Working in small increments towards medium-to-large projects or outcomes is tricky. I too frequently find myself down a much deeper rabbit hole than I’d intended. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and practicing at it! Recommended reading: Simon Willison on productivity.

Read-only and write-only modes of accessing social media – there’s something good here. E.g., blogs and feed readers are distinct from most¹ posting software. Currently, I’m reading Twitter once a day, as a digest, without the ability to scroll an infinite timeline. If I want to post, I open up an entirely different app that nudges me towards writing instead of dashing off hot-takes. Interestingly, Typefully and Mailbrew are what I’m using for this and are made by the same team. I wonder if that was intentional or a happy accident?

Billing/subscriptions/payment projects are absolutely crucial, “undifferentiated heavy lifting”, and difficult to pull off. I have a ton of unstructured ideas about this. The latest kernel of an idea: billing projects are very likely to involve weird interactions between business goals, customer psychology, and anecdata.

The nap hierarchy – naps are probably in my top 5 list of work-from-home benefits.

1. Early versions of NetNewsWire and Userland Radio notwithstanding. ↩

How I work: what might “pairing” with a language model-based assistant (e.g. GPT-3) look like?

How I build: the tension between the web platform being more capable than ever versus the difficulty of standing up many kinds of “basic” applications. e.g. animation is better/more sophisticated than ever, but skipping ahead with building web/database applications requires expertise and a few hours to get something up and running.

How I collaborate: encouraging teams to work in issue threads, thereby improving the quality of thinking (via writing) and building ambient, asynchronous awareness amongst teammates.