Adam Keys is Thinking

My approach to writing on the web in 2024:

• Write (to think, riff, share, or publish) every day.
• Post anything over about one hundred words to my blog. Don’t worry about scheduling, publish when it’s done.
• Every couple weeks, schedule up a bunch of social posts. Some of these are links to the blog posts from the past couple weeks. Many are ideas I haven’t figured out how to turn into longer posts yet.
• Every month or so, roll up all the stuff that went out to socials and blogs in a newsletter.

Robin Sloan, Stock and Flow:

You can tell that I want you to stop and think about stock here. I feel like we all got really good at flow, really fast. But flow is ephemeral, while stock sticks around. Stock is capital. Stock is protein.

And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy.

Jim Nielsen, Blog Posts vs. Social Posts:

Generally speaking, the attention you get with a good post on social media is like a firework: it can light up fast and burn bright, but just as fast it disappears.

On the other hand, the attention you get from a good blog posts can be like a forest fire: it starts small but when it catches fire it rages for some time, burning longer and more intense than any firework.

Matt Webb, 15 rules for blogging:

Give up on trying to be popular. I try not to filter myself based on what I believe will be popular. Some of my favourite posts get ignored. Some posts get popular and I have no idea why. Besides, terrible posts get buried fast if I’m posting three times a week. So post with abandon.

Give up on trying to be interesting. Readers will come to my site for what’s interesting to me, or not, it’s fine, just say what I think about whatever I’m thinking about.

If you waste less time, you’ll make more stuff without increasing time outlays.

• Find more leverage, you’ll make more stuff in the same amount of time
• Get better & faster at a task, it will cost less, you can do more of it (see below)
• Figure out where anxiety, dawdling, etc. happen and how to bypass it; less wasted time, more fruitful time

But don’t eliminate waste. Or, deity forbid, margin.

This isn’t about optimization and efficiency. There’s plenty of time to recapture from outright mis-use of time and space.

Nor is it about reducing waste to zero. It’s difficult to tell the difference between waste, play, and escaping local maximums in the moment.

Note to self: next time I’m tempted to get up just a little earlier or stick with work just a little later, ask myself what I did that was obviously a foolish use of resources.

Squeeze shortcomings before squeezing schedules.

James Somer, Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems

“The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more." (James Somers, Speed Matters: Why Working Quickly Is More Important Than It Seems)

Dan Luu, Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity:

It’s true that the gains from picking the right problem can be greater than the gains from having better tactical execution because the gains from picking the right problem can be unbounded, but it’s also much easier to improve tactical execution and doing so also helps with picking the right problem because having faster execution lets you experiment more quickly, which helps you find the right problem.

Author’s commentary track: this post started because the title was too great of a rhyme to go to waste. I would say that I did not write this with haste. Probably several weeks passed from writing down the turn of phrase to trying to make this a short post suitable for social media to deciding it was really a blog post and wrapping it up.

Recently, I found myself in need of a contact form for my website. Luckily, I didn’t let myself fall to the temptation of rolling my own! 🙃

My good enough pals at Good Enough have built a modest little app just for this occasion, Letterbird. It was super easy to sign up, set up my form, and embed it on my website. It does the one thing nicely and is delightful to use.

I can’t emphasize this enough: it does the one thing and is delightful. It didn’t immediately encourage me to onboard my team, click through a guided tour, or immediately ask me to consider the generous discount of signing up for twelve months instead of one month.

I just used the thing, solved my problem, and kept going. Recommended!

Unrelated: I had to work really hard to write this so it doesn’t sound entirely like a podcast ad read. 🙃

Commonly shared/held wisdom: leadership is flowing decisions down and information up. What if this is (slightly) untrue? Or at least, in need of contextualizing.

Strategy, direction, and context are set by leadership teams based on intuitions, abstractions, and trailing and leading numbers.

The bottom of the org chart has a far better idea of how to get things done than the top. And possibly, what to get done such that customers can succeed. This information _should_be passed up, but it’s not not decision-making.

Seems to me there’s a disconnect and opportunity here for tactics to meet strategy. When things are going well, decisions are guided and informed, but rarely does the middle layer take decisions on its own, instead delegating to the team or below or leadership above. When ambiguity is ascendent and clarity or confidence wane, decisions could flow down.

