My primary goal was to get as many thoughts down as I could so I could see them all at once, so that I could then think more clearly about how they fit together and where to go from there.
A second goal was to do that mindfully, in a way that helped me better think about how to think. What was my brain actually doing as it wrote this post? What could I have done instead? I’ll be writing another post soonish exploring that concept in more detail.
A third goal was to prompt a conversation to help flesh out the ideas here and see what I was missing. What I realized after I had finished was that I hadn’t made the post to be very “user-friendly”—it’s basically a brain dump, cleaned up slightly. I didn’t make much effort to turn that into the sort of examples that introduce ideas clearly, nor even think about who my actual audience was. But I’d already spent 5 hours on it and it seemed like that might take another 5 hours to make useful headway on.
Me too, especially when (1) their authors acknowledge them as such and (2) there isn’t any sign of a general tendency for everyone to post brain dumps all the time when a modest expenditure of effort would let them get their thoughts better organized.
Later on I’ll be wanting to post brain dumps all the time, but I think the rate at which this will come to pass will roughly coincide with “people move their off-the-cuff posts to personal pages and then opt into the personal pages of people whose off-the-cuff posts they like”
Some Meta-Data:
This took me about 5 hours to write.
My primary goal was to get as many thoughts down as I could so I could see them all at once, so that I could then think more clearly about how they fit together and where to go from there.
A second goal was to do that mindfully, in a way that helped me better think about how to think. What was my brain actually doing as it wrote this post? What could I have done instead? I’ll be writing another post soonish exploring that concept in more detail.
A third goal was to prompt a conversation to help flesh out the ideas here and see what I was missing. What I realized after I had finished was that I hadn’t made the post to be very “user-friendly”—it’s basically a brain dump, cleaned up slightly. I didn’t make much effort to turn that into the sort of examples that introduce ideas clearly, nor even think about who my actual audience was. But I’d already spent 5 hours on it and it seemed like that might take another 5 hours to make useful headway on.
Datapoint: I’m okay with brain dumps.
Me too, especially when (1) their authors acknowledge them as such and (2) there isn’t any sign of a general tendency for everyone to post brain dumps all the time when a modest expenditure of effort would let them get their thoughts better organized.
Later on I’ll be wanting to post brain dumps all the time, but I think the rate at which this will come to pass will roughly coincide with “people move their off-the-cuff posts to personal pages and then opt into the personal pages of people whose off-the-cuff posts they like”