superlifter Week 11

This is my first attempt at getting back on the weeknotes bandwagon and doing some accountability, after some pondering in Weeknotes debug.

To recap, these are the things I planned to do.

1. Finish and send a new business proposal I’ve spent a week blocked on
2. Write up my part of a client report
3. Finish reading No Bullshit Strategy, then finish a proper 1.0 version of our business strategy

It went… pretty well, I think.

I didn’t manage to finish the proposal, but this is probably fine because I’m talking with the client next week and everything will probably have shifted again. I came to the conclusion that one of the reasons I found it so hard to get started was that I realised that I have never written a formal (or even semi-formal) business proposal before, so this is new territory that feels like it shouldn’t be. Carry-forward for next week: figure this out, then do it, then template it.

I did write up everything I could for the client report. Not surprising, as researching and writing is my happy place, although it’s nice to be a contributor rather than a collator for a change.

I didn’t read No Bullshit Strategy, but I did finish a 1.0 version of our business strategy. I’m happy with the result and I’m also fine with not having read the book first. I figured it made just as much sense to read it afterwards and see if it helps me do a new version. So I’ll consider that a win.

Two out of three isn’t bad. It’s also probably worth me noting where I went off-plan.

I spent a lot of the week thinking about and using ChatGPT. I had a brainwave about how it might help with some very tedious text-munging tasks I’d been putting off for literally years. It worked: I was and remain impressed. But then, not being able to resist the urge to finish up something that I thought would take hours rather than week, I fell into a rabbit hole of LLM use. Good times.

Media

• Book: How High We Go in the Dark. January is probably not the best month for books about pandemics, but this is good.
• Article: The digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag. Despite my positive LLM experiences this week, I am also totally down with this Garbage Day article about how AI Art is a big “why”.
• Music: Cybotron - Enter (aka Clear). I had somehow never listened to this end to end, despite being a big Juan Atkins fan. From a Pitchfork retrospective review: “Like William Gibson, who was writing Neuromancer while they were recording Enter, they pulled this off by building a future that inspired other people enough to make it a reality.”