Writing for myself

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Sometimes, when I feel my mind filling up with thoughts of other people (tasks, questions, ideas for helping), I take a step back and focus on something more selfish. It's important to me that I sometimes write mainly for myself. If it so happens to benefit other people, wonderful, but it's got to be stuff that I need too.

What are the kinds of things I write about when I'm writing for myself?

  • Notes on things that I'm figuring out
    • Idiosyncratic interests that hardly anyone will find useful
    • Puzzling through the tangles of life
    • Straightforward questions and the journey towards answers, including research and backtracking
    • Plans, scenarios
    • Data analysis
    • Things I'm learning, in case other people want to help out (and sometimes people can learn from it too, which is nice)
  • Things I want to remember
    • Reasons for decisions and expected outcomes
    • What this experiment feels like
    • The influences on my life

Based on a quick scan of the blog posts this year, I'd say that around 25% of my blog posts have been mostly for me rather than other people (excluding weekly and monthly reviews from the count). This is higher than I thought it would be, and I think that's good. It's probably just the buzz from e-mail and from a recent experiment tilting my blog towards more technical topics.

Month Mostly-reflections
Jan 6
Feb 6
March 8
April 5
May 3 so far

Based on my time records, drawing has been on a decline (62.6h in Jan, 34.7h in Feb, 18.2h in March, 12h in April), while Emacs has been on the increase. In fact, the correlation is -0.86 over five months. Interestingly, the only negative correlation for sleep in my top 10 activities is with Emacs: -0.43. Pretty strong positive correlations for sleep with work and writing. I probably like a balance like March, where I mixed things up a bit more with personal reflections. Hmm…

Okay. So maybe I dial back a little on the Emacs side, and do more drawing and writing as an experiment to see how that affects buzz. That probably means that Wednesdays and maybe a bit of Friday will be for Emacs (course, e-mail, blog posts, tinkering). Mondays and a bit of Friday will be for planning. Ideally, we'll get to the point where I don't feel a smidge of guilt for my inbox or limited ability to explain things, so it's all upside. =)

If I set the expectation that I mostly care about my inbox only every 2-3 days (and that I sometimes take a week to reply), I think that will un-buzz-ify my brain enough. It'll be interesting to see if I can still run an engaging e-mail course with those bounds. I like the conversation. I don't want to give that up. =) I just want to make sure my brain has the quiet it needs for other things, too.

What's the quiet for? I want to be able to catch myself being confused, to see the gaps, to say, “Hmm, that's a good question,” and to dig into things further. What am I likely to find interesting after ten years? Easy enough to compare April 2014 with April 2004 (technical posts, snippets, links, teaching, flash fiction), March with March, and so on. I like the mix of March 2014 mix more than April's. More exploratory, maybe? Hmm…

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