• Accepted that herding a distracted brain is a full time job, so it is part of the cost of being.
• Decided that feeling ashamed about it doesn’t help, so to hell with that. Shame doesn’t help me learn or achieve.
• Remembered my main strategic goal is to make new works to share with people, because sharing makes me happy and creates pathways to interesting opportunities.

With regards to making progress on my work and my Groundhog Day Resolutions goals, it’s been slow going. Partly this is because I’ve been building new processes to help manage my distracted nature; the idea is to have a solid foundation and realistic ways to track progress without it all being too overwhelming to remember. But have I made anything and shared it? No. Let’s break it down.

On Not Making and Sharing

I actually haven’t been completely dormant; I’ve continued to LEARN and MAKE things, but I haven’t been sharing them. There is a bit of perfectionism at work here because what I want to share is a well curated collection of really useful things I’ve made, with organized notes for each one. Not only that, I want this to be a system that integrates with my production and knowledge management tools to help me create synthesize derivative projects. It’s a lot of work, and I must admit that it’s beyond my current capability to implement. I’m not daunted by it, but I lack the strength and ability to actually do something about it. This is quite irritating, but it is the reality of the moment.

Heck, let’s SHARE SOMETHING

So, let me get off my butt, overcome my perfectionism, and just talk about what I’m doing right now:

• My works.davidseah.com site is being used for me to share SOME things as they come to me. It’s been difficult to force myself to take the time to do it, though, because I am still thinking that I have too much to do with other work. It feels like I’m trapped by commitments when I really am not; what is contributing to the negative feeling is my feeling that I’m too slow. However, I’m trying to accept that my speed is what it is. I tell myself SLOW IS SMOOTH, and SMOOTH IS FAST.

• I also started a 60 minute daily cardio experiment that has yielded positive results after just seven days. There is a whole daily startup process that I’m working through there; the details are in this post.

• I had a key insight about leadership that I want to develop, based on my existing tendency to prioritize community and sharing.

• My iPad Pro is becoming more of a central thinking tool now that I’m using Good Notes 5 as my daily notebook. An advantage of Good Notes 5 on the iPad Pro is easily switching between dedicated notebooks with a tap of the pen. That I can draw and reposition/resize notes from page to page with the fluidity of handwriting is also a huge game changer. My ability to think on “paper” and synthesize ideas has been considerably improved.

• I put together Tomato Planter V4 and it’s using “Olla balls” instead of sub-irrigation (see pictures above).

• I tried making pineapple cakes out of store-bought pie crust. They were TERRIBLE (see title pic), but I learned that I do have to learn how to make a good pastry dough from scratch. This was not a failure, though: this was a successful experiment to determine whether store-bought pie crust could be a shortcut to pineapple cakes, and the answer was NOPE.

• I bit the bullet and got my 30 year-old air conditioner system replaced. The new one is more efficient though it’s huge it isn’t oversized for my condo (see picture above). I also had the installers run additional wiring so I could use a Nest Learning Thermostat, which is a really nice piece of kit.

• I’m figuring out how to have more Living Room Cafe events without disrupting my personal need for solitude too much. My friends Sean and Don came to visit last week and we had a great time catching up and geeking out over food and virtual reality. I like hosting, it turns out.

Looking to the Future

To summarize the past week: lots of process improvement, but not a lot of programming or goal-oriented making+sharing. On a related note, I had a humdinger of an insight: Maybe I just want to be a community director instead of a maker. I do spend all my time thinking about sharing things, but maybe I don’t have to make them myself. The reason I want to share things is because I need people around me to feel like creating…or so I thought. Maybe I believe creating is what I need so the people that give meaning to my life come to me? There might be something deeper at work here, perhaps residual childhood feelings of “not having worth” in the eyes of others unless I have demonstrable competence. I still value competence, but I have reframed it more positively as “having cool things to share”, and the competence-related aspect of that is BEING ABLE TO MAKE THEM. The OUTSIDER feelings of my childhood, though, are centered around wanting to belong to a supportive and affirming community where I DO have value. Hm. There is probably something here to look at over the next week.

Anyway…I want to continue trying to make and share things, and I think maybe letting go of perfectionism to keep doing that is what I can easily do. The desired system I mentioned above is going to take a while, and I have to actually prototype a lot of different approaches and throw out most of it. Sigh. But that’s part of the new acceptance that I’ve been going through. I’ll add that as a new bullet point here so I see it next week:

• I accept that the ideal knowledge management / sharing system AND process will require a lot of prototype/discarding. I have to build non-systemized prototype content first before I can proceduralize it, duh.

This week is really minimally scheduled, so I hope that I have a productive week. Unfortunately I had to schedule a plumber for Wednesday morning so my week of uninterrupted peace and quiet has already been somewhat ruined. Since Wednesday is already weird, I have designated that as this week’s “social/nonwork” day and do not plan on getting much done. Maybe I can designate such days as community building days, and consider them as the counterpart to making days. I do want both, after all.