and i am writing the body of this post now an hour and a half later. it is 11:11am, and my wish is to cleverly figure out the quickest way to do the best work possible to finish up this god foresaken semester.

first i must work on my case study and review presentation, since that is most important and freshest in my mind. i have an indesign document with the text ready. i want to focus on the ‘executive summary’ and am considering making the full case study body plain text. it would make more sense–then it can easily become a blog post. However, a case study is not a blog post and it is currently 8 pages long, so perhaps it should remain in pdf form. i like that idea better. but if i am planning on using this case study for dissemination–meaning that i actually want people to download it and read it, then it needs a lot of work. but that is where i want to go with it today, so i’m about to get started on that. then i’ll do the executive summary.

so far my presentation for friday consists of this:
1. Ouroboros image, ‘the eternal return’. here i will talk about using metaphors to think about lifestreaming, and how ouroboros spledidly represents lifestreaming. “The Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return.”

2. The Financial Goalstream Case Study Report: executive summary. (note: the site theme needs an image banner!)
Here I will introduce the project as an attempt to demonstrate value of lifestreaming. I wanted to know: “Can I use a lifestream to make measurable progress towards a goal?” and “What specific privacy concerns arise while doing this?

So I picked a goal: “stick to a budget”, which quickly became replaced after I realized my financial life was a lot more complicated than that. The site goal is now “to understand & simplify my personal finances.”

I created a lifestream website and set up a simple workflow to update it. I sent media and posts to financiallifestream@posterous.com, which were then automatically forwarded to social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook, and the lifestresm website itself, which uses WordPress and a special plugin called FeedWordPress to catch the emailed posts.

I then used a system of methods to create the content of the lifestream site: “VISUALIZE. MEASURE. MANAGE.” How do I document my work towards my goal? How do I measure my progress towards my goal? How do I decide what to do next?

From these methods, I used specific strategies to work towards my goal:

I VISUALIZED with
1. photos of financial transactions at stores, restaurants, bars, banks, ATMS.
2. screenshots of financial transactions performed online, like purchases and payments.
3. emails relating to my finances

then I MEASURED my progress by
1. using Wesabe to aggregate my accounts and set up spending targets
2. setting timers while working on posts
3. using Daytum.com to track shared expenses

lastly, I MANAGED my next steps by
1. performing a weekly financial hygiene routine post to keep up-to-date records
2. sharing my experiences with and receiving feedback from my social network on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook
3. reflecting on site archives to look for patterns

The results of the strategies:
164 posts from 9/28/09 – 12/2/09
6 weekly financial hygiene routines performed: (#6) 13 minutes, (#5) 46 minutes, (#4) 70 minutes, (#3) 90 minutes, (#2) 8 minutes, (#1) 38 minutes
265 total minutes, 44 minute/week average.
6 major financial projects completed: (1) budgeted with Wesabe, (2) obtained cheaper car insurance, (3) figured out my student loan paperwork, (4) obtained a credit report, (5) set up autopay on bills (6) made a webhosting map to find my actual hosting costs and created a target budget (should have timed this)
Extensive community feedback received from site comments, Twitter @ replies, Facebook comments
Stress levels significantly reduced

Conclusions:
YES I can show measurable progress towards a goal with a lifestream. I would even go so far as to say I achieved the goal: I now understand where I stand with my finances and have taken many steps towards simplifying.

However, privacy issues exist: there is a need for private document storage (maybe saving posts as drafts?), a potential for credit card fraud if you’re not careful about sharing account numbers, and financial transparency is still a very psychologically difficult thing to achieve.
Future studies would benefit from better measurements of community feedback, mood, and site setup time.

Why go through all this in public? People/communication are the real reason to do any of this.
* accountability (listening/surveillance of many)
* motivation/competition
* feedback (tangible help)
* information (experience of others to base our own decisions on)
* empathy (we’re all in this together)
* reputation (as you accomplish your goals, you become an expert on the subject with a portfolio of work to prove it. Your lifestream is now your resumé.)

3. What next?
I want to figure out how to market/promote this system. How can I convince a teenager to adopt this system? How can I make it ‘cool’? Do I offer the information for free and charge to set up goalstreams for people? Is there a business model here? Could I sell an information product (ebook, video) with this information? Can I teach a course with this information? What I really want is to just do it and stop trying to sell it to people–I want to ‘lead by example’ :/

Other work to potentially reference:
Poster sessions
Tarot poster

The time is now 2:33p and I better fucking get moving. I mean it’s 3:11p. I finished my ouroboros illustrations/diagrams, now time to figure out if I need any more diagrams and then design the pdf(s). Hopefully I can do all that by 5p.