The comfort of writing into the void of a blog.
I won’t worry too much about overhtinking things. I’ve been in a rut with making things online. I got a couple Shorts out last week and that felt good but then it didn’t seem quite as sustainable.
I’m writing this at Philz.
While I was packing my bag with way too many books I was starting to think, “Okay what output would make the time worthwhile?”
I was starting to think about, okay, I can write scripts for some Shorts, that would make it worthwhile.
But then if the output is Shorts, I’m probably better off just staying home and filming some Shorts. The bottleneck is usually visuals, either filming or making a slideshow.
So if it’s strictly about the output, I would’ve stayed home.
But I then I remembered, wait, I love being at a coffee shop and writing. My hall of fame for coffee shops where I’ve spent a lot of great time messing around on my laptop:
- The Bean on 1st Ave & 9th St (NYC): Sadly, it’s closed. I didn’t see it listed ont he website so I clicked around on Street View to figure out where it was and now it’s a corner store. 10 years ago I had aspirations (and a daily affirmation lol) to work in tech. So I’d bring the 15-inch MacBook (Retina baby!) to The Bean and would tinker around in Framer and Sketch.
- Whatever that coffee shop was on Avenue A & 4th St (NYC): This was the closest coffee shop but it didn’t have a ton of seating. One summer I decided to actually read (but not actually understand) Infinite Jest and took it here a few times to bang out like 0.5% of the book with each go.
- The common area at Chelsea Piers Fitness (NYC): Okay not a coffee shop but I’d spend many mornings here around the time I was starting all things Active Recall. Lots of ideas that only 10% panned out. Love it. Tried to replicate it at an Equinox when we moved to the Upper West Side. Couldn’t. Then we moved to SF.
And I haven’t quite gotten back to doing that in the bay area.
Alright that was a lot about how I like writing at coffee shops. I should find some quotes about doing things for the intrinsic joy of doing those things in the moment.
Oliver Burkeman: The problem with the content diet analogy
When I hit some kind of block, I often return to something like, “Okay let’s just review my content diet.” What have I read, watched, or listened to lately?
What you might not want to do is turn everything you’re read into some kind of meal where you need to scrape everything off the bone. There’s value in the activity of reading itself even if you aren’t processing everything through a system that then ends up in your second brain.
(I do like all the second brain, externalized brain, etc. stuff but my 15,000+ notes in Evernote probably indicate a swing too far far in that direction.)
Here’s what Oliver Burkeman says
Oh, this, you know there’s this whole world, I’m sure you’re aware of the world in general, right? Of people sort of using different note taking apps, obsidian, external brain type thing,
That’s a great thing, and I try to do it myself. But there’s a way of doing that becomes this kind of attempt to kind of like eat all the knowledge that you’re exposed to.
And so another point that I’m making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there…, is that’s not the primary point of reading. I’m all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them.
But the benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use. Which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future.
It’s because if it’s a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it.
Okay I thought I was going to do a bunch of different quotes about picking what to work on and how important it is to pick the joy of the activity itself.
(On the other hand… I do buy into the idea that for a specific output we can work on stuff that is so far removed from the actual output itself. Anyway. Accepting two ideas at the same time and all that…)
But coffee shop time has to end and I have to head out. This one highlight will do for now.
Check out Chris Williamson’s full interview with Oliver Burkeman: The Savage Irony of Trying to be Productive
Oliver Burkeman’s book comes out in a couple weeks and I can’t wait to read it and overhighlight it.