Making the big move to a stacked monitor setup was a serious commitment. More specifically getting one of the ATDEC monitor stands was a big commitment. They can be a bit pricey piece of technology. I went with the very heavy duty AWMS-2-BT75-FS model from ATDEC. It worked out well and was very easy to build.
All those writing plans abound. You have to figure out the outcomes of executing the plan. It has to be the right plan. You have to make sure things are lined up in the right ways. Some of those thoughts are coming from the nature of the day that was at hand. It was one of those days where it seemed like a good idea to deeply consider some things. One of those things was just how best to apply the time I have right now to something meaningful. Zooming out a bit it is easy to see that we are in year three of a writing plan that includes producing one block of content per week. Maybe the answer is inside that premise. Writing and producing blocks of content as a process might very well be what I want to do with the time that I have right now. Apparently, the process of producing the thing is what is standing out to me as being pivotal at the moment.
Tonight is going to be a night full of watching the NHL playoffs. Right now the Boston Bruins vs. the Florida Panthers game is on and later on the Colorado Avalanche will play the Seattle Kraken. It’s a big game tonight for the Colorado Avalanche given that the series is all tied up at 2-2. Winning that mid series stalemate is very important. Getting into any elimination game scenario is not a good thing to allow if the team can avoid it. At the moment, I’m considering what is going to happen with dinner and just absorbing some playoff hockey. That is where things are at and it is pretty much what is going on beyond engaging in the practice of daily writing. Sometimes you have to sit down and just work on producing some words. That is a different element than producing a set of weekly blocks as a part of a plan. I know right now what each of those writing blocks is going to be between now and the end of the year. Working on those well defined blocks of content is a type of intellectual work to generate output. Sitting down to just write for the sake of putting words on the page is a different sort of activity.
I’m a big fan of stream of consciousness based writing. Sitting down and just writing until you are done with the act of writing is a great way to relax your mind. A lot of time that type of effort could produce absolute balderdash. Writing about whatever comes to mind will have a mix of results. Some of it might be interesting and other blocks of it might otherwise be terrible prose. It happens. I’m certainly guilty of a few false starts now and again during the writing process. Ok to be fair to that assessment I’m probably guilty of a fair number of false starts. More than a few of those have made it all the way to the blog. Other ones more recently just get to live in a Google Doc in perpetuity.
A few hours of my time this weekend were devoted to seeding Substack posts from week 55 to current (124) into the blog. I’m not sure how long Substack as a platform will last so I wanted to just put the content into my backlog. That process of seeding content really did take a couple hours of working with the posts to get all that content ported over to the blog. My weekly workflow now has an extra step to stage the future content in both the Substack and the blog, but having that extra set of steps is just a couple minutes of post production work. At some point, I will need to circle back and load up the Substack content from weeks 1 to 54. However, today will not be that day of content loading. Maybe it will happen during the course of watching some playoff hockey games here in the next month or so as the playoffs progress.
Last night, I could not make it all the way to the end of the Colorado Avalanche game last night. I made it to part of the 3rd period and fell asleep. That game simply started too late in the evening. I’m an early morning content creator and those late nights are hard to recover from these days. All the round one match-ups have been pretty exciting this year. It has been a good point in my process to consider managing the backlog of writing blocks. Right now I know what content needs to get created between now and the end of the year. All of my energy and focus needs to be put into making the best possible blocks of content. It’s important to really kick the production quality up a notch here and build blocks of research that can be packaged into research notes, literature reviews, or academic articles. At the end of 2023, I want to be able to see several completed articles. Right now I’m tracking to produce a third year end book in three years and that is good, but it could be better and that is where my focus needs to be right now.
Increasing the velocity of my contributions to the academy is where I want to put my effort. My five year writing plan is about assuming I have that amount of time to do something with my writing efforts and trying to plan to use that time wisely. Part of that is about producing content and writing that does not end up being purely ephemeral in nature. Prose that stands the test of time is rare and impactful. Content that simply fades away is now increasingly becoming nothing more than noise or worse it cannot break through at all and is not even background noise.
