So… as the title may suggest, I failed on these projects when spring came around. It was a mixture of things: I like music and want to learn it but it is similar to dance, where I enjoy it greatly but don’t feel desperate to do it. It wasn’t like running/working out either, where I’m often desperate to do it because I want to stay fit.
I’ve reaped the benefits of what I worked on in January, February, and March already greatly this year: I can go to BKB and jump on v2s without too much struggle, a script I wrote in February has been saving me hours of time at work now in June, and the interaction design stuff has been valuable foundation for me realizing that I didn’t know what I thought I knew about design, and need to revisit.
In April/May, I didn’t really do that much. I hung out with my boyfriend and built my relationship. (That’s actually a fairly solid task, I guess — the whole meeting the friends/getting used to each other thing. That was time really well spent.) I guess that was the main focus. April was when I started at the current “work at home” project I’ve been on, and I spent a solid month trying to get used to working on my own and getting over my separation complex with the rest of the Amex team. We also spent a good deal of that time moving and settling in. More recently, I’ve done more actual interaction design with prototyping mobile interactions. Mobile IxD is very different from web IxD and especially in my conversations with people who consider themselves interaction designers, I think it might be a little closer to the product. I’ve had this difficulty pinning down what exactly I wanted to do in design and that’s causing me to fling myself back and forth between all these different fields – user research, visual design, interaction design, data visualization, front end design, front end development, general UX, digital marketing, analytics, data science, and shit, the list probably goes on. How do I generalize this? I like to make things. I want to keep making and tinkering. I also made random things in May like my stuffed animals.
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If I had to cheat and say my “May” was something, it might’ve been these little goofy octopi I made, hahah. Sining had some leftover felt and polyfill, I wanted to make use of it. Alternatively, I might go buy some cool fabric soon and make some pillowcases. Since I am Jenny Fan, they will probably have cute animal faces, like my monkey pillow. Oh yeah, speaking of cute things, I also drew this little fun vector that got me pumped up and made me want to immerse myself in illustration again. This was also super quick – maybe took like 5-10 min. Yeahhhh, gotta get those illustrator vector drawing skills up!
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The June “productive activity” was the new skills learned in prototyping mobile interactions (mostly via Composite — I should learn Quartz Composer soon), but I also did a few freelance projects for Duke Science Review and an indian transportation company. The hard part is following up and getting the payment… if my freelance work had legitimate accounting, my Accounts Receivable would be gigantic and my Days Sales Outstanding would be terrible :( How do I reduce this lag? Help me, consultants. Now that I have worked two years in the Real World, I would probably create a more official legal document, including time tables and payment charges for late payments. The sad thing is, as a small individual, even if I had legal docs, I would almost never go to court because the hassle wouldn’t be worth waiting an extra few weeks for payment. That’s pretty terrible, right? But I’m just thinking like a small business owner here, and those are our biases/prejudices.
As a tangent, I met up with Dillon yesterday for dinner and he is interested in starting a podcast about the topic. Stay tuned for it! I’m definitely interested myself. I’ve kind of had it up to here (*indicator of arm to my neck*) with “start up” jingoism and talk of getting from 0 to 1 million customers, but I’m extremely interested in a small company’s very beginnings from Day -100 to Day 100. (So, not how they earned their first $100k, but how they spent their first 100 days.) How do you take a small business from conception to post-launch? I imagine it is like deciding you want to learn how to snowboard, getting the equipment, getting up on that slope, finding that slope is very deep, get pushed down anyway, and then proceed to roll down the hill until you’ve reached a certain point. That reminds me, I want to reach out to some people I know who have recently pivoted to small businesses for my 20/20 project…
Which brings the tangent back to the main point. This is a screen shot of my Trello board as it is now. (Dean convinced me on the virtues of Trello.) I called this the “Design” board up till about 10 minutes ago, so this is just one subset of the various projects I want to work on.
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To be honest, I’ve expressed since about February that I thought these monthly productivity experiments were a bad idea. Pivoting from one thing to another is hard to sustain progress, and it’s virtually impossible for me to focus only on one activity. So I’ll grant myself this leeway, since I want to finish things: for July, the goal is to knock out half of this list. That’s doable but quite a big task. Bring it on!
Filed under: Creative Tagged: accountability, productivity experiments, projects Image may be NSFW.
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