Wines that smell like Snorks and Taste like a T-Roofed Thunderbird

Oh, would that wine tasting were more like a game! BUT WAIT: in the newest episode of Not About Wine -- available today -- we unveil a more game like format.

If you've listened to the show before, you'll recognize most of the good stuff hopefully -- funny stories! sounds of wine being poured! -- and a tightening up of structure. At least that's what I am attempting to do.

If you've never listened to Not About Wine, check out the show page.

Previous episodes of the show have had one over-arching theme -- Memories from Middle School say, or Jobs You've Had. I found that a lot of my guests struggled to use that theme for the whole tasting. So in this episode I'm modifying the tasting a little. Rather than one theme, each aspect of the tasting -- Color, Nose, Taste, Body, Finish -- has its own small topic chosen randomly from a hat.

It goes without saying, but this show is an experiment. And in a lot of ways, each show is a failed experiment. I have a hypothesis - there is an interesting show in doing a wine tasting/conversation this way - and I have my lab results - I'm not 100% thrilled with each show.

Sometimes my hosting is way too pushy and I laugh too much at my own jokes and I breath weird. Sometimes the recording is too echoey and I have to spend way too much time adding compression and gain and other audio terms which I have learned recently to deal with my echoey recordings. And always always: the recording is too long and requires too much editing. Which means it takes a lot of time to get out.

OH AND: the less said about my singing interludes: probably the better.

And so I keep experimenting. I honestly and painfully hope that these experiments aren't wearing out their welcome and that the show is getting better. I have two shows coming out soon that I am very excited about. I am bringing bottles of wine to some comedy heroes of mine: first, Rob Baedeker from Kasper Hauser; and Scott Simpson from You Look Nice Today. If you don't know either of those names - GET ON THE GOOGLE. I am punching above my weight.

You can listen to episode 8 of Not About Wine streaming here; and you can also subscribe in iTunes

Your Contexts Are Broken; or How to Make Your Computer Dumber and Yourself Smarter

Expectation setting: this is one for the productivity nerds - the 'GTDers' - but I also hope it is interesting to anyone who is trying to do work and do it well. But I will be using language that may or may not make sense to people who have not read 'Getting Things Done'. And I'm not going to lie, it is longish: 3000 words, which using the longreads.com calculation, will take about about 15 minutes. If you got that, go ahead. If you don't: no hard feelings.

Photo via David Locke

OK, let's set a few baselines here:

1. Nobody can focus anymore
2. Because of the internet

Agreed?

I will here remind you to read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.

Now, as someone who wants more than anything to make things that others will like, I find my lack of focus deeply upsetting. Making things -- for me this means writing, usually, and sometimes website making, and more recently audio; but for you it could be whatever, felting, song writing, whatever -- usually requires a phase of thrashing boredom before it gets any good for me. In that period of time, the thrashing bit, I am like a junkie trying to get through withdrawal. I will tell you anything if you let me out of this room. I am all better now. There are demons in here. You are torturing me and must not love me. Please let me out.

I don't mean to compare the making of stuff with the horrors of drug addiction. Or, I didn't mean to then. But now, screw you, I'm intrigued by that metaphor and I'm keeping it. SO: Junkie = the will to not do the work; Guard = the will to sit down and do the work.

OK, BUT SO: I'm not saying anything interesting or novel. All people who make things complain and romanticize this same struggle. Whole entire books by Anne Lamott cover this very subject.

The issue, of course, is that I am both the junkie trying to kick down the door and the person standing outside the door holding it closed. (I told you: I AM KEEPING THE METAPHOR.) This is good old will power. If I want to get through this blog post, for instance, the part of me holding the door shut needs to be stronger than the person trying to get out.

The internet, and my computer more generally, is like kryptonite to the guy holding the door shut. Rather than holding the door shut, I check Facebook, Twitter, my email, Daring Fireball, Pitchfork, rdio, my own blog stats, ET CETERA.

An hour will go by before I realize the door has been opened and I haven't written or edited a thing.

Productivity Will Be Your Savior

To address this I have tried many things. There are many people out there selling anti-kryptonite drugs - productivity tools and methods. I have tried a lot of them - Merlin Mann calls all this stuff "productivity pr0n" - but this post is not about how we get wrapped up in our productivity systems and never actually do any work. For that, I would highly recommend Merlin's post “Distraction,” Simplicity, and Running Toward Shitstorms.

