Weeknotes #283
Photo of the week:
Did this week:
Usual projects
Sent the tenth edition of the Irregular Ideas email. Kpaxs launched a ‘three ideas email newsletter’ with a different approach of getting ideas out of books, but with the very clear value proposition that it will ‘make you wiser’. I don’t really have a value proposition for Irregular Ideas but it led me to rephrase what I say about it as, ‘won’t make you wealthier, healthier or wiser… but it might make you think’.
It occurred to me that if I’d been writing three ideas a week but only sending one then right now I’d have the next twenty editions lined up. The subscribers wouldn’t get any less value, they’d just get it over a longer time period, and I’d have less pressure (not that I find it stressful, I quite enjoy writing about random things). This has made me think differently about content creation and look for opportunities to get ahead (although I haven’t found any yet as the newsletter is the only thing that has a schedule that could be got ahead of).
I finished the sixth Future Skills email and wrote a bit about system-shifting product management, and also completed another module in my British Sign Language course, so all projects progressing as usual.
NFT as art form
I wrote about NFT’s as metamodern art form to try to express my thoughts about why NFT’s are important for art and more interesting than the mainstream lovers and haters give them credit for. I think they, and all emerging tech, signal a shift in art parallel to movements like Impressionism and Cubism.
Annual review 2021
I spent some time on my annual review. In an attempt to create better feedback loops I have plan-do-review cycles happening at different cadences. My life goals are the highest level and pretty much stay the same. Within those goals I have annual objectives and use quarterly OKR’s to monitor progress and maintain direction. Each month I write a retro of what I did, learned and might be able to do better, and set out in my delivery plan what I want to focus on next month. I use weeknotes as a reflective look at the work I’ve done that week, and then I use daynotes at the end of each day as a means of reminding myself what tasks I did today and giving myself a head start tomorrow. This might seem like a lot of different methods and different cadences, but that’s kind of the point. One of the things I want to do this year is refine this whole process, figure out which method and cadence works best for me, and find better ways of using feedback mechanisms to guide future direction and action.
Planning for 2022
I wrote my retro for December and updated my delivery plan for January.
I’ve set up a spreadsheet to manage my project tasks and track progress against my OKR’s. This means I can compare the reporting from both approaches as I try to figure out the optimum working processes for myself.
I also gave some thought to my Twitter goals (apparently there is such a thing) for 2022 and decided that it is to not grow my audience. I’ve been torn between the creator economy rhetoric around audience building with the benefits it brings in being able to validate ideas, and the ethics of the attention economy. I also know that I’m fundamentally anti-social and don’t want to spend time replying to replies and managing all that overhead that comes with a larger number of followers.
Read:
The Messifesto
Jon Cutler’s post about the messiness of ‘product’ perfectly captures the state of product in 2021. Accepting it’s messy rather than trying to create a framework or model to organise and explain it. There cannot and should not be a ‘theory of everything’ for product but instead a wide and diverse pool of theories, practices and ideas to draw upon, experiment with, adapt and use. The best product practice is one that figures out how to make the models fit together, not choose one over another (which just leads to arguments on the internet).
Systems Practice Workbook
I’ve been thinking a bit about systems this week and the Systems Practice Workbook, which defines Systems Practice as “both a specific methodology and a more general approach to grappling with adaptive problems in complex environments”, is really useful. It’s aimed at bringing systems thinking practices into organisations but it’s also useful even if that isn’t your aim (which it probably should be, even if you don’t know it).
Social fundraising in 2021
Being ‘digital’ means understanding how things work on the internet. It’s interesting to see the same trends on the internet between charity fundraising and the creator economy. Although they use different terminology, the same behaviours get the same results. Brand/building in public builds trust, recognition, connection. Meet their supporters where they are/audience building on public platforms makes it easier to get the message in front of people. Charitable giving will exceed $1T by 2030/currently worth over $100bn and expected to grow considerably.
Practices to help you be more creative on-demand
The Creative Elements podcast with Todd Henry had some fantastic advice on creative process which I sum up as ‘’Having a process (including pruning) = managing your energy = bringing your full emotional being to the work = producing something valuable.” The main takeaway is that creative work requires managing your energy more than managing your time.
Thought about:
A lot of people
There are more people on the internet today than there were on planet earth in the year I was born. Today there are 4.6 billion internet users and in 1975 there were just over 4 billion people. There are lots of ways of looking at this: population growth of the human species over such a short time period, opportunity for internet businesses given how many potential customers there are online, or, Roger must be really old.
Organising work
Perhaps because I’ve been planning what I want to work on for 2022 I’ve also been thinking about how to organise work to create the right kinds of feedback loops, which might include how much work can be done in a given time but are mostly about whether the work being done is going to achieve the goal. Whether it’s the right goal or not is another question. I’ve thought about different cadences (5 years, annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily) and how they might match to the generalities or specifics of the work, so the shorter the time period for work the more task-orientated the work is and the longer the time period the more goal focused. But this connection between completing tasks and achieving goals is based on the assumption that they connect in a causal way, which can only be the case if you know what will achieve the goal ahead of defining the work. If it’s an uncertain goal, then the only course of action is to define the feedback loop, take a step that might vaguely be in the right direction, and then assess whether you are closer to the goal or not (which is the Fire Control Problem approach). So much to think about.
Co-existence
The main story we tell ourselves about evolution is of one thing replacing another, and usually that the thing doing the replacing is better. But we seem to miss all the coexistence that is going on at the same time. Maybe that’s where the better better is happening. I wonder if this competitive evolutionary thinking is part of the underpinning rationality of modern society, and so it informs every revolutionary movement that attempts to overthrow the current dominant way society is organised. We can’t build an inclusive society by saying that some ways of thinking, being or doing aren’t allowed. That’s exclusionary. And then who gets to choose what should and shouldn’t be allowed? If something is excluded, then I think the underlying pattern of that rationality will re-assert itself and lead a different group with a different ideology to dominate other minorities. So, perhaps a better way is that of the underpinning rationality of future society to be about co-existence. I think I might try to explore this idea a bit more in a future edition of Irregular Ideas.