The Philosophy
The Why
Why make one thing a week? Why publicly? Why now? The answer is four things at once.
The Inspiration
Jonathan Coulton did it first.
In 2005, Jonathan Coulton — a software programmer who had always wanted to be a musician — quit his job and committed to writing and releasing one new song every week for a full year. No exceptions. No extensions. One song, every week, for 52 weeks.
The project was called Thing a Week. It ran from September 2005 to September 2006, producing 52 songs that were released freely as a podcast. Some were polished. Some were rough. All of them were real. By the end, Coulton had built a devoted following, launched a career, and demonstrated something important: that consistent, authentic creative output — freed from commercial pressure and perfectionism — could be both personally transformative and surprisingly impactful.
His philosophy was simple: set a constraint that is time-based, not quality-based. Push yourself to take risks. Work quickly. Trust the process. Don't worry about what others think of it. Do it for yourself first, and hope that in doing so, you might be helpful, inspiring, or bring joy to someone else.
"There is no ceiling, and I'm going to smash it."
I want to honour that spirit here. Not by copying it, but by adapting it — taking the core insight (create consistently, create freely, create without the weight of perfectionism) and applying it to a broader range of creative outputs, in a different moment in history, with different tools and different stakes.
Four Reasons
The Four Pillars
Create without the ceiling
Jonathan Coulton didn't set out to make perfect songs. He set out to make songs — one a week, for a year, regardless of quality, regardless of audience, regardless of commercial viability. The constraint was time. The liberation was everything else.
That's the model here. By committing to a weekly cadence and refusing to let perfectionism or commercial intent into the room, the creative process becomes the point. Not the output. Not the reception. The act of making something new, every single week, for a full year.
There is no ceiling here. There is only the next thing.
A life spent learning many things
Before running a business, I was the business. I was the developer, the designer, the salesperson, the strategist — all at once, all the time. That breadth of experience is not a liability. It's a creative asset.
Thing A Week is an invitation to exercise all of it. One week might be a piece of code. The next, a piece of writing. Then something musical, something visual, something conceptual. The variety is the point. Versatility is not dilettantism — it's a different kind of mastery. The mastery of the curious generalist.
Fascinated, and a little afraid
I am hugely positive about AI. I also believe we need to be extraordinarily careful about who uses it and how. We're already living through the consequences of what happens when transformative technology is handed to big business and human nature without sufficient thought for the individual or the collective.
But I also believe AI is the most powerful creative tool humanity has ever had access to. And I want to explore that. Not to automate creativity away, but to use it as a collaborator, a co-creator, a tool for making things I couldn't make alone. Each week, I'll be transparent about which AI tools I used, how, and what I think about the result.
A prototype of post-work meaning
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most people have no idea what they would do if they didn't have to work. Not because they lack imagination, but because the daily grind leaves them so depleted that the question feels almost cruel. Get the kids up. Get to work. Get through the day. Get home. Watch television. Sleep. Repeat.
This project is a deliberate attempt to model a different way. To show, week by week, that meaning doesn't require monetisation. That creativity doesn't require credentials. That the spark of wanting to make something — which exists in almost everyone — can be acted on, even in small ways, even imperfectly, even now.
The Manifesto
On post-work meaning
We are living through a fetishisation of work. Productivity is a virtue. Busyness is a badge of honour. The question "what do you do?" is really asking "what are you worth?" And the answer, for most people, is their job.
This is not new. But it is about to become a crisis. As artificial intelligence automates more and more of what we currently call "work," we will face a question that most of us are entirely unprepared for: if I don't have to work, what do I do with myself?
"Things that don't feed the economy, but feed the soul."
I think about the career barrister who steps away from the bench as AI takes over legal research, and finds herself in pottery. The accountant who discovers he's a brilliant short story writer. The exhausted parent who, freed from the grind, finally picks up the guitar they put down twenty years ago.
Most people are living in what I think of as a "meaning tundra." They want to create. They want to explore. They have suppressed creative impulses — a teacher once told them they were good at drawing, they started learning guitar but stopped — but the daily grind leaves them too depleted to act on any of it.
This project is a deliberate attempt to model a different way. Not a blueprint. Not a prescription. Just a demonstration, week by week, that it's possible to create freely, without commercial pressure, without perfectionism, without needing to be "good enough" before you start.
I have been extraordinarily lucky. The success of Swanky, and the hard, passionate, dedicated work of the team I built there, means I've been able to step away with the most rare and precious resource on earth: time. I want to use that time well. Not just for myself, but as a model for what's possible.
What would you create if you weren't constrained by productivity or perfectionism?
That's the question this project is trying to answer. Week by week, thing by thing, for a full year.
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