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- October 16, 2008
Motivation from Solitude
October 16, 2008Read moreI’ve been in a period of enforced solitude, which is hard for me to bear because my summer was socially excellent. I was out in the sun almost every day, forming connections with the people at the local Starbucks and marveling at the variety of life experience that had opened to me. Then a few weeks ago, it got cold, and the economy started sinking into the mire; as a result a lot of us are hunkering down for a tough winter. My mood has not been helped by the nature of the computer programming work I’m doing either, as it demands such intense concentration that my personality essentially fades away. I’ve developed a bad case of programmer-face, which is that impassive, mask-like expression with deadened eyes. Friends have actually stopped to ask if I’m OK, because they’re not used to seeing me like this.
solitude: the inside vantage point
On the bright side, an interesting thing about this period of solitude is that with the absence of the social pleasantries has come a recognition that I need to re-establish my self-reliance in facing certain life questions. Since no one else is around, I’m the only one available to address the following awful truths:
- I’m bored with the immediate life possibilities.
- I’m not really fulfilled by the kind of work I’m doing.
- I’m still lonely despite having lots of great friends. Lots!
It’s only been in the quiet of my isolated state that I could even hear these questions echo around the inside my head. The summer, fraught with pleasant distractions, kept me from worrying too much about them.
In a past life, I would have been kind of mad about being distracted from tackling those big life questions. Being somewhat mellower now, I recognize that these “distractions” are actually the aspect of living that I value most. I’ve been so serious, speculatively concerned, and too darn anxious about not getting things right. It’s easy to develop this kind of tunnel vision, I think, when one allows external expectations (social, cultural, or otherwise) to out-weigh the importance of letting life happen around you. I’m sure that for many people this is a pretty obvious observation, but I think some of my fellow procrastinators and perfectionists might understand what I’m saying.
the corrective action
There are two forces that normally battle within me: the desire for taking control of my life and the desire for inspiration and calling. The former is a rational/control-based desire, and the latter is more about feelings and emotions. The desire to steer my life in a self-beneficial manner is all about control and reason, while the desire for inspiration is more like that summery feeling blowing me to wherever it might take me. I can see that I really want to integrate them together.
The first step that comes to mind is to reframe both desires as one principle: Inspiration and hope can come from anywhere, but answers and action have to come from inside of me. This leads to the following line of reasoning:
- I’m bored? Do something to create new possibilities to break the cycle of ennui.
- My work feels lacking? Make bolder choices about the kind of work I believe will be fulfilling.
- I feel isolated? Make an effort to be involved in people’s lives.
This is a simple and concrete diagnosis, but it’s much easier said than done.
taking on motivation
For me, the main obstacle is the lack of motivation. For example, I’ve been feeling really blah for the past couple of weeks, and it was really affecting my mood at the few social events I’ve attended that should have been a lot of fun. I spent a good chunk of a day sitting on a giant warm sunny rock in the mountains with some of my best friends enjoying wine, aged artisan cheeses and gourmet fruit tarts. And that very same day, 100 miles south, I was in Harvard Square with my awesome sister in a beautiful church listening to Sarah Vowell read from her latest book, followed by yummy pan-asian food at Wagamama and a taste of fresh yogurt and berries from Berryline. It should have been a perfect day, yet it was not. And what sucked even more was that I didn’t know why I felt that way.
A few days later, reflecting on this sad turn of events, I impulsively indulged in some self-pity and lamented out loud, I am so lame. The very next instant, the truthfulness of the statement stuck: I was being lame, and I had subconsciously known this for weeks.
This was very liberating, and here’s why: I have a very strong aversion to the mediocre, which is something that I’d forgotten until recently. Being lame is a form of mediocrity, or perhaps more accurately mediocrity as a value promotes lameness. I’m being a little loose with the definition here, but what I’m saying is that I believe I was withdrawing from the world because I intuitively knew I was being lame, and therefore was not doing anything to raise the level of “interesting” around me. I had found the bottom of my well of personal values, and having landed, I could now look up and see how far I had to climb to get out.
There are two familiar motivation-killers that stand in the way of getting out of my well of lameness: uncertainty and fear. I don’t want to waste my time doing something that I don’t know will pay off, and that uncertainty leads to anxiety. I also don’t want to lose what I already have, so that creates timidity and more hesitation. This all manifests as a kind of low-level fear and desire to cling to people. And this is preventing me from changing my life, charging ahead to try something really different that could very well lead to a more interesting life.
forging two new rules
While I could self-prescribe a number of concrete “action items” to manage my way out of the doldrums, I know it won’t work for me because this is a form of deferral. Next actions, while immediately doable, are just steps along the way to a larger goal in the future. This is a delayed reward, and I just am not wired to appreciate small steps despite their proven effectiveness. And if I’m not wired for this, a plan comprised of next actions serve as a very poor motivator when it comes to a team consisting of me, myself, and I.
