Exactly as expected: steadily publishing writings is hard. Not the generating ideas part (rather too much of those), but the part where I write draft versions and then the act of writing changes my thinking which keeps me (re)writing and editing in an eternal loop.
So I need more practice. After some soul-searching I realized part of what makes forming this habit hard: letting go of old, worse habits. To dedicate more time to writing, I need to stop dedicating time to reading. Not even books - but blogs, newsletters, feeds, articles, …
I keep excusing myself with “I need to stay up to date” and “it inspires my thinking”, but that’s giving it too much credit. In the moment itself it’s always interesting (aaah, dopamine) but at the end of the day I’m discontent. I stopped consuming recent news a long time ago. It was hard but a great decision, and now I need to take it a step further.
So new, self-imposed rules for 2023:
- Publish at least one article a week
- Unsubscribe from all newsletters (in progress)
- Prune rss subscriptions & get down to <70 (done)
- Open Feedly only once a week
- Prioritise reading works that are at least 20 years old. Works that have stood the test of time, the classics, the source materials. Additionally, prioritise physical books.
Re: that last one, a preliminary list of titles I prioritise to (re)read & have physical copies of:
- The Complete I Ching, Alfred Huang (9th century BC)
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
- The Beauty of Everyday Things, Yanagi Sōetsu (1920)
- Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard (1958)
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (1961)
- Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan (1967)
- Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek (1971)
- Ways of Seeing, John Berger (1972)
- On Photography, Susan Sontag (1977)
- A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander (1977)
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William H. Whyte (1980)
- Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman (1988)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey (1989)
- Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte (1990)
- Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte (1997)
- Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield (1998)
- Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug (2000)
Right now I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Published in 1988, I can continue without worry :-)