I was unable to synthesize the idea. I was unable to express it in an interesting way. I was unable to find my voice.
THIS is what has happened:
I was so excited about my new workflow that I found myself incapable of doing the actual work. I had spent so much time working on the tool that I had forgotten how to focus on the output. I was so fixated on the post structure that I missed the content.
See the pattern?
When you take the effort to build your own tools, you dive into a lower level of abstraction, one that can fill up your days with endless tinkering possibilities. One day you feel trapped, spending more time optimizing how you do your work than actually doing it. Just think how many times you’ve adopted a new productivity app, only to realize two weeks later that you’ve spent more time administering the system than getting anything done.
This has two caveats, though:
First, it’s hard to know when this pattern is just part of a journey of improvement—like when a golfer decides to unlearn her swing to take it to the next level; there’s a dip in the performance before the surge.
Second, this is a fractal problem. I am assuming that my goal is writing posts. I could as well assume that my goal is creating a system to write and publish (some people do this for a living). I can take it further and assume that my goal is programming in golang (some people do this for a living too).
WHAT and HOW are two sides of the same reality, one that can be zoomed in and out in different levels of abstraction. The WHAT becomes the HOW becomes the WHAT becomes the HOW. Actually… if writing posts is not just the WHAT of this level but also the HOW of the level immediately above it… what am I doing this for? I… I don’t know… I got lost in the fractal and I no longer know in which layer I live in. See? Maybe I’m better off just crafting tools or tinkering with Vim.
Hopefully, I’ve given you enough scraps of my work for you to put together your own A Cabin in the Woods post. Actually, I may have just created a genre here: the DIY post, the IKEA post; I give you the pieces, you assemble them in place.
