Beyond writing with confidence

Sunday weblog notes from November 23, 2025 that were compiled and shared.

I know, I know, writing is about the process and journey. The outcome is something that is a result of both. Maybe you end up more focused on the outcome of the finished writing product. In a world where large language models will work to spit out a draft in seconds it might feel like hours of your effort have been compressed into a few seconds. That in my experience is not really the case. It took me a bit to sit down and move beyond letting the model draft things out and return to the idea where I sit down in front of the keyboard and make the writing happen. It’s a process where I sit down and either abide by my backlog or engage in pure stream of consciousness style writing. Some of that is just about thinking out loud and writing down the results. Outside of the stream of consciousness style writing I’ll admit that my ability to produce an outline and work section by section to completion seems to have diminished. Something changed and I’m more likely to write a research note or a shorter reflection.

Beyond writing with confidence you have to be willing to put in the work. I think that is the key part of the equation that these new agent interfaces like ChatGPT are fundamentally changing. People find it easier cognitively to allow the machine to produce and to work with the output vs. sitting down and writing something more comprehensive. I have felt that pressure as well recently. I’m just not willing to sit down and write for 3 hours at a clip anymore. I just sit down and lock in for 1,500 words, maybe 2,000 and then I’m done. A lot of the time my efforts just end up being a quick 500-750 word draft and then I move along to something else. My efforts to do that are interesting and they fit into the 4 major writing buckets that I have been focused on maintaining. However, I struggle to figure out if the time was spent in a way that moves things forward toward that perfect possible future. My interest in AI/ML, AGI, robotics, and quantum are all very real and active, but that research in the aggregate is being amassed toward what end goal remains a strong and real question.

It feels like we are going to get back into the habit of producing some of these weblog missives that have sections and are not one endless string of prose. That is probably for the better. It is also the result of my decision to try to guide this type of writing efforts into one big essay each week that is targeted to be shared on Sunday. It’s a weekend writing effort to bring it all together and put it into a package that is sharable, approachable, and ultimately shares the main point even if that point happens to wander around for a bit before becoming apparent.

Engaging in some paper writing

After attending my 20 year college reunion at the University of Kansas last week I was thinking about engaging in some paper writing. More to the point, I was thinking about how to reset my paper writing efforts to somewhere around the transition from college to the professional world. My advisors at the time of graduation did not push me to collaborate on anything in particular or publish papers from my dissertation. I took my dissertation results out to a few conferences and started down the journey toward academic efforts. Things after that just took another direction. It might now be possible to ask Gemini 3 (which is surprisingly good at the deep research type things I like to do) or ChatGPT to engage with me to facilitate writing a couple of papers. That is one way to go about it or I could perhaps engage in conversations with other academics that are writing at a regular clip and try to triangulate the right path forward toward being productive.

Sustained writing efforts

Over the last few weeks or maybe months at this point, I have engaged in writing efforts typically from start to finish on a topic very quickly. Normally, I’ll circle back to what was written for a quick bit of editing and then whatever it is gets published directly or scheduled. I’m not really engaging in sustained writing efforts that last multiple hours. That is something that I certainly could spend time working on and it might be something that is very worthwhile. Maybe toward the end of the year I can take my revised backlog and really spend some time in deep work. I’m going to try to complete some 3 hour writing sessions. That will be very different from my 30-45 minutes of focus that I’m currently achieving. Keep in mind that my current strategy works and I’m able to produce decent research notes, but they fall short of longer manuscripts or paper level efforts. That is something that I feel like is lacking in my day to day productivity and it is something that has bubbled up to the forefront of my thoughts. It’s something obviously that I am concerned about.