Category Archives: Writing

Accountability Affinity

Last year, I struggled to find a local author’s group, and realized that it mattered if the others were basically in my genre. The first one I tried was mostly attended by memoir writers. The second, Shut Up & Write, was mostly fiction writers. It was fun to attend, but I didn’t find much common ground, and so I stopped going to them.

Yesterday, I joined the Useful Books community, which is a community of authors that are writing non-fiction books based on ideas in Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick. He’s in tech, but the community is more broad than that—the genre is described as useful non-fiction: “to create a book so useful that readers can’t help but recommend it.” I went to a virtual writing session yesterday and did end up getting a lot done—and it carried through to the rest of the day.

It’s early on, so I don’t know if this will stick yet, but I do think having something in common with the group helps. Not just that we’re all trying to write, but also the type of thing we’re writing.

4DX: Applying the Second Discipline

The second discipline of The Four Disciplines of Execution is to act on lead measures to accomplish the Wildly Important Goal (WIG). I defined my three WIGs yesterday

  1. Work: no launch blockers in the product by March 31, 2024
  2. Fitness: Go from 23% body fat to under 20% body fat by December 31, 2024.
  3. Personal Growth: Write two 50-page books and put them up for sale by the end of 2024.

For each of those, I have inherently expressed them in a way that defines a “lag” measure. On March 31, I will have launch blockers or not, but there will be nothing I can do on that day to change it. Each day, I will go on my scale and see my body fat %, but I will not really be able to do something that directly affects that in the short term.

4DX asks us to define lead measures that are things we can do right now that will lead to us accomplishing our lag measures. It measures our real-time activity, not the end result of the activity.

For work, it’s going to be time spent coding on launch blockers. I think I can get through the list if I spend 4+ coding hours on launch blockers per week. That might seem like too little—which is common in 4DX goals. You must accept that you still have all of the operational things you have to do. My partner and I are still experimenting, supporting early users, and possibly pivoting. I obviously need to work more than 4 hours per week on the project, but the majority of them are spent dealing with what the business needs today. My WIG is about how we get to the next level.

For fitness, I am accepting that my amount of body fat is very hard to lower (I have lowered it a lot, but have been stuck for a year), and so I am going to work on my amount of muscle mass, which means that I will do more strength training. My lead measure is to do 4 sessions of 10+ minute weight training workouts per week. It’s not 4+, because rest is important. It’s only 10 minutes, because I am working one body part fairly heavy and to failure. I am doing other workouts—these are in addition to what I am already doing, usually on the same day.

To support this, I am adding a secondary leading measure of eating a high-protein, lower carb breakfast 5 days per week. I usually eat oatmeal and fruit, which is perfectly sensible, but perhaps not supporting my WIG as well. I am not a low-carb person (quite the opposite), but I want to reduce this kind of carb. My new staple breakfast will be an egg substitute I make from soaked mung beans (similar to Just Egg) and tofu or tempeh. There is also a cafe near me that makes Just Egg omelets that I will have when I’m lazy. I might also use protein shakes, but rarely.

For my personal goal, since I am aiming for 50 page books, it might be tempting to have a weekly page count goal, but that won’t work for me because I write in drafts. Like my work goal, I think the easiest lead measure will be hours per week, so I will work on the book for at least one hour on five days per week. This will result in 5+ hours per week, but I think it’s important to have a daily practice of writing and not just do 5 hours in one day per week. It seems low, but I have other things I am doing besides this to maintain my level of output. I still want my blog and podcast to be going at the same time. The WIG is about what I can do to get to another level, not something I do instead of what I am doing now. In 6 months, that’s about 130 hours, which should be enough time to write and edit 50 pages.

You might disagree with my goals, and how I am trying to accomplish them. That’s ok, but that’s not the point. The point is that I am trying to accomplish big goals by concentrating on a process that is much more short-term and something I can definitely do (4DX calls this playing a winnable game). I will be checking in every 13 weeks to see if I am moving the lag measure, and adjust if not.

My Current (2024) Blog Stack

This blog is 20 years old. I started with static files generated from CityDesk and hosted on a simple server. Then, I went to static files generated from RapidWeaver on Mac. In 2012, I realized that I needed it to be easier to post, so I migrated to WordPress.

I very rarely updated this site in 2012. I finally decided to bite the bullet and get everything into WordPress so that I could update from any machine, not just the one I had RapidWeaver installed on. I immediately got a bunch of benefits (1) the site has a mobile theme (2) I can update from my phone or iPad using WordPress apps (3) dealing with images and other media is a lot easier and (4) publishing is automatic and fast. Since the migration, I have maintained about a weekly update schedule.

I have been on WordPress since then and can’t see any reason to change. A few years ago, I migrated to DreamHost, which I recommend for WordPress hosting. They can do more than WordPress—I also host App-o-Mat there (which is a custom Django site).

My theme is WordPress’s Twenty Twelve. Each year they make a new theme (named for the year). It was the default when I migrated, and I didn’t look for anything else because I wanted something plain, which it is.

I really try to limit my plugins. There are three that I recommend if you need the features they implement.

I use the Blubrry plugin to help me self-host my podcast. It generates the podcast feed automatically from blog posts.

I use the Contextual Related Posts plugin to put related links at the bottom of each post and the Exclude Pages from Navigation plugin to let me control which pages show up in the navigation.

