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Invisible Glowsticks

You know, 8tracks looks like fun.

Invisible Glowsticks

Keeping me honest

One of the problems with being only slighty disaffected with your career path (my job is fine, but I’m so over being a public servant more generally) is that although you know you need a change, you don’t know what you want.

I have a habit of making grand schemes in my brain. I don’t like to share my grand schemes and future plans until I have fleshed them out and made sure I knew my direction in great detail. This has the unfortunate side effect that it becomes very easy to wimp out of said schemes as I hadn’t told anyone about them in the first place.

This is something of a brain dump of things I want to achieve/learn/do/not suck at in 2010. It’s April, and I’ve already not done about 6 things I had meant to do by this time, so this is long overdue. I’m posting as a way of providing all (… counting …) 4 followers of this Tumblr the opportunity to call me out on my bullshit, hypocrisy, laziness and procrastination whenever they think I’m skiving way from what I want to do.

I want to:

• read all of my unread interaction and web design, advertising, marketing, creative thought and copywriting books (dead tree and electronic variety - so many books)

• sort out what it is I want to do, employment wise. I know that this year I want to start building up my freelance copywriting and web design work, focusing on improving the online presence of small to medium enterprises, but beyond that I am at a loss. I’m a skilled and experienced writer. I’m an experienced project manager used to the extreme scrutiny that is just a part of managing projects that expend public money (the biggest project I managed was worth over $2 million - you can imagine the accountability that surrounds that!). I’m a sociologist by training who specialised in the effects of globalisation (both positive and negative). I’m a technologist. I’m a trained thinker. I need to get out of the public service at some point and start making things again, and doing something that is more than just a small cog in a big machine. Yet all these skills don’t seem to add up to anything employable. Freelancing is fun, but there is something about working in a team that I really enjoy and I just wish I could do that in an environment that was digitally focused. More thought is required.

• decide upon my next course of study. I finished 2009 with my Grad Dip in IT, but it after 4 years of part-time study, it doesn’t seem to have moved me any closer to my goal of breaking out of the bureaucracy. I need to decide if I want to spend the next 10-15 years writing, designing, specialising (eg interaction design, multimedia etc.) or trying to sell a complete package of services. Formal study helps to keep my focused so I need to settle on some more post-grad work.

• I need to write more. A lot more. I enjoy writing but it’s a drawn out process for me. A blog post can take over a week from sketching out the idea to editing the first draft. I have a wide range of topics to choose from, whether it be my often neglected technology based blog, the often neglected parenting blog Helen and I maintain (largely just to ensure that family interstate has photos and videos of The Boy) and I want to launch a blog on writing, design and marketing issues related to the freelance work I want to turn up a couple of notches as mentioned earlier. Writing helps keep me focused and sharp. I need to find a way to turn it into a way that will pay the bills. All part of the challenge.

So that’s the big ticket things I want to do. There’s a lot of fuzzy thinking and undecided outcomes in there.

Please, feel free to call me on the bullshit, the time wasting and the procrastination. I might react at the time, but I can guarantee I will appreciate it later.