I’ve been falling down the rabbit hole on my iPhone game — again. I’m getting too wrapped up in details: “I should shade this graphic better”, “that would look nice with a color gradient”, “I should extend the Bézier curve perpendicularly to its tangent, not just horizontally”, etc.

This is all, essentially, polish. I still need to do sound and music, for example. It’s just fun to polish because I know how to work with features I’ve already implemented — they have a high tweak/reward ratio.

In professional development, which is what I’m ostensibly doing, there are three(-ish) key project management trail markers you’re looking to hit, the ABCs of game development:

1. Alpha: The game is feature-complete. No new features need to be written, existing code needs debugging. All art/sound assets should exist, if not in final form.
2. Beta: All art/sound assets should be final. Code should be stable and fixes limited to high-priority bugs.
3. Candidate: Good for submission to your publisher. Fixes limited to crashes (shouldn’t exist), guideline violations (breaking the rules of your publisher’s platform), or legal issues.

You then iterate on candidates until one is accepted and released. My game, under these definitions, is still pre-alpha — I’d like to get it there before I leave for Europe next week. Then any work I do on it in Amsterdam will be improvement, not implementation.

I’ve been going through my clothes making three piles: keep, donate, and scrap.

“Scrap” is anything that has a hole, however small. I figure not even the homeless want that stuff. I’ve wanted to make stuffed animals and other toys for a while and I decided that my scrap pile is a good source of materials.

As with any new endeavor, first I had to learn the terminology. I googled around About.com and found a basic workflow…

1. Dismantle fabrics.
2. Design a pattern.
3. Sew the pattern.
4. Decorate.
5. Stuff.

… as well as some info on basic techniques.

Dismantling clothing is relatively difficult because, perhaps rightly, wearable items aren’t designed for disassembly. The basic idea is to take a fabric separator and loosen all the stitches, but I’ve been using an exacto-knife with mixed results (careful not to cut yourself or destroy the fabric).

Pattern design largely involves skills similar to drawing — break the object down into easier component shapes, then render those. A large cylinder, a sphere, and a couple of tubes makes a person, thusly: o+<

Sewing the pattern is difficult, but I just learned a trick: yo-yos. These are little modular chunks that you can just sit there and sew during any kind of downtime, like when your code is building. Yo-yos decouple prep work from a variety of designs. You can dismantle a bunch of fabric, turn it all into yo-yos, and then look at what you have and see what you can make, like witches and Frankensteins.

Decoration is down to taste. I’m experimenting with different kinds of line drawing (which is easy to do with a needle and thread).

Stuff the beast with fiberfill or various kinds of beans, or mechaskeleton & a voicebox. Add electronics and weapons and glowing red LED lights to taste.

I just finished a very promising sales call. Roughly:

Me: So send me a design brief and I’ll fire you off a quote.
Contact: Oh, we uh, don’t have one of those yet…
Me: Oh, well, let’s talk online and I’ll help you guys figure out what you want.

My goal in this interaction is to get them excited (possibly with prototypes) to the point where they say, “look, could you just do it? We want it ASAP and you already know what we’re looking for.”

Fingers crossed — here’s to tracking the work I do “for free” as a tax deduction.

On a more basic HOWTO level, when I make a business call I like to write the person’s name, number, and company at the top of a piece of paper, sketch out some answers to their likely questions, then take notes on what they’re saying during the conversation. The sheet goes in my permanent records when I’m done.

I have a pretty good case of telephone anxiety and a ridiculous amount of planning helps. I find having The Beatles’ Abbey Road medley playing quietly helps too.

Re: Making calls — Tony Robbins sez you should just plan to make one call, an easy one, then call that a success for the day. In the worst cases I send a brief spurt of short personal emails and then try to slip the business communication in while I’m on a roll. Once you see that first call go well you’ll be motivated to keep going — the first one is the problem.

I use the same basic idea, combined with some productivity ideas from my homies in the biz and in grad school, to get the coding ball rolling. Another trick there is to not stress about slacking — just acknowledge it and start with the smallest doable next-task to get the ball rolling again (mixing Robbins, GTD, and a little Buddhist meditation).

Generally I try to organize my task list by “closest time to most money”, which is a finnicky metric you have to figure out for yourself.

CNN has pics of some very tiny home offices for the urban warrior.

Me wantee.

I was talking to Cookie about CNC routers today. I’ve been geeking out so much about two trends that I’ve decided to, you know, do something about them:

1. BC exports too much raw wood.
2. I’ve been really getting into product design.

In essence: I’ve decided to start making things — probably starting with very small scale stuff like toys — out of renewable, farmed, hopefully-cheap, local wood.

But in any case, I’m still focusing on the digital realm (moreso than I have been recently). This is a next-level project. I’m really good at dreaming and I’ve recently stumbled upon a set of golden productivity strategies and tactics that are helping me to deliver. I’m filing this under “in the future, try…”

More later, but if anyone wants to jump on board let me know.

