August was the month of the Action Log Project, an attempt to try and get one big idea off the ground and near a state ready to be shipped. So it was an exercise in balancing the trade-off between shorter term daily actions – getting the little bits and pieces done and out there, which are necessary to sustain any general progress at all, and on the other hand devoting a sizeable chunk of time each day to working on something which may or may not pay off well in the longer term, but has little or no immediate consequence. Then at the end of the month I suffered from a major maintenance event which threw everything out for several days on end. Such is the unpredictable nature of life really, we make plans – and then something different happens. The plans still come in handy though. The Action Log that I keep personally, on my own internal wiki page for now, has developed somewhat. In order to track progress on the project I introduced the category “P” for project. Mostly these log entries would not count as Actions in the sense that I have defined previously, since they are not completed, shipped, concluded actions, but merely steps towards a longer term goal. If the longer term goal is never reached, then those steps will have turned out not to have been progress at all, except in the sense of helping to test the viability of the project with a negative conclusion, getting it out of the way so I can move on to the next one. So the number of category A actions for August is down to 27, an average of just under 1 per day, while the number of P actions reached 19. The project got stuck a couple of times with less than the one daily progress recorded. So that would be 46 items which divided by 31 equals 1.48. I also failed to take a full day off every week during August, and I do wonder if the overall level of accomplishment might have been somewhat higher if I had done so, we’ll never know.
What happened with the project itself was that one of the daily tasks turned into a major diversion for me, going down the route of outsourcing. I spent about week’s worth of time and money experimenting with Odesk, advertising, recruiting and briefing to get a fairly small task done. The result was not useable, but the experience will stand in me good stead for getting the larger task done when the time comes. Then I managed to get the small thing done for less than a tenth the price on Fiverr which was an altogether much happier way of doing business. Perhaps it was all down to good luck and bad luck though, finding or rather choosing the right people. And then I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to enrol in a video course on Udemy which is directly project related, and is going to help me with prototyping and user experience design. Back to the Action Log, I mentioned setting up a new code for Project but in fact I set up several and starting using or possibly abusing the system to begin monitoring various life goals as well. This is something to be quite wary of, I think. Let’s call it category proliferation, and be aware that it may be related to definition creep. I have a feeling that these kind of goals, you know, going to the swimming pool more often, avoiding the fish and chip shop, doing some tidying in the house etc etc are really not wanted to be cluttering up the action log which has the purpose of focussing attention on a quite narrowly defined set of positive business actions. A better place for them, I discovered is a very simple little web app called Joe’s Goals. Joe's Goals - Free Online Habit Tracker What is Joe’s Goals? Joe’s Goals is a simple yet powerful tool to make tracking your goals the easiest part of accomplishing them. Use the simple single page interface to setup daily goals and track them with just a click. Watch your daily score to gage your success and use negative goals (or vices) to confront and overcome bad habits that finally need to get the boot. Share your success with your friends and family or post your personal score badge to your blog or MySpace page. Add as many Goals as you want and update them all from a single interface.