Contrary: information up, context down is the central conceptual model of middle management. The Fundamental Purpose of Middle Management: Context Down, Information Up:

This brings us back to the fundamental job of middle management: push context down, and information up. The job of a middle manager is to gather as much information from your reports as possible, synthesize it, and pass it up to their manager. At the same time, they should be collecting as much context from their management chain and peers, and passing that important context back down the chain. If you’re a middle manager this should be your guiding principle.

Context-down should provide a coherent backdrop for whatever steering of execution a manager does.

Garrett Dimon, Organizing Rails Code with ActiveRecord Associated Objects:

At the simplest level, associated objects come in handy mostly by helping organize and compartmentalize related logic so we can better avoid the junk drawer or God object “patterns.” But that’s an over-simplification because the benefits can be almost invisible–it just disappears into the background and does its job.

Associated objects have an excellent effort-to-benefit ratio. The implementation is less than a few hundred lines of code. The docs, which fit entirely in the readme, may outweigh the actual code! From that, you get a multipurpose and surprisingly deep tool for designing and modeling your system.

I’m excited to tinker more with this one.

Nat Bennett, How to write:

• Write a lot
• Just Write
• Read a lot
• Write every day
• Walk
• Have a time and a place for writing
• Take it less seriously
• Have an audience

At least as good as any advice I’ve ever given!

There’s lots of reasons that this works but I personally believe that writing is a mechanical skill as much as it is a mental one. Sometimes you just need to run a bunch of words through your writing engine — practice the whole process, from forming a sentence in your brain down to driving the motion of your fingers — to reduce the friction to a point where you can do “real” writing.

As above for writing, so goes for any iterative, world-building creative activity. p.s. coding is an iterative activity wherein a world of thought-stuff is created (and sometimes checked against a computer by executing it and seeing if it all blows up.)

Ben Kuhn, Categories of leadership on technical teams:

More importantly, though, we often want to somehow split these responsibilities between people. Team leadership covers a huge array of things—as you can see from how long this post is—and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt. Even if you do find someone good-enough at all of them, they usually spike in 1-2 areas, and it might be higher-leverage for them to fully focus on those.

If you find yourself in a wholly new team, this might help you find your way to traction. If you find yourself confused by the (rapidly) changing nature of work and need to zoom out on the team/role you find yourself leading, this will help!

Even if you’ve been in your job/team/organization for a while, to paraphrase David Byrne, “You may tell yourself, this is not the job I signed up for! / My god, have I have I done?”, in which case this mental model is also helpful. (And, good luck!)

Herein, a napkin sketch on producing creative work, ideas on finding the spark(s) that consistently lead us to assemble new things, and the hand-wavy stuff in-between.

Production is connecting the dots

Extensively, manically, collect ideas (i.e., dots). Collect ideas, put ‘em in order. This is the tricky-but-fun part!

Boom, that’s something new! Like this essay. Collect, connect, write, post, again and again.

Austin Kleon, It’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in:

I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me, and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something.

Production is making social connections

So you’ve got a routine of journals and notes and active reading and such. You’re turning those into blog posts and thinking with the network, right?

In particular, using networked writing (hypertext, social media) as an attractor for ideas and likeminded folks. Repeatedly engaging with those folks until a new, boring status quo/local maximum is reached. Iterate and seek ever higher peaks.

Tom Critchlow, Small b blogging:

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.

Henrik Karlsson, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox:

The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

Production is a second-order outcome from consuming/reading

Consider two sorts of people: “Really Into Notes” or simply “An Enjoyer of Reading”. Either way, making things and ideas comes from connecting an idea from what you read, enthusiasm for making, and the discipline to turn that enthusiasm into action. How and what you turn that action into is left as an exercise or implementation detail up to the reader.

Andreas Fragner, Writing Summaries Is More Important Than Reading More Books, if you’re a third kind, “Extremely Okay With Marking Up Your Objects”:

One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones. The ROI of spending 2h writing a synopsis is much higher than spending those 2h powering through the next book on your list. Reading is not about page count or speed [1]. What matters is how it changes your thinking and what you take away from it. Optimize for comprehension, not volume."

