Let’s talk about format
Wherein we have to go deeper.
The format/concept for this newsletter is evolving. My previous favorites were hip travelographer and geeky late night show. The current, and easiest to publish, format is “highlights from my blog”. That’s fine for consistency, but I feel there’s an opportunity here.
The next thesis I want to pursue is “every newsletter wants to be a book when it grows up”. Something between writing longer-form essays on bigger ideas and connecting the dots on the ideas I’m already writing short-form, punchier notes on. That would make this newsletter stand on its own and make room to go a little deeper here with you, my dedicated readers.
To that end, allow me to expand upon a few recent blog posts. 🧠
A field guide to exploring rabbit holes is an exercise in conciseness. I rescued the ideas here from a longer essay I wrote years ago. I was trying to put together a guide for junior developers, but couldn’t get this piece of the puzzle to work. So I rewrote it in the Waste Book style, and now it’s out there! I like writing in that short, aphoristic style. It only took me 20 years of online writing to find a hundreds-of-years-old book that matches my style.
I have to approach rabbit holes with care. Deep, often interconnected, puzzles that are within my expertise. What else could a brain want? As it turns out, what a brain wants is not always what yields results. Hence, a distinction between rabbit holes (deep, distracting problems) and the needful work (deep problems that I’m the right person to solve.)
Looking over the tactics I’ve laid out for managing “rabbit hole”-shaped work, I’m noticing that these tactics restate my thesis of how to do individual work in general. Involve or work directly with a colleague. Set time constraints. Think through the problem, out loud, on paper, or on a whiteboard. Keep notes and share them with teammates. Don’t let adjacent issues distract you.
It’s a nice symmetry that working a rabbit hole is no different from any other work, tactically. Are rabbit holes only distinct from other work in that they might be a distraction?
Maybe the work is the work, no matter how you name it.
I love to say that there is no song that Aretha Franklin can’t sing slower and better than anyone else. It’s 99.99% true! Turns out, Carole King is the 0.01% that complements the rule. Carole King and Aretha Franklin are masters of slowness, in their ways. So now the rule is “no one can make an audience sweat like Aretha”. They’re both great rules.
Aretha was so good because she could perform a slow with effortlessly. Performing a melody well is challenging when it’s slow. The gaps between the notes are longer, so a lack of feel will sink the song. You have to really hit the pitches, or else it’s obvious you’re out of tune.
Of course, I’m going to reference “Untitled (How does it feel)” here because it’s a masterpiece of slowness and feel.
As ever, thanks for reading!