Fortunately, I happen to also know that I am strongly value and character driven. So the answer to my conundrum of being bored and lonely will come from following this simple rule:
Face down those fears every day by daring to do something that creates something new and positive.
This is a value that I believe in, and by facing fear I am building up own character. That’s pretty cool! And to acknowledge that small steps eventually yield great rewards, I can face small fears: helping out an acquaintance despite some imagined inconvenience, for example. It could also be writing a blog post, or replying to an email. Maybe it’s planting a flower, or giving someone an idea that they make their own. The only criterion I have is that whatever it is, it should leaves a tangible mark or impression–large or small–on the real world. That is worth doing, and it is a role I want to play.
The second simple rule is possibly even more important:
Lighten up, don’t be so serious, and remember most things are not of dire importance.
If I’m following this rule right, then what I do will be uplifting and fun for everyone around me. This is the feeling of a warm summer sun, lunching on a big rock in the mountains, celebrating and promoting those moments of life that make it really worth while.
So that’s where I’m at right now, and I’m pretty danged sure that this is the right way to go.
- October 7, 2008
Status on Hiatus
October 7, 2008Read moreI’m still on blogging hiatus because I’ve been busy with a challenging year-long interactive project. This is an enforced hiatus, not a vacation, and it’s been driving me a little nuts. The plus side of my time away from writing: I’m learning a lot about relatively-modern video game development technology and authoring. The down side? I really miss writing and working on my own projects. However, this period of enforced time away from blogging has helped me see what I want to do more clearly.
Here’s what’s been on my mind.
creating mission statements
Over the past couple of months I’ve realized that I just like writing, and writing is a form of thoughtful expression. I’m quite obsessive about it; though I haven’t been writing here, I’ve been writing long emails and documents for projects. I’ve been writing more emails to my friends. I can’t help it. Ideally I would be able to convert this obsession into paying work, and it would be like getting free energy, but instead of jumping right to marketability I decided to start with a simpler expression of what I naturally do very well:
I write about that which catches my eye, relating the experience to what I know, sharing what inspires us.
That’s the fundamental mechanism, my primary tool, the way I always work. I believe that as long as I follow this and produce material, I’ll be on the right path. There are a number of ways to apply this mechanism, and clarifying those applications for next year will be part of my redefinition as a writer/designer/inventor. Although it might seem like a really dumb time to play around with my design services during a down economy, I think actually this will be a good differentiator because clarity sells, especially when the future looks particularly murky. Or so we shall see.
new work aspirations for 2009
I plan to do a lot more writing unrelated to the productivity and design work I do. Or rather, I should make it clear that my productivity and design work is inspired by everyday people. I’d like to meet and write about such people on a regular basis. This past year has been one of tremendous personal growth, and I’ve learned that I just like finding out what people are doing, where they came from, and where they want to go.
There are a number of forms and publications I want to get back to in 2009, along with the usual yearly form updates. I think 2009 will be the year I start putting together some more targeted use cases for the various Printable CEO and other forms. It seems like a natural evolution. I also am still planning on producing some more pre-printed forms; some Emergent Task Planner forms are still available, btw, if you visit the secret store page. I’ll probably bite the bullet and give Amazon Fulfillment a try this year after I do a second print run of pads. If there is another form that people would like to see produced, let me know!
I also plan on continuing to pursue the evolution of my freelance design process. This is a three-pronged approach:
- Investigation : Essentially, an interview of the client to establish the “plot” of the project and the desired physical product. The result of this phase is a succinct description of the real project, goals, motivations, and expectations. It generally takes a couple of hours, and the deliverable is a 4-6 page report that identifies what I think the key issues are in a manner that can be used to create a design brief, project spec, or mission statement.
Innovation via Storytelling : Writing out the story and supporting players that will shape the desired physical product. One could easily plan out a dry production schedule with milestones and deliverables, but I would rather write a “product screenplay” that introduces plot twists, shifts of perspective, moments of anticipation, and life-affirming encounters to create an interesting overall experience for everyone.
Scientific Creative Method : I’m not a stylist designer, and I can’t pick colors or shapes based on how stylish or trendy they are. However, I can apply tangible design principles that I know have certain effects on people’s perceptions and emotions, and from that I can create a design that is functionally attractive while delivering the intended message.
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p>In essence, the work I do has to connect with an individual in a meaningful way, so my emphasis is on clarifying and communicating that meaning throughout the process and with the product itself.
I’m still planning on developing the freelancer peer reviewed network; I did get several emails from people with their information, but I haven’t yet moved forward on this. However I did set up a freelancer network wiki page for development based on the principles I outlined.
