2024 End of Year Catch Up

The Long Year

It’s been a tough year. We started 2024 buying our first house since migrating to New Zealand in January. It had been a long wait for our visas to come through due to COVID, coinciding with an unprecedented surge in housing prices through 2023 pricing us out of the market. Thankfully towards the end of 2023 they began to fall to a reasonable price and we were able to once again get on the property ladder.

The new house was only one street over from our rental, so we hired a van and a few guys to help us move the heavy stuff, the rest my wife and I were going to shift…until she injured herself and it was down to me. Unfortunately I had to use most of my yearly work leave in advance to get everything moved across. On reflection this was the start of me feeling behind in 2024, I didn’t have time to take a break or pause for a moment and it was about to get a whole lot more uncertain…

Shorty after moving in to the house, the new government announced they would be reducing civil servant numbers, putting my job in jeopardy. Not really the moving gift I had hoped for.

The restructure process took a long time, not knowing if I would be able to keep the house and pay our mortgage was quite stressful. Thankfully I managed to secure a role as a service designer, and retain employment, and while it was a less senior role than I previously held (they cut all those positions) it has given me chance to breathe and take stock of what I want to do in my career moving forward.

While the restructure was happening, I kind of tuned out and continued to focus on writing. Eight years ago I had a moment of clarity, where I saw a more humanistic way of viewing and designing services and I began testing and researching my new approach, iterating over and over until it was successful. I debated with myself how to talk about this and finally decided a book would be the best way to represent these ideas. I set about writing with great enthusiasm, I wrote for months and months every evening and when I was done… it was terrible, ideas and concepts were disjointed and hard to follow. I realised that I needed to get better at writing, some of the ideas and concepts I talk about can become complicated. Talking about ideas elegantly and in a way that people can grasp is harder than I first thought. I needed to teach myself to write better, but more importantly, I needed to teach myself how to structure my ideas and thinking into a way that would allow me to take the reader on a journey and slowly be introduced to ideas that link together. My brain is “quite active” it sees connections in disparate disciplines and makes connections others don’t see, and this was coming through in my writing. I needed to do better… and then we migrated to New Zealand.

Over the next few years I disappeared in to a sea of tools and techniques attempting to understand my brain and work out “how do I think and link ideas together?”.

I bounced around for some time before finally discovering Roam Reasearch. This was the first time I started to suddenly connect my ideas in a way that was easier to explain and make sense. However this tool was quite expensive and as I began to make my graph bigger and bigger it got slower. The final piece of the puzzle was discovering Logseq. This tool has without a doubt been the tool that unlocked my ideas in a way that was cohesive, logical and coherent.

This year I have really made big strides in writing and explaining key concepts in a way that I am finally happy with and I hope soon it will be in a position to begin approaching publishers, which is the next totally unknown part of this process. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Looking forward

It hasn’t all been uphill though, there have been positive things too.

I finished the first release of my side project Creative Creations and made it available for free. I am really proud of the way this game works and while I recognise it could do with better graphic design. The ideas are solid and the joy I have seen in people’s faces when playing it proves its a great concept, so I got it out as soon as I could. Hopefully I can do more with this idea next year.

Our design team was scattered to the four winds during the restructure, but we have maintained contact, meeting regularly to share ideas and have fun. This team has been one of the most cohesive and collaborative I have had the joy to lead in quite some time and it’s been really encouraging that we all continue to meet despite the circumstances. Good people make good things happen and lift you up, keep them in your life for as long as you can.