Captain's Log Format To Make Writing a Habit

@August 23, 2021

I heard this interview with Seth Meyers after he left SNL to go to the late show, and he talked about how SNL is 1x a week and his new show is every night, so he got a lot more chances, which meant he can be a lot less precious with the segments they produced.

I've thought about this a lot, and tried for a while to be less precious with writing, but still didn't write. I also created a few sites, but those, too, felt like the infrastructure supported very polished essays. Learning more about digital gardening and setting up Notion has helped clear out some of that pressure. Calling it a "Captain's Log" has helped get rid of most of the rest of it.

So now I'm changing the habit of what I'm doing when I'm writing. With the Captain's Log, I'm not "writing essays" as much as I'm "recording observations" and that alone makes it so much less stressful, it puts so much less pressure on it. And I have a fun playspace to put it in.

I've written 3 of these in under 90 minutes, and that is.... not how I have typically written. At all! I would mull things over and over to try to find the right framing, the most astute analysis, the one that people would read and say "Wow Alli has made a Contribution to the Discourse." and now I'm not doing that, I'm just like "Hey i noticed this thing! Maybe it helps you!"

Next I have to work out how to mechanically distribute everything (just wired up some sweet-looking ChiliPepper.io forms and Notion to ActiveCampaign, next I'm figuring out how to format tweets and emails) and get over those fears of distributing the work.