I’m percolating.
Gestating.
Mulling.
Procrastinating.
Whatever you want to call it, I’ve been in this mode for the better part of a week now.
This happens regularly to me - something triggers my subconscious and it starts to take up and more and more mental resources.
When I get phases like this, I’m sort of hopeless: I can’t remember anything, I’m as distractable as - SQUIRREL! - my production nosedives. I almost never seem to get a warning that this is about to happen, just suddenly there I am - feeling like I’ve only got half brain-power.
Typos go up. I’ll find myself staring off into space for who knows how long.
There’s a plus side to this.
When I get like this it’s because I’m figuring something out.
It sounds strange to say I don’t know what it is I’m figuring out, but historically, whatever pops into my head on the flip-side is fully formed, ready for me to copy down. I used to write papers this way - wander the streets aimlessly for a day or two, come home, sit down & type for a couple of hours before school, come home with an A paper shortly.
Prior to agreeing to have kids I did this.
When I wrote the first scheme for the original Pencilcase CMS, back in 1999, I couldn’t work for a week.
Then in 1 sitting, I wrote the first version of the CMS over about 14 hours, with little to no edits.
So what have I been thinking about lately?
What’s going on back there?
Well, there’s a bunch of stuff going on that are viable candidates for taking over my brain:
- Moving: We might move away.
We might buy a new place in Vancouver.
We definitely want to spend some time away - 3,6,9,12 months, who knows.
The plan for that needs to resolve itself.
- Community: I’ve been thinking a lot about the cross-sections of digital and real-world communities.
My experience as a terribly shy human vs. a fairly chatty avatar.
How to correlate the two, how to bridge the various communities I participate in on- and off-line.
- CMS: The current world of CMS’s don’t really match the type of tools many of my clients need.
Nor do the social CRMs.
Nor does the issue-tracking software we and they all use.
But they all form part of a solution to a real issue.
And I feel like I’m on the hunt for a lightweight suite to handle lots of basic needs.
- mobile & responsive design: Having now built a couple of responsive sites, in addition to 2 distinct “mobile” sites in the last few months, there’s a path there that I haven’t quite found.
This is closely related to the CMS problem: solving the issue of ongoing site existence & emerging break points & client-control of content and so on.
So I’m in the forest, I’m looking for the path. I keep catching glimpses of the shore out there, where the horizon is clear and present, but I’m not there yet & it’s frustrating.