Multiplying Effort

Thoughts on process and work ethic

I’ve been thinking a bit lately (well, I’m always thinking about it) about the process of writing this newsletter, what actually goes into it, and all of the invisible work that goes into a finished piece.

I’ve made a couple of professional process improvements in recent months here. One is paying for a social media scheduler, which has two benefits. One, of course, is being able to send social media posts at times when I’m not online, duplicate posts across platforms, and stagger posts instead of blasting them out at once or remembering when I want to send them later.

But the other advantage—at least as important, honestly—is being able to spend less time plugged into the social media platforms themselves. I’ve long ago started leaving my social media tabs on “notifications” instead of “home” or “for you,” so that I don’t have to see other people’s posts in order to use the platform. I scroll once in awhile, and a lot of my ideas come from interesting people I follow, but at some point you have to cordon off “My job is to promote my own work here” from getting sucked into scrolling for no real reason, getting annoyed or distracted by someone, forgetting what you were even there to do, etc.

The other process improvement is buying my own domain name, so that if I should ever move my newsletter I can keep the URL, because it feels more professional to not have the platform’s name in your URL, and because social media platforms seem to treat such links a bit better in their algorithms. (Substack offers this domain name conversion for a one-time $50 fee, and buying a domain name is pretty inexpensive, about $20 a year.) These things make the time I spend promoting and publishing my work more productive.

Another thing I realized, going to a couple of evening meet-ups recently, and reflecting this day on the road that I wrote about, is how much everything you take in, in the right state of mind, matters. On one of these event days, I spent the whole day out—a morning drive, some coffee shop work time, lunch at an interesting restaurant, an afternoon drive to photograph and check out a couple of interesting places, and then to the event.

On the second event day, I stayed home and then went out in the afternoon. I hit some early rush hour traffic, got slowed down, and the whole thing felt a bit like a chore. There was no day of heightened perceptive observation leading up to the meet-up, where my day had a “theme” that I could chat about, test ideas, start conversations. Without that idiosyncratic preparation time, I had less to say, found it harder to meet people, etc.

It’s a funny thing. I intuitively know my ideal work process on some level but I can’t really even describe it to myself, let alone to someone else. And without being able to articulate it, I go back and forth between thinking it all goes together and is more than the sum of its parts, and seeing as a bunch of discrete time-wasting points.