The Weekly Circle #22
Welcome to the twenty-second episode of The Weekly Circle! A free Circles in Time newsletter released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
My battle with Covid is thankfully over.
Fortunately, the symptoms didn’t get much worse than those I mentioned last week. A lot of water, sleep and sunlight seems to have done the trick. I was also lucky that I didn’t have too much on my plate work-wise, and the work I did have planned, could be pushed out.
For those who are interested, below is what my path to recovery looked like. Sunday night and Monday were probably the trickiest stages. Things got gradually better after that.
Whoop Personal Recovery Data
THE ANNUAL CIRCLE
One of the pieces of work that I have had to push out is my annual review of Circles in Time. I’m about 60% through the review process, so hopefully, this will be something I share next week Sunday.
New Community Tool: Pledger
I plan to share more details on this in The Annual Circle, but I am so excited I can’t help but give you a sneak peek at what I have been slowly working away at for the past month or so.
It is a new community tool called ‘Pledger’.
As you may guess by the name, the Pledger tool orientates around member pledges, which is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the Circles in Time community experience. What may be less obvious is that the name was also chosen because it supports the idea of a Public Ledger - In this case, a functional database of all the pledges that community members and course participants have made.
Why is Pledger useful?
One of the benefits of the Circles in Time online community is that you can learn from others who have experimented with a particular practice in the past: If I know that you intend to build a system to help you get to bed earlier, then I can share my learnings from experimenting with a similar system in the past.
The main problem, of course, is matching: How does one community member know that another member intends to build a personal system to get to bed earlier?
This is partially solved by creating a space for members to share the pledges publically with the rest of the community. However, this is a busy space, especially at the beginning of a month, and I expect (and hope) it will get even busier as the community grows.
To solve this, you can notify members directly that there is someone who has set up a goal and personal system that is similar to something the member has experimented with in the past.
Currently, I have been doing this goal matching exercise based purely on my memory. As much as I would prefer otherwise, there are limits here. Unfortunately.
Pledger ushers in version two of this matching exercise. By creating a clear, legible and searchable database of all the pledges shared on the Circles in Time platform, my community managers, facilitators and I can query the database to identify who has experimented with a particular activity in the past and then link them directly with the current member who has shared their pledge. A huge win.
And that’s just the start.
With time we should be able to remove humans from the loop (me and community managers), allowing accurate matching algorithms to do linking automatically.
There are also side benefits of Pledger. For one, members can explore the database to find practices they may want to experiment with in the future. To support this, I am building out dashboards for all the most frequently selected activities. These dashboards will include research, practical guidelines, support and tracking tools and the members who have experimented within the activity category in the past.
Watch a short walkthrough of the Pledger tool below:
The Pledger will be available for community members to start using before the end of the year.
If you’re exciting as me about where the community platform and tools are going, but aren’t yet a member, you can sign up below:
WORLD VIEWS
THE IDEAS I CIRCLED AROUND THIS WEEK
Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day by Steve Paulson (Interview)
Is the Earth an organism? by W Ford Doolittle (Essay)
The Routines, Rituals, Products, and Apps that Helped Us Get Through 2020
How to have a difficult conversation by Adar Cohen (Essay)
WISE WORDS
THE QUOTES I CIRCLED AROUND THIS WEEK
“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.” ~ Idowu Koyenikan
“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.” ~ Gene Roddenberry
“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ” ~ Michael Pollan
SOMETHING TO PART WITH
Ruins of the Future. A dystopian, yet beautiful art series by the incredible digital artist, Yuri Shwedoff.
Until next week,
Take care,
David
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