I am taking action into helping game designers out there with Game Design Doctor. Lots of things on the ideas box, but the first one is providing direct help. Not by typical consulting but with coaching techniques.
Five weeks ago I started to work with my first coachee and today we did some evaluation and revised the objectives. The experience is great and it really feels good to help others doing something I like to do. It's also very valuable learning since I have to make an effort into taking myself out of the equation and not giving easy and cheap advice based on my experience. I's interesting to hear, ask and lead the other to find his own questions and answers.
Now it's time to find one more coachee.

That is a table I keep in my files to have a quick overview of projects or experiments I have open. While reviewing the objectives of this blog I though if this is a creative lab I should sate more clearly what are the "experiments" going on. It may not be completely up to date sometimes but it is there if I need it. Now, I can use it as a foundation for a new way of representing what is going on in the lab.

I am going deep with rethinking the blog and there is more work on the way.  I got a bit stuck and I am using extensively a self-coaching technique (long story short, writing a dialogue with myself), it works great. If I don't get to the conclusions in the next two days (before the end of the week) I will just start to do "random creativity" posts to fill up.

Avast! Is this a map to the greatest treasure of all? Aye, it is! A map for motivation.

Well, it is actually a conceptual map to deconstruct motivation in two different dimensions providing some insight into different kinds of motivations. Understand better how your motivation works applying your own experiences into the map.

I am sharing with you the steps in the process of rethinking the blog.  You may not find very interesting reading what changes I decide to make to my goal, audience and content in my blog. But you can see how to set up a thinking framework and a process to do that.

In this first step it's time to look at the data. Search for it and gather it all together to better see the patterns.

I am at a turning point, which I already defined to be spanning through, at least, three areas of my present everyday life and my vision. The blog is one of the things I am rethinking. 
I am going to share all the process in a series of posts. Starting with how do I set up a thinking framework:

First, I will describe some data about the blog, which I will analyze and meditate about, driving me to the setting of a new goal for the blog.

In the last weeks I have been meditating almost every weekday for some minutes after breakfast. It helps me to face the day with more perspective, avoiding to do just the first task I stumble upon.

Something I usually do is to count from 1 to 10 while visualizing the numbers. I do this when starting or finishing my meditation session because it helps to stop the noise and get focused.

During today's session the images of the numbers were quite vivid, so when I finished I felt encouraged to make this video which can actually help you to get in focus, or silence your mind, in 1 minute.

Some days counting to ten has taken me several minutes since I get to breath very, very slowly. Another interesting benefit is that the noise coming from your subconscious when doing the exercise tend to be quite revealing. It is like receiving a message which tells you were your energy is going and that you must take some action.

I have been dissecting the situation with the help of my girlfriend/fiancé to find different fronts where I want to take action to improve and keep moving forward. Today we have managed to define at least three courses of action for what seemed a tangled and unique situation, formerly known as "what I do". I think thats three areas are mostly everything, but I cannot be sure yet until I finish making all the questions to see the situation from all the possible angles.

As I was talking in yesterday's post Turning point. The goal of this blog has been accomplished. I have managed to build the habit. But there are some things that the blog needs in order to keep being useful:

• A new goal, to be defined with questions such as: What I have learn until now thanks to the blog? How will I use this new habit to work towards my vision?
• Change the time when I usually write and publish the posts. Which is usually at the end of the day because I either don't manage my time better or because I have get used to talk about what I have done during that day and so, it seems logical to make it at the end of the day.
• Work in batches and have a reserve of posts. In case I keep posting daily , which I feel is something I want to keep doing.

That is, to start working more seriously on a project that can be useful and profitable. Since making an income to live from blogging is not my first choice, I have put to rest some plans to market and promote the blog (because I have a small audience) until I define if the new goal of the blog really needs it.

Separating the search of an income stream from the blog is important since I have been slowly believing that I need more readers to be able to turn the blog into a source of income.

I have around 7 projects or topics which I have been talking about in the blog, plus 2 more which I haven't, that are candidates to be explored to help someone needs.

I need to make better use of my time, specially when doing personal, everyday house chores. Because I am at home most of the day, the everyday tasks such as cooking, cleaning and so on, tend to be around me always and they define my daily schedule more than I have wanted to admit until now.
Because of my inabilty to manage "house chores time" I am also having problems on how to use my "productive time" efficiently. So I am going to use the sames steps I would use to improve a creative or business process to improve the way I face the daily chores:

1. Track
2. Analysis
3. Test improvements
4. Evaluate and control

For example, one of the most time consuming chores is to decide what to cook according to our diet, what we have eaten recently and what ingredients I have available. I haven't succeded in preparing weekly meal plans. Which would be ver useful when doing the grocery list. What we usually use as a reference is what we have bought the last time (specially when buying online) instead of what we have consumed. So, from now on I will be tracking what things we consume each day, instead of trying to figure out what to eat the next week when doing the groceries. 
Another thing I have done is to prepare three check lists in a whiteboard with daily, weekly and monthly tasks for personal and house chores.

Just one simple, and memorable, sentence said today at the NLP course:

So you better have your attention aimed at something useful and productive. This is just another view on the positive thinking philosphy. If you have your attention to how to solve the problems, then you are giving your energy to the problems. 

Last Friday I posted my first mini-product for sale a writers tracking spreadsheet to help improve productivity when writing. Apparently my mind thought all the work poured there surely deserved missing the post on the following day. Yep, that's the second day I miss the daily post. I was the whole Saturday working (or fighting) to develop the web for my upcoming wedding and at the end of the day I just wanted to go to bed and keep my reading of A storm of swords.

Today I had another session to work on the Oppa! video project, but the weather was so awful that we ended in a cafeteria and nothing worthy to be speak of was made. Because of the way the project is this was expected to happen anytime. I wonder why do I want to make a project that relies so much in the weather if I am in the UK.

I have also been writing, and using my brand new and cool tracking spreadsheet for the first time. I wrote 1583 words in two sessions, with an overall speed of 590 words per hour. I was working on character notes and synopses. I don't have enough data yet to draw conclusions, but it seems that I can spot a pattern appearing. My speed is a bit higher on my second session during the day. I will keep an eye on that since this is just a vague hypothesis, I don't even have proper data about long sessions or days in a row working.

See you tomorrow.