Hey, remember when I switched up the cadence of these post to be weekly rather than daily, (No? How dare you not pay attention to the minutia of what I write!).
“You’ll know next week how the experiment is going.“… that’s what I said… and that was back in April. So that’s how the experiment went.
What happened?
Firstly, I completely own this – I could have been posting, but I chose to focus my attention on other things. I chose not to.
I also chose to bite off more than I could chew with the scale of the posts I was trying to write. So while posting daily freed me from my perfectionist leanings, giving myself space to write expansively brought them right back. Instead of posts, I ended up with a bunch of substantial notes which amounted to the spine of a book… or at least a chunky thesis.
Instead of shipping them weekly, I chose to tell myself a story. That if I just kept working on these mammoth posts, they would be so much better than shipping what I had. That the delay would be worth it. Trouble was that a week went by, then another, then another… Before I knew it, the posts were like the response to that email you should have sent ages ago and now getting back to the person seem super awkward, “Sorry for the tardy response! It’s been crazy at my end!!” Of course, it has.
But I did take a very valuable lesson from building those mammoth documents. To be more accurate, I took away lots of lessons. In researching, unpacking, ideating around and trying to condense complex topics, I came up with a bunch of ideas, (of varying quality, naturally) and retained far more knowledge than I would have otherwise. As I type this, I’m reminded of the Feynman Technique. In essence, through tying to teach and spark new thinking for folk who read what I write, I came to the realisation that the process might be as valuable as the subject.
So without going on too much longer, I’ve decided to pivot, (again). Most of what I put out will simply be a reflection how I’m going about thinking and learning that week, what topic I’m curious about, who and what I’m reading and most importantly, being OK with putting out something that reflects where my thinking is at a current time, without a self-imposed frame that it has to be somehow ‘perfect’ (as if such a thing exists). It’s a not just content, but transparency on the process as well.
Anyhow, I’m not making promises about post frequency, I’m still thinking weekly, but we will see how that goes. I hope this cautionary tale proves useful to anyone else wrestling with perfectionism and procrastination.