I’m in the forest, searching for the shore

Corkscrew tree
Searching for the way through

I’m percolating. Gestating. Mulling. Procrastinating. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve been in this mode for the better part of a week now. This happens regularly to me – something triggers my subconscious and it starts to take up and more and more mental resources. When I get phases like this, I’m sort of hopeless: I can’t remember anything, I’m  as distractable as – SQUIRREL! – my production nosedives. I almost never seem to get a warning that this is about to happen, just suddenly there I am – feeling like I’ve only got half brain-power. Typos go up. I’ll find myself staring off into space for who knows how long.

There’s a plus side to this. When I get like this it’s because I’m figuring something out. It sounds strange to say I don’t know what it is I’m figuring out, but historically, whatever pops into my head on the flip-side is fully formed, ready for me to copy down. I used to write papers this way – wander the streets aimlessly for a day or two, come home, sit down & type for a couple of hours before school, come home with an A paper shortly. Prior to agreeing to have kids I did this. When I wrote the first scheme for the original Pencilcase CMS, back in 1999, I couldn’t work for a week. Then in 1 sitting, I wrote the first version of the CMS over about 14 hours, with little to no edits.

So what have I been thinking about lately?  What’s going on back there? Well, there’s a bunch of stuff going on that are viable candidates for taking over my brain:

  • Moving: We might move away. We might buy  a new place in Vancouver. We definitely want to spend some time away – 3,6,9,12 months, who knows. The plan for that needs to resolve itself.
  • Community: I’ve been thinking a lot about the cross-sections of digital and real-world communities. My experience as a terribly shy human vs. a fairly chatty avatar. How to correlate the two, how to bridge the various communities I participate in on- and off-line.
  • CMS: The current world of CMS’s don’t really match the type of tools many of my clients need. Nor do the social CRMs. Nor does the issue-tracking software we and they all use. But they all form part of a solution to a real issue. And I feel like I’m on the hunt for a lightweight suite to handle lots of basic needs.
  • mobile & responsive design: Having now built a couple of responsive sites, in addition to 2 distinct “mobile” sites in the last few months, there’s a path there that I haven’t quite found. This is closely related to the CMS problem: solving the issue of ongoing site existence & emerging break points & client-control of content and so on.

 

So I’m in the forest, I’m looking for the path. I keep catching glimpses of the shore out there, where the horizon is clear and present, but I’m not there yet & it’s frustrating.

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