I wasn’t satisfied with the last vomit and I’d like to think about why that is the case.
I think it’s because I spent a lot of time trying to describe my starting conditions. I think I should attempt instead to summarize my starting conditions as succinctly as possible.
In the context of word vomits, it’s very tempting and easy to keep rambling on describing starting conditions. They’re already internalized, and I just need to talk about them. So I go on and on for as long as I can, and hope that something useful will come out of it. This is a valid strategy for approaching word vomits, but one that I’m getting a little bit tired of. So I’d like to think about what I’d prefer to do.
What happens after quickly summarizing starting conditions? Let’s take that last vomit. How would I summarize it? “I grew up thinking concepts like “integrity” were lame, and sort-of rebelled against them. It wasn’t very useful or effective towards any end. I’m starting to realize now that integrity is actually really useful, because it allows for efficiency. If you can trust a tool, you can focus on the task at hand. Not having integrity means not exactly being able to trust yourself.”
There we go. The above paragraph is the entire previous vomit, distilled.
Where would I have gone from there? I’d have asked myself, well, what’s interesting? What are the interesting questions that I should be asking?
How do I improve my own integrity? How do I get better at doing what I say I’ll do? How do I reduce the amount of time I waste running over the same old ground, over and over again?
Those are questions I don’t have immediate answers to [1], so addressing them is probably a good idea.
How do I get better at doing what I say I’ll do? There are a bunch of first steps.
– First, avoid saying that I’ll do anything that I can’t actually do. Make as few promises as possible until I get the hang of doing everything I say I’ll do.
– Make everything I say I’ll do, highly visible. Trello boards. Post it notes. In my notebook. (Here there’s a task to be made for thinking about how to do this better.)
– Peg an estimated time cost to everything that I say I’ll do.
– Write down why I’m doing something. Why does it matter to me? What is the desired outcome? Who or what does it help?
– Write down what I need to have before I can do it. What are the moving parts? What are the black boxes that need to beilluminated?
– Go through the list of things that I’ve already said I’ll do. If there’s anything that can be done in a couple of minutes, I should do it. If there’s anything that’s not really worth doing, I should get rid of it. Classic GTD, isn’t it?
– Daily reviews. How do I make sure I keep up with them? I should add a task to my daily rewire app that I’ve been using quite consistently. I have to buy the upgrade if I want to add more tasks that I’m already using. It’s only $6. I’ve been using it regularly. Done, buying it now. Done.
Ugh, this all really just feels like I’m running the same old ground over and over again, to be honest. Do I really need to write another vomit about this? Wasn’t there a meta-point I was trying to make about how I get caught up writing about starting conditions? Here I’m writing about the basic steps I need to take, the prescriptive stuff. I already know these things, so why am I writing about them again? Because I need a reminder? Fair enough, I guess, but there’s something inelegant and repetitive about this process. I’ve written before that if repetition is what is necessary, then that’s what I’ll do, but I’m starting to think that the repetition isn’t enough. I can’t just keep walking the same old ground.
I think what’s really happening here is this: I’m not supposed to be writing right now. I’m forcing myself. I’m distracting myself. There’s something else I should be doing. I should be working on, well, work. Or if I’m taking a break from work, then I should be doing something else rather than writing another vomit. I should be doing the bookkeeping of these vomits instead, if I’m determined to be doing some work here. I guess I’m writing this second vomit because I felt like I didn’t like the last vomit, and I wrote that one because I need to write a vomit every day, and because it was about something that was vaguely on my mind.
It probably would’ve made more sense to write vomits that I’ve listed for myself in my todo list. Oh well. I’m not in the mood to write another vomit after this, not right now. So I’ll just spend maybe 25 minutes doing a v1 of a sort of big picture sweep/overview.
Done for now.
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[1] I wonder, though, if I’ve addressed these questions before earlier in my word vomits? Lately I’m starting to realize that it’s getting likelier and likelier that whenever I find myself troubled by some thought, I’ve actually already thought about it before. I just haven’t internalized it fully. Thinking about it again from the start seems slightly wasteful. If I had a better tagging/searching system, if I had a smart system that could surface to me “you’re writing X, you’ve written about it before here”, that would be really awesome. But for the time being I’m going to have to be that system. Right now I make sure I write at least one word vomit every day. This is my second of the day. I should probably then spend some fixed amount of time going through my existing vomits and putting them into neat and tidy categories, so that I can find relevant writing on whatever it is I’m thinking about.