What’s On Your To-Do List?
I keep a list of things I want to do for KDO in Apple Notes, organized into four sections: small, medium, large, and longshots/obsolete. This note contains tweaks, bug fixes, code refactoring, new site features, roadmap items,1 infrastructure migrations, potential project ideas, vague prompts, and even things I don’t want to do but should maybe consider doing anyway at some point. I keep already-completed items on the list so progress can be gauged, noticed, and appreciated.
I was looking at the list today, and thought I’d share some of the items with you:
- Reposting social posts (in comment threads) for members
- Do a podcast
- Publish posts to Instagram. (How?)
- Implement site-wide search
- Make newsletter daily?
- Write a book based on kottke.org
- Sell Blue Line Air Express t-shirts
- Build a Substack competitor
- Make a gift link search engine
Some of these are partly finished or would take very little to implement if I wanted. Some will never happen. Weirdly, some of the projects and site tweaks I most want to make aren’t even on my list. They live only in my head and I mull them over in the shower or while walking until they’re “done” enough to start working on. I guess maybe ideas don’t go on the list unless they’re not that urgent or interesting.
Do you have to-do lists for your creative projects? Care to share an item or two with the group?
Insofar as KDO has a roadmap, which is somewhere between “not at all” and “a general direction into the murky haze of a possible future”. I play things by ear a lot. ↩
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I'm learning music composition as a hobby and have so many pieces that are evolving along. My ultimate to-do is to make them into an album. Conventional wisdom is to just push things out, learn by doing it imperfectly a bunch of times, but I dunno... not trying to overthink it, but I want it to be awesome! Not a permanent to-do, but a persistent one for a while.
Site-wide search would be genius
Buy a book based on kottke.org
Figuring out what to do with my life. That is very broad and intimidating.
Finish the Wordpress site I've owed my wife for years, now (delays due to many things + procrastination), freeing myself to try to work on other more interesting (to me) projects.
as far as Kottke.org goes, I'd like to see it involved in "Textcasting" (Dave Winer term) which intends to let people write using the tools they like, but publish everywhere. It could be done "easily" with RSS but getting buy-in from social media people who get funding via engagement will be an uphill battle.
Turn my 3 season porch into 4 season office/relaxing space. But really, make enough money to pay someone to do it for me.
I have been wanting to get back into working with stained glass.. step one was clearing off my worktable... next is Decide on a Pattern, but I hate what I'm finding... so next is actually CREATE a design... I think looking at what glass I have on hand should dictate what I make as I build my skills again
I would LOVE you to write a book, Jason!
Re: writing a book, you should read “You Should Write a Book” (currently out of print but you can contact the authors or find it online).
My creative endeavors are too chaotic to be constrained to a list. I'm more of a bottom-up thinker, and I don't have an ounce of ambition in my body, so my fibercraft hobbies are just driven by what sounds pleasant to work on at any given time.
I have at least a dozen wips floating around, and some of them will definitely never be finished. Others are samples of a technique I wanted to try, and might someday grow up to be a finished object of some kind, or be unraveled and reused for something else. If I want to work on my bobbin lacemaking tomorrow, my ongoing spinning and weaving and crochet and knitting projects will just have to keep until the whim strikes again.
This is why I buy almost exclusively secondhand materials. I don't want to spend real money on something that might never see the light of day! What motivates my creative endeavors is the accumulation of knowledge and technical skill, not tickboxes. But maybe that's just me and my AuDHD not wanting to waste my limited executive function on my free time!
two items from my to-do list:
- create a real version of "elide". A podcast app I prototyped where "next/fast forward" doesn't move ahead by a set amount of time, but instead skips to where the current speaker finishes talking. The more podcasts I listen to, the more I want this, and no podcast apps have this feature.
- create a website that aggregates upcoming movies and concerts I'd be interested in, local to my area. Let me hide stuff I don't care about and pay attention to what I've liked on letterboxd and the music that I listen to. There's no single place I can easily get this info in one place and all the existing separate sites suck.
I expect to build both of these within the next 3-4 months.
I have a large collection of essays that are essentially philosophical and practical life advice that I wrote for my children when they were younger, during a period when I wasn't sure I was going to be available for them as adults.
They're written in Markdown, and I dream of using a static site generator like Hugo to turn them into a website I can share with the world.
My main concern is LLM exposure. It's not really thrilling to think of putting these heartfelt essays out there, which I want to share with people who might find value in them, only to know that LLMs are just going to slurp up what I put out there and regurgitate it in a warped form in prompt responses.
I used to paint in school, all the way through high school (water colors). In College I did physics and computer science and didn't make the time to take any art courses. Now (30 years later) I want to learn how to paint in oils. For the last 12 months I've had everything setup (the paints, the canvas, the solvents/mixers, etc.) but I still haven't actually done anything because I am too intimidated by the medium I've picked and I haven't had the time to take a class.
It's a mix of procrastinating, being chicken, and just being busy with work. But this is always on the very top my creative to-do list.
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