Kelake

“No artist is pleased… There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.“ – Martha Graham

‘Joy’ and ‘joyful’ are words I use almost daily to describe what creative work should be. I have a chart on my desk that places joy at a circle’s centre, while tasks that support that activity spiral outward, creating barriers – tasks many face but often pay others to handle.

Yet even when those barriers fall away, the creative act itself can feel far from joyful. This morning I must finish part 29 of a 30-part series, and it’s been laborious, boring, and the output is not great. I’m not sure an editor will even want to touch it. But kids like the story, so it must be finished.

Despite not being a writer, I spend more and more time writing. I’ve reached what learning theorists call “conscious incompetence” – that humbling phase where your growing taste shows you exactly how far you still have to go. This gap between taste and ability is far from joyful, but the practice continues.

I full of not yet fully formed thoughts lately …

There is an interesting back and forth in my work life between the old and the new. I want to work and collaborate with people, especially local where we can sit and talk over coffee, but people are messy and it can be a challenge.

We want to try publishing in print. Local publishers if interested have a lead time that feels almost archaic. One local author shared how it took an entire year for an email of hers to get a reply, and she told this story as though it were completely normal. Meanwhile, all of my own attempts to reach out to a local hybrid publisher were met with silence.

Coming from a background in software, these kinds of timeframes feel completely foreign. So, we’ve decided to publish everything ourselves—no waiting, no unanswered emails, and, unfortunately, no in-person collaboration.

I hired my preferred illustrator to bring our stories to life. She’s talented, but here we are, weeks behind schedule. I’m not sure why, though I suspect it’s because this work is just a side project for her.

Then, I turn to AI for help with art, and almost instantly, I get something usable. After a bit of tweaking, we end up with almost acceptable results.

We also wanted to invest in a new website (or maybe all of them), but we don’t have the time or the expertise to do it ourselves anymore. So, I reached out to a team for help. What I got in return was an expensive quote that didn’t address the problems I mentioned, nor did it offer any clear solutions.

Meanwhile, one of our websites broke, and I needed a fix right away. I went to ChatGPT, explained the problem in detail, and it wrote a WordPress plug-in that fixed the issue immediately. It even generated some additional brand-related materials—pretty vanilla, but definitely getting closer.

When I have the time, I like to A/B test different solutions. This time, I thought, “Let’s change the pricing on that product and see what happens.” But Stripe wouldn’t allow it. No warning, no clear explanation. After some digging, I found out it’s due to accounting practices.

There is a reason why I always go to the check-out line that has a person. I like the friction, the annoyance of the person who doesn’t know how to use the pay terminal, the other customer who like me hasn’t talked to anyone all day so is telling the cashier all about her life. The person complaining that they should have more people on cash. I see value in this inefficiency; its social interaction.

There’s a reason I still prefer to go to the checkout line with a cashier. I like the little moments of inconvenience—the person struggling with the payment terminal, the chatty customer sharing their life story with the cashier, and the inevitable complaints about needing more staff on the registers. There’s value in this inefficiency: it’s human connection.

In my professional life I think we all should be aware that there are more efficient solutions on the horizon, and make the value of human friction more apparent. I enjoy my work, but I also enjoy the satisfaction of getting it done.

“Busy” is a relative term. It’s not the same as a cashier handling a Christmas rush, a doctor managing an emergency room during a hectic night, or a delivery driver working all day for Amazon as a side hustle. For me, “busy” means my mental capacity to handle things in a timely manner has greatly diminished.

I’ve been so consumed by work every day that things are starting to slip. My task list has overdue items from more than a month ago.

Today, I received an email from Pair with my resource summary for my WordPress installations. It shows I used 885 GB over the past month—286 GB over my allotment. This means I’m facing a huge overage charge. Typically, we use around 274 GB in a busy month, so this spike caught my attention. I tried to investigate, but the control panel doesn’t offer the detailed information I needed. Then, I got sidetracked by other tasks.

Two months ago, I planned to switch away from Pair and even found a company to help with the transition. But I was too busy.

It’s ironic: being busy is actually getting in the way of getting things done.