- September 19, 2008
Compact Calendar 2009 Update
September 19, 2008Read more
The power of the human voice is such that when someone called me up to ask me about the 2009 version of the Compact Calendar, I was so moved that I actually got off my butt to make it. Easier said than done; I said it would take about 15 minutes + about an hour to post. Four hours later, I’m finally done with tweaking, testing, download testing, virus scanning, packaging, and updating. It takes a bit of work to make sure these archives are clean…hopefully I didn’t miss anything. I almost posted a version that was off by one day…close call!
What Is It?
The Compact Calendar is my impromptu planning calendar, designed to be printed on paper from Excel. Print a bunch of these sheets out; it’s great for bringing to a meeting and sketching out a schedule on-the-fly. I keep a supply on hand when I’m actively out in the field. Unlike other calendars, it represents the months as a solid “bar of time”, which makes it easier to visualize how much time you really have. Plus, it just looks neat.
You can read more about the use and design of the Compact Calendar on the Compact Calendar Page.
What’s New
I finally have a version that will update the entire calendar when you change the year field at the top of the spreadsheet, based on the work of Todd Foster. So now, it’s super easy to make new versions of the calendar yourself for any arbitrary year. Just remember to update the Holiday Table.
“Jenny” and Jim Service both submitted techniques for handling the automatic month labeling on the left side, and I’ve incorporated it.
There have been several other modifications submitted to me over the year, and I’ve tried to pick the ones that are simple to maintain (e.g. they don’t require additional Excel modules, or tricky hidden extra columns). Thanks everyone for your submissions!
Check It Out
You can download the 2009 version at the regular Compact Calendar Page. I have only updated the US version; the international versions are handled by independent bloggers and are not under my control at all. I just link to them!
You’ll need Office 1997 or later to open the Excel Templates. Personally I have been using Office 2007, so there may be some issues with earlier versions of Office that I don’t know about. Please leave a comment if you come across anything. For users of non-Office productivity suites, good luck!
- August 29, 2008
Academic Year Compact Calendar
August 29, 2008Read moreHere’s a quickie:
Professor (and reader) Jim Mitchell adapted a version of the Compact Calendar for the U.S. academic school year, with a few tweaks of his own!
You can download his version of the academic compact calendar from Jim’s blog, Architectural Education.
Thanks Jim!
- July 24, 2008
PowerPoint Resume Layout Tips
July 24, 2008Read more
I know I said I was going on hiatus, but I just I got a nice email from a reader today complimenting me on the layout of the blog…thanks Janet! She also asked a question about my old online resume PDF:
In particular your resume’s design caught my attention. How did you create a one-page PDF resume that’s so organized and detailed? Would you be able to suggest resources or pages on how to design a PDF resume from scratch?
The short answer is that I use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat, which are pricey professional page layout and document management software packages.
The longer answer is that I spent some time thinking about how I wanted people to perceive my resume and how people actually read them:
- After scanning a few hundred resumes, you start to get snow blindness from all that white. This is where graphic designers have a seeming advantage: A HAH! We can use this opportunity to uniquely express our graphical talents and creative expression! While that does work when you know you’re competing against a sea of white paper, it doesn’t work so well when everyone else is doing the same thing. The takeaway is a resume should be easy to read, with style in a supporting role.
- When resumes are being screened by someone who is unable to evaluate the strengths of a candidate themselves, the resume is being scanned for relevant experience and skills that match the job criteria they’ve been handed. It’s important that these requirements are easy for them to find so your resume makes the cut.
- When resumes are being handled directly by the people that you’ll be working with, they’ll be scanning for signs of rare competence or interesting combinations of skills. They aren’t hiring for just skills, though: they’re hiring for a team fit. While you still need to address the basic requirements of the job, interjecting that curveball skill might just catch the attention of the person assembling the list of “awesome people we’d like to work with”.
Most of the time, my resume isn’t being processed by an HR or employee review process, but is provided as a formality, so I don’t really follow the standard format. What is important, though, is that people get a sense of what skills and experience I have. The issue I have with the standard resume look is that they often have long page-width sentences (hard to read) and are filled with sentences that sound like Single-handedly managed team productivity of 50 associates through just-in-time distributed beverage ordering coordination and delivery processes. I am yawning “BS” before I even get to the word “handedly”, so I cater to my own whims by using shorter descriptions in my lists of credentials. My reasoning goes something like this:
- I put all the experience “color commentary” in the “framing statement” at the top of the page, where it is placed so it is the first thing read on the page, after my name and categorical title. It should be short and to the point, serving as a kind of establishing shot, to use film lingo, for the rest of the resume.
- All the following lists of education, experience, skills, and so on then (ideally) support the framing statement. If they don’t, then you are sending a mixed message about what it is you do. You may do a LOT MORE in real life, but a company is generally looking you to FIT into a particular kind of box. You might change the actual categories from what I have here to suit the type of business and industry, and if necessary add the necessary years of experience quantifiers.
