Update 2024-04-07: I have long since given up on publishing weekly. I am trying to write 10 minutes per day but am being more flexible with how I let posts grow over time.

I. 10 minutes per day

When I first started this blog, my hope was to write polished essays about literary fiction and essays. I knew that my time to write long posts was running out due to my wife’s pregnancy in 2021; I predicted that all of my free time to write would be vaporized by taking care of a newborn. I was right. But the problem is that my standards were simply too high; I made my writing hobby depend on my reading hobby.

After a year in which I read the least I have as an adult due to the encroachment of work and parenting responsibilities, it seemed silly to predicate my inner life - this writing project - on sufficient reading progress. If every post were a book review, I would only be able to post five or six essays per year. My goal for this blog was to be a personal archive, a way of capturing how I thought about my life as I lived it, in a public forum. Making it public would force me to channel my energy into making content relevant to other people; my private journal entries are frequently little more than dull exhortations to virtue.

A couple of weeks ago, this Matt Levine tweet appeared in my timeline:

And I thought to myself - what would need to happen for me to be able to post every day? I quickly dismissed that goal; between work, childcare, and other maintenance activities, there is no way I could create a finished product every single day. (I suspect Matt Levine’s advice is for people who don’t have a day job and want to make their money laboring in the content mines)

What I settled on is that writing ten minutes per day is a commitment I could stick to. And by the end of the week, I would have enough to publish. My goal is to publish every Friday at 8am CST (which means the post is ready to go on Thursday night). And to do it as long as I can.

II. Three cheers for mediocrity

You should understand how my conscience rebels against this sort of schedule.

But, but, won’t your posts be bad if you post every week? Won’t you run out of topics? How can you expect to publish every week? There’s not enough time in your days to clean your house and do your laundry on top of your other obligations; how can you expect to be able to publish a blog post every week?

My conscience has a point. I don’t think the median post will be tremendously insightful. But what I’m trying to do here is to bootstrap the habit of writing every single day, and having a publishing deadline is the forcing function to do so. For too long, I have had aspirations of writing, but something has always come up to prevent me from doing it. Now that I am a parent in a marriage, with a full-time white collar job, my life is already full of obligations. But writing is something that makes life worth living, and makes all of the paid work and unpaid maintenance work worth it. My goal, then, is to erect the scaffolding to protect my inner life, and the only way I can do that is with an ironclad commitment.

Undoing my perfectionism has taken quite a lot of time. I have learned to love mediocrity, mostly influenced by Venkatesh Rao’s lovely blog series on it. Here’s a good taste:

To bring it back around to the wave of quitting in response to pandemic burnout that inspired this post, that’s a case of people intuitively, and correctly, realizing that lowering your standards of adherence to the societal script of careerism is the right thing to do when you sense an illegible toll on mental and spiritual health. Even if you don’t know quite why you’re unhappy with the current equilibrium, lowering your standards is a good idea. Lowering your standards around whatever you’re up to is the best way to challenge your understanding of both the situation, and yourself.

Much to my chagrin, lowering standards is the easiest way to create some slack in life. Under the weight of my obligations over the past year, I have found that the lack of slack is the largest contributor to stress and a perceived reduction in quality of life.

It’s easiest to understand why the lack of slack is so damaging in the context of time management. Let’s imagine - purely hypothetically - that you are a middle manager whose day is full of meetings, and you have several of your own deadlines that you must hit. Your calendar is loaded up with meetings that have defined boundaries in time. 80% of your time is devoted to meeting time, which by definition is time that you cannot work on anything else. The remaining 20% of your time is spent dealing with everything else, which is just enough time to get through emails and overhead, but not enough to get to substantial work. There is no slack in the system - if an unforeseen event arises, it just gets crammed in the 20% of time that deals with normal overhead, which causes delays in the delivery of overhead (such as reports to upper management) or feedback to other members of the organization. Without slack, there is no ability to absorb the unexpected. Without the ability to absorb unexpected events, even small shifts in workload can create massive cascades of burned resources due to people having to renegotiate all their agreements to other things that they previously agreed to. This is the typical origin of “something came up”-style excuses.

I have somewhat circumvented this problem in my daily life by blocking off slack into my schedule. When your schedule is crammed as full as mine, I will never just stumble upon “free time”; there are already too many things that are worth doing at work and home. So I’ve decided to block off weekend evenings after 5pm for wine time with my wife. We split a bottle of red wine, put on some music, and relax in our living room together. It is not slack in the sense of “having time to deal with the unexpected.” Rather, it is existential slack, or time I’ve set aside to enjoy myself regardless of what unexpected things are occurring in my life.

III. Shallowness and Depth

One other concern I’ve had is that I will become shallow by only writing about subjects that I can devote 10 minutes at a time to writing about. My hope is to avoid this by having a large roster of topics to write about. As Oliver Burkeman put it, if you’re staring at a blank page, you’re doing it wrong. As I write this - my first post of this weekly publishing experiment - I have six other post ideas in the hopper, and am going to be spending my time editing them in a nonlinear fashion to get things over the finish line week after week.

There will be limitations to the scope of ideas I can consider - I simply don’t have that much free time - but the great thing about a weekly newsletter is, if I don’t explore something in enough depth and my intrepid readers call me out on it, I can always revisit it at a later date.

The passage of time also should be considered. I’m sure I’ll have my hobbyhorses that I return to again and again. But, by publishing my views, I am also leaving a record - a record that I can review and renounce if I no longer think the same. If I don’t reach a good spot to terminate my treatment of a given idea, I can either hold off on publishing it or publish it and make a series out of it.

That is enough rambling for now. Time to work on writing a real post, to be published next week. Welcome to the new Lime Blossom Tea.