Three Things #50: January 1, 2023
A Year Spent Writing
It’s cliche to say so, but… I can’t believe it’s been a year! I started writing and publishing regularly in 2020 (at Etherean and Applescotch), then ended up taking 2021 off. I started Three Things as a way of getting back into a regular writing habit. In the beginning I really had no idea what I was going to write about, or even what form it would take. I started with just this new medium, zero subscribers, and a commitment to publish something every week.
Here we are, in the final week of the year. Including the intro and this recap, I published 51 issues. I missed one week with the best possible, proudest excuse: the week my son was born. I can count on one hand the number of days this past year I didn’t write. I’ve written about all sorts of crazy topics: from Covid and censorship to regrets to Urbit to Dune to politics, Ethereum, events I’ve attended, Ukraine, economics, open source software, the nature of evil, running, privacy, and, of course, several pieces on the design rationale and technology behind Spacemesh. And much else besides!
I don’t feel very comfortable turning the lens around and writing about myself and my writing process: Three Things is not “about me” in any direct sense as I think there are infinitely many more interesting topics to explore. But I do think it’s appropriate to do so once in a long while. I’ve only done so twice this year, and the last time was a while ago. If nothing else, it helps me organize my own thoughts and plans—which has always been one of the goals here.
It feels fitting to use this space in this final week of the year to take a look at where this experiment came from, how it’s going, what is and isn’t going well, and to consider where it might go in the future.
Thing #1: What’s Going Well
My main goal with this newsletter was to write every day and publish every week, and my biggest fear was that I wouldn’t have enough time to do so. When I began writing more seriously a few years ago, the hardest part was overcoming my perfectionist tendencies. I didn’t want to publish anything until it was really polished and I was really proud of it. I wanted several other people I trust to review and comment on everything before I published it. While that process probably makes sense for a lot of people, and it makes a lot of sense for something more serious like academic research or a book, I found it too time-consuming and burdensome. I wrote only around ten pieces in 2018 and even fewer in 2019. After relaxing this constraint I wrote nearly 50 in 2020. Even if most of the things I publish are garbage, there are probably a few decent pieces in the mix, and I think getting dozens of semi-polished essays out each year is better than releasing an order of magnitude fewer, more polished pieces.
But I was still spending too much time on each of those pieces in 2020. I’d often end up spending all day on Sunday editing, proofreading, and finalizing a piece, and that’s time I just don’t have these days. I decided to try a new format this past year, one that would allow me to be a bit more flexible and creative with how I use my time and how I use this space.
It happened organically, but I quickly settled into a rhythm over the first 2-3 weeks of this year, and I’ve stuck to it ever since as it’s worked exceedingly well. Each week I write three things in three phases.
The first phase is the word salad phase: just get the words out onto the page. It doesn’t have to be pretty. I do exactly zero proofreading or corrections, instead aiming for raw ideas only. On Monday I choose the topic and, typically, the three Things I intend to write about during the week. I do keep a running board of topics and Things to write about, but around 70% of the time I end up picking something spontaneously that sounds interesting and that I feel compelled to write about. Then I draft the intro and Thing #1. On Tuesday I draft Thing #2, and on Wednesday I draft Thing #3. This takes around 30 minutes per day.
The next phase is the review and cleanup phase. Now that I know something about all three of the week’s Things, I do a second pass to clean up the structure and content and make sure it’s coherent and cohesive. I often end up rewriting paragraphs during this phase, but it goes very quickly because the raw material is basically all there. I do one Thing per day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and it usually takes around 20-25 minutes per day. Interestingly enough, I very rarely change my mind about a Thing after Monday, and I can only remember one week when I picked three Things, began writing them, and changed my mind mid-week.
Finally, on Sunday, I finalize and send. I do one final stylistic check over the entire issue, add hyperlinks, and do a quick fact check (for more technical pieces). Actually, the hardest, most time-consuming part of Sunday is finding a hero image for each piece. I could leave this out—after all, I’m trying to write, not be an artist—but I feel strongly that aesthetics matter and that the right image really sets the mood for a piece. There’s just something different about an essay with an excellent hero image vs. one with none. (There’s also the fact that the image appears on social media and shares, but that’s not what I’m optimizing for.)
I started the year pulling nearly all of my images from Unsplash, with an occasional personal photo thrown in. Two things changed during the course of 2022. One, Unsplash went downhill considerably, as the site has leaned very heavily into monetization in a crummy way and the UX has gone down the toilet as a result. Two, Stable Diffusion appeared. I now generate 80% of my hero images using Stable Diffusion using a combination of this demo, DreamStudio, and running it locally. It’s been a great excuse to learn something about the technology, but I have to be careful because hours can disappear playing with it—which is perfectly fine some Sundays but not on others!
The whole process on Sunday typically takes about an hour, sometimes two if the piece is longer, if I have a lot of links to check, research to do, end up spending a lot of time generating a good image, etc.. That’s about 3.75-5 total hours per week, which isn’t too bad. I could reduce the time commitment further, but not without seriously impacting quality—as it stands, I’m often borderline uncomfortable when I hit send on Sunday because I really want more time to improve or rewrite stuff (I think that’s the Pareto sweet spot: when you’re just slightly, but not totally, embarrassed by the final product!). Of course I wish I had more time to reply to comments, engage with the topics on social media, etc., and I feel a little bad that I can’t, but I have to timebox the number of hours I put into this project each week and I rarely if ever have time for those things.
This process works great on quiet weeks when I’m home. Of course it works much less well when I’m on the road for work, out all day at a conference, etc.. But it’s lightweight and flexible enough that I can adapt it to almost any schedule. When I’m really exhausted and strapped for time, I write about simpler topics that don’t require any research.
