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Moving On

I stopped writing every day a few weeks back. The decision to stop was fueled by a couple different things.

  1. Writing daily was much more frequent than the cadence I was at before. Resulting in quality, direction, purpose, you name it, getting lost.
  2. It stressed me out. I don't like talking unless I have something to say. Some people might disagree with this statement about myself :)
  3. Burnout. With lots of other stuff going on I didn't have the mental energy to keep up.

So, I'm moving on from that resolution and not going to write every day. Instead, I'm going to write like I did before about once every week. Only about things I think are worth sharing.

Writing Once a Day

I wrote a couple different things today, and none of it turned out the way I wanted. I'm questioning if it is a good idea to write and publish something every day. It seems to be pushing me to write shorter and less well-written things, while also giving me less time to think about what I want to write about.

In doubting my choice to write daily, for now, I will persevere. My takeaway thought is: "how do I write more often while maintaining or improving quality?"

The External Context

Suppose you have this system.

The properties of this system are:

  • The green ball has a downward force acting upon it.
  • Input: the starting slot (1-4)
  • Output: the ending slot (a-d)
  • You have no idea what happens in the middle.

The middle might look like this:

Or like this

The point is, you can not see what is happening in the middle and you only get to pick an input and be given an output.

Example: 2 maps to B. Remember, we don't know why.

Think of this as a highly simplified game of life. There are things that we have control over (inputs) and there are areas that we not only do not have direct control over but also can not see or understand the properties of (context). Choosing the inputs and applying the context gets us "somewhere" or (the output).

I believe it is very easy to spend too much time focusing on inputs and the outputs we expect, without giving enough thought to the context.

For me, the context of my thoughts and ideas has mostly been an internal conversation. Me thinking about things in isolation. This is a bad thing. Without forcing myself to formalize and be comfortable sharing ideas, it is too easy to let the wrong ideas take hold. This is why I'm blogging. To change the context of my thoughts. From my head to on paper (the internet). As an added benefit, I can practice writing.

While I believe the process of modifying context can be very difficult to predict the result of. I believe that my discussion here will, at least, result in the following modification of my context.