I'm making some changes here. You can skip to the bottom if you're in a rush.

Today, I present to you a story in three parts.

Part 1: Writing Online

I've been writing online in some capacity for the better part of fifteen years at this point. There's been times where I've written daily (such as my 30 days of blogging in 2022) or gone months having written nothing (it's been a month since my last post here).

If there's one thing you could say about what I've written, it's that there's "seasons" to it.

It's not hard to see that in early 2022, for example, I went on a bit of a productivity bender, looking up to the likes of Matt D'Avella, Ali Abdaal, and Elizabeth Filips. That's great and all, but my interest lied purely in being able to help myself use my time effectively, not to educate others.

Or a few years before that, where ranting about technology, privacy, and data ownership was more my style. It was pretty easy to hop on the latest security flaw bandwagon and form an uneducated opinion on it.

Or more recently, where I've been taking in a bunch on Stoic Philosophy.

Today, my style is...

Well, that's the thing. I don't know.

Part 2: An Identity Crisis

If you asked me what I did for a living five years ago, I would have told you I was a software developer.

Because that's what I did.

I designed systems, and I wrote code that implemented those systems.

I would have answered you and the conversation would have moved on, probably with a "what about yourself?" follow-up question.

Asking me that same question today might yield the same vocalized response, but internally there's a fiery debate going on with various identities yelling obscenities at each other from behind their podiums, and one very tired debate moderator who has very clearly lost control of the situation.

I'm still a software developer.

I don't see that changing any time soon.

But now there's a fringe candidate who joined the debate, and they're gaining popularity in the polls.

Am I a Creative?

Even now, my mind lashes out whenever I consider that.

On a purely-literal level, of course I am a Creative. To be a Creative is to create, and to write code is that. This was an idea that CGP Grey mentioned in his Spaceship You video during the Covid pandemic.

But to refer to myself as a Creative feels like I just insulted everyone else to whom I've previously considered the true Creatives: photographers, videographers, musicians, painters, writers.

Artists.

People who love their craft so much it's more important to them than breathing.

People who don't want to create: they need to create.

People whose work gives you goosebumps when you take it in, whose work makes you look at things a different way, whose work expands your mind.

The works I create are not that.

Part 3: Experiment

I like the weekly newsletter format. It's great for communicating longer form thoughts. It's not great for experimentation. Short-form social media like Mastodon or X has a role here, as does my site.

I'm looking for a middle ground between the newsletter format and the scribbling in my journal. A place to post ideas with less polish than a typical newsletter format.

So, What's Changing?

I'll be posting less on the weekly newsletter side of things. I'll be posting more shorter form content. A little less polished, a little more often. At most once per day. At least once per week.

It's not for everyone. But you might find value in it.

If you think you might, you can subscribe here. You're not signed up by default.

If you think you won't, that's okay too.

For the past 18 months I've been regularly adding content into my wiki. It's been a way for me to catalogue things that I find interesting or to help reinforce something that I want to learn. And I put it online not only so I can access it anywhere, but also so that maybe someone else will get some value out of it.

That didn't used to be my only motivation, though.

The original idea from my wiki came from Nikita Voloboev's wiki. I even used the same site generator they did. I saw the 4k stars on the GitHub repo, the massive number of commits and contributions to the site, and thought, "yeah, I want that".

And so I started building my own. As I stumbled across sites, interesting articles, or I learned something, I tried to write it down. And I've written almost 400,000 characters. I'm pretty content with that.

But in hindsight, I had terrible reasons for starting my wiki. I started it in an attempt to establish some minor internet celebrity status. Not to help others or to help myself learn, but for clout.

What a shitty reason to do anything.

I had a goal that was based off a metric that was completely outside of my control. I can invest hundreds or thousands of hours into a project or creative work and not get any recognition whatsoever. Others may not find my work interesting or useful. Right from the get-go, my definition of success was based on something I could not influence. I would have been better off basing success off of something I could control, like "only add something if I truly think there's value", or "make at least one contribution a day".

But also (and this might be an even worse reason to have done it), I wanted an ego boost. I wanted to make something that hit big traffic numbers, that would draw in contributors on GitHub, and that would build me some online clout in a small corner of the internet.

