I’ve been trying to maintain progress on my goals despite a HARD FAIL last week and losing my first draft of this report. The week of August 20 was a mixed bag. While there were several “social wins”, I didn’t make appreciable project on my mail billable tasks. It bothered me that I wasn’t able to make significant headway on them. However, a conversation in our Virtual Coworking Chat got me thinking that maybe effort toward a goal actually counted more than I thought. I firmly believe that meaningful work results only from the production of tangible works that can be shared with others. This underpins my entire creative-productive philosophy strategy! However, until this weekend it wasn’t clear to me that not EVERY hour can be attributed to the the production of a useful artifact. In fact, I was actively thinking that those hours spent producing intangible results were unpleasant inefficiencies to be overcome through process improvement and increased discipline. I have come to believe that this is wrong headed and it just stresses me out for no reason. At least, that is my working theory for the week.

I am changing my position on productive vs unproductive hours. The time spent lightly exploring without trying to nail down a tangible result IS STILL PRODUCTIVE TIME. It’s enough to just get a SENSE of the task involved without having to NEEDLESSLY FRET about whether I have a solid plan of action right away. In other words, I can give myself the space to approach a task slowly and in layers. My expectation of myself was that (1) I would instantly be able to identify and find a productive course of action that produced intermediate results and that this (2) was proof that I was not an incompetent boob.

Perhaps I can afford to be kinder to myself. I think that will be the theme of this week! (more…)

This is the first weekly review following my last Groundhog Day Resolutions Monthly Report #6 on August 8. I had set some goals that seemed pretty achievable at the time:

• Start using THEMED WORK BLOCKS, which is focused work on a single project at a time. Since I had just finished a major delivery, I thought I had a couple of weeks to work in my important personal projects.
• I had designated KM/SSG as the theme for this work block. I figured I could use 10 days on this, getting back into the crunch mindset I had described in . This is a hybrid digital workflow/website publishing system to replace multiple thinking/writing tools I use.
• Additionally, I would allow opportunistic projects to happen so long as they did not require any planning. They had to be instant and in the moment, with a clear result at the end of the project that could be entered in my Accrual Log.

That ALL GOT TOSSED last week, and I got nothing done. I was feeling pretty terrible about myself today until I started to look deeper at my expectations and the video game CONAN: EXILES. (more…)