Hey folks just checking in real quick with a work update, a little journaling to get my brain organized and share with you as I dig in hard to get some work cranked out today.
Part of the whole inner work thing I’ve been doing over this last year is trying to train myself to refuse to be rushed, as often as possible. When you get in a hurry because you’re hungry or you’re feeling that stupid social media pressure to always be visible lest you be forgotten or whatever, the quality of the work suffers, then it turns into a spiral of constantly trying to keep up and feeling ever-increasing pressure to create more work more quickly and put it in more places with more hoops jumped through to accommodate various algorithms, and pretty soon you’re spending 10% of your time doing what you set out to do and 90% of it patching holes and shoring up weak spots created and playing catchup.
Sometimes when I’m working I find myself unable to move forward. I know what my next task is, and I know that I need to get on it, but something’s in the way that I usually have to take some time to really look at and understand before I can break loose and get moving again. In this case, after my last update, I kept thinking about doing that audio and sticking on it, not getting it started, and it finally dawned on me late last night that the reason is I’m letting that task prioritization be driven by urgency rather than by the needs of the piece. It’s not a time-sensitive article per se; the information will be just as valid a week from now as it is right this minute.
Part of what I’ve always struggled with in my weird, gifted, and cross-wired brain is organization and prioritizing and keeping myself “on task.” Anyone on the spectrum or with an ADHD diagnosis can relate, I’m sure. Right now I’m at the tail end of MANY years of trying to find workflow and tools that are effective facilitators of my work – which often ends up in them being distractions of their own, just like writing these work diaries can!
Part of what I’m doing now is keeping close track of what it really takes to get a long piece completely done, written, short and alternate media created, and have it ready to ship. THEN I can have a better grasp of how much time and effort it really takes to do that, and that helps me create and shape my workflow more effectively both in terms of elevating the quality of my long-form content (and providing MANY more ways to distribute and expose it!) and of being able to respond to ongoing events with some degree of agility so when something important does happen and I’ve got something to say about it, I can get it said and out in the air before the conversation has moved on and people have stopped caring about that particular matter. All the project management software and stuff is very much about solving those problems (By the way they’d have been solved twenty years ago if I could afford Microsoft Project). Projeqtor has been and continues to be an excellent tool, but it lacks a lot of integrations and ease-of-use tools that would be really nice to have and that I wouldn’t have had to spend in some cases dozens of hours trying to cobble together the functionality for with free tools and baling wire. This poverty stuff has to end now.)
So being in that spot, it occurred to me that if I was really smart I’d get more than one long-form piece ready right now, do audio and video and shorts for ALL of them, and that will give me space to drop those one at a time over a longer period while also freeing me up to create new content, both long and short-form, and do all of it much more efficiently than I have been in the past.
And that’s why I haven’t recorded the audio for the first of my five currently drafted new long-form pieces (one of which may never see the light of day, I haven’t decided yet but I haven’t assigned it an article number/release position yet either) 😁 I decided the smarter approach is to get the “written” work done first on what I’ve got in the hopper right now, minus archived backlogs from older draft stuff that I still need to sort through, some of which will likely end up as book chapters, others may be spiked entirely, others will end up getting finished as new content).
So that’s four new pieces I’m currently working on:
- “On The Price Of Bread” – the writing on this is 99% finished and the visuals – inline images for the blog post plus the featured image – are finished. Basically I could go live with it now if I didn’t want to do any other media related to it.
- An as-yet-untitled article about trauma, mental health, and social media, focusing on the problem of people who radically misuse and appropriate legitimate diagnostic terms of emotional or mental dysregulation, keying off a well-intended but misguided post by a popular Facebook page attempting to call out that “fake service animal” behavior. The draft writing on this is about 75% done. Graphics about half.
- “The Ethics of Generative AI” – Pretty obvious what this one’s about. Draft writing is also at about 75% on this one, and again the graphics about half finished.
- “Anti-Intellectual Propaganda On Social Media” – again, self-explanatory. Draft is about 40% finished on this one, and graphics about half.
I don’t have a firm plan yet, but what’s generally going to happen is I’m going to finish writing at least one more (and probably all) of those articles and getting it in publication-ready status, then I’m going to record audio for it, then I’m going to work up video for it, then I’m going to start dropping it. I still have some fuzz and ambiguity about exactly how I’m going to approach that as well. If I do it just right I can set up a reasonably decent groove so I’ve got new content on four different topics circulating at the same time I’m creating new content on new topics, and then it becomes more of a steady flow rather than short intense bursts, with older content sort of rotating out as new content rotates in, with maybe the 3-6 most recent long-forms active at any given point plus side-quest stuff that’s shorter like memes and random status messages and what have you.
Moneywise I did get a little help – about $125 – but am still very short of where I’d normally be due to work being in the “slow season” right now – I’m currently bringing home about 40% of usual from my job, which is a deficit of about $500 a month, and it’s starting to turn into unpaid bills including the hosting for this site as well as my ability to eat. I’ve tried really hard to stay away from fundraising over this last year, but this is unquestionably a moment of intense need, so please do help out if you can. LIke seriously, this sucks. This isn’t even trying to get ahead, just trying to eat and keep things running until hours pick back up at work. (On the upside, I’ve got some time to work on this stuff that I haven’t had…but it doesn’t pay. And the Adobe bill is paid and I ate for a couple of days and took care of a handful of low-cost personal care items I needed…)
So yeah. We started slowing down at the end of November and I’ve managed to scratch it out this far without panicking but also I’m like $800 behind on normal for the last six weeks, and normal wasn’t keeping up anyway, so please if y’all can help out do so now. Like I’m out of food, this minute, and I really need to get like fifty bucks together at once just for that, so I can buy real groceries instead of nickle-diming at the local convenience store because it’s the only thing that doesn’t take at least an hours to screw with. And there are other bills hanging, some already overdue and things being shut off, like my phone. I probably should’ve been pushing harder on this a few weeks ago, but I’m keenly aware that I haven’t been putting out much in the way of substantive work over the last year, so I haven’t wanted to mention it until I could at least point to ongoing work and say there’s definitely something coming real soon now, and here’s an idea of what it looks like and when it’ll be here.
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And that’s where we are for now. Thanks for your time and patience and continued ongoing support. I’ve already got hours-plus in this (got sidetracked on some templating stuff and then broke out to eat my last two packs of ramen), so let me shut up and get back at it once I finish the sidework for this article.
