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As 2021 is wrapping up, it seems like a good idea to think about putting together some goals for the new year.
I usually don't set goals, but given the fact that my schedule has recently filled up with a full time job it's becoming clear I'll need to. It's tricky because there are projects I very much want to work on, but figuring out how to find the time is difficult. The desire and energy is there, the time is not. Hopefully setting some clear and achievable goals will help.
It's time for me to choose a project to work on as my singular area of focus. This year I worked on Twelve Websites[1], whose goal was to prevent me from focusing too much on any one project. But through that experiment, it's clear to me that there's an underlying current that needs exploring. That current is not entirely well-defined yet, but I can feel its pull in clear direction.
That project is Hyperfov[2].
It's time to make this project into something real, something worthy of at least a year's worth of focus. There's a series of impressions in my mind, impressions of what a system like it would be like to use. I felt parts of it with the experiments I ran as part of Twelve Websites, but I feel like I need to keep pushing it.
The trick with long projects is to keep a steady momentum.
I've worked on two of my own projects I'd consider large (as in 3+ months of effort.) The first was the poorly named {WebET}, an eye tracking system, and the second was {Pith}, a discussion system that was my capstone project in {college}.
Both of these projects got a point where the momentum was gone; rather than speeding up over the course of the projects, I slowed down. They became less and less interesting in part because the technical challenges grew in order to meet the systems' goals. Those goals were clearly too difficult to meet, not because they were unreasonable, but because they shifted over the course of the project. Rather than setting a goal, working towards it, and meeting it, it became a never ending cycle of "just adding one more thing." Meeting goals became like adding roadblocks rather than removing them, absolutely destroying any momentum.
In a better world, I need to meet the goals I set and then reevaluate the next steps. Momentum continues to gain over time--I build a system that works quickly and build off it instead of never reaching the state of true functionality.
So next year I'll use a new strategy: stage the projects I'm going to work on ahead of time into clear phases. Of course things will change over the course of the year, but for the most part I think having a kind of skeleton I can fill in will provide a real structure for maintaining and increasing momentum. I'll record tangential ideas and directions, and evaluate how they fit into things at certain moments. The trick will be figuring out the right mix of specificity and flexibility.
Beyond Hyperfov, I'd also like to continue to work on my writing. Adopting a daily practice of writing here has been very helpful for my thinking, and in the coming year I'd like to expand those efforts by dedicating more time to One Dimension. In particular, I'd like to adopt a 'daily pages' style[3] approach where every morning I write a page and put it up here.
I'm going to try a new tool for this: a typewriter[4]. We'll see how it fits into the process, but so far it's quite a promising machine for creativity.
Last updated Thu Feb 03 2022 in Berkeley, CA
1: /thought/twelve-websites.gmi
4: /thought/i-bought-a-typewriter.gmi