[ photo courtesy ]

Well there have been a few changes round these here parts. After a brilliant 2.5 years with the lovely folks at Naked Communications, having learned a hell of a lot and been privileged to work with some of the best & brightest minds in the business, I’ve made the scary but exciting decision to go freelance. I’m both shitting it and totally stoked about the opportunity to spread my wings, and get stuck into a whole range of different things with different people. But you don’t know unless you try, right? We’re always telling our clients to learn by do-ing and to fail faster, so I figured it was time I took some of my own advice.

And so following in some very fine footsteps indeed, and first initiated by my friends at the-then Schulze & Webb (now BERG) this also gives me the opportunity to have a crack at writing regular Weeknotes.

I think, and hope, it’ll be a useful discipline – it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of whatever you’re working on at that particular moment in time, but just as I’ve always advised my clients of the importance of taking a step back and looking back at the bigger, aggregate picture, so too should I take some of my own medicine.

So here we are. Week 1 – my first official week working freelance.

People are wonderfully supportive. Over the last few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to have several chats over coffee with awesome folks who gave me some really helpful pointers, tips and general ‘things they wished they’d known about / done at the outset’ when they first started freelancing. Others have provided much-appreciated support when I’d have a bit of a freak-out about the fact I’d resigned my job without a job to go to, and what the hell was I doing? (Stumbling across David Hieatt’s recent observation that the three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary was also pretty timely).

T’interweb is, unsurprisingly, invaluable. There are some brilliantly useful resources online for the new and wet-behind-the-ears freelancer who’s just starting out, from the more obvious Business Link type stuff to Phil Gyford’s utterly fantastic A Beginner’s Guide to Freelancing (few years old but still pretty much essential reading).

I’ve still got a lot of admin to get in order. The CV & site need updating, and the portfolio I said I’d develop needs doing. But being obsessively anally retentive about organisational matters means I’ve rather enjoyed getting my paperwork and whatnot in order, and I actually love a good spreadsheet. Especially one with conditional formatting. (Yes, I am that tragic. Really).

I’d said I was going to take a few weeks off between finishing at Naked and starting work, to spend some time decompressing and catching up on all the stuff (i.e. life) that’s been utterly neglected over the last few months of being totally manic and flying round the world running workshops for Coca Cola (including 5 countries in 4 continents in 3 weeks. Sorry trees, my carbon footprint from May/June was horrendous). I’d been meeting with lots of people to line stuff up, but the plan was to have a bit of time off over the summer before kicking off.

Then a short but v. interesting project came up courtesy of the brilliant Gareth Kay, to work with the very fine folks at Goodby Silverstein & Partners on a piece of work for a UK-based client of theirs (I’m not sure that BERG-style project code-names are really my thing, so for now I reckon it’ll just be ‘the Goodby project’ or similar). All good stuff, smart people, an interesting challenge…. and also getting my first taste of working at home. I haven’t yet had a full-on day working in my PJs but as I was promised that this was one of the perks of going freelance I’m determined to have at least one pyjama-clad day at work. I’m sure my vision of a clothing-lite future is going to be a crushing disappointment, but that’s life for you.

Not quite week 1, technically week -1 (or week 0?), which I guess makes me a week behind already, but bugger it, I’m playing loose with the ‘rules’ and bunging it in this week’s note: last Thursday I also had the pleasure of joining some fine folks to judge Cadbury’s Pocketgame game creation competition, which was terrific fun as my good pal Willsh made playing games an integral part of the judging process itself – you can see what a terrible time we all had in this little film of the afternoon’s proceedings.

Even further behind, as it was at the beginning of July, but I haven’t yet written it up and so I’m now really really playing loose with the ‘rules’, I spoke alongside some really kick-ass women (+ 1 bloke) at the first (of, I hope, many more) She Says conference, entitled SCAMP, as the theme for the day was ‘work in progress’. I spoke about a project I’m very excited to be getting involved with – the fantastic Chromaroma, which turns the city of London into a game and makes commuting really magical. I’m chuffed to bits to be doing some stuff with people like the brilliant and lovely Toby Barnes (of, amongst many things, Playful fame….you are getting your ticket for this year’s event, aren’t you?) – got lots of interest about becoming an alpha tester from attendees of SCAMP, starting to get involved with some development stuff with TFL, and been invited to go down & share some stuff about the game with the nice people at BBH and Made by Many, as part of the ‘Meet the Makers’ series organised by Anjali.

Other stuff I’ve done includes:

Backed Bud Caddell’s awesome Bucket Brigade project

Met up with some brilliant people about future projects / opportunities to work together. Exciting.

Finished some great books (again this isn’t just this week’s reading, and I’m cheating as I went on holiday so this sounds a lot more impressive than any future weeks’ reading will be): highly recommending Cognitive Surplus, The Spirit Level, The Hell of it All, How Not to Grow Up and my current read, Elephants on Acid (and other Bizarre Experiments)

Still not seen Inception