- While I like to say that people should find out how to stand out rather than just fit in, the resume is one of those cases where you might want to make it easy for potential employers to IMAGINE you as a plug-and-play part in their company. That is what you are trying to sell here: possibility of a good fit, which makes it a no-brainer of a deal to get a phone call.
- When you get to the interview, your personality can then sell the other connections you can foresee. The AREAS OF INTEREST part of my resume provides potential jumping-off points for conversation.
Anyway, this is just what I do for my simple resume. I’m generally targeting the case where my resume is being considered by the creative professional for informational purposes, not competing with others as I’ve described above. So your mileage may vary considerably!
So, You Don’t Have InDesign
In answering Janet’s email, I thought about the common problem I face when telling people that I use expensive production graphics software to do my work. The implication is that THEY SHOULD TOO, though it’s impractical most of the time due to the need for training and people like to use what they have available. Most of the time this is Microsoft Word or Excel. While I like Word for straight writing and basic formatting of source text, I hate its page layout tools. They are very finicky, and often times one little layout issue will cascade into an unrecoverable mess. Excel just lacks the fundamental typographic control tools, though it is surprisingly flexible.
I avoid using Microsoft FrontPage on general principle, which is that it is the source of ugly web pages that I have had to clean up. Call me small minded, but I don’t even want to know what it does because of past ills visited upon me by its twisted autogenerated HTML progeny.
That leaves Microsoft PowerPoint. I occasionally have received photo assets that had been copied and pasted into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation, and this creates a production headache because the original file is down-sampled or destroyed in the process. However, I’ve also seen several reader-provided PowerPoint and Excel versions of my templates, and these look fine. I then idly wondered if I could use PowerPoint to recreate the layout without looking too ugly, so I gave it a try. I think it actually works. The advantage of PowerPoint over Word is that you can freely place text blocks and format them as you would in Word. You can place graphic imagery. You can also specify in PowerPoint’s options to produce output aligned to the resolution of your printer, not the screen. And since PowerPoint is part of the most basic Microsoft Office suite, you probably already have it…so let’s rock!
Shown below is PowerPoint 2007 duplicating my resume layout, with the “view grid” and “view rulers” options turned on to make the screenshot look more impressive:
PowerPoint allows you to set the page size of your presentation, so I set it to US Letter. Then I just drew a bunch of text boxes and aligned them in such a way that the white spaces worked together. The grid isn’t particularly tight or well-constructed (in other words, it looks a little sloppy) but the overall look is fairly clean. The unit whitespace I used is the height of a line in the body text, because I didn’t feel like fiddling with line heights for every paragraph. I adjusted the spaces between the headers to be greater than the blank line that separates paragraphs, and just adjusted other parts of the composition so they tended to line up cleanly where it seemed that should happen.
If I was being more anal, I would have shrunk the space between paragraphs by about 25-30% and tightened everything up proportionally…this would have improved the “scattered” look of the “education” and “experience” areas. However, this effort would have required a lot of paragraph twiddling and hey, I would have used InDesign or Illustrator for this if I were doing it for real. If you are so inclined to this kind of adjustment, though, you would select the paragraph and then right-click to choose “Format Paragraph” to play with the “space after” parameters and linespacing.
There are a couple of tricks that I had to apply to the topmost header that says DAVID SEAH.
- First, I tweaked the left margin from 0 inches to a small value to make the left edge of the D in “DAVID SEAH” line up with the type before it. If you align by the text box margins, the D does not optically line up with the left margin of the text below it (“new media designer”). In a real page layout program I would have just nudged it over, but I could not place the text box accurately enough with the mouse due to the way the program “auto-snaps” objects into alignment. Adjusting the internal margin was easier than figuring out how to turn that feature off, which I suspect is not possible.
- I opened the text box formatting options to adjust the character spacing (the default value was way too wide) by -2pt. This didn’t fix the regrettable amount of space between the D and A letters (a common problem with electronic type on PCs) but it does seem more put together.
I use Acrobat Professional to create my PDF files, but I imagine there are other providers of inexpensive PDF encoders. I’m not familiar with any of them. Readers, any suggestions? [UPDATE: Several suggestions have been posted in the comments, so check them out!]
Download Example Resume Files
If you’d like to play with your own version of this resume, just download the zip file which contains the PowerPoint 2007 source. I’ve also enclosed a version that should work with PowerPoint 2005 versions and earlier, though I’m not sure if it works. A sample PDF is also included for your reference. Please note that this is not my actual resume, though it is using elements from it.
» Download PPTResumeSample.zip (170K) » Requires Microsoft PowerPoint
Note: If you are looking for Calibri, the font that I’m using here, it’s part of Office 2007. You can download and install the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to get them; check this article for some tips on other options.
NOTE: There have been some really great reader comments for this article; you should definitely check them out! :-)
