My problem is I get stuck at the very last step: publishing.
I take copious, detailed, organized notes for everything I do (house renovations, DIY projects, programming projects) with a robust system that I've fine tuned over the years. This habit has proven to be invaluable for me, as I continuously reference notes and learnings from many years prior.
However, by the time it comes to editing and publishing, I've already moved onto something else.
> These days I make myself do it: I tell myself that writing about something is the cost I have to pay for building it. And I always end up feeling that the effort was more than worthwhile.
This might work? Sometimes it's a tiny mental shift that changes everything.
Maybe start out not editing and just publishing your raw notes if you can. If people express interest, that might incentivize you to start editing. Basically prototype your writing.
Also, I find editing easiest with some time between writing and editing. Time away allows me to digest my own thoughts more and also makes my writing less precious to me. I sort of become a reader to my own posts and find it much more palatable to edit at that point
I think writing in public might work for you. Don't do drafts, instead, start an article with just a title if you have to and progressively refine it. IMO an article's lifetime is much more than just the initial day or so after publishing it. Sure, that's when it will most likely get the most attention, and if you're optimizing for that, this might not be the best advice, but if not, it sounds like something that might work well for you.
I have a /notes/ section on my site just for this. They're living documents that get updated and edited over time, they're never really "done". Turns out people get value from these even if I wouldn't describe them as real articles.
Running something like TiddlyWiki or Wiki.js for notes also helps with the publishing aspect, all you have to do is make your wiki accessible from the wider internet and you're done.
Like with every habit, there's less and less friction with every finished attempt. (speaking from personal experience, I'm terrible at publishing consistently)
>This might work? Sometimes it's a tiny mental shift that changes everything.
Could be. What works for me is finding something small enough that I can't overcomplicate it (write today, edit and publish tomorrow, done!). Then, I will (obviously) overcomplicate it, but instead of ending up with a week-long commitment, I spend 3-4 evenings instead of 2. (example: https://sonnet.io/posts/reactive-hole/)
I would also suggest treating writing a post (or a series) as a project itself.
I feel like we're struggling with a similar problem. Good luck!
It's not for everyone, but I keep running notes in a special section of my blog, which is hosted on github pages, so it all just stays in sync across multiple computers on a repo. I have found it useful even for myself looking up stuff, and maybe people find your half finished notes useful or not. I'm a big fan of lowering the barrier. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
If I leave something as an unpublished draft, it's game over. There's too many things.
I've been looking at the Zettelkasten note taking method recently, and one of the things it forces you to do is write notes that are pretty much publication-ready. The main use case of the method is publication actually.
Of course it's more upfront investment, but then you arrive at a state where it's more about selecting the notes you want to put together to form your article and just write a few sentences to connect the dots before your article is ready.
This may suit you if you're ready to invest more initially.
I thought the whole point was that you're organizing your thoughts and ideas across connected notes. I didn't think it required publishing. Got any more info on this? I want to publish someday
> I thought the whole point was that you're organizing your thoughts and ideas across connected notes.
I think the whole point is that you're NOT organizing :D
You end up sequencing the notes under a main line of thought per topic, but the idea is that the connections between your notes help you discover new unforeseen connections.
> I didn't think it required publishing.
I don't think it requires it either, but it seems like it's a waste of effort if you don't want to publish the product of your "notes" at some point.
The method asks that you write the notes in a publishable state, so you need to invest time to write like this. This time improves the form of the content, but not the content itself, and if your goal is only to remember or learn, then it's the content that you care about, and a lower quality edit would also do the job.
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It is "sold" as a general productivity method, highlighting the fact that Luhmann (the creator) published 50+ books and 600+ articles in his life. I believe it is a publishing productivity method.
I still think it must be beneficial, but the question is are you able to keep up with the effort required if you don't have this end goal of publishing your writings? I'm not sure I do.
> I still think it must be beneficial, but the question is are you able to keep up with the effort required if you don't have this end goal of publishing your writings? I'm not sure I do.
This is the exact conclusion I came to. Honestly, a personal wiki seems better in this regard.
I received an email inquiring about my note-taking system, so I'll copy-paste my response here:
Nothing revolutionary about my system. The short answer is that I use Notion, because it checks a lot of boxes right out of the gate: it's cross-platform, easily searchable, shareable, and strikes that perfect balance between unstructured and structured data.
The longer answer is: I have top-level documents for each facet of my life, and each of those documents is organized with a particular structure to optimize for a particular use case. Much of it ends up as some combination of nested documents, databases, and kanban-style boards. The databases and kanban boards make use of templates to normalize data whenever possible.
For example, I have a top-level "Automotive" document. Within that document are sub-documents for each of my vehicles. Each vehicle document primarily serves as a quick reference with vehicle metadata like VIN number, license plate number, etc, and maybe some general notes. The vehicle document contains a "Maintenance Log", which is a kanban board to track upcoming maintenance, completed maintenance, repairs, and everything in between. The maintenance items are templatized to streamline entry and reduce cognitive overhead.
I've found that the combination of templatized kanban boards and free form documents can be applied to basically anything, from programming projects, to house renovations, managing job interviews, cooking / menu planning, etc, with slight variations to adapt to a given use case.
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I'm really pleased with how well this system has worked for me, and have considered writing about it in more detail. How meta. Perhaps I should blog about it :)
I take copious, detailed, organized notes for everything I do (house renovations, DIY projects, programming projects) with a robust system that I've fine tuned over the years. This habit has proven to be invaluable for me, as I continuously reference notes and learnings from many years prior.
However, by the time it comes to editing and publishing, I've already moved onto something else.
> These days I make myself do it: I tell myself that writing about something is the cost I have to pay for building it. And I always end up feeling that the effort was more than worthwhile.
This might work? Sometimes it's a tiny mental shift that changes everything.