Apparently, within the posts section of WordPress I have 225 draft posts that span from 1998 to 2021 to clean up. Over the years my total collection of posts has moved from being a Microsoft FrontPage site to being over on Movable Type to finally landing on WordPress. A couple of times I have had the entire site wiped out which left a bunch of content holes including images and wholesale missing posts. Most of the time I had backups of the actual written words, but the posts that had images were not well backed up over the last twenty years. Even the Wayback Machine does not have all the content anymore.
Currently, my routine is set up to produce 52 blocks of content per year. Each week one block of content is getting generated. Within that cycle I have time devoted to writing on the weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday morning I wake up early and focus for several hours without interruption. We are in the third year of this 52 block creation format. The previous two years were moved into a manuscript format and packaged as books. Each of the blocks is shared out as a Substack post along the way. All of that is geared toward my efforts to learn, understand, and explain complex topics. That is the routine that I have setup and am implementing as part of both my daily writing plan and the research trajectory I have set up for myself. All that rolls up into my five year writing plan and I have been successful in adhering to the plan.
This pattern of production works for me and I’m ok with sustaining it. One of the things I need to really focus on doing is converting some of the blocks into research notes, literature reviews, and the seeds of academic papers. Last year I built a solid literature review in Overleaf and was able to share it out. Pretty much every part of that effort was rewarding. It was good research and the effort put into that made sense. This year we have moved from post 105 to where I am currently working on post 124. That pretty much means that 19 blocks of the 52 for this year have been expended. All of that effort did not yield another publication shifted over to Overleaf for extended sharing. At the moment, I’m deeply considering what that means to have spent the time and effort on that writing effort, but not have turned the corner from building blocks of content to creating publications.
All that being said, I’m trying to figure out how to take my remaining backlog for the rest of the year and either mix and match blocks to build something or change out some of the remaining blocks for the year to help support the mission of creating better literature reviews. I know that the best possible plan is to probably just sit down and write down the top 5 literature reviews toward the bleeding edge of technology I would like to read and then just produce the ones that do not exist. Working on things within that process is probably the right way to move things forward. Getting to a posture where my routine is generating the output I want over time is really the outcome I’m looking to achieve. Having a routine is great and it is the first step in the process. A good next step is understanding the outcomes of that routine. That is what I have been trying to think about within the last 500 words or so of prose.
Each of those 52 blocks right now is created in a Google Doc and that is where the content stays within the 5 week planning and review cycle. For the whole year I work on content within that document and pull out completed works to share them in Substack. I’m trying to figure out if I should be publishing the content on the blog as well. No real conflict of obligation exists in doing that type of doubling up on posting the content. Generally, each blog post is created in a separate stand alone Google Doc and then that word processing document is just left in storage afterwards. That is very different from the 52 blocks of content where towards the end of the year I take the time to format the content back into a Microsoft Word document and prepare that manuscript for both editing and publication. From what I can tell, old Substack posts don’t really get a ton of traffic and at some point I’m sure that platform will cease to exist. My blog will exist until approximately 5 years after my efforts cease. I tend to pay in advance for domains and hosting.
At the moment, my writing schedule for the week looks like this:
The most straightforward part of my planning trifecta (research trajectory statement, writing schedule, and upcoming research plan) of thinking about what I’m going to do next is really the writing schedule. It really just details my plan each week to sit down and be productive at the keyboard. For better or worse that means tracking in advance what my weekend mornings are dedicated to working on and how that time will be best spent. My writing schedule can be summed up as a simple look at weekends vs. weekdays and what needs attention.
Things seem to be changing a bunch in terms of social networks this year. I’m curious to see if a return to the weblog and self hosted content is coming. The problem with that creation of your own island of content is that the crowds are generally elsewhere. We have seen massive changes in where new crowds are going. I mean MySpace was exciting before it was a wasteland. Sometimes I miss the community of the early communities like what happened on Flickr at the start. Some of that early community started to happen on Substack Notes. You will find that the best chance to see a smaller number of creators and have a solid level of interaction with people is at the start of a thing.
