budgeting my time and words, plus consulting

I intend for this post to be non-philosophical. Let's see. 😏

I missed writing yesterday, which was pretty much set as soon as I filled the morning with other things. (In the context of my just-this-week intention to write every day, and of already having a scheduled evening activity.) I'm getting a pretty good sense of what is and isn't going to happen in a day, and how to be honest about what will fit in what time, as a kind of side-effect of setting daily Complice intentions. Which, by the way, has been fun! If you start from a "task/todo manager" mindset, think of it as "goals but without the guilt" - it's very respectful and supportive without any (self or other) shaming. I now have Workflowy integrated with Complice for the actual future TODOs that I need to keep track of, where they sit in their own little list and automatically show up as I build my list of intentions each morning.

What is the best ratio of doing to meta-doing time (In general maybe, but mostly for me)? Oops, abstraction already. Well, I'll just say I think it's probably higher than we'd usually think! Agile coaches remind us, one 30-minute retrospective every two weeks is less than 1% of working time. When I've asked "how much time should a team spend getting better at delivering, versus delivering directly?" I get answers like 10% or 20%, and "an hour a day" is about the max I've heard. But "getting better at delivering" is not just skill-building - I think all planning/steering/sensing counts when I say "meta-doing". Heck, it's unclear how meta this writing practice is - I think I'd say at least 60% meta.

I rarely go above 1,000 words here, but rarely find myself done with even one idea in less than 500-700 words. (The Ghost editor has an unobtrusive counter in the bottom-left corner, else I don't think I'd have even considered this topic much.) At least, when I'm not intentionally topic-jumping like I am right now. 😉 On that note, yes I've discovered the "Win+." keystroke to access the OS level unicode-emoji-inserter.

I have an idea to expand my open-consulting practice beyond employee activism into organizational culture development and community organizing in a broad sense. The post-Agile Future of Work stuff, combined with the Human Connection stuff, combined with Adult Development stuff is a large and powerful frame for so much dysfunction and so much opportunity. That plus the benefit to my own thinking when I hear about other contexts and/or get to apply these things to diverse challenges - it's pretty much win-win, and I get the additional satisfaction of helping someone and seeing them light up with insight and validation.

Hmm, I'm going to make https://www.bakejam.com/consulting/ right now so the TODO gives me some momentum.