Production is doing the thing you can’t not do, a vocation

Maybe it’s writing, but it’s cool if it’s not. Putting all these ideas together yields something new in the world, literal creativity. That calling, no matter the ambition or profitability or fruitfulness, is different for all of us. But we can all work the skills that support that creation.

Jared Henderson, AI won’t replace you, unless you let it:

Similarly, there are men and women for whom being an artist if their vocation. It is what they most suited to do. I believe that determining and pursuing your vocation – even if your vocation is not your job – is crucial for a good human life, because it puts work in its proper place. Work ceases to be toil when you are pursuing your vocation.

Tools for thought are nothing without producing ideas and publishing them.

There are things you can only learn by negative experience. In these cases, you just gotta go out there and suffer:

• Lose your first 50 games as soon as possible (Go proverb)
• Struggle through your first 50 interviews (hiring or seeking)
• Awkwardly run your first 50 meetings
• Flail at leading your first 50 projects
• Bomb your first 50 jokes

I won’t keep you waiting or give you false confidence with a snappy conclusion. Get out there and make some mistakes!

Robert Fripp via Austin Kleon, The Meaning of Discipline:

The musician has three instruments: the hands, the head, and the heart, and each has its own discipline.

So, the musician has three disciplines: the disciplines of the hands, the head and the heart.

Ultimately, these are one discipline: discipline.

Bear with me as I try to apply this lively metaphor of emotion and musical creativity to dry-and-boring engineering leadership¹.

The leader’s hands gesticulate, often for the aid of the speaker more than the listener. Sometimes, the hands conduct the thoughts to written words through the keyboard. Not too dissimilar from a musician’s hands through which, crucial for (most) musicians to make their sound, but equally a bit of flair.

The head thinks, and overthinks. Sees patterns and connects the dots. Listens to what people say and answers their questions directly and honestly. Is convinced it sees patterns in randomness, or that folks are hearing and understanding a message that they find confusing but don’t know how to address the issue.

The heart, for the leader, is there to mediate the head. There are other people on the other side of the decisions and decrees leaders make. A process or strategy is only good if it does right by those carrying it out.

Discipline is our capacity to make a commitment in time.

Discipline, in leadership, is to make a decision and then support the people executing that decision. All the while, seeking new information by which you might update, revise, or set the decision aside, if necessary.

To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end.

✋🏻 management by walking around

👉🏻 leadership by sitting down² and engaging with the people doing the work

Even better: leadership by sustaining long period of assimilating what the team and meetings are telling you into a slightly better way of working. And sometimes, memos and slides, etc to send out and socialize ideas for you.

Mike Hoye, Fifty Years of Diff:

My friend Greg Wilson has argued, and I absolutely believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into who has diff and patch, and who doesn’t. It’s the seed crystal of all workable open collaboration, and people living without it don’t even have the language to recognize how bad they’ve got it.

Re:re:RE:DRAFT-draft-V7-FINAL-FINAL2.doc is just no way to live, and if you live in word processors, spreadsheets, slides, art, anything without diff and patch you’re definitely feeling this pain, even if you don’t have a term for it.

Yep. diff, along with its trusty companion patch is a developer superpower. (Even though patch came 10 years later, apparently, TIL.)

diff made source control possible, so I have to think it’s in the top 5 accelerants to software development of all time¹. Let alone using diff or patch under the hood in systems to move changes around.

Even the concept of diff is a big deal!

Part of the superpower of being a developer is the idea that you can analyze two pieces of data with a common lineage, extract the changes, and work with/reason about the changes as first-class data. Were it only that more non-developer tools had this capability!

Writing from notes is a bootstrapping problem. Anything you can do to get started, overcome static friction, and “defeat” the first blank canvas is the best thing you can do.

I started with journaling. Don’t worry about the quality or quantity — yet. Just write. Start with recollections of your day(s) and branch out from there.

There is a trough of despair, at some point. It may feel like you’re just writing into a void. Don’t reach for a “crushing your notes” course on YouTube. You’re writing now, it’s not unusual for it to take a moment (days, even weeks) to click.

