Tags:#writing#procrastination

10 reasons I don't write

By Archie Cowan

Prototype Developer for AWS global and strategic customers, former ITHAKA/JSTOR Chief Architect. Generative AI builder. Aspiring to do everything.

two super saiyans whos energy is projected toward each other with a shallow depth of field, intense faces

I always need something I don’t have to write. Sometimes it’s time, sometimes it’s a tool I don’t have yet. If only I could write for the web and have margin notes, I think to myself, then I can begin writing seriously. Because, how can I write without margin notes? I need to be able to express my parenthetical tangents in the way that I intended. Also, I guess I need to be able to caption images. And, I need to be able to caption other things too like code samples. Boy would it be great if I could automatically number those captions, margin notes, and footnotes too. Yes, when I can do these things, then I’ll be ready to write for the web.

I’ve come to recognize thoughts like these as a form of perfectionism. Perhaps also as a form of procrastination. My mind carries with it a small army of procrastinators. They are never so organized and tactically efficient as when I have a fleeting thought about writing online. When I write code however, there are many ways to divide and conquer the procrastinators. Probably this is why I’ve been able to make a career out of it.

A thought passes into my mind, this would make a blog post I might have liked to read. A siren goes off and the troops organize. Tanks, rocket launchers, and marching soldiers organize in an instant, marching across a wide street with generals looking over the troops. I can hardly remember what I originally wanted to write as the deafening sound of goose stepping soldiers marching through the streets of my mind. They shout in unison. Margin notes, footnotes, automated numbering, figures, captions, all with markdown!

It isn’t long before my vulnerable writing idea satisfies itself as a bullet in my daily journal rather than coming to life. Other people need things from me. It’s much easier to surrender to the urgency of the immediate needs of others. So long writing idea, perhaps I’ll see you again soon.

Aside, I wish that my writing/journaling life started much sooner. The stories I would have remembered, the wisdom that is only packed into my mind as experience, only callable by my single threaded mind in a similar experience, might be available in more circumstances. Instead it is stuck in my memories or perhaps even lost.

Having recognized this pattern, a turn of phrase I’ve said aloud to many people arrived in my thoughts like a whisper under the din of all these reasons I couldn’t write my article. I’ve helped many teams with continuous improvement, shipping to production more rapidly, automating toil.

One of my best managers ever gave me this advice:

Use the skills you are good at to help you improve your weaker skills.

For over 10 years I worked with someone I admired (and continue to) for a long time. Dale Myers was first known to me as my CTO at Careersite, a former Borders Books VP of Tech. The guy who left on principle when borders decided to outsource its technology instead of innovating with its own engineers. Never thought of this until now. If Borders hadn’t lost the game, I probably wouldn’t have ever met Dale. That's nice icing on the cake for having lost my favorite book store.

I am an ace when it comes to helping a team overcome their obstacles to shipping every day. Could I do this to reduce my own suffering? Something I’ve said to many groups of folks is that speed is the absence of things that are slow. Or, put another way…

High velocity toward a goal is the absence of forces in the opposite direction.

One of those questions I could ask people I was coaching is what are the things that slow you down? Turning that question inward, what are the reasons you aren’t writing online? I gesture toward the goose stepping army of reasons why I’m not writing online. Rather than just give up here. I do as I would recommend folks that I would coach regarding their software development process. If something is slowing you down, write it down.

If something is slowing you down, write it down. Give it a name. Put some action against it.

My first iteration of writing down what was holding me back from writing looked like this:

I wrote this list yesterday.

I like to write in plain text formats

I like to use source control

I like to just write even when its garbage and expand until I get what I’m doing, like in a journal

I like writing in google docs but not publishing in google docs

I really like how authoritative numbered figures gives my writing, same with table of contents and margin notes

I don’t like toiling on tools when I should be writing

I really like the idea of writing markdown and adding my own capabilities to it like textual diagrams and numbered figures and references.

I want a core format that can render in pdf or html in a way that I like it to

I think the labeling systems should be consistent across the different output formats… like figure 1 on a webpage should be the same as figure 1 in a pdf document.

It seems to be important, to me, to be able to create unique features in my writing so I should be in a position to add computation around features of the words I’m putting down.

And yet, I write this initial draft in google docs. How conflicted I seem to be about some of this.

Layers of conflict here. I contradict myself. I see it after writing it down. I want to write in plain text but I find myself so productive while writing with google docs. I don’t like sharing my work online as a google doc. I have this belief that I shouldn’t be building tools just so I can write.

I wanted this time to be different though. I gave myself permission to delve into tools and find out if I could fix this. My excuse was that maybe I could write about this adventure.