I enjoy playing with technology, trying new apps, and adjusting my processes. I listen to podcasts that nominally focus on productivity and the tools to get work done. You can look at my track record of changing writing setups to understand what I mean. It’s easy to conflate optimizing how you work and the work you’re trying to do. It’s rarely the case that these are one and the same, so it’s good to remember that the only way to accomplish a task is by doing it.1Some of this post was discussed in OHAC 52.
Identify the Goal
We’ll take a hard look at this blog as an example. What is my goal in having a website that I update on a weekly basis? Initially it was because people I admire on the internet—podcasters and writers I follow—all have their own websites and they suggest everyone else have a place on the internet that is their own. But that only addresses the existence of markrichard.org, not that it’s specifically a blog, or that I choose to update it once a week.
The goal of my blog is twofold. First, I like having a public place to put certain thoughts and projects. It serves as a record I can point to when relevant.2Spoiler: it’s almost never relevant. It serves as a creative outlet, and at least one time that served a practical purpose.3When I applied for my internship at Art of Problem Solving, I was able to point them to some of the mathematical writing I’d done here as evidence of both my ability and passion. Second, and more importantly, having an external place for my writing encourages me to write differently than I would if nobody were allowed to read it. I want to put out posts that are free of typos and accurately represent my thoughts. Even if nobody reads this, knowing that someone could is reason enough to take care with my words. It’s an approach pushes me to practice my entire writing process.
As for my weekly cadence, I know I’m unlikely to be diligent in writing posts that feel “worth” the effort if I reduced my frequency. Since my goal in writing posts at all is to practice the writing process, I’ve continued to find that one post a week is a pace that stretches me without putting too much pressure on the quality of the idea or the depth of research. I also enjoy the pattern of posting something by each Monday. I get to think ahead, plan out ideas, and identify which ones need to be considered for longer versus those that can be drafted, edited, and posted with little bits of free time on the weekend. Notice that the posting schedule is not in itself a goal that matters—the goal is to continue improving how I write, and I’ve found this schedule aptly serves that larger goal.
So, we’ve identified two goals for the continued existence of my blog.
- Maintain a public-facing repository of my ideas and projects.
- Practice and hone my writing process.
With these goals in mind, I can consider what work needs to happen to achieve them.
Determine the Core Work
This is the harsh step that is the crux of this post: What is the precise work needed to achieve the goals stated above? For me, this is straightforward.
- Regularly come up with, and plan out, ideas for posts.
- Write drafts in a timely fashion.
- Edit and proofread the drafts before their scheduled date.
- Post the drafts on my blog.
The first piece of work is paramount to working on Goal 1. I could turn this blog into a place where I do book reports from school, or respond to writing prompts I find on reddit. But unless those actually interest me and represent ideas I want to share with others, I’m making no progress. So, naturally, I instead choose to write about anything and everything that captures my attention. I don’t pigeonhole my blog into a certain category.
The second and fourth pieces of work are necessary for Goal 1 as well: I need to actually write something and put it on the blog if the website is going to be a record of what I want to share. However, all four of the steps are relevant in some way to Goal 2. The writing process moves from the genesis of an idea through to saying a work is completed, whatever that means to me.
If I want to achieve these two goals, any time spent on the blog should emphasize these four activities. Time I spend doing more than the bare maintenance necessary to support the core work is, in terms of my goals, wasted.
Here is some of the work I’ve found myself doing over the years that is at best tangentially related to my stated goals.
- Updating the design or layout of the blog.
- Trying new WordPress plugins.
- Changing text editors for drafting my posts.
- Using different tools to edit my drafts.
- Changing task-tracking systems to manage my ideas.
Each of these is important in some way, but it is explicitly not the work I’m aiming to do for my blog.
If my focus is achieving the two goals above, then I need to catch myself whenever I fall into work that isn’t oriented towards those goals. However, it’s worth addressing two factors that tend to confound my ability to follow my own advice.
Battling Interests and Tactical Procrastination
The reality is that I, along with basically everyone I know, enjoy spending some time thining about how they work as opposed to just doing the work. This is typically due to a combination of interest in the tools they’re using, and having a plausible excuse to not actually do the (more difficult) work they intended to accomplish.
I thoroughly enjoy trying out new apps, and new technology in general. I have great fun learning how to use a new tool and implementing it in a process in some clever way. In fact part of my day job is to create, update, and maintain processes for my team. In corporate jargon, I think operationally. Because I like playing with all those tools and ideas, it’s easy for me to get distracted by them.
But I could also get distracted by playing guitar or going to a baseball game. The difference is I know those are completely disjoint from writing my blog. If I get completely distracted by an unrelated activity, it’s evident and I have to face that. However, spending time finding a new app that could make publishing a post a little faster, or the editing process slightly more streamlined, or the footnotes and PDFs in a post marginally more pleasing to view, is a strong temptation. I convince myself that these are making the final work better in some way, or by reducing the hurdles between the start and end of a post I will somehow benefit either by time saved or an increased eagerness to get the work done.
Surely someday I will operationalize my way to a magic bullet that gets these posts written, edited, and posted so simply that it’s like breathing.
Of course all that is poppycock. Some of it may be justifiable if my only goal was to create a record of my ideas, and I didn’t particularly care about the quality of that record.4Let’s put aside the idea that good writing, or at least good communication, is good thinking and is completely tied to how an idea is represented. But I’ve really painted myself into a corner by requiring that I work on the writing process. It’s difficult work, and getting better at writing doesn’t make the process easier, it just tends to make the final result better.
This is true of most work that is interesting and worth doing. You can have playful interfaces and slick processes that bring you joy due to your cleverness—that’s great—but if the work is difficult, it may well be inherent to its intellectual challenge. Eventually you have to face it head-on with whatever tools you have at your disposal. When it comes to writing in particular, those tools are all but irrelevant. They’re all the same to a close approximation.5I’ll admit that writing a novel or a huge research paper is different, but the lesson is the same. There are some standard tools that are all basically the same, and if your goal is to do the work, complaints of small hurdles related to your available tools is probably just a poor excuse.
It’s not wrong or bad to be interested in the tools of your trade. I find it natural to be thoroughly taken in by exploring options for how to do and create whatever my current hobby is. That could be text editors, computers and tablets, baseball gloves, guitars, or pens. I’ve fallen into rabbit-holes of looking for the best overall option in each of these. In the end though, I have to refocus on my actual goal. Do I want to find the best guitar on the market, or get better at playing guitar?
If you find yourself ignoring your work under the veil of optimizing it, recognize the relative futility of these adjustments. Enjoy them if you find it pleasing—just like I do when exploring new writing software—but acknowledge what you’re actually doing and nudge yourself back onto the track of accomplishing your goals. It’s not easy, but it’s how you keep pushing forward to what matters.
- 1Some of this post was discussed in OHAC 52.
- 2Spoiler: it’s almost never relevant.
- 3When I applied for my internship at Art of Problem Solving, I was able to point them to some of the mathematical writing I’d done here as evidence of both my ability and passion.
- 4Let’s put aside the idea that good writing, or at least good communication, is good thinking and is completely tied to how an idea is represented.
- 5I’ll admit that writing a novel or a huge research paper is different, but the lesson is the same. There are some standard tools that are all basically the same, and if your goal is to do the work, complaints of small hurdles related to your available tools is probably just a poor excuse.