Working Notes
an old-new kind of blog post
Older internet surfers often talk fondly about the early days of the internet, where forums and short blog posts were the norm. They miss the “off the cuff” nature of blogging. Now with platforms like Substack and Medium, I suspect many writers keep their ideas bottled up for longer than they should for fear that they aren’t ready yet. I do this too. I’ve had a post on boredom in my drafts since January.
This isn’t always a problem, sometimes letting the right things percolate over months or even years can be mysterious and magical, ultimately improving the work. Rushing an idea or project is certainly its own kind of problem.
But, being afraid to share ideas that are under-polished can create bad creative habits. It can lead to more second guessing and doubt, perfectionism and even end in a project sputtering out and being abandoned. I’ve abandoned many projects unintentionally, because of inertia.
I’ve played with a few different solutions for resisting the siren call of perfectionism.
One is publishing less refined, more impromptu posts, over on my personal site. I call them working notes. They are meant to capture early ideas, inklings of bigger concepts or projects, or even random bits floating around in my head. And I’ve mostly reserved my Substack for the eventual iterations on those ideas, and I work harder here to dress them up (hopefully not superficially).
Having a place for your unrefined early ideas and a different place for your polished work is helpful for resisting perfectionism and keeping up creative momentum. Many people use Twitter for this too.
Another solution for resisting perfectionism is my framing of “experiments and endeavors”. If you have a cool idea, don’t think of it as a long term project but a short term experiment. If it turns out horribly, that’s ok, it was just a test. Nothing serious, no big commitment or time wasted. I also believe that most things we give our full attention too cannot “turn out horribly”, there will always be something gained from the attempt. This is called Systems Thinking: how can I benefit even as I fail? I’ve tried to keep this as a kind of mantra over the last half-decade.
The essence of both of these approaches is lowering the stakes of your work.
This becomes hardest when you know in your gut you’ve got something very good. An idea or prototype that could really be great, one that you suspect could be an endeavor or long term project. An example of that would be my essay on boredom or the Printernet web app I’ve been building. I don’t have an answer for those cases but I do think making a habit of sharing your ideas early and often helps over time. I am still struggling through this part. Some projects feel easier to “lower the stakes” than others. Could that be an intuition about where to focus your time? Maybe.
This little post is an example of trying to do this more though. I’ve been working on a lot of fun things and have not had time to simply sit and write lately. It’s been a tiny voice of anxiety in the back of my head. I suspect the next six months will be similarly busy.
So I will try to start sharing “working notes” here, little low stakes posts that sketch out small or new ideas, about the things I am working on or thinking about.
Have a great week!