To create clarity out of messes we need to make an inventory of all the components of the mess. That’s not enough. Once we have an exhaustive and tidy organization we need to classify each piece and question its nature. Is it old or new? What’s its purpose? And most of all: with other pieces does it connect to?
If we don’t have a detailed, well-organized, comprehensive inventory of all the components of a messy thing we can only use luck to make sense out of it.
361/365
When I will conclude my year of blogging I will dedicate this stolen time to more reading. I’ve learned that If I don’t actively take notes while reading I will retain a few commas. So I will write while reading. I might be able to publish much less daily but I should be able to capture more notes.
And, yes, then I will connect the captured note into a draft.
Shall I do “a year of draft writing”?
360/365.
Next week I’ll be ending this experiment. I’ll be concluding my 365 days of posting on my blog, every single day. I’ve listed a lot of the lessons, considerations, implications of this long challenge, I don’t know what to add. I feel like I am already done, today, seven days in advance.
And this is the “old” me talking. The “me” before the effort of forming a habit, of making a more disciplined approach to creativity. I had no due dates, no commitments and any side project would have been good for wasting time. And that’s exactly my battle: avoiding dispersing energies mindlessly, throwing away time because “I am too tired” and “I just want to get rest”.
So, once again, I am acknowledging my illusory defeat, I am clearly stating that I don’t have anything to write. Thing, which, is false since I have found so many ways to avoid that from happening. And especially false because I had interesting experiences to talk about.
The effort that would require me to recollect all of my thoughts, put them in a meaningful way, extract the good parts, and put them in a usable format is exactly the work I am not doing.
359/365.
Reflecting on my search for an audience, I realized that I can focus my communication efforts on real people around me. The first “persona” is myself. It’s one of the many possible personas, meaning, when addressing my content to myself I am intentionally orienting my communication to things and topics which interest me. In a similar fashion I can look around me, to people close, friends and acquaintances. What do we share? What interests do we have in common? How can I research some of the topics relevant to them and produce meaningful content?
It would be a “bottom-up” approach to select very specific topics to investigate, research and detail so I can make explainer content, for me to learn better, for them to appreciate some relevant knowledge.
That’s the part when the old dear Design Thinking approach becomes useful. How do you know what to design if not researching what your users want, need, desire?
In the end I should be more intentional and propositive in spending quality time with people I love trying to learn them better. It can be an occasion to have life experiences together, improving our bounds, bettering us as persons. It seems to be a great motivation to learn, develop relationships, acquire knowledge, develop new content and create new opportunities. Isn’t that exciting?
Call anybody you can reach to, even a family member is fine. Prepare on the screen the prototype, the mock-up, the demo of the visual artifact you’ve just created and you want to have feedback on.
Do not make any introduction, do not give any explanation: call the chosen tester and ask a direct and straightforward question: “What do you see?”.
As the first thing you want to have the first reaction, you want to listen to their thinking process. When they start to describe what they see, do not make any reaction, do not judge, do not answer. Keep on asking “and then?” or “why?” or “what does it make you think of?”. Ask only open questions to elaborate on what they are seeing and feeling.
Only when you are satisfied and their patience hold, if you feel like, ask them more specific questions like: “Do you like it?”, “What do you like?”, “What don’t you like?”.
And only at the end try to give context, application, and audience: “How do you see this ‘thing’ in the context of conveying this ‘message’ to these ‘people with the objective of achieving this ‘communication goal’”?
Congratulations, you had the chance of receiving brutally honest feedback.
Instead of thinking about what I should write I should think about something else.
Where do I imagine myself to be in the future?
What is the future I imagine for me, my loved ones, the Universe?
By virtue of this vision that I strongly feel, then, I will have a mission to accomplish.
How will I make my vision come true?
In order for my mission to be fulfilled, then, I will need to identify objectives that will make it true.
Rather than imagining a generic and indistinct audience, it is better for me to identify real people. When I work and communicate, I should refer to each of those existing people I know who allow me to have a direct, dedicated dialogue aimed at understanding and acting on that specific person. This can help me focus my work as if I were actually having a conversation with them. Talking with a specific person involves certain communicative, emotional, psychological contexts, etc. and therefore activates the important principle of reducing abstraction from a hypothetical shapeless mass of people to a specific face that I know and with whom I interact spontaneously.
