Bursts of Focus + the /now Page

If you know me at all, you know that I work in deeply intense bursts. I get super excited about something, and within an instant, my entire cognitive processing is focused on said thing. This is a gift and a curse, and I've felt both sides recently.

For the purpose of this note, you'll see that I'm currently in a burst of sharing my work. The rest of this year, in fact, you're going to get a dump of what I've been up to lately. The desk* has become too cluttered, and we need to clear it.

I've also been talking with brilliant, world-involved people on a daily basis, and…wow! There's something so small I can do to ease the cognitive load — share what I’m doing right now, so I can find the people I’m looking for. I have to credit Tom Critchlow for the nudge-via-osmosis, and Derek Sivers for the initial concept.

There's honestly so much to catch you up on since October, so I'll just direct you to certain places for the time being. You can choose what you want to spend your time learning about.

  • I am a published author for the first time.

    • I wrote about my process for thinking through problems — always on paper — in the Future of Text Vol. II. The list of contributors is borderline earth-shattering — Alan Kay, Barbara Tversky, Ted Nelson, and Vint Cerf, to name a few of the luminaries. Then there's me. Hm…

    • You can purchase on Amazon, but here’s a link to a free PDF for the entire book.

  • My research work is invigorating and all-encompassing.

    • I'm spending time with Joel Chan and Rob Haisfield on most days, working to find how to design tools for the process of synthesis — both for individuals and collective groups.

    • Part of that is deeply reading and grasping the academic research around this topic. Part is testing new tools for thought and understanding how they’re built. The best part, though, is interviewing brilliant people doing the work on both those sides.

    • If we get any of this right, we'll lay a foundation for better decision-making on complex topics and the future of learning tools (which is obviously near to me).

  • Because of this and my future dreams, I started a newsletter.

    • As part of the newsletter, I shared my ideas about giving gifts differently — as propellers for a person's life.

      • Then, a half dozen people reached out, and this thing that surely can't scale delighted them.

    • I also built my own computer, which spawned a friend to do the same.

      • Now we’re gathering millions of tweets a week. Build the data lake, young man.

    • I documented how that came to be, through the lens of me designing physical environments that enable me to think and create at higher levels.

  • I designed and taught a free cohort course on turning notes into insights with the rising tide of networked notebook tools. I learned how slow I can talk. Watch at 1.25x speed, at least :).

    • It dawned on me that this is a bit of a trend — much of my past has been designing unique cohort experiences for:

      • leadership, onboarding, and strategy trainings at Fortune 500s (Merck KGaA in Germany, Olympus, Boston Consulting Group) and fun companies I like (Humane Society, Red Ventures).

      • MBA Strategy courses at major universities (Indiana University, University of Florida, DePaul University, Pepperdine University, EDHEC in France, and New Jersey Institute of Technology, to name a few),

      • early career Product Managers, designers and engineers (the aforementioned co.lab course),

      • and recently, enterprise learning communities (Knowledge Graph Conference)

    • Occasionally I forget how much I’ve done in certain areas! Reach out if you want to scale a successful cohort course.

  • And later this week, I'll share the yearly wrap.

Phew. I’ve been busy. It’s been nice.

But wait, there’s WIP…

Something new for me is the ongoing release of unfinished work. I did so many other projects that are still floating, and quite frankly, I need to clear the slate. Consider this an open call to work on any of these projects.

  • I wrote about the Future of Educational Games, designing what I thought to be are the base principles of learning experience design.

    • But I hadn't published until now because, well, something is missing. I can't quite spot it, but I welcome your eyes and brains helping me put it together. We’re building for the kids (of all ages), after all.

    • I wrote this through the lens of CapsimInbox, which should be a massive product at this point. The tool is for real good if you want to create a text+media choose-your-own-adventure.

      • Inbox is currently marketed as an email game for corporate training, but it can do virtually any RPG/day-in-the-life building.

      • No, I don’t work there anymore. Yes, I love the tool and core team.

  • I'm in the process of mapping my ideal collaborative environment, and I think it looks like an Academy.

    • This is heavily inspired by Paul Johnson, and everything he and his twin brother, Mark, are trying to bring to the world.

    • Paul's own explorations into personality, social interaction, and grand cooperation are documented in his monthly Chaos Map essays, which I can not recommend highly enough.

  • I have plenty of thoughts on what our tools should enable us to do, and seeing as I spend most of my time researching, I began designing a research engine that I would love to see someone riff on and build out.

    • I will eventually publish a refined version, but I’m posting here to get your thoughts.

  • So many things are obvious to me, and not someone else...just like there are obvious things to them, and not me! We all have different backgrounds! This is an ongoing list of what I find obvious that I imagine can help you.

  • Evan and I compiled recordings from a weekend hackathon building a baseline version of [[for thought.]], a set of pomodoro experiences to help you think in layers.

  • I’ve been playing with web components, with a lens towards building a citation layer for the web — like Quotebacks, but expandable to provide context about what you’re reading.

  • A web3 FAQ, built from friends' questions of how my income is growing without a full-time job, is floating around somewhere.

  • I wrote ~120 Twitter Drafts that didn't get published this year...and recently found Twitter deletes these. How!

  • I'm always harping on Spotify to make a more intuitive tool, and here's the gist of what I want them to do — prioritize the listener experience.

  • My design philosophy and best practices on game design, cohort course design, and incentive design are under ongoing construction here.

  • Lastly, I’m still writing code 5-10 days a month, mostly small scripts that make my life better. In fact, one such script helped in this piece!

    • In my research writing, I’m required to be much more specific than my natural conversational tone. So, I wrote an editing assistant to spot vague language and play back to me after I finish a draft.

    • I tested on this update. I chose five general words I frequently use (it, something, there, thing, this) and ran my editing assistant through.

    • The results? Initially I had 62 general words. On second pass, I cut out 21.

    • Constantly on the mission to build helpful tools. This passed my initial sniff test. The piece reads better!

Part of this exercise, I suppose, is to clear my own head for the future. These ideas clearly didn't reach a level of completeness or quality that I held myself to, so I'm trying a more radical approach — sharing everything, including the rough parts.

Ah. A joyful close to 2021. More to come on Friday.

BL

Footnotes

*The desk is a stand-in for life, here. My actual desk is messy, but my mental desk feels like a flooded basement connected to an open fire hydrant. Usually this happens when I try things that don't scale, which is the exact world I'm living in now. I’ll probably drown if I don’t do something, so I decided to open the flood gates.

Brendan Langen