Focus

If you’re reading my blog, you might think I’ve been living in the woods since June. Unfortunately I haven’t, because boy would the facial hair be bizarre, but there has been plenty going on.

The five-year-and-counting experiment is still going strong, now from a new office with some new clients. For somebody like me that enjoys diverse and interesting challenges, saying "no" to things and focusing on great over good is hard. It means deliberately taking on fewer projects, fewer clients, and saying no to good opportunities. It means releasing inactive side projects back out into the ether, where they can’t quietly compete with other thoughts and ideas. It means having the discipline to identify those little things that sap attention and deal with them. It means letting dumb domain names expire and being okay with it.

Raina (my wife and archnemesis) has joined me during the day, and her strict Trello discipline alone has sharpened the view on the ground and at 10,000 feet. My year-old(ish) decision to jump headfirst into Craft has led to fun and interesting work, including the past week I spent with an awesome¹, recently-acquired startup in beautiful Palo Alto. Being there was energizing and made me want to be better, which is how I know I’m on a good path despite making all of this up. Even minor improvements to focus have yielded more fun and more interesting work.

In hopelessly dorky terms, I’m happiest when I’ve reached high I/O in strong relationships. Hopefully I can continue weeding out idle processes and patching memory leaks until I can fly².