No, no, no (he said in his Ira Glass voice), we will not do that today. Today, I want to outline for you my recent thinking on my own productivity; as well as offer you a few perspectives on how to be productive when:

A. you work mostly on a computer B. you do what could be called knowledge work or creative work (douchey terms the both of them C. you like productivity pr0n.

Does this describe you? Well step right up my friend and let's talk about GTD.

Part 1: Why it's hard to Get Things Done on a Computer

If you work on a computer and are interested in productivity and particularly interested in systemizing it, you have heard of and probably follow David Allen's method called Getting Things Done.

If that is true, then you can skip this paragraph. For people who don't know what I am taking about: in a smallish nutshell, Getting Things Done is a task management system geared towards clearing your head of all the stuff you need to do; getting it on paper or whatever, and organizing it in such a way that you can focus on what needs to happen next; and crucially, what can happen next. You group all your to-do items into projects, but also into Contexts. A context is a place where certain tasks can happen. The classic GTD example is that you shouldn't be worried about mowing your lawn when you are at your office. You can only mow the lawn when you are at home, so you have a list of Home things and you look at your Home list only when you are home.

It is this idea of context that I have been thinking about. In Allen's system -- developed mostly in the belly of corporate executive floors -- contexts are very location specific: Office, Home, Online, In-Town.

To be fair: I don't know if Allen himself ever said a context had to be defined this way - it's just what made the most sense; and so a lot of GTD applications are still built with these defaults.

These are still helpful and truthful contexts. I have things that I can only do at home (e.g. mow that good old lawn); and I can only pick up beer when I am in-town. But for the most part -- and by that, I mean like a good 90% at least -- I execute tasks in one context: The Computer.

The Computer is not a Context

Why is that a problem? If contexts are defined by when you can do certain tasks, then having computer as a context should work like any other: you just do those tasks when you are on or around your computer.

Photo via eurleif

Well, the problem is this: the computer is a ridiculously and unhelpfully flexible context. Whereas the boundaries of my home are very clear -- I am either there or I am not -- the laptop computer:

1. contains way too many types of work
2. contains a lot of it
3. does not separate that work in any way from each other the way Home and Office are separated by your commute

This will of course not be surprising to anyone who has spent any time on an internet connected computing device. You may be trying to accomplish your 'office' work, but you will inevitably check your 'personal' facebook, and be interrupted by your 'spouse' on IM, and want to check the price of some of the items you are 'shopping' for, and then, whoops, you have an idea for the 'writing' you want to do.

Everything in quotes in the previous paragraph could be considered a context; and they all take place right next to each other inside the computer. You see? The computer is not one context. The computer is essentially all contexts. It is the place where all contexts collapse into one.

What do you focus on when your 'context' contains everything?

Part 2: Separating Your Computer Like a Lunch Tray

Photo via dougww

This is the problem with the universal machine: it is universal. We did not evolve with all-in-one tools and except for the very rare case - the Leatherman comes to mind - all-in-one-tools are inferior. I will always choose my real corkscrew over the crappy one on my swiss army knife.

NOTE: the swiss army toothpick was always pretty boss in my opinion.

So, ok this is going to get a little GTD technical, but bear with me. 45 seconds, promise.

I'm going to show you my contexts. As a reminder: contexts are the places your to-do items can happen. For awhile my contexts looked something like this:

• Home
• Work
• Laptop
• Email
• Spouse
• Laptop

Reasonable right? But, as I said, most of tasks ended up in either Work : Laptop or Laptop. And truthfully, Work : Laptop and Laptop were the same machine. If the point with contexts is narrowing down what can be done at any given point in your day, it's not helpful to basically collect all your to-do items in one context. My work stuff was getting mixed up with my personal stuff with my side project stuff. I never knew what to focus on when I looked at my Laptop list.

OK SO: This is a very long way of saying, I need a way to divide my computer into focus-based contexts rather than location based contexts. I am basically in the same location - the computer. So just like the person who needs to separate out their sleeping space from their eating space, I need to put up some walls inside my computer somehow.

So then my contexts looked like this:

• Creative
• Production
• Processing
• Consumption
• Zendesk
• Production
• Processing
• Errands
• etc

I won't go through the whole list, but you see what I'm starting to do? I am building rooms inside my computer based on what kind of work I need to be focusing on. They are abstract locations - all of them are happening in the computer - but I am saying Zendesk : Production is different than Creative : Production. (Zendesk is my employer btw.)

