Process

I often spend some of this week each year doing a retro on the previous year and planning what next year will look like.

Since the pandemic started, along with accepting the impairments I’m working with because ADHD brain gonna brain, I’ve seen my plans fall apart spectacularly, to the point where the idea of setting year-long goals feels like a mistake before I’ve even started. Time to try something new I’m currently in the process of creating a new system for myself. There are still some 2022 goals, but they’re based on work already in progress. I’ve shifted my perspective to looking at things on a quarterly retrospective cadence, with monthly check-ins to summarize what I’ve done.

I’ll also be picking my practice of weekly focus intentions back up along with the daily developer journal and personal diaries that have proven their worth over the long haul.

The biggest question I’m asking myself as part of this new goal system is this:

What if I assume there will be failures?

Having my brand of neurodiverse brain means I’m going to get pulled off track regularly. Rather than feel like a loser about it, how can I embrace failure as an accepted state and reap a different kind of harvest?

An example quarterly retro question that incorporates failure as a possibility:

Did I make progress on my goals?

If the answer is yes:

• Do your goals still have momentum?
• Do you want to change anything?
• Does the next quarter have space for this?

If the answer is no:

• What did you focus on instead?
• Was it of use?
• What goal did this apply to, if any? If it didn’t, is there a need for a new goal?

Value-based and sustainable goal setting

I do have a few 2022 goals. They are specific but broad and build on work that I’ll be doing anyway or already has so much momentum that it’s an easy win. For example, I’m working toward becoming a Level 4 software engineer. This is something already I’ve been working on for about half of 2021 and also has support from my manager and others. The work I need to do to get there will be more targeted in the coming year, but is generally a deeper version of what I do regularly anyway.

In addition to those sustainable goals, I’m shifting most of the goals I would usually list for the year to be “ongoing”, with no expectation of when they’ll be completed or how much progress I’ll make on them in the coming year. Things like “organize my digital life” or “publish a new book” are highly specific, but also take a lot of energy and focus. Getting one aspect of my digital life cleaned up or getting one story ready to publish in 2022 would be huge wins viewed through the lens of marginal gains.

As part of getting this all set up, I’ve stepped back and made a list of my values, based on a compiled list created by James Clear. I have a few more than the suggested 5 value limit (9 core and 9 secondary, to be exact), but it was interesting to think through what these values mean to me and how they manifest in my goals and work.

I also made a list of my particular interests, things that are always with me that I keep coming back to over and over that provide meaning and shape to my world. I even started a hobbies list because I find enrichment important. It’s satisfying to have a few things in my life (coloring, building models, watching baseball, etc.) that are there purely for the pleasure they bring. These lists form the core of who I am and what’s important to me outside of my career and work. The new setup There are a few tools I’ll be using to manage this system in the coming year:

• Habitica and Trello integrated with Zapier to manage my daily tasks, task inbox, and nitty gritty planning. This gets reviewed and cleaned up weekly.
• Obsidian as my digital notebook (dev journal, commonplace book, monthly summaries). This holds the majority of my daily thoughts, achievements, notes, etc.
• A paper list of my values, hobbies and interests, pinned somewhere visible (this is also stored in my commonplace book to have it at hand)
• A paper weekly focus journal based on PEMS (practical, emotional, mental, spiritual) plus project specific intentions with a post-week reflection.
• A yearly calendar for mapping out holidays, vacations, and LSQ planning.

Once a quarter, I’ll be sitting down to review my progress and plan the next block. The first quarterly review will use the following:

• A large pad to mind-map and scribble notes
• Printed copies of the monthly summaries
• My values, hobbies, interests lists

I’ll ask myself a few questions:

• Are my values, interests, and hobbies still of use? Do they enrich my life?
• Do I need to change anything about those lists? You can add or subtract, both are fine!
• Is the work I’m doing still in line with my values and interests?
• What progress have I made on my annual and ongoing goals? Are these goals still valid?
• Did I get off track anywhere? If I did, do I need to change something or do I just need to lay new track elsewhere?

Asking these questions will ensure the work I’m doing is in alignment with what and how I want to work as well as what I want to work on, providing me the best chance of having the energy and focus I need to do good work. I accept that things may change and this cadence allows me to adapt and update my own expectations for myself. Conclusion My main goal with all of this is to create a system that is flexible and dynamic, a method that keeps me on track with my larger vision for my life while also allowing me to adapt my goals to my energy and focus rather than trying to adapt my focus and energy to my goals.

The best part is that every three months I get to assess the system itself and determine if it’s working or if there’s a change needed for whatever my reality looks like at that time. I look forward to trying it out and am very interested in seeing where I’m at come mid-March.

I have a few things in my life that I am having trouble making decisions on. None of them are life-altering, but they’re small things that have some daily impact.

Workona is a great example. I’ve been using it for a couple months and really dig it. It’s going to a subscription model as it comes out of beta and I need to decide if this is worth it to me to pay for or scale back and use the free version that’s more limited.

As I’ve been doing over the last few years, I’m looking to the skills and process I’ve learned as a software engineer to tackle this problem. As an experiment, I’m going to try out making a form of architectural decision record for some of my personal choices.

