Should I always start with an italicized intro here?
Hidden Experiments
This blog has gone through a lot of iterations. Its been a Webcomic, Poetry, Photo, Daily Blog (2018-2019), Notes on My Consumption, and now a OPM Letter.
Quite a few fits and starts in hidden in plain sight. However, I’ve built up a nice archive, and my recent push with my Notes has established a good rhythm for regular posting over the past year, albeit for a very small audience. Maybe this latest experiment will be the one to hit. Then again, the earlier experiments have become the established infrastructure for my newer projects, indeed, much of this newsletter is repackaging and publicizing what I’ll have already written.
One of the most enjoyable things about being an OPM has been the autonomy in my job and freedom to experiment. I don’t know if other public works agencies work in this manner, but when I joined the State, my supervisor said all he cared about was that I don’t blow the project schedule or budget and to pay our vendors promptly. Beyond that, be fair to the State.
How liberating!
Standard operating procedures and checklists and processes certainly have their place. As a government agency, we have plenty of all of them. However, it was amazing to be given my own office and the freedom and encouragement to try out new ideas and see if they’d go anywhere.
Usually they don’t. Such as my attempts at utilizing gantt charts for scheduling (too detailed for our needs), spreadsheets as tracking mechanisms for all kinds of minutia (not worth the effort), personal productivity hacks (Pomodoro!), and so on.
But occasionally, something hits. The workflow documents for implementing digital signatures in our agency were invaluable when the pandemic hit. The dead-end random spreadsheets projects gave me the skills to kludge together a life and work tracker that I use at the start and end of every day. During the pandemic, I experimented with weekly check-ins with my architect, and now added another weekly check-in with my supervisor that will be recurring long after we return to the office.
Instead of searching for my next success, maybe I should be looking for my next opportunity to fail. The more of those I grab, the higher the chance I’ll get another hit.
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What are some memorable successes or failures when you were innovating at the office?
Hit Reply and lets chat!
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My OPM notes from February
I came across this quote by John Adams which is simultaneously inspiring and challenging. What are we willing to do in order to free up opportunities for our children?
I’m only an excel expert in my office because because architects are notoriously basic when it comes to spreadsheets. It’s not the most useful skill in my original profession, but my attempts to get better at this program over the decades paid off one night in helping out my colleague.
One from the Archives
The link above for my daily blog experiment was for the first post in that year-long run. However, I also wrote a longer analysis of what I got out of daily blogging at the end of the project. The TL:DR version is that daily blogging has its value but takes up a lot of time, and I stopped because I needed a better balance between consumption and production. Even so, it was a good exercise that led to my current twice a week blog schedule. I strongly recommend that everyone start a daily blog. Cut out social and create your own media.
… and a public domain photo.
