Flarup’s Weekly Report #1 — Battling fuzziness
Week 18, 2016 (May 2nd — May 8th)
Ever felt like the weeks are just flying by? I feel that a lot. Before I know it, another weekend rolls around and, while I love weekends, I sometimes get this sense of dread. Have my life progressed in any meaningful metric over the past 7 days? Was it a good week? Did I do something? Did I have enough fun? Did I spend my time on things that matter? It’s obviously ridiculous to measure your life like that — but the feeling gets compounded when you start to look at longer stretches of time. Individual weeks go by in a blur and it get’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things happened or how you felt at any given time. What happened last week? Great, you got that stored and easily recalled. Now what happened 4 weeks ago? 8 weeks? I quickly loose the granularity: details disappear and only the bigger things remain. Eventually even the bigger events or milestones fade and I’m now mostly reminded of them when flicking through my Camera Roll on my phone. Memory is fuzzy like that. The problem with this is that for all the effort we put into living our lives to our fullest, we’re incredibly poor at retaining those experiences. We’re constantly working towards the next thing and quickly forgetting about our achievements once we get there. I believe this is the source of much anxiety. So I’ve decided to battle fuzziness by being better at recording my weeks. Weeks are obviously just arbitrary intervals decided by society– and it’s entirely possible that nothing of note will happen in a given week. But 7 days gives me a framework to answer the questions above and to keep track of what I’m up to. To document it for myself and anyone interested. Maybe it’ll help me fight the fuziness and maybe it’ll inspire someone else to do the same.
––– Welcome to Flarup’s Weekly Report.
Launched pixelresort.com redesign
as part of the #may1streboot movement
I used the wonderful #May1stReboot movement to finally push out the 5th edition of pixelresort.com. The palm trees are gone, but they’re replaced with a cleaner look that puts my work front and center. I’ve overhauled the presentation of my entire portfolio, and each project (or genre) now lives in their separately styled little universe. I can’t believe that my one-man design studio Pixelresort will be celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year!
I’m really happy with the new version. I think it does a better job at the two things a studio website needs to do:
- Communicate what type of work I do and
- Make it easy for people to connect with me.
I actually missed the May 1st reboot deadline by a few hours because of some DNS issues pointing the domain to Squarespace, but I was still fortunate to be featured on the may1reboot.com website. Thanks Tobias van Schneider!
Published a new drone video
of me flying in the South of Denmark on Lolland
Continuing to build out content for my newly minted youtube channel I published a new drone video, this time flying in Denmark on the island of Lolland. I love making drone videos and I’m thrilled that people say nice things about them. I hope that I’ll get to make many more.
Taught 2nd graders about design
Had a blast in the classroom discussing the making of things
My mom knows a teacher. She asked me if I could swing by their school to talk about ‘innovation’. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I had 2 amazing hours with the kids talking about what designers are and what they do.
I showed products and games I’ve worked on and brainstormed ideas with them. They where absolutely bubbling with creativity. Would love to teach more.
- Finished listening to Gary Vaynerchuk’s #AskGaryVee audiobook. I liked it a lot.
- Started listening to Lore — a podcast about folklore and… oh who am I kidding, it’s ghost stories.
- Trying out Nuzzel — an aggregator showing me top new stories from my networks.
Let me know what you think about this ‘Weekly Report’ approach and how it could be improved. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the fuziness of memory and how we can make sure to take stock more often and enjoy the journey.
Michael is a danish designer, entrepreneur & keynote speaker. he loves making things, going on adventures and telling stories.
