i’m currently reading goldratt’s The Goal– it’s been on my list for a long time, but i bumped it up after reading that mrbeast recommended his team read it. and now i’m thinking about bottlenecks in my own process, my own throughput and inventory and so on. at one point in the book, the protagonist has a breakthrough while helping his son’s boy scout group with a 10 mile hike. you gotta put the slowest guy at the front of the trail, and then do anything you can to make him faster, such as reduce his load. because he will determine the speed of the entire group.
what’s my own process? i believe that i once published more than 10 wordvomits in a single day, though it’s been long enough that i can’t remember precisely when. it feels like it was on a saturday in 2015 or so. anyway. let’s not even talk about substack yet, let’s just talk about wordvomits, since they’re simpler. all i have to do is to write 1000 words. i’ve done it hundreds of times. actually i think by now i’ve written 1000 words over 1000 times, but there were many times that i didn’t hit publish because i wasn’t satisfied with the output.
that said, do i write everyday? i do not. why not? well… there were times in the past where i felt burnt out on writing and didn’t want to do it anymore. i would tweet instead. and i do love tweeting. but i don’t love the outcome when i’ve been tweeting a lot but not publishing wordvomits or substack essays. of the three, publishing a substack essay is the thing that makes me happiest. but it’s the hardest to do. (there’s something even more satisfying than “publishing a substack essay”, which would be publishing a REALLY GOOD substack essay, or, I bet, doing a substantial update to my ebooks FAN and Introspect. but for now let’s go back to focusing on wordvomits.)
I feel like I’m ready to be done with the 1000/1000 component of this project. and what i’ve learned from my /archives/ blog is that i’ll be quite happy to continue writing wordvomits after 1000. so i’ll go on to 1001, 1002 and so on. i think i’d want to do at least one every month at that point, just for the sake of practicing stream-of-consciousness writing.
but i’m getting ahead of myself. i still have about 130 wordvomits to go before i can declare this project completed. and maybe i’ll want to do something special towards the end, maybe i’ll do 2000/vomit for the last 10 or so, so that there’s no doubt that i crossed the 1m word threshold.
back to goldratt. (for some reason i got distracted and wanted to spend an hour on a thread about an 93year old model carmen dell’orefice)
“we adjust capacity so the bottleneck is at the front of production”
what IS the bottleneck when it comes to my writing? is it the amount of time I spend writing? is it… the prompt? in the example of a group of boys hiking in single file, the bottleneck is the slowest kid. that feels straightforward and easy to understand. I suppose I should try to diagram out my writing to publishing process again from scratch? right now i’m thinking “that feels silly/stupid” but i know i’ve attempted to diagram this stuff before. the last step is to hit publish. before that is copyedits, which i sometimes don’t even bother with. i suppose one could start with a title, or an outline, but I don’t always do that. sometimes I just start typing and see where that goes. oftentimes something comes up for me while I’m scrolling twitter, or watching youtube, or playing a video game, or watching a tv show, or talking to a friend. I think when I think about it more, I might have come to undervalue fresh inputs lately. There was a time around 2015 or so where I remember writing a medium post about “quality inputs, quality outputs”. Ah, in 2014. And… in that post I talk about how horrified I was to notice that I hadn’t prioritized my inputs in a long time. I was sort of coasting from the inputs of years and years ago. you can’t do much with fossilized inspiration. you want flow, you want fresh waters, fresh air. I do think that’s been a big mistake of my process in recent months, maybe even years. I keep trying to work with old things, trying to rekindle old excitements. i should let that shit go and try fresh searches. really navigate by feeling rather than by intellectualizing that I should feel a certain way.
to be fair i think i do sorta do this to some degree, like i often wait for a compelling thought in the shower and then use that to drive me in my writing. but that itself is downstream of the stimuli i’m exposed to, my info diet. so… i think it’s time i try an experiment where, lets say for the next few months, i try to search out for something interesting– look through my bookshelfs, do some kind of exploration, until I find something interesting/compelling enough that i feel like I can write a wordvomit about it. i’d like to make that a serious priority for the rest of the year. worst case scenario, i’ll learn something. best case scenario, i’ll publish so much, i’ll be close to finally finishing this 12+ year long writing project, ie closing one of the largest open loops I have. and i will surely become a better writer as a consequence, and I think enjoy my process more, enjoy my life more, make more money. yeah. what if I hit “partition”– like those “time machine save” scenarios? what if I hit ‘save game’ and went ham? that would be so fun. i feel like i’ve been stressing and knotting and twisting and it would be so nice to have some fun.