The Year of Big Works

What I’ll be doing with the hundreds of hours saved from not being on Facebook

6 min readJan 3, 2017

This year I’m planning to work on fewer projects that involve longer term, solid commitment. Some of these personal projects will inevitably reach beyond the current year. My intention though is to develop and reinforce specific skills in concentrated areas.

Finding Time

The excuses I’ve used in the past come down to the familiar ‘finding time’. I now know that learning how and where to allocate time, sacrificing some of the more frivolous pursuits and committing uncompromisingly to what deserves attention does lead to astounding benefits — especially when it comes to things that I deeply care about.

Being aware of how I spend time is the first step. Using the time tracking and visualization service Gyrosco.pe has been nothing short of a revelation. One of the many things I’ve noticed about my daily habits, after connecting my RescueTime tracking software, is how much time I spend on activities I consider unproductive or unfulfilling.

Yes, post-election was a particularly unproductive day

In a sample of my data from the tail end of last year I’ve found huge pockets of wasted time on Facebook and other online platforms. Now, I typically enjoy much of my time on these platforms but this year I’ll need to draw a distinction between mindless distraction and genuine fulfillment.

It is the people I care about on these networks, not the networks themselves that deserve my attention. There are plenty of alternatives.

Transitioning to an online behavior that involves pulling the information I need rather than being fed stuff I don’t want will be a major part of this year. I will be writing more about this at some stage.

All this comes, of course, with a healthy dose of post-holiday perspective. Family matters a great deal to me and while freeing up some time means spending more of it with my father, my mother and close friends it will inevitable mean I’ll lose touch with a few people I’ve gotten to know and lose some of the services I’ve come to rely on. These are real and genuine sacrifices. But what’s first comes first.

Having an understanding wife also helps in this regard. Now, I figure I was already doing a good job, but hopefully it means I’ll become a better husband out of all this too. You never know.

Four Big Projects

I will continue to track progress and will not disappear from social media completely — mostly because many of the tracking apps I use still rely on my social media identity to log in — but the projects I’ve now committed to, in no particular order, are as follows:

1. Maven: Argue for ethical design for mass platforms

This will be a big year for Maven, a video platform built out of the interactive technology company Storygami which I co-founded with Heidi Lindvall. The team, together with our early beta users, have worked hard to build a corner of the internet made by and for video creators. One in which the individual creator maintains ownership, independence and economic parity. We are soon to launch, seeking seed investment.

Now that the bulk of development is over, I intend to communicate as much of the design philosophy behind Maven as I can. In alignment with the ideas of Tristan Harris, Joe Edelman and Livible Media’s research regarding design ethics, I’ll be finishing up some early thoughts in a series of four short essays; I. Contextual Media, II. Community Parity, III. Post-advertising Business Models, IV. Reputation Based on Emotional Resonance. (UPDATE: Completed first-run essays in April 2017)

My intention is to establish Maven as an early example of how building with ethics in design, with a strong economic element, could lead to tangible benefits around online community building for the creative class.

2. Developing Focus: Blockchain, Bitcoin, 21 Marketplace, ethereum

One of the passions I intend to spend more time pursuing is the blockchain space. Bitcoin first caught my attention in 2014. Since spending time in San Francisco in 2015 I now also have a personal stake in seeing both the bitcoin space and more broadly other blockchain efforts (ethereum, Yours) as a whole thrive. I made a small investment in bitcoin last year (just before this past winter’s bull run).

I intend now to contribute what I can to the community’s future. I also like the idea of spending some of the bitcoin I made last year on learning more, earning more and investing more in the same space.

I believe micro-payments for content to be an inevitability, beneficial to both creators and consumers of online media. My enthusiasm for ethereum and 21 is simply down to my feeling that those behind these efforts are some of the smartest around.

My ultimate aim is to be able to develop a rudimentary app for the 21 blockchain marketplace or if I choose to delve further into ethereum and Solidity then I’d like to take a look at tokens for content. I think the notion of a machine-payable web and smart contracts are fascinating. It correlates with my thoughts around Maven and how value should be intrinsic to content creation and distribution.

I’ve settled on this Princeton/Coursera course as a primer. There are many cryptocurrency concepts I’m still very wooly on but I also intend on delving into the C and Python programming language as well as close study using a few recommended books.

This will take some time, and I am under no allusions as to how difficult it will be to wrap my head around a lot of it. But this is the rarest of opportunities to be part of something that will fundamentally change the way the internet and its economy works.

Note: it does sometimes feel as if I’m the only out-and-out designer interested in this stuff but if there are others out there — send me a note.

3. Writing: A second novel — ‘The Language of Rebellion’

In mid-2016 I completed my first novel In Our Mad and Furious City. It is a book that concerns extremism among London’s youth and more broadly violence among the city’s multi-generational history. I spent two and half years writing it between the hours of 5-8am daily.

To my surprise I managed to sign with literary agent Conville & Walsh relatively rapidly after sending the manuscript out to a few lit-agencies in London. This first book is now going through the processes of finding a publisher. UPDATE: I found a publisher: Tinder Press/Headline UK will publish my novel in June 2018

Having such a long-gestating project bear fruit confirms much for me. Firstly, it turns out I can write. Secondly, concentrating on slow-burn projects is infinitely more satisfying than spending time on short-term, smaller ones. I like big bets I can throw my guts into.

Over the winter I began work on a second novel, this time exploring rebelliousness, dissent and paternal relationships. It’ll get deep, it’ll take time. 2017 has plenty time left.

4. Activism: Fight political extremism, promote open liberalism

The events of 2016 has pulled much of this into sharp focus. I’m less willing, quite honestly, to spend time on things that don’t matter while things that do blow by without much as a whimper from many of my colleagues working in technology. Shouting into our own echo chambers on Twitter, sadly, does not count.

To be responsible enough to speak out against virulent forms of populism and authoritarianism is a duty, no matter what field you work. I intend to do so with my writing online, but again I’m under no allusions that what really counts is the real world of local communities, individual contribution and civic action.

With that in mind I fully intend to aid political startups such as More United here in the UK in as many ways I can.