Experiment in open-hearted productivity

Making space for better questions

Last week I stepped into an experimental, 2-week product development retreat with my two friends Jarred Filmer and Matthew ‘Anansi’ Huff.

We wanted to experiment with a new way of working - more relational and emergent one.

Instead of asking ourselves what we want to build, we asked ourselves how we’d like to feel as we build.

For the past few years all three of us have devoted our lives to exploring various contemplative, embodiment and relational practices.

We all really care about presence and connection.

We have also all previously worked in tech and love the process of building cool software tools.

We became curious what would happen if we designed our own working culture, a more balanced mix of yin and yang, being and doing.

We fundraised for an Airbnb from a friend, cleared our schedules and converged on two things that feel most important for all three of us:

01/ We want to explore building something cool, useful, marketable together that we can be proud of;

02/ We want to experience more wellbeing, flow, love and safety in the process of doing so.

We’re calling it an experiment in open-hearted productivity.

Keeping our hearts open to everything that arises as we try to build something.

It’s been a few days and we’ve already had a taste of what arises when we do that - a lot of unresolved stuff from previous collaborations.

Things like fears of not being good enough, anxiety about losing momentum, being attached to specific product ideas, our relationship to money, feeling like we need to prove something or meeting out basic bodily needs in the flow of creative energy.

Here we begin with welcoming all that to the table and aspire to be as open to our shame, fears or desires, as we are to ideas, tasks and timelines.

Traditional work contexts are not very good at creating long stretches of idle time, leveraging the wisdom of emotions, moving through dissonance in connection or doing things in a way that is sustainable for the body.

Here we spend way more time being in the not-knowing but when clarity emerges, the right action happens more effortlessly.

We’re learning as we go and we want to invite more people into our process.

It seems that the product ideas we’re drawn to all revolve around using AI for more effortless and meaningful context management.

We’d like to create something that helps individuals and groups of people better orient amidst the complexity of life and stay connected to meaning.

There is so much that we’re learning every day and I want to bring more visibility to our process, whether we ship something or not.

“Could work really be like this?” is a quote from Jarred that really resonated with me after a particularly rich product exploration session that ended in a shared breathwork practice.

I think it can. I am experiencing it now and it gives me hope.