If it isn’t scheduled, it won’t happen

Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a pretty good run of writing something (internally, for Yelp) every week for a while now, averaging ~3 posts per month since August. These posts are usually focused on what I’ve been thinking about this past week, but I try to include a dedicated non-status-update section in each one. Writing these sections is the majority of my effort for each post and also the most common reason I fail to publish something — they’re hard!

When writing isn’t scheduled….

Lately I’ve noticed a bad pattern (including this last Friday) that goes something like this:

My week is a little crazy and I feel behind
I don’t write the weekly post until Friday
Friday morning quickly fills up with all the other things I’m behind on
The post either happens very late Friday, or I write it on the weekend, or it doesn’t happen at all that week

This isn’t occurring every week, but when I miss a post it’s nearly always due to this sequence of problems. I’ve given a talk at Pycon with a variety of ideas for not getting overloaded, and part of that strategy is to identify important work and prioritize it explicitly.

Parkinson’s Law and the value of explicitly blocked time

Parkinson’s Law says “work expands to fill the time available” and the only way I know to protect tasks against encroachment by other tasks is proactively setting aside of time.

I strongly encourage explicitly blocking time for the most important work you want to do, and scheduling it up front where you’re forced to work on it before anything else can claim your limited time. Leo Babauta advocates for thinking regularly on your most important tasks (MIT) and attacking it immediately and directly — another way to avoid unintentionally prioritizing the tiny “junk food” tasks that are easy to crank out but relatively unimportant.

For my writing, this means no “squeezing writing in after work” or “when I have free time on a Saturday”, but blocking dedicated time (1 hour a week for now, Thursday mornings) in my calendar. Inevitably I’m tired on a weeknight or I have competing life plans on a weekend (like spending quality dog park time with a certain puppy).

Applying it in practice

So I’m going to try setting aside time for writing less informally and more explicitly. Major changes:

Set aside 1 hour Thursday mornings
Check in another couple weeks and see if this is enough time or I need to adjust the duration. Maybe try one longer block and more, shorter blocks to see which works best.
Build a feedback loop of making sure every month or so that whatever setup I have is working (am I actually writing and publishing regularly?)

The goal is to also make a point of more regularly writing here in a public and visible way. I’ve often felt frustrated at the lack of technical leadership writing on the web — time to make sure mine is generally available at least.

Originally published at www.locallyoptimal.com on March 26, 2019.

Publish independently and publish often

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I got sideswiped this a confluence of factors that finally convinced me to resurrect a decent static site generator (hi Pelican!) and bring this blog back from the relative dead.

In fast succession: Medium finally locked all useful distribution they do behind an even stronger paywall, I read this article by Fred Wilson on the value of being self-sufficient, and the one and only patio11 kindly responded to some of my questions about how to bootstrap a fledgling website no one visits out of the cold start problem.

I’m going to primarily be writing on my own blog (e.g. this post you're reading now), syndicating posts across to Medium for a least a bit, and seeing how it goes.

A new site generator

I got fed up with fighting a packaging ecosystem I didn’t know well in a language I didn’t understand, so I picked this up and took it from Octopress to Pelican. So far there seems to be actively less magic (mostly because I can probably read Makefiles and Python much more natively) and it was easy enough to port.

Credit to an old friend’s blog post showing up unexpectedly in Google results while I tried to work through the port 😄

Publish independently

On both Patrick’s and Fred’s advice, I’m going to try and have this website be the first publishing platform and, where it seems useful, I can syndicate out elsewhere. Seems that importing content into Medium w/ canonical links isn’t too hard, so I got that going for me. In some ways it seems a shame to lose the very small amount of momentum I had on Medium, but I suppose that makes it cheaper to do now than later.

Publish often

If history is any indication, this will be the hard part. I’ve had a pretty good run publishing nearly-weekly posts internal to Yelp in the last 3 months or so, but I’ve been quite awful at putting them out on the greater internet. That seems like a shame in retrospect, because I’ve often been frustrated at the extreme rarity of any decent writing on technical leadership for non-managers. Except this week of course — see Jessie Frazelle’s excellent post on distinguished engineers which has immediately become my new favorite post describing the holistic set of skills behind excellent senior engineers.

And to better defend my ability to publish often, there’s probably going to be a bias here to just text and links for a while. Something I can crank out in a markdown editor without worrying about any technical issues and throw onto the website without effort.

So here’s to nothing?

Wish me luck — we’ll see if a better generator, some reaffirmed intent, and a coat of new paint do the trick.

Writing on Locally Optimal