In conclusion, I think this whole writing process is going well. It’s not perfect. But it’s fun, flexible, manageable, and sustainable. Flexibility and manageability are especially important given the other commitments in my life. I also love that I can use this space to write about things I need to study and write about anyway, like Spacemesh and blockchain technology more generally (and, you know, SimpDAOs). There’s something really magical about having time blocked every single day to be alone and think, research, and write, just a little. It’s a form of journaling, which makes it cathartic as well.
Bonus fun fact: the “three things” format lends itself exceedingly well to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis format of the Hegelian dialectic (this wasn’t intentional). Not every issue follows this format, but if you pay attention, you’ll see that many do. It’s just a natural, compelling way to tell a story and convey information. (I use it when I give talks, too.)
For more: Try writing every day! Try my process if it makes sense, or adapt it if it doesn’t. The most important thing is to write every day. Even five minutes a day makes a difference, I promise. If you’re short on time or don’t know where to begin, start with the “word salad” phase as I described it above: just write, stream of consciousness. Don’t go back and correct or edit anything. It doesn’t take long to fill a page this way!
Thing #2: What Could Be Better
I find this question surprisingly difficult to answer. I think the reason is that, in order to have a standard of quality that you’re aiming for, you first need to have a target “customer” in mind. As a writer, you should consider what sort of topics your audience would be interested in hearing about. Would they prefer long form or short form? What sort of language should you use when you speak to them? Etc..
The thing about Three Things is that I’m my own customer. I’m really not writing this for anyone else. The fact that from time to time other people read it is great and it makes me very happy. Other things being equal, I’d love if even more people read it. But I’m not tailoring content to any particular demographic or trying to make anyone else happy. I write about the things I’m interested in—which tends to be a mix of technology, politics, crypto-stuff, random social topics, and occasionally calling out bad, antisocial, hypocritical behavior—and I try to write in accessible language, which is how I’d personally like to read about these topics.
So: it’s easy to say that Three Things could be “better” or “more successful” if I narrowed the scope and focused exclusively on, say, the tech side of cryptocurrency or social commentary. Either would be fine, and I’m sure either would still be interesting, and either might attract a much larger following, but neither would be Three Things. I’m aware that the number of people who are interested in more or less the same intersection of things that I am, in the same proportions, is almost certainly very small, and at this stage I’m totally okay with that. This project is meant primarily as a creative outlet and as a way to organize, clean up, and structure my own thoughts.
I’m a big fan of sites like SSC/ACX, LessWrong, and RibbonFarm, and it would be wonderful if, someday, this project could blossom into a community with multiple contributors, in person gatherings, etc.. But that’s a big project—effectively a full time job—so I intend to keep this small for now. Someday I dream of being a full time writer, but that day is still far away! (More in the next section on how Three Things might help with that.)
Within the bounds I’ve set for this space, and my time bounds, there probably isn’t a whole lot that can or should change. One thing that comes to mind is that most of what I write is pretty impersonal. I think this could be improved. I need to better understand why I hesitate to write more personal things, aside from the obvious reasons (privacy, opsec). I have written a couple of more personal pieces recently, and I’d like to do more of that in the future.
Of course, I value your opinion too, and would love to hear if you disagree with me!
For more: Share your impression of Three Things! Who’s the target audience? What topics are the most relevant, interesting, and important? What should I do more of, what should I do less of, and what should I change? What sort of topics would you like to see covered? What changes, if any, would you like to see in format?
Thing #3: Whither Hence?
At last, the million dollar question. I see three potential paths forward for Three Things.
The first is that it more or less remains the same. I think this is likely to happen in the short term because I want to keep writing and I’m not sure what I want to change yet, in addition to the reasons outlined above: the format is comfortable and seems to be working relatively well, and anyway it couldn’t be changed too much without a much greater time commitment.
The second is that it evolves into something else, gradually or perhaps more quickly. I think this is likely to happen in the medium to long term. I think all things should continue to evolve and respond to the world around them, and I don’t want to get too comfortable. There’s probably still quite a bit of experimentation that I could do here if I put my mind to it, even within the rough bounds set by the structure of this newsletter. I might turn it back into a more traditional essay structure, or focus the content more, or do something more experimental. (Four things? Audio content? Who knows!)
The third is that I wind it down. It’s hard to say how likely this is. I could just as easily see myself still writing here in ten years (albeit in a somewhat different form/format) as I could see myself winding it down in a few weeks or months. At the moment I’m enjoying writing it, and as long as I’m enjoying it, I doubt I’ll stop. If that changes, I’ll reconsider.
I don’t think I’ll continue to write in exactly this format forever. I think the real question is, what do I really want to write? To be honest, everything I’ve written to date, including Three Things, feels like preparation. For what, I’m not entirely sure, but a book (maybe more than one!) feels like the most obvious choice. I’m still not totally sure what shape such a book would take. I’m not even totally sure whether it’ll be fiction or nonfiction. I’ve always thought about the writing I do here (and in my previous blogs) as a series of essays that could and hopefully will someday be assembled into book form. I’d love to begin working on that experiment this year, if time allows.
To get from here to there, I’ll need to do a number of things differently. When the time comes to pursue that goal earnestly, it’ll necessarily impact how and what I write here. It’ll probably (but not definitely) mean less time to write here. If a year from now this space has evolved into a space for me to post early drafts and character sketches for a sci-fi novel, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Or maybe Three Things will turn into something entirely different when it grows up! Who knows? No one, which is part of the fun. For now, I think I’ll keep the format the same, though I think I might mix up the topics a bit.
For more: What sort of book would you find interesting? Especially one that hasn’t been written yet, or that really needs reimagining for the modern era. What’s the single most important, relevant, interesting topic that hasn’t been covered well in living memory?