Cultivating Done

Having been trained to blithely accept the time-warp of most large website projects being drawn out over months and months, it's taken a while for me to really grasp the significance of the realization that I can make stuff happen really fast. Winning the first FullCodePress taught me that it was possible to totally screw things up, and yet still achieve a fairly decent result in a very short space of time. Unfortunately in the months afterwards I didn't take full advantage of this shift in frame. Evidently, I'm much better at explaining and expressing ideas, than actually living up to them. This is an aspect of myself that I would love to change, and I think I am slowly getting better. Hence, when the The Cult of Done popped up recently, I was immediately smitten.

Let's mediate on The Cult of Done Manifesto for a few moments...

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you're done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.

In this vein, I have been appreciating Giles Bowkett's discussion of how to form improved habits - he is posting a new beat every day on Twitter, and a new micro-app every month or so. This philosophy of course, stems from Seinfeld's famous tip: "don't break the chain". Good advice... I am still trying to get this working for my writing, but I don't want it to be at the expense of my other interests.

I think I am going to start doing something similar, regularly launching nano-apps, web services, tinkering with smaller things, and publishing them. I have also re-discovered my passion for typography and CSS design, so I will probably be doing a little more visual stuff and layout design too. The focus for me is not really on the end result, so much as retraining myself to proceed in small steps and achieve more in less time - to avoid trapping myself in the abstract and to route around the tar pit of writers block.

In this way, I am slowly working towards achieving the HUGE goals that I have set for myself, without letting their daunting scope distract me and lead me into self-doubt and despair. I see these first months of 2009 as mostly about establishing a rhythm. The kick drum anchoring the rhythm - and the main reason why I'm writing about it - is of course this 'ere website. In recent months, the home of maetl has become a neglected garden with crumbling walls, overgrown with weeds. It needs rejuvenation.

Over the past two weeks, I've been looking to spend an hour each day working on the redesign. It's coming along well, as well as it can really, considering such short bursts are not at all what I'm used to when it comes to web development. In the past, I have dreaded dealing with this, and procrastinated the task to death. But after breathing in some recent vigor, I am actually finding it to be a lot of fun, and filled with interesting possibilities that I wouldn't get to explore on other projects. Having a design that is actually usable would go a long way towards encouraging me to write more quality content here, which is the main objective.

I look forward to revealing maetl, reshaped and rekindled, at the beginning of April 09.