Each day when I wake up time could be devoted to writing. My knowledge, skills, and abilities need to be applied to something each day. I’m sitting at this crossroads where my attention is pulled between multiple things. It would be better to go all in on something. Bringing all my focus to one thing and really working on it would be a good path forward. It would be a clean and clear path forward. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go back to my three folder plan for publishing papers. That plan involves keeping three classic manilla folders with in progress academic papers. Based on the day and the time one of those folders would be the focus of the day and I would try to complete academic works to ultimately advance to the next paper. That conveyer belt of ideas is one way to keep moving things forward. 

Over the last 3 years I have used an alternative format to that three folder strategy for writing academic papers. I moved to a plan where I keep 5 research notes in planning or review. Obviously, based on empirical evidence from that strategy it radically increased my writing output and ultimately my pace of learning. Within that set of heuristics it was a very successful pivot. Being all in on completing a weekly block of research and writing is probably not a path to an end state or an ultimate journey. For the most part it’s a clearly definable process that is both definable and repeatable. 

Engaging in the process of daily writing and publishing a blog is really just about being reflective. For the most part, that type of writing has nothing to stand on or no basis for being recalled later for having value. It’s a reflection of what happened and as the written word it remains a form of art for what it is and what it will always end up being. That being said, it is probably better to spend time creating blocks of research notes or ultimately stacking those into articles, manuscripts, or other longer forms of written communication.

Weblog update: After writing those last 3 paragraphs, I went into the settings for the weblog here and turned off the Newsletter option under Jetpack. That should reduce the sharing of this weblog content and ultimately allow it to exist as it does for the purpose of being a place to think out loud. I have two Substack newsletters that are written to exist outside the process of thinking out loud. They are structured content meant to be consumed in a different way.