I hade a confession to make. Despite me constantly admonishing my colleagues, both past, present and hypothetical, to please make decisions, my designer self is just as likely to be distracted by a nice new design or a pretty new feature, meaning I’m not much better and that I got distracted.

I am still trying to create something of a portfolio to showcase how I work, partially through Twine and partially through captures of released games as well as prototypes showing off my current skill set, but I keep getting side tracked.

I’m trying to do, right now, what I should have done way back and just plan it out, but another unfortunate side effect of the games industry is that I’m enormously tired and I really need my vacation. There’s so much material, in addition, that I have no idea how to make heads or tail of it.

I feel like I should have one of those giant whiteboards and make a roadmap of what I need to do and what the goal is. I’m actually not sure what the goal is. How do I show people the inside of my brain? How do I showcase the hundreds of reviews I’ve written, the game analyses, the designs I’ve done, my thought processes, my ideas? My discipline, which honestly seems to have run off to enjoy a vacation of its own?

I have years and years of blog posts, all in relation to games or gaming culture. I have adventures. Literally piles of adventures for different systems, and I have piles of notebooks with ideas, thoughts and plans that never took off.

My mental backlog is massive, and it feels as if I have nowhere to start pulling because I’ll never catch up.

So I save my brain by getting distracted, when in fact I wish I could hire someone to make sense of it for me, or at least help me come up with a viable plan.

Perhaps I should include it more firmly in my habit list. Also I’m kind of miffed at myself for not hitting the ground running this vacation. Three days and all I have to show for it is lots and lots of sleep. Maybe I need the sleep?

But maybe I also need someone from the outside to help me deal with the massive amount of work I have done and keep doing?

I wish there were portfolio consultants. Actually, I wish Tove was alive so I could talk to her about it. I think maybe I need friends more than I need a consultant.

I also need a clear and concise roadmap. Maybe I should try to focus myself a bit more.

By the way, any tips, tricks or ideas are welcome. How did YOU do this for YOUR portfolio? What are people interested in knowing?

If you’re not a visual person, how do you showcase UX skills? I feel like a lot of portfolios are more about UI than UX, even for the UX people I’ve seen. What does one do when one is a damned good systems designer rather than a visual designer? I have, as a UX director once said, an “expertise to solve more complex design problems.” I’ve also been told that my attention to detail is almost alarming.

Should I also showcase what others say of me, because there’s a lot. But would that seem pretentious?

See? This is why I need a consultant and a good plan and maybe to start over at some point with a clean slate and just add the important bits. But how?