By Chris McGinty
The following blog post is meant to setup a series of blog posts. I don’t know if it’ll be completely formalized where each and every post related to the topic has a naming convention. I don’t know if there is a logical end to the posts where we say, “Well, that was fun. Time to move on.” I don’t even know if this will be something that Nathan participates in. He might want to do his own series. He might want to forget this blog exists (this is a very real prospect since Google hates their own platform). I don’t know how long this will go on, or how frequently we’ll post. But I do know that I love you. And I know that if you love me too. Oops. I was actually thinking to myself, what a wonderful… You know what. I lost the momentum of this opening paragraph. Let’s move on.
NOTE: Apparently, Nathan wanted to forget that the Blogger blog existed, now that the blog has been moved to our website. Also, when I say “last week” in the following sentence, I mean back in September – since one of Nathan’s ideas was to move the blog, I delayed posting any of these posts until this blog was ready.
On Friday, last week, Nathan texted me and we had the following conversation:
NATHAN: Im itching to do something.
NATHAN: A project of some sort
CHRIS: Let’s each make a list over the weekend of 100 possible project ideas ranging from completely doable to probably impossible. I only say this because Friday, Saturday, Sunday are the days I work the most so it’ll give me time to think of stuff. If 100 seems high, I’m presuming that some of the stuff we’ll list will be so small that they’ll end up being To Do List items rather than long term projects. We can share lists on Sunday (maybe our top 20) and discuss what’s possible to do now.
Chris: Making things complicated since 1973.
NATHAN: Challenge accepted
NATHAN:
Nathan Stout, Easily persuaded since 1973.
CHRIS: *snort*
That’s either laughter or I’ve taken up cocaine.
If you’ve ever wondered what Nathan and I are like, this is pretty much it. Nathan says something and I suggest we make a list of ideas. Making lists of this nature is a great way to find ideas (good and bad) that you would have likely not found going about your regular day to day life. John Cleese has said that he always felt he was the least funny of the people who worked on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but that he was considered the most unique only because he kept working until he got past all the plain ideas, and found that idea that he didn’t feel anyone else would have. My hope was that by forcing us to keep listing that we’d have to really get into zones that we might not immediately think to get into.
Since I deliver pizza for a living, it wasn’t as easy to just list things in the normal way without slowing down the deliveries. I have a speech-to-text app, so I started dictating my ideas to it. This allowed me to not just list the ideas, but to discuss them for a couple of minutes. Why did I have this idea? How would I go about doing the project? What would be the next logical step? How am I ever going to be able to read what I dictated into this less than accurate app? Oh well, I should be able to get the basic ideas.
After the first so many ideas, I realized that I had a project idea that was somewhat meta in nature. I could write blog posts about each of the project ideas. The thing is that I don’t think I came up with any ideas that we would need to keep super secret. A lot of the ideas are things that other people have already done anyway in some form. I already had the starting point for a number of the blog posts with the dictation. This meant that from that point on, I made sure to talk out each idea as far as I could, including angles for writing the blog post about it.
By Monday, Nathan came up with 62 ideas, and I was sitting at somewhere around 70. I told him that we could finish our lists at our leisure, and discuss what we had. Nathan and I finally talked on the following Thursday. We decided to rank each project idea from 1 to 5, where 1 was really no interest at the moment in following through and 5 was let’s get started on this ASAP. We only had time to discuss a few of the ideas, but we did seem to have some similar thoughts.
I called this post 200 Projects because it was the number of ideas we were supposed to start with. I’m going to write about things we do as there is progress. This is meant to serve as a link hub, so I’ll be updating it with links to other blog posts as they’re written.
Links to Posts about 200 Projects
Using the “Getting Things Done” Method on the 200 Projects Project by Chris
200 Projects – The First Two on My List by Chris
200 Projects – Zombie Death Force, Go! Second Printing
Chris McGinty is a blogger who is no longer on Blogger. This is a link hub that never made it to Blogger.