Needless to say, I've achieved neither. And it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

I still contribute, although not as much recently as I used to. And I will continue to publish it online in the hopes that others – and my future self – get a benefit from it. But my reasons for contributing are no longer tied to a meaningless metric or a shallow desire for recognition. The act of contributing is enough.

I wonder what else I do for the wrong reasons.

Meetings without goals are, by definition, pointless.

And no, "discuss <issue X>" doesn't count.

A meeting needs to have a clearly defined goal. "Determine root cause of <issue X>" is a good goal. "Create plan for finding root cause of <issue X>" also works. "Answer all questions about <issue X>" can also work, depending on the scenario (although initial questions should be provided in advance). "Discuss" – or, even worse, no agenda at all – doesn't count.

Booking a meeting that doesn't have a clearly defined goal signals to the attendees that you're not willing to invest the time to let them prepare.

It hurts you, too. A well-defined meeting means the meeting can be more efficient. It could even (gasp) end early. Or the goal could be achieved without even needing to meet. Everyone loses when the majority of people don't know what they're walking into and don't know what "done" looks like.

Here's an idea for an Outlook or Gmail addon: automatically decline any meeting request that doesn't have clearly defined goals. Use an LLM or something to check the subject and body of the meeting invite.

If it's not clear what the goal is, send a canned response encouraging the host to not waste people's time (but in a nicer way than that).

Based on a Mastodon post of mine

I've just come off a week of a much-needed vacation. I've typically looked at vacation time as "an opportunity to recover" or "to work on my side projects". (In other words, time to work essentially work a second job.) This probably hasn't been the healthiest way to approach time off.

This time, I finished my day job, dropped my dog off at the dog hotel, and left the city to spend a weekend at a friend's cottage.

The cottage has no wifi. There's one clock on the wall, tucked off to the side, discouraging you from "oh, it's 12pm, better do X". People wake up when they want to, eat when they want to, go for a swim when they want to. A complete inversion from my regular regimented schedule.

And that shock to the system, I think, did wonders for my enjoyment of my time off. Sure, there were things I wanted to get done during my time off, but a complete disconnect made all the difference in the world. It was uncomfortable in the best way.

It got me thinking: how can I get this experience every time I take time off? Taking a trip out to a friend's cottage every time I take time off isn't exactly viable (and seems like a great way to get uninvited in the future). And travelling, while it may be viable for me, may not be for others. How do I capture the system shock that pushes me immediately into vacation mode?

A few ideas, in no particular order:

1. Offload responsibilities. Put the dog up in the hotel, or ask a friend to pet-sit for a day/night/weekend/few hours. Prepare food and drink in advance, either by ordering or by prepping it so it just needs to be reheated. I bet the kids would love a sleepover at Grandma and Grandpa's place.
2. Get a change of scenery. Take a different path on your morning walk. Try a new restaurant. Don't spend your time in the same place you spend your regular days. You've been following your loop for too long. This is your chance to break from it.
3. Disconnect. No email. No phone. No X-Insta-Thread-Tube. Take pictures if you want, but the sharing of them can wait. The picture should be the catalyst to remember the moment. Don't live through the lens.
4. Experience nature. Spend time just sitting outside, taking in the world around you. I spent a literal hour sitting in a chair watching hummingbirds. It was time well spent. You can do the same on a park bench.

I suppose all this translates down to: reject the norm. You're taking time off to get away from the regular day-to-day life, to provide that recovery provided by the change of pace.

I love well-designed storage.

Casey Neistat's infamous wall of red boxes is such a good example of this. The closer in proximity two things are, the more related they are.

Staple gun close by wood glue? Sure: they're both for keeping things in place. USB cables? Look further away.

This is a great example of a bespoke storage solution for physical goods when the goal is to be able to access one of a thousand different things efficiently.

I wonder what this would look like for digital goods.

Without deliberate linking, a wiki or other storage doesn't really work here. A computer doesn't understand the similarity between one blog post and another. A wiki article about meditation and Stoicism might not have any common keywords between the two, but they are certainly related.

