Jumping into it

It took me 2 years to redesign / rebuild my website. Every few months, I would get some time and start on it, make a new design that I was half satisfied with, and then forget about it. When I went back to it, I would look at the prior version and think “oh that’s okay, but I should take another pass.”

A month ago, I just decided to finish it. The act of finishing the site was not a herculean sprint to build this massive piece of technology. Finishing the site was really just committing to getting something shipped. Not something perfect, hell not even something beautiful - just something tangible. To force myself to finish it, I deployed the new version the second I had something workable. From there, I felt motivated to iterate, fix any remaining issues, and get to something I was happy with.

I find I have a similar issue with writing. I always want to write something, but it never comes out as well as I would hope, and then the piece dies. This particularly happens for anything ambitious – I start writing this well-researched writeup on X interesting thing, just to discover I knew less than I thought I did.

As before, I just need a forcing function to get something out. Accordingly, this is my new “thoughts” page. Its lower stakes and lower effort, just the things I happen to be thinking about throughout the week (obviously). Maybe you’ll enjoy it, maybe you won’t. At the very least, I’m putting something out there.