Blog: #productivity

Starting now, I’m going to batch releases of my art/writing/etc., posting things only at the beginning of each month. I did this back in 2014–2015 for four or five months, and I think it’s a good fit for me again.

Arbitrary reasons for doing it (acknowledging that it would be just as easy to argue convincingly in the other direction):

• To focus more. By not thinking as often about posting work (speaking mainly of art here since that’s primarily what I’ve been doing lately), I’ll hopefully be able to focus more on the work itself and less on its reception.
• To slow down. Being able to release finished work immediately is a magical and wonderful part of the Internet, but I think some detachment can be helpful, giving ample time to assess and reassess the work and to polish it further before finally posting it. (I have regrets. Not many, but I do have some.)
• I don’t know that batching will actually make this happen, but: to work more on somewhat larger projects that take more time. My current working theory, however, is that immediate release cycles encourage me to optimize toward projects I can finish as quickly as possible. The experiment is to see if slowing the release cycle down makes an actual difference there or not. It may not. I may just be lazy and ill-suited for large projects.
• To write more blog posts that aren’t just release posts. Or, failing that, to at least make the blog feel less like a neverending train of releases and navel-gazing meta posts. (I do believe I’m yearning for the old days, when I wrote “real” posts. We’ll see if the essayist in me still lives.)

Rules I’m arbitrarily giving myself in this experiment, and other tacked-on miscellaneous thoughts that I didn’t want to start a new list for:

• I’ll post each bundle on the first day of each month, or the second day if the first is a Sunday. (I’m calling these batches “release bundles,” by the way.)
• A project has to have been finished for at least a week before I can release it — so anything finished during the last week of the month will go out a month later.
• There’s no set end date for now. If it works well, I’ll hopefully keep doing it for a long time. If it inhibits the old creativity, I’ll stop.
• I’m not sure yet whether I’ll write about in-progress projects during the month. Lately I’ve found myself harboring some misgivings about working in public, or at least some parts of it, and I need to soul search and figure out what I’m comfortable with and what makes the most sense for me and my introvert self.

Here we go. Next releases will be on March 1.

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• David Cain on using paper dictionaries — this resonates with me a lot, even though by profession I build web tools; I think this may be part of why, in my personal projects, I tend to prefer making discrete, downloadable objects like PDFs and EPUBs
• Ben Kuhn’s weekly review habit — great idea, planning to do something like this myself
• Colin Rofls on a new hyperbezier pen tool — excited to see where this goes, mainly for type design
• Basecamp’s Hotwire approach to frontend dev — I still need to look at this in detail, but it looks promising
• Jeremy Keith on Hotwire and Turbo — where I heard about Hotwire

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• Tiantian Xu’s 100 days of 3D design — great work, and her other 100-day projects are great, too
• Chris Granger demoing a natural language programming environment — intriguing; color me a bit skeptical (mainly because of the ambiguities of human language), but I hope it works out
• Frode Hegland’s free book The Future of Text — essays from loads of thinkers about text and reading, including Alan Kay
• NVIDIA’s Maxine — using deepfakes for good (saving bandwidth during video conferencing)
• James Somers on why speed matters — food for thought

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• David Moldawer on getting your setup right — agreed, getting rid of friction is usually worth it (just make sure to avoid the trap of spending all your time working on your setup and not ever getting to the actual thing you wanted to make) (been there)
• Tania Rascia’s history of what she’s learned as a software developer — stellar example of both learning in public and blogging (and her React tutorial is well done, too)
• Jim Nielsen on Sass color functions in CSS — more verbose, sure, but I think worth it
• Tanya Basu on digital gardens — I think it’s a given at this point that I’ll link to anything that talks about digital gardens
• Matt Webb on Machine English — some fascinating history here, and it’s an interesting idea

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Lately I’ve been thinking about this Sam Altman quote on focus:

Focus is a force multiplier on work.

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

Still mulling it over. (I like it, just figuring out whether/how to apply it to myself.)

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• Ben Kuhn on your attention being your scarcest resource — thinking a lot about this lately since I tend to have too many plates spinning at a time (his blog in general is quite good, by the way)
• Matt Webb on a countdown zine site — this countdown clock idea is intriguing and now I’m thinking about using this idea on some things
• Jake Archibald on AVIF — a new image compression format I’d never heard of but which looks quite promising
• Apocalyptic West Coast fires — whoa (“hot coals the size of marbles falling from the sky”)
• Self-powered wireless keyboard made out of paper — though with electronics printed on it (still cool)

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One of the most important tools in my productivity/creativity toolbox is carving out time to think. I’ve recently started being more intentional about doing this, and already I can tell the difference. It feels a little like a superpower.

The areas which I’m currently dedicating time to think about are: story ideas, art, HCI/toolmaking, school, and work. I’ve done something similar in the past where I would write down everything as I went along, but I’m finding benefit in making specific, separate time for each area, and in not writing things down by default (but I do of course write things down if I need to).

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• Jennifer Jacobs’ interview on the Future of Coding podcast — this is the area of HCI I’m most interested in
• Muse — an intriguing spatial canvas idea
• RFC8890, on the Internet being for end users — hear, hear
• Steven Johnson on the spark file — great idea
• The microCOVID Project — a layman’s method for quantifying Covid risk (probably not extremely accurate but interesting nonetheless)

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• Robin Sloan on stock and flow — a little old but still good, on creativity
• Niklaus Wirth on lean software (PDF) — even older but also a bounty of wisdom
• Salman Ansari on his digital garden — good points, particularly (for me) the bit about being interested in lots of different things
• Anne Laure Le-Cunff’s digital garden — also good, and I’m reminded I still need to build my own public notes system
• Tiffany Matthé on being okay with not being extraordinary — hear, hear (and what a relief it is)

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The productivity tools series has now come to its end, thankfully. (Thankfully because I’m more interested in talking about current and future work.) I ended up featuring only twelve; there are a couple others I’ve stopped using, but if that ever changes, I’ll write about them.

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