But a digital interlinking could allow for a graph-based association with an exponential number of weighted edges, each tying the vertices together with a "similarity score".

What would that even look like?

I came across this post on Mastodon today.

Nebyoolae (@nebyoolae@masto.neb.host)

The words that @shanselman@hachyderm.io used in this blog post over 10 years ago are still true to this day https://www.hanselman.com/blog/your-words-are-wasted

masto.neb.host

In the linked blog post, Scott Hanselman says:

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

That was written in 2012, by the way.

Twitter seems to be inevitably heading for that cliff as its CEO continues to execute on a number of potentially-questionable business decisions. (Frankly, I'm surprised the platform is still online given all of the SREs that have been let go; perhaps that speaks to how good their former SREs were!)

This got me thinking about what I write here, or my posts on Mastodon, or my streams on Twitch or YouTube, or any content I put out into the world.

Hell, even my code on GitHub falls into that. (Can you imagine if GitHub failed? Yikes.)

I think Scott's point about owning the content you create is a valid one, and one that shouldn't be taken for granted. From that perspective, I'd like to aim to write more here and then distribute via social media rather than the other way around. Or, at the very least, Mastodon becomes the place where I hash through rough ideas to coalesce into better content here.

Here's the part I struggle with, though: discoverability.

Hypothetically, if you get enough users on a social media platform, there's opportunities to have your work discovered. Without that discoverability, how do people find what you make?

I suppose search engines help with that. Write something useful, someone searches for it, and readership can grow from that. That's worked for me in the past (on a now-lost-to-the-ether blog I used to write on, my post "Ruby Documentation Sucks" was the top-viewed post by a wide margin. Apparently I struck a nerve!)

If we go one level deeper, does discoverability even matter? Who are you writing for: yourself, or for others? For fame and popularity, or to help someone else out?

Ultimately, helping others is a good enough reason to contribute. Contributing in your own place means that you maintain the ownership of what you produce, a point in which Scott and I both agree is important. Does that mean you shouldn't use social media? Not at all. But it's worth thinking about what would happen to your works if your social media platform falls off the face of the earth.

I had the opportunity to see a live performance of the musical Rent the other day. I'm always impressed not only with the talent of the actors and actresses on stage, but also their comfort level. Getting up in front of so many people must be daunting.

They didn't just get up on stage and start performing, obviously. They practiced for months beforehand.

They didn't just practice for months beforehand, obviously. They probably did some fringe shows too.

They probably didn't just do fringe shows, either. Maybe they did an open mic night or two.

Or acting classes.

Or join an improv troop.

Or do a music recital.

Or post something online for the world to see.

The level of vulnerability that everyone on stage demonstrated is incredibly impressive. But they slowly worked up to that. As audience members, we only see the finished product. We never see the literal thousands of hours of deliberate practice that were required to be able to get up on that stage and perform at the required level every night for the duration of the show.

I finished reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon yesterday. I love Austin's writing style. Short. Punchy. I want to read his poetry book too, now.

His website is something is something I'd love to emulate with my online writing, but I fear I have nothing to contribute. But the point is more about pulling back the curtain, isn't it? So: pull back the curtain. Talk about your observations. What do you see in the world around you?

Look at any collection of urban art, or a piece of clever graffiti, or macro photography. Someone noticed something small and decided the world needed to see more of that.

That impresses me twice. First, that someone was able to notice the novel in the mundane. Second, that someone created that thing in the first place.

I can tell you exactly how much time I've spent on things this week.

For the past two weeks, I've been religiously tracking how I've spent every bit of my day, from the big ones on the chart above like eating, sleeping, and working, to the smaller things like how much time I've spent driving places (46 minutes, by the way).

Why would someone do this to themselves? How much time does it take to maintain this? Am I insane? And how do I categorize my time?

But...why?

In a word, prioritization.

More days than not, I get to the end of my day feeling that I could have done more. More productive, more goals achieved, more tasks completed. Tracking my time to this level of detail provides me two valuable pieces of information:

1. How intentional am I being with my time? Did I spend almost 5 hours this week doomscrolling on YouTube? Or was that deliberate rest?
2. Am I spending my time, at the macro level, on what I value?

