Tag Archives: projects

relinquishing stubbornness

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I’ve been working on 101in365 accompl.sh for about 18 months now and it’s been an endless crash course in time management, building a community, product development, design, coding, you name it. My feelings about it have run the gamut from “yay! cool! people are using something I built!” to “holy crap! people are USING this thing! I really can’t screw it up now!” to “hey this is just a side project and it’s MINE so why can’t I just do whatever the heck I want?” to “But the PEOPLE! They have demands!”

It’s been a constant struggle for me – determining that line between “this is mine” and “actually it’s not MINE anymore.” I had a very specific vision for the site when I first pieced it together over a holiday weekend, but at the time I was really just building it for myself. For my very specific use case. And as a Product Manager I know better than anyone that that’s just NOT the way to build things to be used by the People of the Internets.
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Getting to 10,000

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Today 101in365 reached its 10,000th completed goal, which I think is a pretty big deal. The site that I kind of pieced together with my limited PHP skills and some help from friends has helped people complete 10,000 of the goals they set out to accomplish this year. There are just about 35,000 locked goals on the entire site which means that the average user is about 1/3 of the way through with their list. Pretty amazing.

Getting to 10,000 was not easy. It’s been a lot of trial and error and thankfully our ever-patient users have stuck with me as I used them as my guinea pigs for experiments in motivation, community, and social design. I thought I’d take a step back to really think about what I’ve learned getting to goal #10,000 and perhaps ponder some possible changes to the site to hopefully get that next 10,000. Or even better: 100,000. Here goes:
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Announcing 101in365. 101 things to do. 365 days to do them.

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As 2008 was coming to a close I was searching around for some good new year’s resolutions. I’ve never really been good at resolutions. They’re too intangible. “Be a better person.” “Keep my apartment neater.” “Drink more water.” How could I measure whether I was able to accomplish these things at year’s end?

Announcing 101in365It was out of this that I wrote my first 101in365. A simple list that I put on my old blog. It’s still there and I still update it, but now that 2009 is coming to a close and it’s time for me to start working on my 101in365. I wanted something better for 2010. I wanted a way to automate it so I didn’t have to go through and add strikethroughs to each item and so I didn’t have to go into a blog post and scroll down to find my item. I wanted a way to keep track of the number of items I’ve marked as done, as in progress, and just as empty. I wanted to be able to manage my list more easily with a quick “heads up” view of my status. So I tried to automate it.
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The Importance of Having Projects

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I’m a projects person. I love projects. I love having something to play around with when my regular responsibilities get to be old hat. I love the challenge of having something else to think about besides school work or real work – something that stretches my mind a bit and keeps me from losing touch with reality.

I’ve been struggling with not having a project for the last few months. When I got back from Europe and found myself with a few weeks with nothing to do but enjoy summer vacation I was itching to DO something, to create something, but I didn’t know what. Instead I played around with my blogs. I decided to leave forever-digital behind and move here. And that kept me occupied for a while, but it wasn’t the project I was looking for.

It was incredibly frustrating. I hadn’t started work yet, I was in the process of moving and starting my post-college life, but at the same time I felt almost directionless. My mind was idling.

When I started work a lot of these frustrations were set aside as I learned the ropes of the corporate world and had some work projects to keep me occupied for a while, but now that I’m more settled in and I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve struck a decent work/life balance, I’m ready to get back into my personal projects. Now that I know how much time I need for work and how much time I need for a social life and all that, I’m ready to tackle MY projects again.

Having all of this time to really think about what I want to do has been incredibly helpful and for the first time ever my need to create something has matched up with having the time to do it. I’ve had this idea mulling around in my head for a few months and I’ve finally gotten it down on paper and it’s almost ready for the next step: action.

I’m really excited about it and when it gets a bit more fleshed out I’ll try to share some of it, but for now I’m just really thankful to have a problem that I find personally interesting to work on for the first time since I finished school in May. Here’s hoping it all works out!

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Designing Obama

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Every once in a while I poke around Kickstarter looking for cool projects. It’s inspiring and an interesting model for supporting a project or cause. Not to mention, pretty much anything that Andy Baio gets behind is going to be cool.

I’ve seen a few cool projects go here or there that I was intrigued by, but I haven’t necessarily felt compelled to contribute – until today. There is a really good batch of project proposals vying for support and I finally gave in to one of them: Designing Obama.

The proposal is this:

…The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art and design from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.

The 360-page book is full-color and hardbound, highly crafted with an embossed sleeve…

I’m a bit of a design geek and I can’t wait to get my hands on this book! Fellow design geeks and Obama supporters alike should definitely help Scott Thomas reach his goal. He’s 3/4 of the way there! And while you’re at it check out the other Kickstarter projects – there’s something for everyone!