I’m about to finally finish a series called The Magical Book of Dreams, which I started for Sleep Tight Stories a year and a half ago. It’s a story about a girl whose father disappears, and she goes off to find and then rescue him. I found it very hard to write, and my writing style changed about five times throughout the time I have been writing it. Though a mess, it’s proven to have a following, and we often get requests for when the next chapter is coming.

I read an excerpt that at the bi-weekly meeting of the Montague Writing Group. I don’t think they came away impressed, and they had some helpful feedback.

Next, I hope to publish it in print and ebook, but because it’s so messy, I think it’s going to cost a fortune to have it edited. Once done, the publishing part should be more straightforward than the other stories I have written, which occupy the space between board and chapter books. They will also require more illustrations.

The other continuing series is The Transfer Student, about a girl who moves to Canada from Mars. I started this series after I was inspired by Patti Larsen’s Cat City, which we published and are re-mastering as time permits. The Transfer Student is far less developed and will take considerable time to complete before it’s finished. The story never explicitly states the location, but I will somehow find a way to weave Charlottetown into the story.

By the time both of these series reach their respective end points, it will be the end of June, and it will be time for a couple of weeks of working outside.

I’m working on trying to change my mindset. A mental hack perhaps. I am trying to put certain aspects of my life into mental buckets. When there is time to devote to that “bucket,” I’ll take the cover off and devote whatever cognitive capacity I have at that moment to that bucket. Perhaps this is called mindfulness, or living in the moment? I have yet to really look into the proper labels. In a way, it’s related to not taking your work home with you.

What I have found is that I have a tendency towards workaholism in the sense that I cannot disengage from work-related problems, likely due to some underlying issues like anxiety or perfectionism. I tend towards rumination – I dwell too much on problems, primarily in our business.

I think the underlying anxiety I feel is related to age and the question that Sheryl once asked, “If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?” A question I don’t have an answer to. There is also a tinge of anger towards the source of many of our problems, something I will write about later.

I recently shared with Camren one of the methods I was taught many years ago, related to musical performance. Often, problems creep into your playing as a musician, or perhaps there is a particular music passage that you always play poorly. Sometimes it’s stage fright. These issues become even more acute the more you focus on them, and it can get to the point that you can hardly function at all.

I was taught early to be a systems thinker. What are you doing holistically? What process to being better are you taking? Almost universally, when I focused on the process, the problems went away.

That’s the approach I am going to try to take again. The first step is to stop this incessant focus on the problem and just try to be good (which is good enough) at what I want to do.

I’ve been struggling lately with a new schedule and the reality that my early mornings spent drinking coffee and running through the trails near Cardigan are coming to a close. I knew it would be a tough year, but waking at 3 so I can drive Camren to early morning training has worsened my cognitive decline due to lack of sleep. All this also means that I have found myself way behind schedule.

I was sitting at my desk with a story due 3 hours later on Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t have time to continue a series I had started, and I was stuck trying to come up with anything else. So, I relented and opened ChatGPT.

I subscribe to ChatGPT, and it has saved me from having to pay someone to do research or spend an hour on Google so I can write one sentence based on fact. It’s pretty good at giving me ideas for AD copy, too.

If someone asked me, and I realize no one would, what are you good at, I would say, nothing really. I might add I am empathetic and have some creativity (like we all do).

I entered into ChatGPT a long prompt asking for story ideas, and it returned a list that was so complete I didn’t feel qualified to write them. I asked for something simpler, and it delivered again. It’s more creative than I am.

Defeated, I went and prepared dinner.

I’ve already been replaced.

We never really stopped working but we took a selfie to commemorate our showered return to work last week.

Part of my motivation. I value greatly who I work with and its very difficult to know how well you will get along with the team in any company you might join.

… No bosses or investors to tell me what to do. Just me and my customers. And no-one else to share the profits with, apart from the tax man.

The downside is that you don’t always have someone to bounce ideas off and it can be a little isolating at times. Nothing is perfect. …

The place in which you work makes a difference as to how you deal with isolation. I find Charlottetown to be a very difficult place to do the work we do and have often considered moving to a place where there is a community of like minded people, or organizations to interact with. But life is not all about work so we stay.

