Category: Blogging

Long Absences

You never intend to step away for very long. A week goes by, then another. Without realizing it, a month has passed.

It can sometimes be hard to keep up a weekly blog. I don’t know how the daily folks do it – Seth Godin says it’s just consistency, but does that mean it’s easier to show up everyday than once per week? Maybe… It’s harder to push off to tomorrow when the deadline is always midnight. I’m not impressed by the folks whose job is to churn out multiple pieces of content per day. Creative burnout aside, there is a difference between being paid for the content and doing it without pay.

Excuses are easy, especially when they are real. Yes, I didn’t set time aside to write, but I also had a major deliverable due at work. I even set up auto-responders on my emails to manage people’s expectations while I was in focus mode. These are reasons, but they do not excuse the absence when you know what you are getting yourself in to.

And when you return to the notion of an update, you feel the need to write something profound to offset the time away, but the ideas feel crusted and not worth sharing. Instead, you hide away, and figure you’ll get back to it next week, meanwhile the feeling of panic and dread increases at the thought of delivering that perfect post.

But next week comes and goes.

There is no magic solution beyond showing yourself compassion, resetting the clock or counter, and shipping the next thing by trying again.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Slipped Time

Sorry for the lack of posts these last two weeks. I have lots of reasons (the holiday Monday, work has been keeping me busy, feeling tired from childcare, and our family being sick the last week), but those are poor excuses for not carving out some dedicated time to put thoughts to screen. I have been doing a decent job of holding myself accountible with work, but knowingly allowing two weeks to go by unplanned without posts shows that my systems still have some issues with keeping me on top of everything.

I appreciate the grace you have offered in my absence.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

On Tardiness

For all the lip-service paid on this blog about doing the work, I have been posting late recently. My target is supposed to be going live by 9am on Monday mornings, yet I can’t remember the last time I had a post scheduled to go live on time in a while. I think the last time I was ahead was heading out for my honeymoon in 2019, where I had three weeks lead time while I was away.

Part of why I’m behind continues to be working from home – in the before times, I would procrastinate in the office from real work by writing. But since working from home over the last twenty or so months, all time feels like procrastination time. With no one looking over my shoulder, it doesn’t matter what I am doing on my screen so long as I continue to deliver on the goods.

And as with most procrastination, the longer I go past my deadline (e.g. today), the harder it gets to get to work on the task. It usually results in taking a mulligan for the week, or cobbling together a half-thought into a semi-stream of consciousness post just to have something shipped. You’re welcome.

It feels good to publish, but I shouldn’t consider it a win to get something up for the week for the sake of hitting the metric. At the same time, I should extend myself some measure of kindness and acknowledge that I still did the work.

I still show up to do the work, just not according to what was expected of a professional.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Post #302

I uploaded my post last week without much thought. When I went back to draft some ideas for a future post, I saw that Beachhead was my 301st post. I missed the opportunity to both celebrate the milestone and reflect on its significance.

Earlier this year, I missed the 5-year anniversary of this blog. I let the milestone pass by, unlike years past. I think part of the lack of enthusiasm for these significant milestones is due to general pandemic-induced apathy (we’re all feeling it). But the optimistic side of me also thinks that these milestones are less important than the work itself. I used to be more metrics-driven with my blog, excitedly noting the passing of the first year or the first 100-posts. However now I’m not concerned with reaching a future target but instead focus more on ensuring I’m keeping up with the weekly schedule and trying to come up with decent thoughts worth publishing.

That’s not to say that all of my posts are worth reading. I wouldn’t say I take a lot of pride in the final product of what goes up weekly; I’m not ashamed either. It’s just that the quality of the final draft isn’t as important as sitting down to do the work. Of taking an idea from brainstorm to coherent narrative. I find more satisfaction in putting in the work than the bragging rights of the final product. I try to think of it as more of a craft-mentality rather than creating a masterpiece corpus of writing.

Each post is an exercise that stretches the muscles, practices the movements, and gives me an opportunity to learn and develop slowly over time. At present, this blog operates at a loss (no income is generated to offset the nominal fees I pay for the site and URL). And I’m completely fine with that. At one time I thought about turning this into a brand and trying to monetize it. I’m not opposed to scraping money out of the endeavor, but it’s not the primary focus of this blog.

When I shifted away from the blog being an exercise in becoming a paramedic, it merely became a place to publicly share my practice of writing to meet a deadline. That’s good enough for me. It doesn’t have to seek to achieve anything grand – not everything has to be epic or monetizable. It’s still fun and I feel good shipping the work. As the mass of posts grow, I can look at the incremental progress and take satisfaction in what it represents – time well spent.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Planning and Preparation

Last week, Seth Godin wrote a poignant observation about the wisdom of refilling your gas tank at the right time. This of course was a metaphor; it’s not about literally filling your gas tank (except when it is). Instead, the observation is about recognizing that you are better able to weather uncertainty when you are mindful about resources, whether that’s financial, physical, human, or even your own attention.

