Part one of the Narrative Hyperobject is 'Metamanagement' which is my needlessly fancy way of saying 'the bit the contextualises all the other bits for me'. The process as a whole is a set of phases any creative project or deliverable I've worked on seems to have gone through.
The boundaries between those phases are permeable and my divisions of them somewhat arbitrary, but these are the ways in which it has made sense for me to chunk up my tools and thinking.
Those phases, then, are:
- CONCEPTING/IDEATION
- DEVELOPING
- BREAKING
- DRAFTING
- REVISING
- FEEDBACK
This is not linear. One does not start at the top, 'concept' to completion, then advance. It's looping and self-referential. Sometimes you have to step backwards or reach ahead. Moving back to a previous phase with new inputs. But there's a notional trend line that tells me where, really, I am with a given piece of work at any given moment, and thus which hat I need to be wearing. I have, it seems, a lot of hats, and many need to be stacked on top of one another.
If I were to make a heat-map of the phases, the bulk of time and energy would be spent around BREAKING and DRAFTING. They also often end up being the 'least fun bits' in terms of effort expended to positive feeling about self and work. But they're trunk-legged and necessary.
Each of these phases has a smattering of tools and techniques I find useful to apply, plus a bunch of lenses and filters I use to squint at things and try to diagnose problems and either pre-empt them emerging at a later phase, or fix something that's already manifest.
A lot of this division also represents a form of psychological trickery. Or possibly sensible expectation management. I know what things should feel or look like at a given phase, which has the benefit of making it easier to handwave a way (to myself) the bits that still feel rubbish or wonky or worrying because it's not the time for figuring that stuff out yet.
I suppose all of this comes down to the general maxim I realise I try to bring to everything, which is trying to do more of what you're meaning to do and less of everything that you're not meaning to do. Which includes drawing boxes and boundaries round things you will mean to do (and need to), but don't mean to do just yet. Something can be important without being important yet, and if you try to solve all of the problems at the same time, you don't solve anything.