I like creating products. So I created a job around that, with a conscious decision not to take on any employees. A ‘lifestyle’ business.

I like this framing; creating a job around doing what you love doing.

What do you call a solitary entrepreneur?

My love of coffee and the vision I have for my for my professional life converge.

… Instead of privileging the pursuit of profit, craft businesses and professionals are part of the rise of creative professions. They are driven by esthetic engagement, creative expression and an aspiration for quality.

Craft work gives professionals the opportunity to create unique products that align with their personal visions. This helps the makers distinguish themselves and express their identity through their work.

The craft revolution helped develop the market for specialty coffee

I’m experiencing deja vu this morning as some workers next door are sawing, drilling, and generally making as much noise as possible. This as I have a deadline which requires quiet.

In Taiwan, inevitably whenever plans were made to do some concentrated work at home, or take a rest day, or in one case celebrate Christmas, someone somewhere would decide to refurbish their whole apartment. Some neighbours would do it multiple times a year. This of course involved lots of drilling of concrete and deafening noise. This tendency to create noise whenever it pleased was one of the many reasons that prompted our decision to leave and return to a place with slightly less noise. Except for today of course.

So much has been happening all at once lately, that I think I must add a shit happens clause to my life. Whereby everything gets postponed until all the dust settles.

I’m sitting in St. John at the Second Cup drinking putrid coffee trying to stay awake after a sleepless night. We are here yet again for another few sessions at the Aquatics centre.

I’m supposed to be writing a story about a mouse who is jealous of a dog’s life but when I am tired I am more open to procrastination.

Thursday we signed an agreement with Redcircle for non-exclusive distribution for 3 of our podcasts. If we were more marketing savvy this might warrant a press release, or something similar, but this paragraph with have to suffice. All change entails some risk but the terms and the platform that they gave us makes this an important opportunity. So far the switch has worked seamlessly and the redirects are working as they should.

This agreement also means we are also obligated to publish our funky science podcast, which was a fun experiment for us, and which we have been trying to relaunch for almost 2 years (I can’t believe I have been doing this for that long). There will be less beeps and bops, fart noises and such in this season, and it will focus around Bernice and Papa Bear working on science homework before bed. Bernice and Papa Bear are characters that I created for Sleep Tight Stories, and which I hope to have in print over the summer.

My son asked me last night what a graphic designer does, and I gave him the standard definition that floats around visual communication and the mediums in which they generally work.

He then asked me if this is what I do or what I call myself.

I said no, though it once was close to what I once did (my concentration in grad school was also visual communication) but it’s not a title that I would have or would use now. I left it at that because I didn’t really know what else to say. He knows what I do, but I guess as part of this foolish CEO class they take in high school they discuss job titles and he is trying to find how to fit my square peg in their round holes.

The work I do today ticks a lot of boxes for me. We are a success in so far that we have built products that people love. Unfortunately, despite making an income that should be enough (but isn’t), from work that I could continue doing till my mind turns to mush, I made a decision a while back that the likelihood that I can continue is pretty low.

Last year I ran a research project, interviewing 15 different people, local and remote, to get a sense of job prospects, their methods of success, and how I might now fit in the grand scheme of things. The reason to do such a thing was I guessed I would soon need to become an employee, not an employer. I analysed and abstracted the results, which in turn gave me action items. But I didn’t take action because I was having a great time doing what I was doing.

I don’t care much for job titles, if you ask what I do, I just say I make products for kids. But many employers seem to care and computers that scan CV’s care.

Much of the work I do still involves design at some level, but I’m not a graphic designer, nor UX, nor a product designer (whatever that is). Nor am I podcast producer or audio engineer. I’m certainly not a CEO. None of these levels of abstraction seem to work with me; maybe I’ll just string together a bunch of words like they used to do years ago in startups like (but add product and UX for SEO): Dream (Product) Alchemist, (UX) Happiness Engineer or a title used years ago when I was at the Creativity Lab, Creative Disruptor.

