I can’t get anything done lately. Then again, maybe it’s not just lately. In grad school, and probably in undergrad too, I would wait until the last minute to finish term papers, then crank them out in an all-night session right before they were due. I vividly remember starting a twenty-page paper at 9 pm, finishing it at 8 am, showering, heading to campus, dropping it off, and then crashing at home. I had done three-quarters of the research before I started that night, but no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t focus enough in the days and weeks leading up to the due date to start writing. Those days and nights were filled with dread about finishing the paper. The only thing that seemed to flip the switch was knowing it was due the next day. Worrying about getting it done didn’t make me act.
It wasn’t just in school. Fast forward 31 years, and I’m faced with a mountain of things to do around the house, but I can’t start any of them. As always, I can only focus when time is an issue, and something has to get done. Even then, time pressure doesn’t always produce results. I started a project in the basement last year that stalled because it got too cold to paint outside, and I can’t spray inside. I have had all summer to finish it, but I haven’t started, and now it’s October. We have a storage problem, and I can’t park in the garage because all the lumber and other things are taking up my side of the garage. Now I have a couple of weeks to build some drawers and upper cabinets before the weather gets too cold to paint.
So, why did I think starting a Substack would be a good idea? I don’t know. This is the third one I’ve started, and each one reached the magic number 3. I’ve spent the last four years trying to figure out what to do with myself after I closed my freelance web dev business because the work had become mostly a commodity. I found myself unemployable due to my age and varied work experience. Other than freelancing, I never worked anywhere longer than 2 years.
One of the things I figured out over those four years was that I enjoy learning and researching, so maybe my calling should be writing about things I have researched and investigated. My first idea was to write about happiness and why everyone seeks happiness, but it is elusive to many of us. By my third post, I realized I didn’t have anything particularly insightful to say that others hadn’t already said. Not to mention, the explanations for how to obtain it seem incomplete and, to me, subjective.
I abandoned that idea. Shortly thereafter, I read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “Tiny Experiments.” I was inspired to do a tiny experiment. I would read self-help books and critique them through the lens of psychological principles. The idea was that many books claim you aren’t happy, achieving something, etc., only because you are doing it wrong, and that following the self-help author’s formula can fix it. I thought in many cases, that was BS, because the formulas are oversimplified and usually based on the author’s experience. Most suffer from survivorship bias or ignore people’s constraints that affect outcomes. I wrote three articles, but I didn’t publish them. I read two books, The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins and Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don’t Manage You by Ethan Kross. Before I could pull the trigger on them, I looked at them and thought, “Nobody is going to read this”. People look for inspiration, not reasons not to read a book. And I lost interest again.
The most recent iteration was to serialize a non-fiction book on Substack. Maybe this would help me stay committed. My idea was to write about how LinkedIn changed from a novel way to network to another social network that rewarded performers who create engaging content but didn’t necessarily help people tap into a network previously unavailable to them to find a job. Preferably a better job. Those three articles are here. I have two that are half done.
But again, I have lost interest. Partly because no one is reading them. If people read them, I’d feel pressure to produce, like I did when I had to write my term papers. I don’t see that changing soon, but if I stop again, I guarantee no one will read what I have written.
Over the summer, I subscribed to Breakthrough & Blocks to see if I could jumpstart a different writing project, I started 2+ years ago. I had written 30,000 words of a sci-fi novel and gradually gave up on it because I didn’t think anyone would read it. I had read their book, Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts. They have writing sprints for subscribers, and I wondered if using a habit-based program for writing could help me finish it. They incorporate Fogg’s behavior model in some of what they do. I was once a certified Tiny Habits coach, so I was very familiar with the framework and could do it on my own. But the accountability piece, sharing what you’ve done daily, drew me in. I did it every day despite traveling to Georgia to visit my parents and then back home, then leaving to help our daughter move for a new job she was starting.
I kept the daily writing habit for several weeks until I didn’t. I had a battle scene I didn’t know how to write, and I lost momentum. That was a month and a half ago.
Then I went to the Medium Day and sat in on a session about blogging every day and its benefits. It sounded interesting, but is Substack really the place to do that? I don’t know. But I have a Substack domain for another 10 months. Maybe I just focus on writing reactions to things I am reading and go from there. So daily posts are my next Tiny Experiment. Instead of pushing things off to tomorrow, I’m doing this today.