Thing A Week itself

Every project has a beginning. Most beginnings are invisible — a decision made quietly, a commitment held privately, a first step taken without witnesses. This one is different.

Thing A Week is a project that begins with itself. The first thing I made this week was the commitment to make things. The website you're reading right now. The public declaration that for 52 weeks, I will create something new every single week, and I will share it here.

That might sound like a cheat. But I think it's actually the most honest possible beginning. Because the hardest part of any creative project isn't the making — it's the starting. The moment you say "I'm going to do this" out loud, where other people can hear you.

This is me saying it out loud.

The project is inspired by Jonathan Coulton's original Thing a Week, which ran from 2005 to 2006. Coulton — a software programmer who had always wanted to be a musician — committed to writing and releasing one new song every week for a full year. The project launched his career and demonstrated something important: that consistent, authentic creative output, freed from commercial pressure and perfectionism, could be both personally transformative and surprisingly impactful.

I want to honour that spirit here. Not by copying it, but by adapting it — taking the core insight and applying it to a broader range of creative outputs, in a different moment in history, with different tools and different stakes.

The process this week was primarily one of thinking, writing, and building.

I spent time in deep conversation with an AI — using it as a mind-mapping collaborator to help me articulate the "why" behind this project. Not to generate the ideas for me, but to help me find the ideas that were already there, half-formed, waiting to be named. That conversation is documented elsewhere on this site, and I'd encourage you to read it.

I then worked with Manus.ai to build this website — the platform you're reading right now. The entire site was built in a single week, which felt appropriate for a project about weekly creation. It's not perfect. It will evolve. But it exists, which is the point.

The tools used: Manus.ai (website build), Claude (philosophical brainstorming), my own brain (the irreplaceable part).

Time spent: approximately 6 hours across the week.

One of the things I want to be transparent about throughout this project is the role of AI in each creation. AI is not a shortcut here — it's a collaborator. The thinking, the vision, the voice, the decisions about what matters and why — those are mine. The AI helps me execute faster and better than I could alone. That's a distinction I think is worth preserving.

There's something both terrifying and liberating about making a public commitment.

Terrifying because now I have to do it. Every week, for 52 weeks, I have to make something and put it here. No excuses. No extensions. No "I'll start properly next week."

Liberating because the decision is made. The hardest part — the agonising over whether to start, whether it's good enough, whether anyone will care — is over. I've started. The rest is just showing up.

I've been thinking a lot about what Jonathan Coulton said about his project: that the constraint was time, and the liberation was everything else. By committing to a weekly cadence, you remove the option of perfectionism. You can't spend six months perfecting a song when you have to release it on Friday. You just have to make it, and let it be what it is.

I think that's true of this project too. And I think it's true of life more broadly. We spend so much time waiting until we're ready, until we're good enough, until the conditions are right. But the conditions are never right. You're never ready. The only way to get good at something is to do it badly first, and then do it less badly, and then do it less badly again.

This is me doing it badly first. And I'm genuinely excited about that.

What would you make if you committed to making one thing a week for a year? Not what you'd want to make — what you'd actually make, starting this week, with the time and tools you have right now?

Don't answer that question in your head. Write it down. Tell someone. Better yet, make the thing and share it here.