I haven’t had to dress well for work in over 20 years, with smart casual being as fancy as ever needed. Mostly my uniform of choice has been jeans and a t-shirt, maybe leather shoes if necessary. But a combination of working alone and the pandemic has created a whole new level of comfort. Sweat pants, comfy sandals and running socks are now the norm for me. I get some looks from other olds like myself when I’m shopping for groceries, but I could care less. This habit is here to stay.

I started my holiday not with sitting still but with cleaning the whole house, taking all the extra stuff’s laying around out to storage, installing some new pieces on the wall and generally doing things that kept me moving and busy. It’s excruciatingly difficult to not do something.

Eventually I calmed down a bit and Christmas Day was spent preparing for our afternoon dinner and watching bad movies and TV. The only close family we have left on the Island is my 90 year old uncle who came over for a socially distanced dinner. He left with enough food and sweets to get him through January.

Perhaps it’s reverse culture shock, but I’m still not convinced with the “be kind to yourself take a break” culture that seems to be so common on the Island. I do feel energized today, despite not sleeping well, and am looking forward to a full day of work tomorrow. To contradict myself, they might be on to something.

When I was in Asia I was big on resisting the prevailing attitudes on work. I wanted hobbies, time for outside activities, and time to think. It’s strange to me that once I arrived in Canada, a place where you can’t find people because they are on coffee break, I became what I often wasn’t before.

While I don’t expect I will start taking weekends off anytime soon, I do plan on taking time off like this more often.

In the Spring of this year I finally came to the realization that the work I was doing, though rewarding, was at best a side hustle and decided to make some changes. Ideas of what to do are easy, ideas always are, but I didn’t really trust my own intuition and decided to ask for help.

So I started a design research project of sorts. Which though odd, makes sense to me since I use design thinking in most areas of my life. In total I interviewed about 12 different people, some of whom knew me, but none of whom have ever worked with me. Most were employed in tech, design, or were entrepreneurs. These were “casual conversations with a purpose”, short, and very open ended. I had no script.

The results were a wall of data which I further distilled to 2 categories, each with 3 data points each.

So I knew how and what to do. But I didn’t take action because all of sudden we started to make money podcasting.

The funny thing about living in Canada is that more money is not always a positive. It has to be a lot more money.

In our first year we made next to nothing, but had almost zero expenses. In our 2nd year, we doubled our income but we added a huge increase in expenses which negated the increase. In our upcoming 3rd year we see a large increase in revenue but now any increases will be absorbed by taxes, depending on how, or if I take a salary.

Yesterday over coffee we looked at the business, our finances and talked more about our future. We lead a modest lifestyle with the majority of our money going to support our mental and physical health. The thought of living here long term, leading the lifestyle we wanted, was a risk, the economics of which no longer exist.

I don’t know other families in Stratford well enough to ask how they manage, but I do know that we make far above the median income and just break even. We can’t approach the same lifestyle we had in Taiwan, nor could we survive on my wife’s salary like we frequently did there.

So we have started planning for an alternative future, one that includes living elsewhere, but also includes me working for someone else, which I admit is attractive, and/or working multiple jobs.

The future is basically more, not less work.

I’m burned out and reached my limit. With the exception of my wedding anniversary I have not to my knowledge taken a day off since last Christmas.

There has always been a bit of darkness to my personality, lurking in the background of my form of introversion, and sometimes exhibited by moodiness, or by being overly pragmatic, or once at it’s worst, mild depression.

Lately, it’s been more akin to burnout, which is what I have been feeling for a number of weeks now. It shades my perspective of living here and life in general.

My lack of running due first to injury, than the near constant horrible weather (an excuse), has not helped. When I move and do something I feel good. When I don’t accomplish much I can feel the darkness encroaching on my mood.

The conditioning workouts at Crossfit help, but working myself to physical exhaustion, last night I felt like throwing up, doesn’t have the same lasting effect as before.

So for 4 days I am going to try and do nothing, except clean the house, read, and binge watch tv. That’s this years Christmas gift. The hope is that this will be a recharge of sorts and that it will enable me to continue doing good work in what is going be a very busy new year.

I’m sitting here at what is becoming my second office trying a soy milk Latte, after tasting which I remember that I have always hated soy milk. The kids love of all things soy never took hold with me.

