Recently, while re-reading something by Austin Kleon, I felt my chest tighten, remembering the stupid label maker we had when I was a kid.
It used to stress me out a ton.
It was like a calculator that printed strips of whatever text you wanted, that you could then peel from the backing paper and stick to stuff. I think it was to help with organizing boxes in the basement, but the kinds of things my siblings and I actually ended up using the label maker for mostly flipped between pulling pranks, and helping my step-sister, Ali, with whatever Spanish vocab words she was working on at the time.
I loved the idea of that label maker. But, truth be told, it also made me pretty uncomfortable because it pressured me to choose a succinct way of describing multiple things. And I felt that was something that deserved significant consideration. Everyone else didn’t seem as bothered by it, but I needed to find the common threads. That’s what stressed me out. I struggled with whether things should be grouped together based on what they were used for, or just by what they were.
Was that a box of “art supplies” or “school stuff”?
And where should the post-it notes go?
I’ve written about Austin’s book Steal Like An Artist before, and even alluded to his philosophy of Showing Your Work, too. Well, since I started re-reading Show Your Work, it’s already helped me untangle a few things that have been tripping me up. Specifically, I like how Austin differentiates between Process and Product.
From a Process perspective, I specialize in brand strategy and operations. But the Product(s), at least with regard to my work as head of editorial for Unobstructed, are stories—columns, essays, and podcast episodes (and soon to be print editions).
One is the organized box with a label, the other is a look into how it came together.
I’m still figuring out exactly what that means, but I think it means derekmacdonald.com is the container for Process and theunobstructed.com is the container for Product(s). At least, that’s what my mini whiteboard brainstorm revealed. So, I re-worked the backend infrastructure of derekmacdonald.com to support a blog, separate from my daily column or my essays.
Derek MacDonald 