Aside from those, I just picked the most popular ones for generating a sitemap and to make it easier to embed videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.

I use Hover as my domain name registrar.

I have no plans to change anything. I do keep an eye on the CMS sites that offer some distribution (Medium, Substack, etc), but I care too much about owning my URLs and keeping content in something I could easily migrate away from.

It was 20 years ago today…

I started this blog on December 23, 2003 with this post about automating software processes. I had just decided to leave my job in the new year and start consulting, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a website with a blog, so I made a simple one. I don’t even remember what software I used. Soon after, I ported it to Fogcreek’s CityDesk.

At some point I decided to use a Mac full-time, so I ported the site to RapidWeaver. And then like many others, I ended up on WordPress, which I still use. I have a giant redirect file that keeps the URLs from CityDesk and RapidWeaver working.

I’ve written about the impact that this blog has had on my life and career before, so I’ll just leave some links and not repeat myself

2024 Page-o-Mat Journal

Last year, I released Page-o-Mat, a YAML-based language for defining journal PDFs so that I could make my own Recurring Journal. I used this journal all throughout 2023 and gave some updates along the way: The First 13 Weeks, The Second 13 Weeks, and The Third 13 Weeks. I split the year into 13 week quarters because I do all of my planning by weeks and months and quarters aren’t regular enough.

I just finished making the 2024 version and got a nice surprise. Because January 1st is a Monday, and 2024 is a leap year, the first three quarters line up on 13-week boundaries. Jan 1, April 1, and July 1 are all 13-weeks apart and on Mondays. It’s unnecessary for the way I like to journal, but I do appreciate this. It won’t happen again until 2052.

I pushed the new yaml to the Page-o-Mat repo. There are instructions for building the PDF in the README. I will also be putting a book based on this PDF on LuLu.

TL;DR Yourself

If you write long-form text, people are going to paste it into ChatGPT to get a summary. Do it yourself and put a well-written summary near the beginning.

If that summary is sufficient, delete the rest of the text.

Shut Up & Write

I went to a Shut Up & Write meetup today at a café here in Sarasota. It’s a simple idea. You get there, you say hi, some chit-chat, then you shut up and write for an hour. I decided to spend it doing stream-of-consciousness writing and just keep the pen moving across the page for an hour.

You’d think I could salvage something from it for this post today, but I had some weird dreams last night I wanted to work out.

Anyway, Shut Up & Write was fun. There are events everywhere if you want to try it out.

When Someone is Wrong on the Internet

I have a policy never to write a negative reply to an opinion on the Internet. But I still sometimes have negative reactions. At first, I try to let it go. That works a lot, but not always.

If I find myself thinking about it the next day, then I need to do something just to get it out of my head. In Reframing Anxiety, I wrote about how I’ve come to see anxiety as as asset. I see my anxiety as the flip-side to conscientiousness, which I need to be successful. There’s another way anxiety is working for me now.

Part of what’s happening when you read social media and see an opinion you disagree with is that you imagine that you are in a live debate with that person and that you are losing. You imagine that everyone can see this, so (if you are prone to anxiety) your brain will keep it in your head. You think you can solve it with the perfect remark. The problem is that both sides of the argument think this, so it quickly escalates.

What I am doing instead is using that energy to write my own post here that expresses my opinion on the subject. I write it in a positive tone. I don’t refer to the original post. I don’t post it on social media. It’s just here on my site outside of the conversation.

My inability to let it go helps me fulfill my personal commitment to write every day and I’m grateful for that.

Generating Podcast Episode Ideas

Tomorrow, I will record and publish episode 36 of Write While True. I have not given a lot of thought about the content yet except that I have the topic.

For each episode, all I want to do is end with a takeaway that I have learned about writing better, It feels like there should be a limitless number of topics, so I’m not worried about running out, but I still need to think of them.

To make it more focused, I have been using “seasons” to set a theme. At some point in the week, something that fits in the theme comes to me. Sometimes it’s from something I’m reading, or maybe another podcast, or it just pops into my head from some past bit of writing advice I saw somewhere.

Sometimes I get an idea that is not on theme. For that, I just make a card on my podcast Trello board. Eventually, there will be enough cards in some other theme that I can use to start a new season.

In a way it’s a lot like James Webb Young’s Technique for Producing Ideas. He recommends exposing yourself to both random things and the problem you are trying to solve. At some point, a new idea will pop into your head, since new ideas are just novel combinations of old ideas.

Then, you refine it, because the idea alone is only a seed, and not good enough on its own.

Announcing: Morning Pages Journal with Prompts

I’ve been experimenting with creating books for Amazon KDP using Page-o-Mat. My first book is a journal for writing prompted morning pages.

Cover for the Morning Pages Journal with Prompts book

There are 4 volumes of the journal, each offering a different 30 prompts.

If you don’t know what morning pages are, I covered them in two episodes of my podcast:

I have written about them in these posts:

The journal has two pages per prompt. At 8.5 x 11, it takes me 20-30 minutes to fill them, which is about the right length of time for morning pages. I set them up so that they are the front and back of the same page, so you could remove the page if you wanted.

I also encourage you to read and highlight past pages. At the back of the book is an index where you can harvest your favorite parts.