Next, I started reading actively and taking highlights. Tools don’t matter here. The outcomes you’re looking for are 1) getting more out of the reading than if you didn’t mark the passages that grab you, 2) coming back to the good stuff later. It’s nice that highlighting, even on mouse-and-keyboard computers, gets your hands moving and involved in the reading process.

Once I crested about a hundred notes/journals/highlights/etc., the next level was resurfacing past notes and revisiting/rewriting/reworking. I use random resurfacing of notes¹, “on-this-day” resurfacing of journals², and spaced repetition of highlights via Readwise. These generate insight, nostalgia, and (sometimes) the spark to connect the dots of enough ideas that a new draft comes into existence. That’s a big win! Honestly, even writing up a new note connecting some older notes or highlights feels like the system is working _for _me.

On a great day, the combination of resurfacing mechanisms and a bit of luck leads “a perfect post”. That is, one that connects old insights to new ideas, a quote that backs up the new insight, and a recently generated idea that ties it all together delightfully³.

Now I had a compounding loop of making new stuff (journals) and revisiting old stuff (highlights). Time to look for connections between them, and notice how the quality of the more recent stuff is improving over the older stuff. The temptation, particularly in a world of influencer media on note-taking⁴, is to get a Big System to Lead You Right To The Big Connections in Your Thoughts. You don’t need that, you’ve got one sizzling away in your noggin, right now.

The revisiting and revising and rewriting is how you end up making the connections. The last generic tool I’ll recommend here is a good-old blog. For me, the insights and connections first came to me in short form, link posts and asides⁵ if you will. Over time, my insights grew into a ton of notes, journals, and some short-to-medium length⁶ writing on this blog.

In other words, what you require is not just a blog, but a blogging habit. Not just a journal, but a journaling habit. Not just the desire to connect the dots, see your ideas compound, and point proudly at a volume of work, but the habit to make all those things happen.

Possible next levels in my process, use the blog:

• as an iterative series of first drafts (see 15 rules for blogging) and
• as a way to figure out _what I think_by writing my way through it.
• worrying less about writing down what I already know⁷

Slash pages:

…are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.

This sort of thing is what makes personal/humane-scale websites the greatest. So many adventures to choose from!

My favorites, already in place here:

• /about – “a page all about you”
• /blogroll – “a list of other sites that you read, are a follower of, or recommend”

And the ones I need to get off my butt and implement:

• /uses – “details of the things you use on a daily basis”
• /colophon – “a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies”
• /hello – “a single page listing the ways that you prefer to keep in touch”
• /now – “a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life”

Adjacent: Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites.

Steph Ango, Style is consistent constraint:

“Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Your constraints generate your style. 🧠

Yet again, the grass was not greener. I did learn a little more of simplicity-by-reduction. I asked myself, what Obsidian plugins or idioms am I using because someone else seemed to benefit a lot from it? Then I stopped using the ones that weren’t actually doing much for me. 💪🏻

I don’t need daily notes. That’s for the journal, which happens elsewhere. Daily notes might actually make my note-writing worse because I’m not above a perfunctory streak-preserving note.

It might even be the case that Muse is the right connecting-the-dots notes tool for me and Obsidian is more like a long-term development tool for preserving, archiving, and evolving ideas. 🧠

One of Obsidian’s advantages is the data is not opaque, its files in folders. I should use Finder more! It’s very good for dragging files around and considering organizational hierarchies. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I thought just buying Bear (it’s not expensive!) would cut the envy knot. It sorta did, so that was nice for about a day. Then, almost immediately afterward, I caught word that Obsidian’s previously-vague “mobile improvements roadmap” turned out to be “improved load-time” which is half of what I wanted. Timing is everything, folks! That said, native macOS/iOS apps are just excellent and I hope the Obsidian developers can close that gap.

As far as how to use Obsidian without getting nerd sniped: Tom MacWright and Matt Stein have the right idea. At least, not too nerd sniped. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Should internal narratives, and the philosophies they generate, be among the guarded proprietary info within a company¹? The stories the company tells the outside world are more about marketing and serving a purpose. Not those stories.

In particular, the stories the company tells itself to generate the culture and conditions for its success (or not). How it really happened, and what does that mean for where the company is now? They’re not exactly running to the press to tell the story².

