IDEO’s Tom Kelley advises me to treat life like an experiment. This year, I am — given that I am the notorious dilettante, there are a number of things I’ve always wanted to do/be able to do but rarely follow through with. I often feel that the barrier of getting from 0 to 1 is so much harder than 1 to infinity. As a productivity experiment, I’m going to stop trying to skim across the surface of a number of activities at any given time and focus on just 1 or 2 goals in the particular time period. I won’t be doing that and only that of course, but the idea is to devote enough of a solid chunk of time to one particular skill that I’ll be able to at least have some baseline competency with it. After all, these are long-standing interests of mine that I have always wanted to be better at.
January: Bouldering/arm strength
Before: I had gone climbing twice before, both times with shaky arms and tenuous grasp of v0 paths.
After: Now completing most v0s and v1s without much of an issue, and managed to knock out a v2. Went to MPHC about 7-8 times in the month. I got so much stronger with my Noob Gains that I can almost do *half* a pull-up. (Recall that my New Year’s resolution is to do 1 – yet another example of 0 to 1 being harder than 1 to infinity.) Carrying groceries = easy peasy. Great success!
Follow-ups: I’m not going to renew MPHC but I want to keep up with it, so I bought a 10 pass to BKB.
February: Data analysis/Python
Before: Starting off on a strong foot because I managed to do some cool things with Requests and PhantomJS (thanks to a big shove in the right direction from Dillon), also Kawin sent me a stats book that I will try to read through. Time permitting I’m hoping to learn some R with Swirl. I spent a lot of time last year familiarizing myself with data visualization and the graphics behind it, but I feel that I don’t have the analytical/technical chops to consider myself a true data visualizer yet.
After: I did a good job getting started and learned a lot about command line programming, and I even got to do a Hackathon this month. Unfortunately, I mostly did prototyping/design and I still don’t feel like I’m in a comfortable state with either the programming or the analysis. I lost a lot of time because work picked up and I was busy socializing on the weekends. That socializing was well worth it I think, but this month finished on an unsatisfying note.
Follow-ups: Too much to learn; I’m not going to learn R and focus on Python. I did get enamored with NodeJS though so I think I need to learn more JavaScript.
March is likely to be a coding-related or interaction design-related activity. I did order my piano, which is coming in 3/10, so that may be my April activity!
Some other things I may work on:
- Singing, particularly hitting correct pitches
- Ear training and music theory
- Dance
- Piano (I’ve been passively trying to find a good but most importantly cheap keyboard for the past month)
- Painting/drawing
- Positive psychology/happiness projects
- Fiction writing
I’m looking forward to this and a little anxious about sticking to it. The major underlying motivation behind this is learning how to pace myself and trying to minimize my ADHD/FOMO/tendency to scroll through an unchanged Facebook feed whenever I sit down with an actual chunk of time to do something productive.
A slight disadvantage is that most of my freelance work and other projects are kind of falling to the backburner. I need to finish 20/20, and get that outta here before the content is too irrelevant.
Filed under: Creative Tagged: 20/20 Project, experimentation, notorious dilettante, paradox of productivity, productivity experiments, projects Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
