The elephant in the room would be
diana_coman: jfw: how’s it going?
jfw: diana_coman: not the greatest, I’m in the eleventh hour crunch again
jfw: draft is not finished
diana_coman: jfw: what does it lack to be finished?
jfw: I’ve got a bunch of context as to my original goals and steps but what’s lacking is much delving into the events of the month
diana_coman: jfw: in truth, it is a whole month indeed, dunno who exactly made it that.. long :P
diana_coman: but I’ll let you focus on it now then, no worries.
dorion: dunno who exactly made it that.. long :P << keks
jfw: diana_coman: ok. Assuming I make it out of this one alive, is there an upcoming assignment I should get in next week’s plan?
diana_coman: jfw: an overview of the WoT as you understand it.
jfw: alright
diana_coman: and do get out of it alive.
(the last of which I took as friendly encouragement with a hint of “you’d better…”)
And then
jfw: so my ‘reflections’ article just isn’t anywhere publishable. Got maybe 80-90% of planned content in the draft, but not reviewed at all, placeholder references and such. Trying to at least not snowball the mess to the review+planning but even that’s looking iffy.
And the draft isn’t that long anyway, ~1400 words. I’m uncertain how severe the failure on the article is by itself, given my lack of clue on the timing. But then I let my time management slip regarding Young Hands stuff in going for broke on the article and
2. Re-read of http://ossasepia.com/2018/02/06/its-only-words-and-assumptions-and-priorities-and-ouch/ – I’m through the article itself but reckon I should also include the (English) comments and log references: 2h
didn’t happen (with irony not lost on me, yes). What I will do to prevent this from recurring is to maintain respect for my time allotments and not rob from one necessity to cover for another mess.
The third layer of the problem I see is that I’m not getting anywhere if I can’t break this pattern of writing hangups (a past teacher once said – “your writing is fine, it’s just that you have to sweat blood to do it, huh”). I’m seeing I logged 14 hours on the outline – which turned out useful for remembering what things to write about but lacked a coherent flow and the draft ended up wandering pretty far from the outline – and 18h on the draft.
At least one thing is I haven’t really managed to apply the oft-given advice of “don’t self-censor on the draft, just let it flow”. Can’t say I know why, given I’m perfectly capable of speech and all! But perhaps a bigger one is the:
jfw: diana_coman: I report with some trepidation that I didn’t finish my outline last night. It wasn’t distraction, more of a sulking state where I know I gotta, but something in me just doesn’t wanna; then somehow I got unwedged and it started to flow. Clearly a time waste and I dunno what to say other than it’s a long standing pattern with my writing and I want to fix it. Gotta focus on other things now but I’ll get back to it with urgency tonight and remind myself not to pre-optimize.
diana_coman: jfw: treat the sulking state with a big ignore and – if need be – force writing ie just *write continuously* whatever until sulky-you can’t stand it anymore and rather than keep at nonsense will back off.
I tried the forced writing, which did “get the pen moving” and certainly felt better than just sitting there, but the momentum didn’t quite seem to translate back to the topic at hand. Seems like I need something stronger than “ignore it” – like, shooting it (yet not myself) in the head, or something. (Aaand it also occurs to me that a sufficiently developed set of “just don’t wanna”s would form the negative space of the detested “Just Want To”…)
Otherwise this week, I was privileged to see my pal Robinson interviewed and accepted to the club and to celebrate it with him. I did some reading in Trilema, Ossasepia and the #t log, mainly on the situation with asciilifeform, and contemplated, which hit me pretty personally given the aspects of him that I see in myself, for better and worse, and how much I looked up to him (and think I still do). At any rate I take heart from knowing that if there’s hope for me, I’ve chosen a promising (necessarily not easy) path for realizing it. (Though it’s not like his life is over or anything either, what.) Between Diana Coman, billymg and myself we got to the root of a WordPress editor bug that I and some others had noted, which turned out to be in the cleanup patches. Finally, I got to ponder the subtleties of what constitutes adapting man to machine or the other way around.
The last para is certainly rushed in and glued on but look at something here: you wrote out of dire necessity both review+plan in 3h instead of 8 and while yes, they are not “as good as” those of last week, the part that *matters way more* is that they are not half as bad or worse either! In other words, when you spend 4 hours on one of those instead of 1.5 hours, you just ignore stupidly the fact that gain there is not a linear! And time permitting, by the sound of it, you’d even happily spend 10 hours on each without a care in the world that the improvement you get out of all that time sunk in is barely worth the mention.
To put it plainly: from what I can see so far, your problem with writing most probably stems from a combination of fear of “failing publicly” + fixed evaluation of output quality as an isolated & ideal attribute rather than a practical (and thus limited + constrained) property.
The solution to the above (and to killing your sulks on the matter too) is very simple: set aside each day 1 hour (and NOT more, just 1 hour) in which you will write 300-500 words posts that you’ll publish as they are, on your blog. To not derail the rest, I’d say make them basically installments on what you’d have to write otherwise anyway, eg the WoT . But otherwise I don’t mind it at all if you write some of them on anything else really. So this week there won’t be any big article, no. Cut up that unfinished overview too and choose a chunk for tomorrow’s 1 hour – that chunk will get *published* at the end of the hour, no matter what. And so on from there.
Comment by Diana Coman — November 4, 2019 @ 5:24 pm
My two cents to add is this daily writing habit may be best tackled in the morning, first thing. Wake up, have your coffee and let the page be filled with whatever you have. Stay in your “light cone” and see what’s up with the world after.
When you establish the momentum of getting your most difficult work done to start, everything to follow will be relatively easy. You also avoid having an 11h crunch where external stress is added to and associated with the task at hand.
Comment by Robinson Dorion — November 4, 2019 @ 6:12 pm
Heh, Robinson there seems to know what he’s talking about and as he knows you too, give it some thought.
Jacob, there might also be something else that is not obvious to you (and it usually doesn’t become obvious upfront either): for the sort of trouble you’re having there, there is *significantly* more gain from writing a *lot* than from any mulling/polishing it. Annoying as it may be for the analytic mind, that’s how it goes.
Comment by Diana Coman — November 4, 2019 @ 7:04 pm
The diagnosis sounds quite plausible. Giving it a shot!
Comment by Jacob Welsh — November 5, 2019 @ 8:01 am
[…] in GPG, and a ratings database available through deedbot. [^]The installment style lately was assigned as an exercise in improving my abysmal writing speed by publishing whatever I can get out in one […]
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