As the choices I’m thinking about revolve around tools and productivity-oriented processes in my life, making ADRs seems like a natural choice. It likely seems a bit analytical, but for me it makes sense to get my thoughts down in a more concrete format. Having them stored in a notebook so I can come back to them later and see if my thoughts on things have changed would also be helpful.

Time to set up a folder in Obsidian and make some decisions. The first one is going to be pretty meta and common: an ADR on choosing to use ADRs.

As I think about writing zines again and creating a few games, I find myself thinking about visual language. I used to have a very defined graphic style, but I haven’t done much creative design work over the last decade. While there have been book covers and typography work, not much that was purely creative, bordering on art.

The zines and other personal projects I’m thinking of working on would benefit greatly from some more intentional design work. As a bonus, it’s a chance to stretch muscles that are long atrophied.

Part of me considered looking around and seeing what the kids are up to these days and trying to evolve my style to be more “modern” and up to date. But when I start thinking seriously about that, my heart is not happy. I like my old style and, as we’ve been saying often around my house, this is something I’m not done with yet. I still feel like it has value and use.

I might do some exercises, play with things a bit, and see if I can find all my old photoshop brushes and textures, etc. I want to see if I can reclaim this style, in particular:

It’s not what you see much anymore in today’s world, obsessed as designers nowadays are with minimalism. It’s still holding onto a piece of the early aughts grunginess, with my own spin on what feels “right”.

I opened up my Dribbble account for the first time in eons and I am pleasantly surprised by the work I found there. It may not be the cream of the crop, but I can see what I was reaching for at the time. I still find my voice in there.

I look forward to reclaiming this kind of work, reclaiming my visual voice, and seeing what I have left in the tank. I suspect it’s still quite full and that does make my heart happy.

On my habitual Sunday morning drive I spend a lot of time thinking. It’s my “out of the house” treat for the week, just me in the car going over hill and dale, waving to horses. I rarely even put music on. The only destination is my favorite convenience store for coffee.

This morning I was thinking about how pleased I am that I’ve got my notes and writing organization project well underway. Obsidian has helped considerably with that, as well as the surprisingly robust export tools of the various apps I was using before. While I still have a few questions to iron out (I do still like Scrivener for various things, organizing the actual structure of the folders), the bulk of the notes have been moved over. Now it’s down to organizing, a simple drag and drop between folders task.

Another phase of this digital organization project is looking at my bookmarks. So many times I run across something amazing or cool and I want to save it for later and share it out with people, but it just ends up lost among the 3,600+ bookmarks I’ve carried with me for literal decades now.

In thinking about woolgathering I reminded myself that I created the site to get back to curation, to go deeper into thoughts I have, and not for anyone else, but for myself. Sure, I’m sharing that stuff publicly, but the public aspect makes it handy to share out when I want to or am asked to. The important part of that site is that to me it’s not a site at all. It’s a Obsidian instance on my computer, with all that lovely interconnectedness going on.

So I’m embracing curation, I’m treating my digital garden like a garden. That includes pruning and cleaning and watering. In the end, sure I’ll have some things I can share with people, but that’s not really what it’s about.

I’m old enough to not be concerned about chasing followers. I frankly don’t care if anyone reads my newsletter or this post or anything else I produce. It’s really freeing that outside of my day job and Luna Station work, no one even cares what I’m doing. In this new internet, that’s a blessing.

So I’m grabbing my digital hoe and rake and I’m doing some spring cleaning. If you’re reading this, thanks for stopping by.

The sorting and cataloging of my stuff has begun. We’ve got to bring everything home from the storage unit (aka stuff I haven’t seen in 3 years) and I want to have the things currently in the house organized while it’s still manageable.

• I have a LOT of reusable bags, backpacks and totebags.
• I have a lot of tschotches, which make my space feel personal and cozy, but I’m not ready to display yet.
• I have so, so many bits of paper ephemera and journals and notebooks
• We’re not even gonna talk about all my computer bits and bobs

There’s a lot more to come home from the storage unit. Mostly books, which have a clear place to go, but also toys from when I was a kid and some other things that…frankly, I don’t even remember what because it’s been too long.

To tackle this, I’m starting by sorting by category and that has me stepping back and asking what I want to have easy access to and what’s okay to shove a bit further back in the attic.

My big cabinet holds supplies for various crafting and art projects, but I’m gonna reconfigure it to hold high priority stuff in general. For example, there’s no point in having a huge box of wool in there when I can have my backup hard drives stored there instead. The big wool box will be easy enough to pull out of storage when I want to work on that kind of project, where the drives I need very regularly.

A spreadsheet would be useful for keeping an inventory, but well-labeled boxes will do just fine for now. I want to be sure the physical items are organized. Digitizing can wait. Keeping like with like for once will also help so I need to acquire some smaller boxes. The last couple of moves happened under duress so there was a lot of “just shove whatever fits into the box”. Now is the time I can refocus on measured sorting and storage. It makes the piles of boxes in my spaces feel less scary.

The end goal here is to make sure that I know what I have so I can enjoy it and use it. Just like getting a shelf for my comic book boxes, making things more accessible makes them useful and enjoyable, otherwise, why have it? The stuff I have does “spark joy” when I have access to it. Time to make that access just a bit easier.