My writing goals and systems

I wrote this on a plane reflecting on my experience becoming a more consistent writer over the past decade. I intuitively knew writing was something I wanted to be doing, but I had to rearrange my thought process and habits to make it happen.

Goals and systems

My goal is to write about my ideas and things I learn. I aspire to do this and value it because it motivates further thinking and often provides the spark for new ideas and projects I will undertake.

My brain does this thinking whether or not I write. Writing both focuses that thinking process and creates some amount of order from my internal monologue.

I also enjoy working on projects because I find it enjoyable to see ideas come to life and even when things don’t turn out exactly how I had hoped, usually I learn something, which is intrinsically enjoyable to me.

For a long time I’d had the impulse to write and engage in a cycle of thinking and experimenting, but my systems held me back.

Creating a blog

My first challenge was I didn’t have a lens through which to write the work. Independently journaling never resonated with me. There were times over the years where I’ve been able to journal consistently, but the systems that made that possible never seemed to put me in the frame of mind to think about interesting things.

My focus was often what I was doing or more self reflective.

Creating a blog was the first step to solving this challenge. My blog is technical in focus, so it’s the obvious place for my writing about tinkering to go. I created the first version of my blog about 12 years ago but if you look at my post history, just having the blog wasn’t enough to create a system where I was writing, experimenting, and learning.

Actually writing

I’ve personally been quite influenced by the orange website and folks who share their work, projects, and interests. I aspired to contribute my own thoughts and work to a community in a similar way.

When I started writing on my blog or trying to, I often was faced with the Catch 22 of not feeling like I had anything to write about. Occasionally, there would be projects I would do in personal time or at work that yielded interesting results, but I was often keenly aware and self-conscious that what I had to contribute to the conversation was either uninteresting, naive, or potentially wrong.

I’ve since learned that no one reads your blog. This is never more true than when you start, so what you write hardly matters to anyone but you. Just doing something is the best path forward.

If I could go back in time, I would have focused on writing Today I Learned posts consistently starting in 2013. This type of writing and work has several positive functions. It serves as a note to future you on how to do something, either for reference or to be superseded if you learn a new and better way. It also serves as a solution for someone in the future with the same problem you had. Most of the traffic my site receives is to these Today I Learned posts, presumably from people who want to do things like

• Switch to Raindrop from Pocket
• Run the Janus image model on their Macbook
• Setup multiple task queues for Temporal

No one reads your blog

This is no longer literally true for my blog. I get mostly Google traffic with the occasional ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity/Bing/LinkedIn/etc. but mostly for “how to do X posts”.

Almost zero people have read my post on language models or how to use them. In a way, this is liberating. I have no audience and no expectations to fulfill.

For some reason, having the blog and continuing to write on it and publish is part of a system that makes my process of writing and experimenting continue to work. I write something and then I send it off.

I don’t have to agonize over editing and refining if I don’t want to. I can play with the thought and then move on.

Making more buckets for content

When I first created a blog, the site had posts. This was a bigger problem than I realized for about 10 years.

A post felt like it needed to be formal. A post needed to be well edited. A post needed to say something interesting. A post needed to be worth someone’s time.

These internal preconceptions are the reasons I wish I’d started writing TIL posts earlier. Something I learned today is not obviously interesting or useful to you. It was for me. That was the point I missed for a while.

I write for myself

I don’t write this blog for you, I write it for me. I don’t mean that to be an insult if you are reading, but I’ve tried to write for other people or with a sponsorship focus and it doesn’t satisfy me in the same way.

Once I realized creating additional content sections was helpful for making it easier to just write stuff and not worry about for whom or why, I added several more sections to the site. Logs are like a digital pile of sticky notes with quotes from others and fleeting thoughts or exploration. Garden contains longer essays that I am not finished working on and may never be. Link blog is a collection of thought provoking things I’ve read.

This multi-bucket system has grown organically to help me allow myself to just do stuff and have somewhere to put it if I want to. Logs have been especially helpful for this and I’ve built tools that make it trivially easy to write a log entry from my machine. Running

just log

from within my site project creates a new log entry for the day if one doesn’t exist already and opens it. Then I just write.