Visually Yours: A Guide To Work, Tech and Life In "TBD"

A Post-Pandemic Passion Project

It’s been a few weeks since I shared that I’d be living life in “TBD,” meaning intentionally putting myself in an open state of mind as I navigate a sudden career transition (destination, To Be Determined). There are a lot of unanticipated gifts that come with “work interrupted.” by far, my favorite one has been the many conversations with the people who reach out or are willing to have a “no agenda” conversation. When I think about it, I’ve been having these kinds of conversations most intensely both during and post-Covid. It’s gotten me into an exciting state of mind where I am looking at three territories simultaneously:

1. My own past experiences (personal + professional)

2. The current state of post-Covid life 

3. The future of work, career, and tech (supercharged by AI.)

So, I’m doing something for myself, which may or may not become something more. I don’t know… it’s TBD. I used to keep tons of Moleskine notebooks, which I would fill up with ideas, and then, one day, I stopped. It happens: We get busy and enter periods of life where we focus on other things. More recently, and with the help of a simple iPad note taking app (Goodnotes), I have been doing some visual thinking again as part of my writing—so I figured, why not put these visuals together in something that feels “book-like” as a way to work through them more rigorously? And so, a passion project is born. Here’s the general hypothesis per territory:

Visually Yours: A Guide To Work, Tech and Life In TBD

Life: This is primarily a collection of my personal experiences with the intent of covering dynamics others may be navigating but need to put into words (and visuals). I’m exploring this area in terms of life BC (Before Covid) and AC (After Covid) as one of the themes in my many conversations with friends is how, while things look the same as they were before the pandemic—they are different in ways which are sometimes challenging to put a finger on.

Tech: I’ve been working with tech at the center of my career since the beginning of it, so technology is woven throughout Visually Yours in ways that reflect the past with a lens toward how these insights will inform the future.

Work: I believe vital forces are reshaping the world of white-collar work. The pandemic has drastically altered our relationship with work, while employers are grappling with the emergence of GenZers who have drastically different attitudes about work. To top it all off, we’ve got a multigenerational workforce where boomers, GenXers, millennials, and GenZers all have vastly different working and communication styles yet must somehow collaborate. Lastly, the “contingent” workforce, i.e., freelancers, is exploding—expected to reach nearly 50% by 2025. 

A.I.: My take on the explosion of Generative AI and the inevitable march toward autonomous agents and possibly “AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence) is that we must move toward a place of “Intelligent Co-existence” where the benefits of AI outweigh the societal harm (and I believe there will be significant harm—see social media and mobile). Still, the AI genie is not going back in the bottle, so instead of raging against the machine, we must learn to Coexist with it, intelligently. 

Below are some screen grabs of the project. Consider yourself invited on this journey to…TBD. Feel free to reach out if you have any ideas on where this could and should go—I’d love to hear from you. Until then… here’s to life in TBD.

Visually Yours,

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