“iPad-ready” has already become a salable business jargon phrase. I closed principle negotiations on a new contract for Samhain today and I was able to use the reality distortion field to judo the meeting into that most-awesome of pre-sales states: excitement.

me: I spent yesterday reading the new iPad documentation and getting up-to-speed on the SDK. Let’s see if we can build an iPad-ready version in 60, oops, I guess now it’s 59, days.

Client: Yes! Sounds fantastic!

Another key technology? Thinking rationally about my own productivity. First, Jill convinced me of an adage I’ve been quoting for a while without, it turns out, truly understanding:

Agenda Books are Weapons that can be used to smash The State*.

Second, through experimentation, I’ve come to the same conclusion as Stefan Sagmeister: unstructured free time isn’t productive (I recommend that link if you’re working overtime regularly). I decided to try the same solution: Scheduling my time like a university student, essentially “giving myself classes” (I suppose that means I should get some kind of review as well).

Through discussion with Jared I thought I’d try having 10 four-hour blocks of time per week, and pre-plot them out on Sunday nights. Photography: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, four hours in the morning.

The immediate payoff, which I didn’t really get until I had tried it, is that structure has a soothing autistic-hugging-machine effect. It adds a dollop of helpful stress to my life, letting me say things like, “gee, I should really get back home it’s time to work on my screenplay“, or, “I schedule my time in ten four-hour blocks per week. I can shuffle some things around to fit your project in”, as I did in that client meeting.

The key for me is to keep things lightweight and email-notification-based. It would be cool if I could set up a Google Calendar that would text & email me (tweet?) scheduling info. Does such a beast exist or did I just invent something?

* I interpret this as “of Affairs”.

Every morning I wake up surrounded by objects. Some of these objects have to be manipulated before I leave for work. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Some of them have to be manipulated in a specific order. Don’t put your pants on before you get in the shower.

I take objects with me when I leave the house. Some are to get to work. Bicycling is more fun in tights. Some are to use at work. It can be hard to keep an ironed shirt crisp. Some are to use during my breaks. Run! Some are to use after work before I get home.

All of these objects need to be transported. How do I handle all these “moving parts”, as David Allen calls them?

• Leave objects where they are used. My toothbrush is by the sink; my climbing gear is in a locker at the climbing gym.
• Use external cognition: remember things by manipulating the environment instead of storing them in my neurons. It’s hard to miss something blocking the door.
• Use rituals: do things in the same way every day so I don’t need to think about them.
• Have backups and contingencies. I love the stack of pressed shirts in Don Draper‘s desk drawer.

One thing I don’t do is check my next actions list. Maybe I need another list for small recurring tasks, organized by phase? But it’s hard to imagine technology that would be seamless enough to not get in the way.

I miss some opportunities to complete next actions. I won’t be dropping my pants off at the dry cleaners today – they’re still in my closet. I forget a few nice-to-have objects per month but so far nothing catastrophic. I don’t worry that much that I’ve forgot something. But I do feel it is a stressful burden to keep my life on track.

Would driving to work help? Is this another sacrifice I’m making for the environment? Can my life be simplified? Can I use more external cognition? Can I do the same actions but interpret them differently to manage my stress?

Gordon Ramsay. Here he is in Boiling Point. Work-ego-will gets things done like mad:

In addition to Ramsay’s cooking shows — Kitchen Nightmares is the best small business how-to show ever made — I’ve been looking at pro-workaholism tips. Most are jokes, some are better.

Here’s one that bugs me constantly. Mores around new technology just aren’t there yet, and no one seems to care:

People and existing conversations trump gadgets and potential conversations.

If you stop a conversation to answer your cell, you’re insulting your partner. I take note of slights like that.

The idea that you can succeed at anything without being a workaholic is slavethink; it’s one of the most destructive ideas people propagate without thought. Ayn Rand wrestled with that bugbear in Atlas, particularly with how the Reardens hobble Hank.

Managing what’s on your todo list is, I suspect, the key to super-productivity. As Cuban says, “you can drown in opportunity”.

Kousin and I are working on… Never mind: “the game is to be sold, not to be told.” I’ll get backatcha when I have news.

Getting Things Done is a task management system that has a significant following. The basic idea is that every task you plan to do in your life should go on a central list ordered by context. Contrast that with naive task management: tasks you’re likely to forget go on lists all over the place ordered by priority (or on aspirational days in your calendar).

The theory is that by getting every task down, you are relieved of the stress of keeping to-do items in your head. Having a central list means you can check it frequently to be confident in your system. Ordering by context lets you use small chunks of time effectively. I’m not exactly sure why important tasks get done, but they do – maybe GTD gets you in a groove of productivity rather than procrastinating against the big thing on the top of your to-do list?

The tasks on your list must be actionable without any prerequisite tasks. The full GTD system has a bunch of mechanisms for tracking subsequent tasks, but I don’t use it. Every task on my list implicitly contains a subsequent task: figure out what to do next. I trust the people I delegate tasks to, so I don’t have a system for tracking follow-ups.

I keep two lists, one for work and one for home: work is ordered by project (because @mydesk is the only context), home is ordered by context. I’m currently using the following contexts: @afterwork, @groceries, @home, @online, @phone, @saturday