Changing My Approach to Writing

I have a new strategy for how to improve my writing in this newsletter. Apologies, this issue isn’t using the new strategy, but I’m hoping it will serve as a public commitment to making the switch.

Up to this point, I’ve been beeminding spending thirty-minute blocks on the newsletter weekly, and it’s been my unofficial goal to publish an issue at the end of each of these blocks. In practice this has meant thirty-minute train-of-thought writing sessions with little or no editing before publishing.

My plan going forward is to break that single Beeminder goal into two—one for capturing thoughts, organizing ideas, doing train-of-thought writing; and a separate goal for publishing posts. I’m hoping this will have several benefits:

1. Having time spent thinking separated from the need to hit publish will hopefully reduce anxiety.

2. Time dedicated to exploration of ideas separate from a specific newsletter issue should allow my thoughts the room to develop before publishing, even if that means some ideas take weeks or months before they’re ready to share.

3. Having the freedom to vary the size of my posts, rather than every post being roughly thirty minutes worth of words, should allow posts to be more contained and coherent.

I’ve just taken a moment to complete the step I’ve been procrastinating on, actually creating the two goals:

• sowstack - starting at six minutes daily, autodialed up to a maximum of thirty minutes daily

• reapstack - starting at one post weekly

I’m storing the raw material (thoughts, ideas, questions) in a folder in Obsidian. It also has a sub-folder where claude code can add stuff if I’ve requested it to. I’ve instructed claude code to always add such material as outlines rather than prose to further reduce the chance any AI-written prose will accidentally make it into the newsletter.

Hoping this will significantly improve the quality of my writing here!