Today is supposed to be a day of writing, but with writing being my worst skill and with no real deadline, I’ve done every other possible task.

Perhaps next I should go home and clean out my son’s closet.

When I first arrived in Fuzhou I was required to stay in a dorm in the city – they had my passport for a couple weeks so I little choice as hotel stays are bit more strict in China than say the former Queens Arms Inn (which based on experience was of similar quality). Luckily the apartment I had later was in a different class all together. I remember being a bit salty when I walked into the room, but though I was recruited, I was still considered a local management hire and with their obsession with harmony, deserving of the same treatment as everyone else.

25+ yrs earlier, Sheryl’s tiny one room apartment in Antigonish had a similar arrangement in the bathroom which seemed more fun at the time.

I watched this last night and it brought back memories. Particularly the constant messages that you had to answer no matter the day or time. As a foreigner I had been given different expectations, but if everyone else on your team is working, it’s pretty hard to walk away. This work ethic was not limited to China, it was the norm in many companies in Taiwan as well. I still remember the first time I saw the Startup Zone in Charlottetown, it was just past 5pm and the place was dark and empty. I couldn’t believe that people at the beginnings of building a company would leave work before 5pm. And that in summer, so many office workers would be on their way home at 4:30pm.

No getting lost in blue sky white cloud induced daydreams in this space. It’s all business. What we do need is a neon sign with our logo to give it a more pro-podcaster/designer vibe. ;)

Working long after everyone else went home.

Every design office that has a team of researchers keeps this mess on display, seemingly to show that something is being done – to make the invisible insights visible for others to try and understand. I think we kept these whiteboards populated for 2 months after the project ended in the off chance the VP of design might pop by.

I had my first session with Focusmate today, a service that was introduced to me a while back as a means to keep me accountable while doing those tasks that I generally abhor, and thus delay until the last possible moment.

During my first year back on the Island I was in the midst of a work crisis. I was doing so many different little things, attending far too many events, had no real deadlines, and no one to answer to. The structure and extreme pressure of my previous workplaces were gone and I was languishing.

This wasn’t a new problem, as I’ve tried working independently from home at various times, for over 20 years. I think seeing Sandra Bullock sitting on a beach with a Powerbook, miraculously connected to the Internet, in The Net, might have started it all. I tried just about every productivity hack, software, and method available and am a self-professed expert in most. While they certainly help with organizing the things that I needed to do, they were useless when it came to keeping me accountable.

The problem has been largely solved – I can be as productive alone as I was with a sociopathic CEO and overly ambitious team members. Developing my own work structure and self-discipline has been one of my successes over the course of the pandemic. Too much so, as I became the workaholic I was when competing with others.

But now that I am working in my own space, without any distraction whatsoever, I find I miss the little bit of human interaction you get when you work around other people. The noise. The annoyances. I also learn a great deal by simply observing others in work or public space. Perhaps Focusmate could fill this role?

I found my first session … weird. Beyond a check-in and a wrap-up you don’t actually talk or listen. You just stare at this head on the screen from time to time, like a voyeur who has commandeered a strangers webcam. I can see where it might help with accountability but it feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole for my use case.

At $5/month it seems like a ridiculous value, so I’m going to give a few more sessions a try and see how it changes my work habits.

We’ve recently moved in to a small office space in the bowels of a building on Victoria Row. The landlord was gracious enough to give us a couple weeks to get a feel for the place before we start paying rent and so far it’s working out well.

The small space should serve as both a working space for me, and once built, a voice-over booth for Sheryl, and possibly others. With our small home seemingly being more office than living space it became clear that constantly working from home was not tenable over the long term. That and having to constantly schedule our recording sessions based on others’ quiet times had us looking for alternatives.

We looked at recording studios, and shared spaces, but though the costs were doable, they didn’t make much sense. It also didn’t solve the problem of having 3 desks littering our home.

We also found a new house but since we are both essentially self-employed, we decided to not take on more risk. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

This means no more permanent desk at the StartUp Zone. I’ve had a great deal there for a couple of years, and might have stayed on into the fall, but with the organization in such disarray, I couldn’t count on having a desk there from one week to the next.