Without at least some level of tracking, those are hard questions to answer. How much time did I really spend zoned out on the couch?

If we're looking at my time spent for the week, #5 on that list is YouTube. And if I drill down into the individual time entries, it's all doomscrolling (what I define as mindless, valueless time). Not proud of that one. It's time to make a change there.

How much time does it take to maintain this?

Surprisingly, not much. Maybe 10 minutes of deliberate time each day.

The catch here is that I've automated some of the data collection – enough that, when I need to go and fill in the blanks, there's enough data points there for me to easily remember what I was doing.

I use Toggl for my time tracking, but other time tracking tools can be used too.

To make it easier on myself, I use two tools to help me.

The first is Timery for MacOS (also available for iOS; sorry Android users). This app has a place for saved template timers, so if I sit down at my laptop I quickly click on the saved timer I have for a task and get to work.

The second, more involved one, is Tasker for Android. Depending on what I do with my phone, I send off API calls to Toggl to start time entries.

• When I start and stop sleeping (using Sleep As Android), I start and stop the Sleep time entry.
• Various NFC tags around the house will trigger context-relevant things, like grooming, eating, and taking my dog for a walk.
• Connecting to my car's Bluetooth triggers the Driving time entry.

During my morning routine, I review the previous day for any gaps in the schedule, and fill in what I missed. I miss a lot, but having dedicated time while I'm planning my day out means it's quickly brought back in sync. It takes 5 minutes normally, and 10 on a bad day.

Time Categorization

So you've got all of these time entries. How do you categorize them?

Toggl has three categorizing concepts: clients, projects, and tags.

The client/project relationship is the one I rely on. A client can have many projects, and so I group similar but distinct categories together with a client. Self-improvement, as an example, is a client, and then everything under that relates to being a better person.

I personally use tags sparingly because things aren't as clear to me, but that's how my mind wants to work. Tagging absolutely has its purpose here and is probably a more flexible way to track your time. As an example, do you categorize your 20 minute bike ride to the grocery store as Transportation or Exercise? How about playing games (Entertainment) with friends (Socializing)? In these cases, I pick whichever one matters more to me in that moment.

I have clients for three personal projects (streaming, my professional online presence, and CallToAr.ms), Self-Improvement, Work, Chores, Daily Living, Entertainment, Shopping, and Socializing. Under that, you can set out projects however you wish.

Am I insane?

Yeah, probably.

Ultimately, this is only valuable if you're going to do something with the data you collect. If it just produces a pretty chart, then it doesn't really have value. But if you're going to look at the data and take action from it, then I'd argue that 10 minutes a day of time investment is well worth it.

I'll take that time from my YouTube doomscrolling time, thanks.

Ever feel like you just can't get anything done, like you're not making any progress on anything?

I've really felt like I've been stuck in a rut this past week. My current metric for measuring this is the number of contributions I've made to my personal wiki; if there's more than a day or two between commits, something's probably wrong.

Well, it's been a week since my last commit. Before that, another week. Before that, two weeks. Uh oh.

Maybe it's been more than a week.

Now feels like a good enough time to grab a self-awareness onion from the fridge and get to peeling that bad boy back.

The Self-Awareness Onion

What's the self-awareness onion? It's a term that I was first introduced to by Mark Manson while reading The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck (it's a great book, by the way; Mark has a knack for cutting through the bullshit). Think of it as The Toyota Way but for emotions.

1. What am I feeling? Like I'm in a rut (otherwise known as "not happy").
2. Why am I feeling these emotions? Because I'm not contributing enough to my goals, my projects, and to others.
3. Why do I feel like I'm not contributing enough? Because I expected my goals and projects to be further along than they currently are.
4. Why do I consider this to be a failure? Uhh...
   ...
   ...
   Good question. Sounds like I need to rub a few braincells together to figure that out.

The Course Correction

Okay, so we've run the engine diagnostic (yes, this car is onion-powered; deal with it) and we see that the timing belts are out of whack. What can we do about that?

