Building within an ecosystem
Despite a hectic two weeks solo parenting and then hosting my own parents (~reinforcements), I managed to make some progress on a small open source project, Rehype-JSONCanvas.
Working on the project led to some learning pains, so I figured I’d share those here. This post will also serves as a “demo” of sorts for the plugin going forward (though not yet, as this post describes):
Building within an Ecosystem | andrewlb.com blog
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Keeping a public journal is unintuitive.
I was initially exposed to Week Notes through the Berg blog early in my career, but I always saw the approach as more “for the org” than “for the person.” I would personally take long-running/evolving (often visual) notes that would crisp up at whatever timescale was required.
My consulting stint at IKEA was a good example of this: weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports were “flaked off” of an ever evolving but connected maelstrom of data, writing, decisions, and activities. These flakes became notes and reports — defining a temporal frame for others to work within.
Inventor and creative consultant (and a coaching client of mine), Tom Armitage, wrote about the idea of weeknotes vs. worknotes here, and the idea that fixing the timescale is as important as getting the content out there. For him, the quarterly notes interspersed with more fit-for-purpose content becomes the right cadence.
What’s emerged for me is the structure of blog (a way of processing), week note (public fixed temporal), and notes (public and private notes that evolve). Week notes link the other writing temporally, and even in slower periods (like Danish summer), make the momentum or stasis of a project more legible.
I’ve been writing weeknotes now since March. They hold many false starts as I’ve been getting this consulting practice off the ground, but some of those starts have become things.
It started a bit more rambly, and my current format is very spartan. I am not precious about it. I’ve seen some weeknotes become enormous, others a simple checklist. Maybe I should dive more into an existing method? Or join a community? (Maybe not)
Either way, I guess I’ve come around.
Some Links
Weirdly fascinated by this ongoing list of IRS tax schemes maintained by the IRS, called the “Dirty Dozen.” The process of identifying and naming these extremely abstract and ambiguous activities is worth exploring.
Venkat Rao’s “Many Other Shoes Are Dropping” post hit a chord with me. Here’s my highlights for it
This note on travel by a fairly extreme traveler stood out to me as starting some pretty interesting conversations — particularly the bit about building roots.
I’m have standing “office” hours for mutual sparring, tangential discussions, and fun. Some of you are making use of this already and I’m loving it. calendly.com/alb/social
I do 1:1 coaching on creative practice, strategy, process and related topics — less life coach, more sparring partner. It’s not my main gig, I don’t charge a lot, and I focus on makers, designers, and entrepreneurs pretty exclusively. Book an intro session with me