The only downside to the new office is the solitude. That can in part be alleviated by daily trips to a café, but something tells me that customers might not be interested in hearing “problems at work” from a stranger.

I’m sitting here in what is usually a quiet office (few come to the Startup Zone anymore) trying to test the mix of some audio, when sound of a drill hitting pavement reverberates through my skull. Unlike Taiwan this noise is outside on the street instead of your upstairs neighbour changing the layout of their kitchen for the 5th time in a year. I try to test the mix of our audio on devices that our listeners will most likely be using, including a phone speaker, and this requires some quiet. Though I suppose not every listeners environment would be as quiet as Charlottetown at night so this is perhaps a good test.

The view from my apartment window in China. I wore a N95 mask regularly for entirely different reasons than we do today. Eventually it became inconvenient, I became complacent, and as a result, I have no doubt my lungs are filled with all manner of micro-garbage. It’s scenes like this which help me appreciate what we have here on the Island. Often when outside I simply stand and stare at the deep blue skies in appreciation.

I found our constant attention to WeChat both fascinating and frustrating.

I worked in the design centre, not finance, and was in a less developed province, so while this made many things slightly more relaxed much of what is related by Zara Zhang rings true.

“Work”, as we know it, is basically a struggle to reply to WeChat messages. On any given day, I probably receive several hundred WeChat messages (this is not counting large WeChat groups) for work. Business plans, legal documents, and due diligence files are sent over WeChat. It is very common for professionals to have tens of thousands of unread messages on WeChat. Consider it your email inbox, except that every sentence within an email is broken down into separate messages, so the number of unread messages multiplies. Since WeChat messages come at all times and many require immediate response, people are constantly interrupted and distracted during meetings.
What is it like to work in China? via Jan Chipchase

.. or in my case too much time.

In 2018 I was sitting in perhaps one of the worlds great cafés drinking tasty coffee and working on an app called Sleep Tight Stories. An app that would get finished, but sucked, and then transformed itself into one of the worlds most popular podcasts in its niche.

I never could revisit that code, in part because I no longer could understand what I wrote, and because it’s nigh impossible to find someone locally willing to write in Swift (on the cheap). Also, I’ve been working 7 days a week on something else.

Now that I have a few days a week to devote to creating new products, it’s time to revisit that bad code, write a tech. spec, and find someone online to help write the parts I will never be able to do alone.

This photo of my father and I at the CDP was part of a section on garbage in a health/social studies text book.

For all of my adult life, with the exception of that period of time where I would wear a black suit to the office, my definition of work wear consisted at its most fancy, a pair of khakis and leather shoes. For the most part, I’ve dressed the same as when I was a kid – jeans, t-shirt and sneakers.

Today, I stayed home and didn’t make my weekly trip to the town centre for meetings and general conversation. But I still decided to dress for the office. Which meant ditching the comfy gym shorts and old t-shirt, and donning gym pants and a fresh sweat shirt. I don’t think it’s possible to get any more casual.

I’m in full support of this anti-fashion, super comfortable work from home office attire.

Don’t multi-task browning meat, cooking vegetables and siting at your desk editing audio.

On Sunday I cooked a turkey we had in the freezer as a protein hedge in case the world came apart at the start of the pandemic. Cooking a turkey in of itself is nothing special, I cook most meals, but trying to multitask while browning a turkey proves yet again that multitasking is largely a myth.

With headphones on I heard a strange sizzling sound and came out of my daze to realize that I was actually cooking something. Water was boiling all over the stove. And the oven had been set to broil. A minute longer and we might have been met with disaster. Luckily the turkey, despite some charing, was moist and as delicious as turkey can be.

I like trying different ways to organize my day. My current system using Omnifocus is getting tired and I’m now somewhat blind to the ever increasing list of tasks tagged “today”. So I have been having fun, as much fun as you can writing lists, trying different analogue ways to capture my attention and decrease the cognitive load associated with having to remember to do things. I saw this nifty little pad at Staples and almost purchased it until I realized that it was missing two days. Obviously this pad was created for people other than myself.