(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
Ah, I am encountering a moment of mental cloudiness! It feels like this: What is the next, clear, substantive step I should be taking? Let me try to work through this and see if I can discern the cause, and make it go away.
First, let me review what I’ve gotten done since the last post.
- I had been exhausted from assisting my buddy Sid on a 7-hour long photo shoot on Tuesday, in the muggy summer heat. Afterwards I stayed up to enable the network (as in “multiple blog”) feature of WordPress, which took a few more hours to test. At the end of the day, I felt I’d done two good things that moved me a little bit forward.
I awoke later than usual on Wednesday, just past 1130, and took care of email. I became very irritated at the amount of “opt-in” email, so I unsubscribed from a lot of stuff. I don’t want to get notified by any of these services, ever. That includes YOU, Google Plus! Then I checked the usual news sites to see what was going on, and before I knew it 3PM had come upon me. I prepared to leave the house to run a bank errand, and planned to stop by Starbucks. I worked there until around 530PM on WordPress dev work for a client, until the power went out. At that point, I went home, and napped until the power came back on at 7PM. I cooked dinner. For the past couple of hours, I’ve been fussing with my WordPress installation and looking at WordPress themes, as I considered what the next step should be.
So it’s actually been a fairly busy two days, but they haven’t felt really productive. But what do I mean by that? Well, I think it’s because the work that’s going into my own projects hasn’t yet gone public. It’s not done, and therefore I haven’t shipped anything I can show to anyone. The reward of finishing is still a ways off. As a result, it feels like I’m in the doldrums, halfway between starting and finishing something of importance. Here, stuck between those two endpoints, I’m experiencing a surge of impatience-driven anxiety: WHAT CAN I DO TO STOP BEING STUCK IN THE MIDDLE? I DON’T LIKE THIS! I’m also realizing that I don’t have quite as clear an idea what being done entails. I’m concentrating on building-out the new blogs because I see this as providing me more room to stretch my writing legs. It’s the primary focus of my development work right now. However, there are a few technical challenges and content strategy decisions that I have to handle. I actually can’t in good conscious move forward without actually taking the time to sit and design the solution. And that’s why I’m stuck: the ghostly voices of uncertainty are creating hesitation and confusion. To fix that, I need to do a brain dump:
- declare the goal: get the new sub blogs online! soon!
- challenge: do I start moving older blog content into the new topical sub blogs? This will break existing links. Is there a technical solution for this (no, not really) or will I have to write some code (yes, probably). And is this important enough that I have to fix it? Well, it is if I want to have “meaty” sub blogs. But I figure that these can also grow over time, so this is not a critical challenge to resolved now.
- challenge: How do I list sub-blog content on the main blog page? This will take some custom post queries. It will also mean I have to change the design of the blog.
- challenge: how should I change the main blog? what is its focus? is it productivity, or is it something else?
- challenge: what is the experience going to be on the main blog? it is sort of like a department store of ideas, in my mind. what does that look like?
- challenge: I need to fix my image layout plugin to handle differing widths on a per-blog basis. Or, I need to design all the blogs to use the same width. That is probably a little easier, but it still means that I need to make new blog themes.
- challenge: how do I handle feeds?
- My website is where I write about the process of becoming a better designer. It’s also where I share what I’ve learned and promote stuff that I think is awesome. The audience is people who like designing and making things, enjoy reading about how such things come about, and like to see creativity sprout up around them in novel and wonderful ways. The main website has always been written for the educated general audience with a curiosity about process and underlying principles.
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The sub websites, made possible by WordPress multi-site, will allow me to start writing more narrowly-focused blogs for a specific audience. For example, this very blog post would be more at home in a personal process journal blog. Likewise, the highly-technical work I’m doing (and still enjoy documenting) can go into the appropriate development blog. I think this is the right direction, but I’m unclear about how it will look.
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win: Specialty blogs allow me to be more verbose than I can be on the current site. I will be able to write with abandon, which is key to my productivity. I love writing about what I’m doing, and I love it when I do something so I have something to write about and share. But I recognize that not everyone will be interested in everything I’m writing about.
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win: Specialty blogs also make it easier for readers to see only the stuff they are interested in. They may also help clarify what it is I do.
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win: Specialty blogs really are more like departments in a department store, with their own themes and features, each with their own clientele.
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p>So those questions cover about 80% of what’s on my mind. I’m going to sleep on it and answer these questions first thing tomorrow morning. The goal is to get out of the house and working on this for at least an hour.
ASIDE: You know, I think I will move this blog post to its own process sub blog. That just makes more sense to me.
5 Comments
“WHAT CAN I DO TO STOP BEING STUCK IN THE MIDDLE? I DON’T LIKE THIS!”
