Optimisation through stripping

One the things you always want to do as a business and as a person is to optimise yourself. There are so many things ‘going on’ and we all accumulate baggage that just hangs there like left over Christmas bulge. For some reason the onset of Spring has this weird shedding and readressing effect in me. I don’t think I’m the only one that gets the urge to spring clean and my cleaning usually surrounds my sites, my business and less actual getting soap and water out to clean down cupboards.

First strip: business stripping

WIth this optimisation concept through stripping in mind I’ve chosen to give myself 4 areas of focus. The first of these is directly at my online business. I am about to finish some major work on the Logical Binary CMS and with this in mind the site needs a fit for it. For now it will probably be more of a re-align but it’s going to change slightly. Also, the blog I want over there to become more of an advice article type thing as a resource for my clients. I do enough of the blogging about design over here and will also be linking to this blog more than through the about and portfolio in that site. I don’t want to merge them but want them to work better alongside each other. A lot of this year has been about what worked for me and stripping away sites and projects that simply didn’t. I’ve cleaned down my plate a bit ready to take on some newer stuff and work on things didn’t get time for.

Second strip and third strip: real world shedding

My offline world has a double focus, my surroundings and my productivity. A while ago Dave Seah talked about doing at least 3 things a day (one of the GTD principles). I’ve been using this as a principle for a while and it’s worked really well. I want to now up this bring in some better time management processes and optimise my time a bit more. I’ve been thinking a lot about removing potential for clutter space and have brought a smaller desk with no drawers and with this having a filing system set up is starting to help (if only I can now sort the boxes left with various crud from the moving). I’m in a busy work time but thinking of taking at least a few hours a week off from online and looking at sorting through and making my office space more efficient – forcing myself to not procrastinate.

Fourth strip: personal strip tease

The final spring cleaning comes with this site. For a while I’ve had espresso as my ‘daily shot’, now this would have been great if the daily hadn’t become less well daily and I always felt it wasn’t relevant enough and didn’t fit in. Along with this in the last flavour I brought in the links at the side of the main page to give other resources. Again great but it just futher fragmented. I have had a bit of a think about this and I’m going to change the way slightly. I’ve always had a del.icio.us account and this has been updated with varying spurts of activity. I want to bring this back onto this blog and with this I am clearing it down apart from relevant links to start a fresh. From now on the links in del.icio.us are going to be design resource related so should create a bit of a resource library.

How does this fit in with expresso? Well I have decided this is going to become a quote section. I run into so much quoteable / good things online that through espresso I am going to give you a shot of that. This is of course going to mainly be other sites and I will be linking to them through this. I want to try this as an experiment at also keeping the things that made me nod and go yeppers some place. What they will be would be such things like something from a blog post, article or something written online – could of course be offline but probably going to be online mainly.

I will eventually make espresso more styled for this new material, for now in the transition they will just fall like the other posts. Using this section is something I want to work on in the next flavour (yes I am starting to think of the next one now and looking for a May release (not committing yet to when for sure as work is bit crazy but good crazy) to keep up the seasonal flavours – no flavour is chosen yet but there are a few contenders. I thought it may be fun to also ask what flavours anyone fancies, remember the rule is it has to be a coffee flavour and that is the only rule.

Try it, you’ll feel better for stripping

There really is something therapeutic about focusing, cleaning and getting things sorted. I feel better doing the small bits I’ve done so far and with the plans made. Sorting my office space with the new desk has had a rather surprisingly focusing effect on me and raised my winter grumpy muttering.