I've realized I'm drowning in a sea of words, so this is me lifting my head above water to take a breath. I started writing today with the idea of spending on hour on another 250-word Atomic Essay. It didn't go as planned.
Without a clear topic in mind I did a few minutes of free writing to see what came to mind. After three or four sentences I latched on to a topic. The idea was to write a short how-to guide on a programming topic, but after 40 minutes I had blown past the goal of 250 words. The topic ended up being more involved and complex, and there's no way I could get it down to a crisp 250-300 words without investing significantly more time.
I wasn't able to get the level of detail right, probably because I didn't have a well-defined audience. I also kept expanding the scope of the article because I felt that I needed to add more and more context to make it understandable. What started as a quick and simple how-to evolved in my head into a whole series of articles on how to dominate the intersection between analytics, programming and saving the world. So two hours in, I had to put the original draft aside because I want to publish __something__ today, but I don't want to spend the rest of the day working on it.
In the Ship 30 for 30 program one of the pieces of advice is to publish a small post, and if that gets positive feedback, turn it into a medium post, and if __that__ gets feedback, turn it into a longform article. On one hand I can see that working if I'm committed to publishing short blogs every day for 30 days. But if I shift my perspective to writing one longform article every week then it's a different story. In that case today's exercise could be considered very productive. If I spend 30 minutes to an hour on this piece every day this week, I'll have an well-developed piece of writing to publish at the end of the week.
In short, I'm still figuring things out. I don't want this to be a diary where I post my internal, self-reflective thoughts. But in these beginning phases, publishing anything at all is a victory, so I'll take it for what it's worth.
Without a clear topic in mind I did a few minutes of free writing to see what came to mind. After three or four sentences I latched on to a topic. The idea was to write a short how-to guide on a programming topic, but after 40 minutes I had blown past the goal of 250 words. The topic ended up being more involved and complex, and there's no way I could get it down to a crisp 250-300 words without investing significantly more time.
I wasn't able to get the level of detail right, probably because I didn't have a well-defined audience. I also kept expanding the scope of the article because I felt that I needed to add more and more context to make it understandable. What started as a quick and simple how-to evolved in my head into a whole series of articles on how to dominate the intersection between analytics, programming and saving the world. So two hours in, I had to put the original draft aside because I want to publish __something__ today, but I don't want to spend the rest of the day working on it.
In the Ship 30 for 30 program one of the pieces of advice is to publish a small post, and if that gets positive feedback, turn it into a medium post, and if __that__ gets feedback, turn it into a longform article. On one hand I can see that working if I'm committed to publishing short blogs every day for 30 days. But if I shift my perspective to writing one longform article every week then it's a different story. In that case today's exercise could be considered very productive. If I spend 30 minutes to an hour on this piece every day this week, I'll have an well-developed piece of writing to publish at the end of the week.
In short, I'm still figuring things out. I don't want this to be a diary where I post my internal, self-reflective thoughts. But in these beginning phases, publishing anything at all is a victory, so I'll take it for what it's worth.