What Am I Doing? (Mar 2009)

Freelance

Things are going well with my freelance project. We’re pretty much wrapping up with the foundation of the site, with a few more adjustments and fixes. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to present it here with some process work.

GTD

I finally had some time to revamp my GTD system, and it seems to be working better than before. I basically digitized my projects list and actions so that they’re easier to look through (and therefore, less intimidating for me to review and organize). There are still parts of the system that I need to streamline, but things are definitely more efficient already.

Twitter

I recently started using a public Twitter account. My username is ivanwlam, and you’re welcome to follow me if you want. So far, some of the “famous” people I’ve followed include David Allen (the GTD Guy), Ze Frank, swissmiss, Armin and Bryony at Under Consideration, and TED.

Cut&Paste

Me. Me. Me. The fact that I forgot to mention that I went to watch my friend Sam Sellers talentedly compete at the SF stop of the Cut&Paste Competition Tour is unacceptable. Long story short, Sam did a great job and was robbed of his first prize. I love the piece he did for the first round, which was (and will be again) my Facebook profile photo.

Motivation

Something happened in the past week that retriggered and intensified my motivation to advance my career and my life as soon as possible. I can’t go into the details, but I now have a stronger desire to be independent and self-sufficient and to take control of my own life. So hopefully, in the coming months, I will have more exciting things to report.

Really Simple Designer Web Comic

Within the past month, I ended one blog and started another. Really Simple Designer Web Comic was an experiment to create a daily web comic starring Point, Line, and Plane. Every start of the day, I take about half an hour coming up with a concept and quickly draw a comic for the next day on my Wacom tablet. The idea of this project was to become more comfortable with my tablet, and I definitely am now. I ended it after two months because it was taking too much time of my day and the creative juices just weren’t flowing as fluidly as I’d like.

One Per Day

One Per Day is a much simpler project. Every day, I post about the day before, using only one word or phrase as the title of the post, and only one sentence describing the day. This keeps my post lengths short and to the point. It’s sort of a practice for me to pack as much content and meaning into one word and one sentence as I could, instead of dragging on and on about an incident (which I tend to do quite often… like right now).

The idea for One Per Day originated from a revisit to Ze Frank’s The Show, which indirectly kept a record of Ze’s personal life and experiences behind the scenes during its running. I have tried to keep a record of my life ever since I could write and had self-awareness. I used to write by hand with special notebooks and special pencils, and then switched to LiveJournals for a while, then to design blogs with monthly reviews (like this one).

But all these posts were taking too much time of my life to sustain, as I write really long posts, usually about now-apparently trivial things, and I wouldn’t want to return to them if I wanted to recall events of my life at the time.

One Per Day reaches a compromise between wanting to document every experience of my life and cutting down the number of words that I would have to read later on. One year from now, the individual events that happen every day will mean very little to me. In the end, a day is just a day, even on special occasions. What’s more important is the overall mood.

I just started blogging on One Per Day on WordPress (my new friend, perhaps my fortune cookie best friend?), and I haven’t gotten to redesigning it. But the presentation is going to be more streamlined and intuitive. Subscribe to the feed, and stay tuned.

Quotes I Go By Lately

“A day is a day. Every event, however trivial, will, by definition, influence and change the rest of my life.”

“Keep it simple (and easy), stupid.”

Flush.

What Am I Doing? (Jan 2009)

Happy new year, all. The holiday season is behind us, and as much as I had enjoyed it, I’m glad to be at the start of the new year with a few optimistic things to look forward to.

Freelance Client

The project with the freelance client is still in progress and is still very exciting. One thing I learned from being a freelancer is that it’s almost an art to have to know how much time tasks actually need to get done. I haven’t done enough freelancing at this point to provide a more accurate estimate of time required to do a project, and it’s easy to imagine an overall picture of the steps in my head, but it’s something else to actually do them. That’s why I feel bad sometimes (or often) because my current client needs the project completed ASAP, but it’s taking longer than I expect to churn out results. But one of the things that are motivating me to continue is my vision of how it’s going to look and function when it’s up and running.

Last Week of Peet’s

Next week will be my last week at Peet’s. It’s almost a bittersweet departure. Half of me knows I’m going to miss it, and the other half is glad to be moving on. The past few weeks, I feel that I’ve dramatically improved at the bar, and all I wanted to do my whole shift is to make drinks for customers. It’s like I’ve finally gotten used to how things work there and I’m just working like a well-oiled machine. But, I don’t want to get too comfortable to the point where the quality of my service and product goes down and I get stuck, which is why I needed to leave.

This job has not been all for nothing, though, and I never thought it was. This has been an excellent environment to learn about teamwork, customer service, multi-role relationships, and immediate problem solving. I would not learn anything like this or to this extent in an office environment. Of course, the office environment has another set of valuable skills that one would learn. So when you think about it, in a way, I’m glad that I took this chance to work in a fast-pace, high-volume, not always predictable retail environment before I presumably move to a more “corporate” or business-oriented world for the rest of my career.

Outlook

2009 seems like a great chance for improvement, in all fronts, no matter what the news says. As usual, I always see the future as a positive time to spend the rest of our lives.

Quote of the Moment

“The world is not waiting for you.”

Flush.

Be Ready for Anything

“Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.”

While I was trying to fall asleep on my slightly shifted sleep schedule, I tried to read before bed again for the first time since starting my job at Peet’s. So I chose Michael Bierut’s Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design since I haven’t read anything from it ever since I got it for Christmas last year. The above quote was the last paragraph of the first short essay, “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content”: “Not everything is design. But design is about everything. So do yourself a favor: be ready for anything.”

It just spoke to me. Well, the first part spoke to me; the second part dared me to get off my butt and to keep grinding my way (no sick pun intended) through this portfolio and website of mine. If I’m still passionate about design (which I am), I must not let it out of my sight.

And before I end this post, I’m going to cite the quote to the original source (posted 18 March 2006) as well, to the design blog Design Observer, just in case Michael Bierut comes at me demanding money for quoting him or whatever.

Flush.

Stefan Bucher’s Advice For Students

“Work your ass off, but do it for something you care about.” —Stefan Bucher

This was his advice for students (and probably to designers and people in general) on the Reflex Blue Show Episode 2.

• 344 Design, Stefan Bucher
• Daily Monsters by Stefan Bucher
• The Reflex Blue Show at 36point.com
• The Reflex Blue Show—Episode #2

Flush.

Later, By Definition

“Later, by definition, will never come.”

Just something I thought of while briefly visiting Stefan Sameister’s “Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far” web site promoting the exhibition.

Flush.