Te scar tissue, what caused it, how that’s reflected in the process today? That’s guarded info, not eagerly shared in blog posts and conference talks. At least, not the entire truth.

Granted, many stories are used for building an image and marketing. To investors, competitors, potential hires, professional communities, etc. Or even to help teams internalize the purpose and goal of what they’re building today.

There’s a term for the people who’ve been around to witness these events and craft these stories — the old guard. They’re almost literally guarding the stories or narrative, but also guarding the way of working that made those stories a success.

These stories are often divorced from the reality of how the much bigger company now operates!

Narrative is powerful. Makes sense to guard it³. Both for alignment, but also for preserving myths that hold that purpose up. Myths that come from true stories. Myths that were constructed/embellished for marketing or aiming throughout the company’s existence.

Tall tales and fables by the campfire: now for corporations, too!

Thorsten Ball with a great reference to Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Be findable:

You’re in your apartment watching TV, and they knock on the door, like “Jerry, I’m Dave Addison from the Show Business Commission. We understand you got enormous talent and tremendous potential and you don’t know what to do with it, and there’s really no bridge or no other conduit which will carry you over to the next level, which is why we’re here. We’re the Show Business Commission. We’re here to sort of collect you up.”

No one is going to discover your work spontaneously. Making your work discoverable is part of the work. It’s not bragging or obnoxious. Unless you’re habitually obnoxious, in which case a little self-promotion is the least of your problems!

100 Tips for a Better Life:

95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.

Teaching someone the depth to something like cars or pens or literature is a gift and a curse. On one hand, you’re showing them a new, deeper world that they might really enjoy and find fulfillment in. On the other, they might realize something like “a true classic Porsche 911” is out of reach or that the pen they like is kinda middle-ground or that their favorite sci-fi author is kinda schlocky.

Maybe the gift is “this is amazing, but it’s a bit of a forbidden-knowledge hazard to know you could have this thing.”

The classic knowledge hazard for me, is One car to do it all. If that video hadn’t re-awoken my excitement for Porsches I would have a much more boring car, a lot more time back in my life, and mid-five figures of money spent otherwise. But maybe I’d have missed out on a fun hobby. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Riffing on this idea:

“If you want to upset a person for a day, tell them their car sucks. If you want to upset them for life, show them how to appreciate the automotive experience in a way that they will plumb the depths of for the rest of their days.”

“If you want to upset a person for a day, tell them their taste in music sucks. If you want to upset them for life, show them the first step in the journey to seek out and appreciate the depths of really great music despite the knowledge that the most popular music is an entertainment business and will never reach the levels which you aspire to.”

Enjoy things, seek out the finer details of what makes them nice. Not too much. Mostly things that don’t cost more than your monthly mortgage/rent.

Previously:

The only way to finish writing, planning, coding, designing, etc. is to do the thing.

Rarely will new tools, larger scope, a different approach, another section, more tidy, or any other number of not doing the thing finish the job.

Finishing is the skill. Finishing is The Way.

Conjecture: the last 90% of a project is 90% of the effort because we rarely develop the skill of finishing.

It’s easy to think “this project was doomed from the start, let’s start a new project to right our mistakes”, and boom you’re starting instead of finishing.

Finishing may incur damage to pride, reputation, etc. OTOH building a reputation for finishing is a tremendous asset in teams and careers.

You probably haven’t heard of many people who didn’t finish their thing.

Schubert had to write nine symphonies so he could write “The Unfinished” Symphony and have it live on hundreds of years later. Is there a writer who is only known for one unfinished novel or screenplay?

Starting a new thing is more fun than finishing an existing thing. This is always the temptation! The interesting things in a project usually happen when you’re starting and when you’re getting feedback from people interacting with it. The finishing phase is often the “canyon of disillusionment” where all the mundane or tedious tasks end up.

Updating another earlier thought:

✋ We’re not here to work on things.

👉 We’re here to finish things.

Corollary: we’re not here to push JIRA issues/Trello cards/etc. around. We’re here to make something and share it with the world.

Don’t neglect those issues/card¹. Finishing is important, but communicating that progress counts for a lot too! There’s no sense in finishing if no one else knows.