What Has My Attention
It’s the end of another month which, by definition, means it’s the start of a different month. Funny how that works, right?
In April I re-dedicated myself to writing everyday because I felt like the first time I tried to do this, in February, I dropped the ball badly. I needed redemption. I needed to see if I could learn from what happened. And redemption I’ve found! Well, at least partially. I wrote about 11,000 more words in April than I did in February, had five more days of writing, and published significantly more. Much of that was due to a very quick start to the month and very little of it happened near the end of the month... but hey, a win is a win.
I’m working on a longer article diving into what I experienced last month but I thought I’d pick one insight and share it here first. The main thing that got in the way of making April truly epic as it pertains to my writing output was the fact that I started to feel like my day job responsibilities needed to impinge on my morning writing time. In the second half of April I was consistently shaving off some of my supposedly sacred writing time in order to “get caught up” or “make sure I’m ready for this work thing.” It always felt like the right call in the moment but in retrospection I have to wonder if this was just my brain scrambling for something, anything, else to do rather than the difficult task of writing (which, as much as I love it, is not particularly easy).
What I’ve learned, though, is that the best way to make sure I feel like I have the time and space to write in the morning is to make sure that I have an excellent 9-5 block of work the day before. If I wake up feeling like I used my work time productively (and was actually effective the day before) it’s much easier to tell my brain that everything is fine and that nothing is going to blow up if I spend the first hour and a half of my day writing for myself. If I spent the previous day working on work of low consequence or let myself get distracted then it became difficult to feel like I had “earned” the solo early morning writing time.
It has nothing to do with the tool I’m using to write or the time of morning I get up or the environment in which I’m trying to do the writing. It has nothing to do with the coffee I’m drinking or the difficulty of what I’m trying to write. The number one lever that affects my ability to consistently write that I seem to have control over is simply whether I felt like I used my time wisely the day before.
Kinda neat. Kinda weird. But maybe not that surprising after all?
Links Worth Your Attention
The computer scientist who can’t stop telling stories. (Quanta Magazine)
How to make big changes one step at a time. (Matthew Strom)
Cultivating a deep life. (Cal Newport)
The running novelist. (The New Yorker)
Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro: A new breed of laptop. (MacStories)
Crack the WIP (work in progress). (John Cutler)
Closing Round
Reading: I thought I gave up on reading Personal Knowledge awhile ago but it’s been mocking me in it’s half-finished state so I picked it up again a few days ago. Maybe it’s wishful thinking... but I felt like I was understanding it more? Also reading A Place of My Own by Michael Pollan.
Watching: Started watching Joe Pera Talks With You on the strength of Craig Mod’s recommendation. Hoo boy. This show is special. I love it.
Playing: Still knocking out a couple hours of Final Fantasy 7 Remake each weekend. Playing a couple rounds of Overwatch with my brother once or twice a week in the evenings, too. Have fallen off the Animal Crossing bandwagon a little bit over the past couple weeks (I let a batch of turnips rot and now I hate myself).
Your friend,
Sam