For me, the first adjustment was fixing the lack of physical activity. I set myself a 30 day challenge of doing yoga each day (Yoga With Adriene FTW) and I failed hard at this for the first half of the month. I've now got my girlfriend holding me accountable and that little bit of movement is already helping. I even have exercise plans for June already scheduled.

"When the ship is in trouble, prime with the physical."
– CGP Grey, Spaceship You

The second adjustment was to take my foot off the gas. I was pushing so hard for what I wanted that the only thing I was trending towards was burnout. Weekends and holidays were really just "time spent working on things outside of work". And all work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

The third adjustment is to my goals. Because, well...

My Goals Suck

Let's take my goal of growing the readership of this site, as an example. This is a bad goal. Why?

• It's reliant on something outside of my control: someone has to stumble across my site somehow, read something, think that the slop that I toss together here is worthy of ending up in their inbox, and feel comfortable enough to trust me with their email.
• I'm not spending time deliberately practicing my writing. "Wait, didn't you just write about the importance of deliberate practice last week?". I sure did. And yet, I'm not doing it for my writing. I don't even know where to start on deliberate practice. Sounds like I have some research to do.
• It's a goal that will only lead to disappointment. Wanting higher readership means I will never be satisfied; the number can only go up (well...to a point).

A better goal for myself would be to:

• Consistently produce something that is the best quality I could create
• Regularly practice to improve my writing skills

These two points – along with a detailed plan – are fully within my control. I can practice. I can do my best each time I sit down to write. I can commit to publishing regularly.

This re-evaluation of each of my goals needs to take place regularly. I now have a reminder in my calendar to do this re-evaluation every two months to keep things on track. Because somewhere along the way, many of my goals have turned to dreams and are tied to metrics which simply aren't in my control.

And that's a recipe for disappointment.

Chances are, you've heard of the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something. This was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

Nowadays, those 10,000 hours tend to be treated as 10,000 hours of doing the thing, rather than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. These are not the same.

Let's say you have a basketball player with a killer 3-point shot (Steph Curry, anyone?). Curry didn't get that good by playing games; he got that good by running drills. By deliberate practice targeting his areas of weakness. By analyzing his shots. By being self-cricital and looking for areas of improvement. And by thousands and thousands of hours of invested time.

All of this happens outside of the game. That's not to say that you don't need to play to get better; practicing being in the high-stakes environment is also deliberate practice, if that's what you're focusing on. But simply playing game after game is not enough to achieve mastery.

Interestingly enough, when athletes talk about needing to practice, nobody bats an eyelid. "Of course", they say. "That's what it takes to play at your best. Playing isn't practice."

Now swap basketball for your area of discipline. Mine is software development.

Is your opinion on deliberate practice the same? Or does the idea of deliberately practicing make your stomach churn enough that you're now tasting that grande Americano you just chugged an hour ago?

Simply knowing isn't enough. It must be absorbed into the muscles and the body. It must become part of us. Or we risk losing it the second that we experience stress or difficulty.

– Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (May 19th)

With software development, the line can get a bit more blurry, but I still strongly believe that the time spent in the office working on your current sprint task does not count toward your 10,000 hours to mastery. The sprint task is to the developer what the game is to the basketball player. And if we are to agree that doing the thing is not the same as practicing the thing, then all of a sudden the idea of using "years of experience" as a metric for capabilities becomes much more nebulous.  

And so as a developer, how do we practice? How do we grow? Practice, training, coaching.

Time spent in in-depth code reviews with a mentor is your time with a coach. It is the broad-strokes, macro view of your current state. It's the time to analyze your code. It's the time to be be self-cricital and look for areas of improvement. (Hot take of the day: if your code review has any reasonable amount of code to commit and your reviewer doesn't challenge you on anything, no alternative approaches are discussed, or you didn't get any recommendations, you didn't get a review. You gave a TED Talk on your code.)

Time spent practicing in a homelab, doing challenges on LeetCode, or kata on CodeWars is your time in the gym. It's the deliberate practice of the microskills required for you to excel. It's running drills. It's deliberate practice targeting your areas of weakness.

Growth comes from these two points: analysis and practice, then applying it. And by thousands and thousands of hours of invested time.