David, I’m working through this issue myself. I’ve always gotten myself into projects that take months before launching, and somewhere in the middle I would always grow extremely impatient and start having doubts about whether it was even the right direction to be heading.
I’m having some success borrowing tactics from Agile SCRUM. Specifically, I’m developing the habit of planning my projects in “sprints” that last a week (or sometimes two). At the end of each week I try to have something I can show my audience to get feedback on it. This helps me regain confidence that I’m heading in a good direction (or to see that I need to change things up a bit).
So far, so good. It requires a little bit of change in the way you plan, though. You have to develop your own way of carving off good sprints from the bigger project so that they still efficiently add up to the whole, and yet allow for feedback along the way.
David,
You are correct. I do love watching you work through your ideas and thoughts. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
I’ve seen others say that one should give himself a reward for reaching a certain stage in an unfinished project. I guess it could work — it is just that whatever reward I give myself seems trivial and contrived. I want the reward that comes with completion. Satisfaction.
Oh yeah, I also prefer to see dollars coming in as reward; rather than dollars going out as I “reward” myself.
You said, “I will be able to write with abandon, which is key to my productivity.” Could you take time to expand on that thought?
Jim: I keep seeing SCRUM and Agile Development pop-up, so I’m with ya! People have pointed out that there is some crossover between how I’ve been gravitating toward productivity and how Agile or Lean works. I’m fascinated! My sprint right now is the 15-minute push, lowering the expectations that produce anti-productive worry so that they can rise naturally through doing. I’m not sure why this even works for me…there are some interesting hangups I have, perhaps :)
Yvonne: I feel the same way about little rewards that feel contrived, like getting some kind of pet treat for being a “good boy”. I want the end result! And I am impatient! I guess my coping strategy has been evolving lately to think less about end results, so I can achieve them while being fully engaged with what’s in front of me. I think when I do this, I discover exciting new ideas that can be applied to the end result, which IS a reward.
Explaining Writing with abandon, which is key to my productivity:
Once upon a time I thought I was going to be an English major and become a writer, as I enjoyed the process and I got good grades in English class. But then I discovered computers and went to learn how they worked, so I could make video games. It turned out that the part I liked about making video games was really the stories that you could tell. And it turned out the reason I liked stories was because I liked being around people who were trying to do something exception for themselves. Whether it is getting up early every day, or conquering the armies of the Moon King, I want to know what’s going down and how it’s getting done.
Anyway, I discovered early on in my life that writing for me was a matter of just getting the words flowing, so the ideas would come out. With a good word processor, then, it was just a matter of smoothing the sentences until everything fit together. I never thought about applying the same technique to other work until I was very stuck doing some programming work I didn’t want to do a few years ago. I was stuck, so I started writing a dialog to myself to figure it out. This became part of my development process, because it worked really well.
I’ve noticed very recently that it seems that everything I do that has had some success has involved, at one point or another, a lot of writing. I now make it part of my everyday design process, and I write copiously detailed notes in my project communication for clients. I always ask if this is something they would prefer not to see (as it is a lot of reading) but most of the time they seem interested…maybe there is something about seeing someone write about YOUR problem that makes it inherently interesting.
One thing that is important, though, is that I have some kind of audience on the other end. The writing is tied to sharing my thinking. On the blog, I learned a long time ago that there are always a couple of people who find what I write interesting, and that totally makes it worthwhile. Since I am lacking local partners in certain areas of my endeavors—video game developers, content strategists, hardcore graphic designers, and stationery designers—writing about these topics in detail helps keep me amused by myself. There is also the possibility that someone might come across what I’m doing and make contact.
I’m also testing a theory that a minimum of 15-minutes a day are sufficient for maintaining productivity on non-urgent-but-would-be-great-to-have projects. The minimum sets the threshold so low that you can easily get it done, and I suspect once anyone is 15-minutes into anything, the impulse to keep going and complete what you started is enough to maintain energy. That is particularly in the case when you are seeing results happen, or are making some kind of progress.
That’s cool. I do that free-writing dialogue thing, too. It almost always helps. It’s difficult to put a coherent and meaningful (and motivating) plan together when you don’t know what all the pieces are. Free writing/dialoguing is a great way to discover what the pieces are. I agree with Yvonne. It’s nice to see you write, because I see many of my own processes being described for the first time by someone else.
Thanks for the explanation Dave! Very well put.
As for the pet treats I surely agree. There are some things which simply should not make it to the reward stage. When our daughter was small and the sweet little ladies who led her Sunday School class would hand out the “rewards” I found myself mumbling about the reward being so useless. It actually felt to me that the “rewards” given cheapened the entire experience. But I chase rabbits.
And as for the explanation — I think that I do much the same thing but didn’t recognize it as such until I read your thoughts. Who ever said there was nothing interesting to write about simply doesn’t see that the interesting is often brought about by the writing.