Writing Blog Entries
Monday, January 7, 2008 at 11:58 Something that I have remarked on often in my books is that when one puts one’s attention on a subject it begins to change. This phenomenon is actually at the root of the “Current Initiative” idea in Do It Tomorrow, where the idea is to give a particular subject a daily burst of attention. Projects and the like resemble houseplants. Ideally they should be watered every day. If you miss a day or so, it won’t matter too much, but anything more than that and they will begin to wither and die.
So I was interested to see that the second that I decided to get writing on my blog again I got an idea which had never occurred to me before.
What I’ve done in the past is collect ideas for articles in one place. I usually keep a list of possible titles on Evernote. Then when I am ready to write an article, I select an idea and start drafting it in Notepad. (I use Notepad because, unlike Word, it doesn’t produce any formatting problems when uploaded). Once I have finished the drafting and editing, I upload the article to Squarespace.
Now the chief characteristic of this process is that there are innumerable opportunities for the articles to get lost. And that is exactly what has tended to happen.
And then I had a blinding flash of the obvious. All I had to do was every time I got an idea for an article or posting, however unformed or incoherent, was to start a new entry on the blog and leave it unpublished. That means that all the ideas are in one place, I can have a number of articles in draft at any one time, and none of them are going to get lost.
Now, as I say, this is a blinding flash of the obvious and is probably the way every blogger other than myself has worked since the beginning of recorded time - but it’s not the way I’ve been working. In fact it’s an excellent example of the way improving a system can make life much easier - a subject which I deal with at some length in Do It Tomorrow.
Once one has improved a system, the next question to ask is “How can this be applied elsewhere?” As soon as I ask the question the answer is obvious: I can use exactly the same system of unpublished drafts on ConstantContact for my newsletter.
Related article: Expand Your Ideas the Easy Way!
Mark Forster
The above idea is working well, but I found initially that I had so many draft postings that they were becoming difficult to keep track of. I then had another blinding flash of the even more obvious and added a “Draft” category to the category list. This means I can bring up all my draft postings together in one place.
As a visitor to the site, you won’t be able to see this category if you look in the Blog Archive because you can see only published postings. The Blog Archive does not show empty categories.
Reader Comments (10)
I've tried to post twice a week since I started, and I've yet to run out of ideas. My notebook captures ideas as I get them, and at any time I've probably got six posts planned out at various stages.
So welcome back, and thanks for the intitial inspiration.
Thanks for the comment, and your blog looks very interesting. I'm glad I provided the initial inspiratation!
Best wishes,
Mark
I too am a Squarespace customer (and a very happy one !) and I tried your idea, Mark - except that it was independently mine as well. What *I* found was that it was not workable for me. Perhaps my drafts were too long, but what happened was that I could not easily see where I was with any particular post. Nor indeed could I get a good overview of the draft posts outstanding.
Thanks for letting us know your experiences with the blog drafts. It's working fine for me at present, but I haven't tried drafting any longer articles yet.
Time will tell!
Since empty categories do not appear in the Blog Archive, visitors to the site are not aware of the existence of this category.
http://medium.com/@martinomich/consistency-over-intensity-c02d9e45970
Firaz Zahabi became internet famous after talking about this idea on Joe Rogan's podcast.
It is basically about building routine. Current Initiative is exactly that.
However I'm at odds here, especially when using Simple Scanning.
SS suggests do what one feels like doing on the 'LONG' list. So there doesn't seem to be any set routine to work on a particular project, consistently. So how does this work...
At a conceptual level, habit and intuition seems to be at odds with each other. While I am finding tremendous benefit in employing both, I am not able to find a union of the two concepts.
@Mark - Hope to hear your opinion on this.
<< So there doesn't seem to be any set routine to work on a particular project, consistently. >>
This is a very interesting question. In fact I think Simple Scanning (and other similar systems) are ideal for implementing Firas' ideas in the world of work.
The reason for this is that as one works on something one's resistance to it falls. But, not only that, your resistance to tasks also falls when you scan over them and decide not to do them on that pass. This is because evaluating a task counts in your mind as doing some work on it.
To give a very over-simplified example, suppose you have a list of 10 projects which you are resisting on a scale of 1 (minimum) to 10 (maximum).
Your list of projects looks like this, showing its place on the resistance scale:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Using simple scanning after your first pass you would end up with something like this:
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2
The original tasks 1 to 5 have all been worked on and re-entered at the end of the list. However because they have been worked on their resistance has fallen to either 1 or 2. But just as significantly the original tasks 6-10 are now at the first part of the list but resistance to them has fallen simply by the scanning action.
On the next pass you will probably succeed in doing one or two of the tasks you didn't do on the first pass, but you will also do all of the tasks you did on the first pass, and will continue to do them until they are finished.
Eventually the whole list will have been reduced in resistance and you will have done all the tasks.
This will all have happened much more easily than if you had forced yourself to do every task to completion on the first pass. This is completely in accordance with what Firaz says.
With recurring tasks you will find that they find their own natural place in your daily activities.
Of course, it's more complicated than the example in real life because you have a constant inflow of new tasks, but the principle remains the same.
One note of caution:
When scanning tasks it's important to make sure your mind is saying "Not now" rather than "NO!" to the ones it's not ready to do yet.
So many of my explorations over the last year or two have been trying to get a better understanding of the dynamics around this problem, and finding ways to address it. Serial No-List was really good at it -- focusing on the things that were most active and most top-of-mind, and putting the other things on the back burner for review only a few times per day at most.
A common theme in these explorations is the need to put more focus on the few top things, while still taking care of routine tasks and one-off tasks, and giving new opportunities the right level of attention. When I keep all of these things in one undifferentiated list, I tend to start too many of them, and the increasing WIP tends to slow down the cycling through the list.
I've tried to raise the bar on what "standing out" means -- instructing my subconscious not to let things stand out so easily. That does help this problem, to a degree, and maybe that would solve Sathya's problem. But for me, it's just better to put aside the things that I don't want to stand out, and review them less frequently.
I think the answer to what you are saying on this subject is much the same as I have just written in reply to your latest comment on the "Focus, Flow, and Batch Size" thread, i.e. if you have too much work, then concentrating on the big stuff results in the small stuff being neglected, and concentrating on the small stuff results in the big stuff being neglected. So really the only solution is to reduce your workload.
Serial No-List worked by displacing some of the work into the future. The problem with that of course is that it's like getting into debt. Of course it ceases to be a problem if you schedule your work forward and refuse to accept any more work until your schedule is free. But I don't think you're doing that!
The secret to working efficiently is to have as little resistance to one's work as possible. "Little and often" is the best method for achieving this that I've yet come across. What that basically consists of is making your batch sizes as small as possible and your speed of processing as fast as possible. So you are moving a lot of small batches forward fast, rather than a few large batches slowly.
One thing that might help you a bit is to let things stand out at their current rate, but instead of working for 30-40 minutes on tasks, work for 10-15 minutes each time. One of the things I started off teaching was that stopping while you are in the middle of something makes you really want to get back to it. That's still as valid as ever.
But even if you are working at 100% efficiency you are not going to be able to do more work than you have time to do.