Over time the algorithm and the crowd removes the elements of community that form up the things I generally like about new platforms. I mean where Twitter is now and where it was coming out of SXSW (2006) is like two entirely different companies that just happen to share the same name. It was interesting to see what was happening on Substack Notes. At the time, I was at a soccer practice and thought using the post template that Substack provided to share the news about notes was a good idea. I’m not sure my sharing helped drive any degree of adoption, but I did share that news. So far I’m checking into Substack Notes every day as a part of my entertainment routine. It’s probably eating up a little bit of time that would have been spent on Twitter.
Sometimes I play Boom Beach, the rather mindless smartphone game, on my Google Pixel 7 Pro (now repaired) for a couple of minutes during the afternoon. I’m actively considering just hitting delete on my Twitter account. It is not really something that I need for any reason. Maybe spending some time without any social media would increase my writing output. I had Facebook turned off for years and that was fine. Maybe getting rid of Twitter would be a good thing to complete. Anyway, that is a course of action that I’m strongly considering. The fact that I did not just complete the action is probably an indicator that it won’t happen. It however is something that I have spent some time considering.
Things have been moving along and I have content prepared to go live until the end of May. It’s good to have gotten back to where I have a solid backlog of content ready to publish. Part of that gives me the ability to read and edit it 30 days later which is the key point where it’s like reading it fresh and my editing improves. You are probably aware that it is much harder to edit recently written things. Time is the best friend of editing.
All sorts of posting happened this weekend on the old weblog/blog. I was super productive on the writing front as well. It was just one of those weekends where a lot of words happened. Then we ran into Monday where things just fell off the applecart and no words were written for the blog. It’s entirely possible that it was due to the need for a visit to the chiropractor. One of the things that just disrupts all my writing momentum is a bit of back pain. As a disrupter that cause is undefeated for sure. Today I got back up at 0500 without my alarm and sat down to write in front of my Dark Base Pro 900 computer case by Be Quiet! a company from Germany. They make a very quiet computer case. I’m actually curious when they will release a successor to the highly successful 900 series.
Most of you who read this blog know that building a custom computer is a fun adventure, but not an adventure that happens every year. Right now my current parts configuration is working out well enough. I’m not really in the market for a full computer rebuild at this point. Most of the time that happens it is a part by part ordering process. I would probably start with whatever Be Quiet! produced as a new computer case and then slowly add new parts until it was time to swap the new computer in to replace the old one. Generally speaking, my computer needs involve one desktop as my primary daily driver and a laptop of some sort to allow me to go mobile.
I’m probably not buying any major computer hardware at the moment. At some point, my Pixelbook Go is going to have a hardware failure and be replaced with a new laptop from System76. That could happen at any moment or a year from now. Nothing really resides on the Pixelbook Go in terms of files as it happens to be a nearly completely cloud based device. Opening code notebooks or word processing documents is really about saving things to the cloud and moving along. That type of scenario is nice as you can switch seamlessly between the laptop and desktop without any friction.
You certainly are able to replace the act of tweeting with WordPress posts that generate a tweet during publication, but the process is a lot more work. That is probably the reason that most people would not use that methodology for posting. Other people have come to the same conclusion. I’m also pretty sure that the algorithm downranks the posts you send over that way. I’m going to really lean into building things with code. It does markedly increase the velocity of posting on the blog. I’m actually approaching 10,000 total tweets. Well I’m actually at 9,871 total tweets since March of 2009. The number of weblog posts that have been created in that same window happens to be 2,614. That number includes 1,201 published, 243 drafts, and 1,160 private posts. My velocity of tweeting was way higher than my general posting velocity. Certainly sending out tweets is a much easier thing to do than writing a more complex longer form missive. I’m not entirely sure why I ended up spending so much time today thinking about Twitter.
Right now I’m listening to this podcast called The Social Radars. They are interviewing Garry Tan which is turning out to be an interesting discussion. It seemed like a good idea to make a blog post to tweet about it.
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