Yes, sometimes we are so strapped for time that it’s hard to remember to prioritize fil1ing before empty, but if you pay attention to your resources, then as he says you can “have your emergency on your own schedule.”

His post was well-timed, because I’ve found myself falling behind this week on some critical tasks. When I reflected on it in my journal, it’s easy to say I was busy. It’s true, I was busy – I was in a lot of long meetings, I had appointments, and obligations at home. But I’m always busy, so this week wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary.

Instead, my lack of progress is due less in part to other people’s demands on my time, and instead it’s largely due to my own poor planning and preparation. Without an appropriate plan for the time that was all my own, I was left to flit carelessly to this whim and that urgent thing.

As a reminder to myself, open blocks of time in my calendar are not default downtime. I have more control over my time than I realize (or behave).

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

A Decent Day

My productivity has been garbage recently. Maybe the lingering effects of working from home during the pandemic has finally ground me down, but I’ve been struggling with staying on task. I’m failing to prioritize my work, I’m failing to follow-through on intentions, and while I’m keeping up with some deliverables, it’s a real slog to turn stuff around. Even this blog consistently goes up days late.

I try to not take this to heart, because it genuinely wears me down. On a good day, I cross items off my list and stick to the pomodoro timer, letting its ticking provide a meditative soundtrack to my flow. On bad days, it feels like the whole days gets past me with nothing of substance to show; time that’s gobbled up by the Past forever.

On the days when I catch myself heading towards an abysmal performance by 5pm, I tell myself to just get one thing done. It doesn’t have to be huge or complicated, but get at least one important thing done and shipped, and you’ll have had a decent day.

It’s not the best day, it’s not a great day, but a decent day is better than nothing. And it’s easier to chain decent days together to push forward in your work.

Aim for decent days, when you get at least one thing done, then give yourself permission to be satisfied with that.

If you aim for perfection, you stall yourself out. If you aim for decent, you get at least this blog post out.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

No Post This Week

I apologize for having no post this week. We are moving houses and everything has started coming together rather quickly, so I’m being pulled in multiple directions and didn’t have anything prepared.

I didn’t want the week to go by without acknowledging the silence.

See you next week!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Falling Through My Systems

This late post is a nice springboard into something I’ve been thinking about throughout the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, when I was still commuting to work, I had a fair number of systems to help me get stuff done. My commute to work helped me film daily vlogs, listen to books, and think about big ideas for blog posts and Stay Awesome vlogs. When we started working from home, those outputs began fading. Now, I feel behind on my blog posts, I *maybe* film a personal vlog once every two weeks, and Stay Awesome has been put on an indefinite hiatus until Jim and I get some extra headspace bandwidth to devote attention to it.

I was also known for my notebook. I carried a Field Notes notebook everywhere with me, and was constantly scribbling notes into it. Then, around 4 months into working from home, I found myself abandoning the monthly notebook and appropriating a disused larger notebook to jot down tasks, lists, and random thoughts. The Field Notes book was small, portable, convenient, and had many systems to track things I found important, such as exercise, health, habits, etc. Now, my notebook is largely devoted to task management, because when every day feels the same, you can quickly find yourself several weeks down the line having nothing to show for your time.

In a sense, I’ve fallen through my systems. The various “systems” I implemented succumbed to inertia when I both lost the cues that triggered them and lost the will to keep putting effort in the system to power the flywheel, and friction has ground them to a halt.

James Clear has a pithy phrase, that “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This is a riff on an older Greek observation from Archilochus: “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

Regardless, the question I have is whether I truly had a system if it was a fair-weather operation that wasn’t robust enough to adapt to these kinds of radical changes. When I lost the external liminal cues that came from commuting to work, or from even leaving the house on a regular basis, the things I called systems disappeared as well. Is it charitable to call these things “systems”? In virtue ethics, you aren’t said to possess a virtue if you only exercise it some of the time – you aren’t considered courageous if you don’t act courageously in a moment that requires it. Does this apply to systems as well?

Part of me says yes, but that’s not very helpful. Perhaps I should reframe my thinking and consider the quality and attributes of the system. Borrowing from Taleb, some systems are fragile, some are robust, and I suppose some are antifragile. I understand antifragile systems in the context of biology (e.g. stressing muscles can allow them to get stronger over time), though as of writing I can’t think of any productivity system that get stronger under pressure.

Regardless, it’s clear that much of my productivity was built upon what can now be labelled as fragile systems. They worked under certain conditions, but outside of that narrower band they are less able to withstand fluctuations or variance. In my reflections over the last few months, I’ve been seeing the value in understanding the causes of system failures so that I can create new processes to help me in work and life. For now, the first step is to acknowledge that I’ve fallen through my systems, and having acknowledged this, I can stop spinning my wheels and start seeking traction.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan