Weeknotes 70 - Racoon Candyfloss

The past few weeks, I've been trying to reduce down my to-do lists by actually doing the tasks and, more importantly, not adding new ones.

It hasn't been totally successful but not a complete failure either.

Some of the things on the to-do list sit around not being done because, in most cases, I've overcomplicated things. One example of that is my online shop; I had all these ideas about having different seasons, different collections & categories, and how I'd have a whole range of things in each.

What happened, in the end, it that I just got overwhelmed by doing anything, but at the start, I didn't know that was why. Sometimes it just takes a long while of repeatedly asking, "why am I not doing this thing?" and trying to be honest with the answers.

My new solution is to get rid of all the everything and aim to have only 16 items in the shop at a time; there's currently just eight, I think. However, now I'm feeling better about this new simple solution that I'm less overwhelmed by the task of getting the ones that have been waiting for ages sorted.

That's the theory anyway.

The aim is to now go and simplify more of my processes and beliefs. There are probably books about this, but I'm still too busy to read them. Perhaps once I've got it all done, I'll have time.

The new studio move is going well. I still don't have enough shelves; more are due to arrive from IKEA soon. So things are still at the old studio because there's no point bringing them over as there's nowhere to put them.

The NFTs thing has been interesting. I don't think I've written a Weeknotes since that went down, or at least since writing about it and adding it into my end-of-month profit/loss report.

In theory, I've made some money by selling digital art, but that money is in the form of magic-sky-money, and I have a feeling at some point it'll be a bit like this racoon trying to wash his candyfloss.

Although last Sunday I sold some more and raised £10k/$14k for Women Who Code, who very sensibly unlike the racoon above turned the sky-money into real cash ASAP. I got this lovely email from them with this in.

These funds will provide assistance to 520 WWCode members for a full year giving them technical development events and access to life-changing coding scholarships.

It's nice to be able to turn this somewhat weird moment into something useful; no matter how things end up, that above is at least a thing that definitely happened.

I get to try it all over again next month, but goodness knows how everything will be then.

Because these weeknotes don't take me long enough and I often don't find the time to do them, I decided that to do a video version that takes even longer to do was a brilliant idea — starting a weekly "vlog" over on YouTube like it's 2015 or something.

https://youtube.com/revdancatt

The main reason for doing it is that at some point, I want to make tutorials on how to do things with the pen plotter, and I would like them to be at least good.

I figured making slap-dash vlogs is a fun way of learning how to use the camera, microphones, video editing and finally, YouTube. And by doing it this way, I can get a bunch of mistakes over and done with before I start trying to make the proper ones.

It's been pretty full-on these past few weeks. I took Friday off to do a whole lot of nothing, which carried on into Saturday. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it feels like a (UK based) holiday is something that could happen this year, but, well, you know.