2021 w19 & w20: what needs to be done?
I wrote last week that Futureland takes a ‘daily’ approach to (mostly) everything. This is both what makes Futureland powerful and what makes it difficult to understand (or get into) for new users. In other words, it’s obvious that the more we do something the better we get at it. But what’s less obvious is that we can apply that insight to realize any of our visions by designing our days to repeat the right things.
It seems what’s even less obvious is that we can create software tools that consider our daily behaviours in how they work. Until now, most software tools have been created to help us organize, edit, create and share information but they are not necessarily designed to transform who we are. For example, anyone can use Final Cut Pro to edit films, but it is not designed to transform us into skilled filmmakers. Transforming ourselves into skilled filmmakers (or anything of value) requires consistent deliberate practice over multiple years.
We can see this pattern emerging everywhere. We have access to more information and tools than ever before and the only thing holding us back from realizing any of our visions or learning new skills is ourselves. Our own behaviours. How we live our days. This is what Futureland is for.
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A few notes:
1 - Blogging or writing on Futureland
We are realizing that in a lot of ways, Futureland is a social network for the things we’re learning, making and improving. However, there’s a delicate balance for us between blogging, community and daily behaviour. Perhaps @ethan describes it best, “I think there should be some line, this is not the best place for you if you only want to blog. Like Futureland isn't coming out with feature sets of things that help you do blogging stuff. If you want to blog and also learn woodworking and take some Vitamin C, then that's the vibe. Like multi-dimensional, home base for your creative life”.
This delicate balance of blogging and daily behaviour seems to be permeating everything that we do. And although blogging is not the only focus of Futureland, we are recognizing that it is a useful area for us to expand on. We have been making improvements to our editor and we are starting to explore the creation of richer entries that support embedding all forms of media, other Futureland entries / journals and more. Perhaps a 'block based approach' could be how we begin experimenting with this.
2 - What needs to be done?
The more we use Futureland, the better we get at controlling our daily behaviours. Repeating things daily is something I have been experimenting with for 4 years now and I am definitely better at it now than when I first started. I have seen others experience similar transformations on Futureland.
But once we are pretty good at controlling our own daily behaviours, what do we do next? I think about this a lot and of course the answer is different for every one. I do not know what the answer is for myself.
The question I can’t get out of my head is, “what needs to be done?”. If you are Stewart Brand, it seems the answer to “what needs to be done?” is somewhere between the intersection of climate change, urbanization and biotechnology. I’m curious about answering this question for myself and perhaps others wonder about this question too?
So it ‘seems’ I may begin to explore the question “what needs to be done?” in a multidimensional way through some kind of Futureland podcast. It may go somewhere or it may go nowhere.
3 - Tons of improvements
In my last email I wrote about how we are steadily progressing through improvements to design, onboarding and performance on a daily basis. This week we launched a few new things.
✦ entry permalinks ✦
We launched new permalinks which allow you to share well formatted single entries with anyone. Readers can either read the single entry or click ‘open journal’ if they want more context into the entire process. This makes Futureland entries easier to consume if readers have never used Futureland before.
✦ new profiles ✦
We launched new profiles that begin to show you an individual’s public daily and not daily journals on Futureland. We will continually expand on this through what we learn and there's new updates to these profiles already on the way.
✦ an optimistic interface ✦
We are moving towards an optimistic interface on as many dimensions of Futureland as we can. To help us do this, we’re tuning how we handle errors and we’ve implemented things like ‘instant publishing’. There’s more improvements coming and the idea is to continuously tune Futureland until it begins to feel like an extension of your mind.
✦ feeling like a ‘shared space’ ✦
We’ve started integrating little elements like displaying user avatars in certain areas of Futureland to make it feel more like a shared space when it should. We’re steadily moving through making improvements to discussions on Futureland as well.
✦ design tweaks and bug fixes ✦
There’s been hundreds of other little design tweaks and bug fixes (an on-going process) over the past 2 weeks. Thank you to everyone who continually shares notes with us 💕
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Now a few journals to visit:
‘Neon Tetra Sky Paludarium’ by @seanbod is described as “My adventure into making my first paludarium. I’ve been super inspired by a few YouTubers that do “x”ariums”. It’s a very unique journal and I found it inspiring because it was a multi-dimensional process that I had never been exposed to before.
‘fragments’ by @gndclouds is described as “Short fragments of code that I discover when researching problems for projects". The journal provides a unique glimpse into moments from his creative process. @gndclouds has created a few other interesting journals lately, ‘🍄 knowledge’, ‘Today’, ‘TinyGarden’ and (my favourite) ‘🍵’ are a few of them.
‘applied statistics’ by @mintie is described as “a place to put applied stats stuff by me and others”. The journal is updated consistently with papers that explore different subjects. Things like, how crime rates are affected by things like proximity to a church or temperature levels. Recent findings on workplace productivity as we move towards work from home setups and how private prison contracting can increase inmate time served.
‘new room’ by @joseph is described as “documenting the process of renovating my bedroom to refresh my living space”. It seems like the project is now in a completed or close to completed state. I asked him if he had ever done any renovation stuff before and he said, “I’ve only worked on about 2 other rooms before this, and with some help, I’ve been learning a lot”.
ty for everything <3
We’re distilling our experiences on Futureland (FL) into weekly emails. If you ever want to chat or hang out, just reply to this email. Your input helps a lot on independent projects like this. 🌀
And if you're curious about how you can use Futureland, watch this video on using it to design a morning routine. 🌞