It becomes essential to have a collection of real people corresponding to the conversations I like to have and would like to develop.
It’s in moments like these, when I don’t want to write that I must find value in my notes. I don’t want to choose what I should write because I chose already when I annotated something. If I was diligent I’d also organize my notes according to emergent topics. What’s the most popular theme in my notes? What grabbed my attention yesterday or yesteryear? That is the approach. The next obstacle is in having a note archive organized to offer such creative opportunities. Do I have idea buckets? Draft idea lists? Semi-finished articles written when I did have the inspiration? Because, otherwise, my note archive has no creative value. It would be only an amass of junk hoarded with the illusion of making something out of it, one day. And that day will never come.
So, exercise, before starting to write, if it is not a free-flowing writing session, I shall curate my notes by identifying threads, discussions, connections and potential drafts. Or, better, the work done in the note archive should be exactly that: the writing. The final manuscript should naturally evolve in the notes and when it will spontaneously emerge I would only need to extract it into a draft, candidate for publishing.
My next step is to move my writing context from the blank page of a new document to the already existing network of notes and ideas. So that writing becomes gardening, curating, connecting, nurturing ideas that have been already found.
It all sounds good. Let’s see what practicing it will look like.
354/365.
Technological systems are becoming more and more like living entities. It becomes increasingly difficult to set the boundaries of a piece of technology. Your computer is not yours anymore, it’s a node of a massive network of other interactive objects. It doesn’t matter how many efforts you make to clean, maintain, set up, fine-tune your dear personal computer, constant updates of software and hardware are creating a continuous change in their running setting. That’s why it makes sense to double-check settings and configuration, to assess the new features before doing an update or an upgrade. Unfortunately, intentionally or not, many software applications are now resetting their configuration selectively or totally at each update or, even worse, they are adding new parameters affecting their execution.
It’s a constant flux of changes and interaction, it’s a fluid universe, somebody may call it a metaverse, and we should face it as we live in the real world, by trusting the next piece of software only as much as it allows us to do what we need to do and to carefully look around us for hazards and threads like we would do in a jungle.
It’s a fantastic always-changing fluid technological world and we need to be responsible and careful in living it.
353/365. Thanks to Alberto Gelpi for the inspiration.
I find stimulating to take voice notes while listening to podcasts. Not only do I highlight, paraphrase and summarize the most relevant parts but I connect immediately with whatever comes to my mind by association or contrast. I am walking, I cannot (or I find uneasy to) check my notes, so the connections are coming from my memory. But the kind of interpretation and connection that I do is particularly satisfying.
I take notes directly in my real-time voice transcriber. Problem: I am outdoor so the transcription is only 90% good and, in the end, the notes are longer than the podcast duration. I will never find the time to listen back to what I captured, moreover, I should listen carefully to fix all the mistranscribed words.
I would call that a partial success. I am looking to improve this knowledge capturing workflow because I like how it started, I don’t like how it ends.
352/365
You are, at the very least, three persons: yourself in the present, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future.
Leverage on this multiplicity by identifying your three selves as real persons whom you can talk to.
What can you tell about your past behaviors? What were you thinking when something important happened to you? What can you learn from your past actions? And, what was your past self sending to your future self? That is you, now. What’s the message for you, today? How can you change your behaviors based on what your past self did in the past?
Your future self will look at you and ask you questions: “what should I do?”, “What are my options?”, “What happened when I did that?”.
This is your chance, now to provide your thoughts in the hope of helping your future self. What are the things that could be useful in the future? What are the trends you see that could develop for yourself, tomorrow, in one year, in ten years? Write a letter, now, and address it to your future being.
That’s the person you have available to interact with. What do you need now? Who are you now? Use the present time to reflect, track your feelings, your fears, your desires, your happy moments. Spend some time to express your gratitude for what you have and who you are. Acknowledge your weaknesses, you’ll feel better. Recognize your strength, you’ll be more confident.
This is the only real-time you can live. The right here and right now moment. There are no other times to live. It’s just imagination. Useful, yes, but only a projection of your mind.
You are never the same, even your multiple past identities are different, you are definitely changing each moment you are alive, in the present, and, therefore, you cannot be but an infinite variability of selves in the future.
351/365