It's a slight reversal of Allen's system. Rather than looking around at the context I am in (office, home, in-town), I am defining a context to help me create meaning out of all the crap on my list.

This is getting deep catalogue, but if you care about the whole "Production", "Processing" thing above, I realized that most of my tasks fit into three basic types of work:

1. Production - anything that basically starts with a blank page; anytime where I need to create stuff. Writing is production, but so is research in my case. Research doesn't come to me, I must seek it out.
2. Processing - anything where there is something coming at me that I need to deal with and send out. Email is processing.
3. Consumption - this is stupid context that I will probably get rid of, but it is time set aside for reading and learning basically.

Oh, and there is no Work context per se. There are only types of work: Zendesk is my employer; but anytime I have a collection of work -- creative in the example above -- it gets its own context.

Part 3: Reinforcing the Walls You Build Inside Your Computer

Ok, at this point, I would not be sad if you bailed. The basic idea has already been stated: if you work on the computer a lot, you need to learn to separate out the kinds of work you do and keep them separate. The rest of this is basically how I pull that off.

But just making those distinctions about what kind of work I had wasn't enough. I built walls on paper, but my computer didn't care. I might be looking at my Zendesk : Production context, but I can still check my Zendesk email (decidedly a Processing task). And do I! Holy crap. Production is hard. Production is blank page stuff and I will avoid it when I can. Processing is easy because it is simply you reacting to stuff flying at your face.

So I took it one step further. I got out the old calendar and scheduled out blocks of time that I would attack my various contexts. It looks like this:

This is getting complicated I realize, but for each task in my to-do list (I use OmniFocus) I estimate how long it's going to take me (see sidebar). Then, when I look at my list, I can see about how long I should spend in Zendesk : Production or Creative: Processing.

I just watched a video where Merlin argues against estimating the duration of your tasks. I get why he argues this (just as he gets why you might use it). I use duration for this important reason: when you have a universal machine like the computer, you have no spatial walls so you must create temporal ones. Instead of saying, "I am at home and thus I can do this and this", you are forced to declare: "I am committing to myself that I will spend the next hour working on this Zendesk writing and that's it!" You must will that room into being for it does not exist otherwise.

To return to our junkie kicking down the door metaphor: Blocks of time are your locked door. You need to make them strong.

And so to check-in:

1. Break your computer into meaningful contexts. I use Production and Processing.
2. Break your day into blocks focused on each of those contexts.

Part 3: Moving Away from the All-in-One-Tool

OH BUT: even when my I've split my computer into meaningful collections of tasks; and even when the calendar says I should be focusing on, say, writing this blog post, I can still check my email or whatever. Temporal walls built in my calendar program are not enough!

The next step GTD nerds: we need to learn how to disassemble and break out computer out into individual tools that work for one type of work and one type only.

This occurred to me recently: when a carpenter shows up to do their work, they do not bring one tool that does everything. They bring a bunch of tools each of which is specifically designed to do one thing awesomely. Our computers' very strength - their universality (they are a reading device, a writing device, a work machine, a play machine!) - is their hugest weakness: it is tough to write when you are also trying to read.

So NOW THIS: my contexts now look like:

• Creative
• Production
• Online
• Offline
• Processing
• Consumption
• Zendesk
• Production
• Online
• Offline
• Processing
• Errands
• etc

As said above, I block out each of those in my calendar; but when it comes time for Zendesk : Production : Offline, I start up my trusty Freedom app (which kills the internet so thoroughly on your machine that you can not get it back without shutting down your computer entirely) and disable all network capability for an alotted time (as dictated by my calendar). And finally, I can focus a little. My computer is a better writing machine when it is not a reading machine. And definitely when it is not an internet machine.

Breaking The Computer Apart Further

Oh, but I wish it went further. I would love to see an application developed that allowed me to disable and break my computer more granularly. As an example, here is a list of ways I configure my universal machine to be less universal based on the context I am in:

Zendesk : Production Online

• Freedom - inactive
• Email - Closed
• Chat Status - Busy

Zendesk : Production Offline

• Freedom - Active (no internet whatsoever)

Zendesk : Processing

• Freedom - inactive
• Email - Open
• Chat - Available

Laptop : Production

• Freedom - active

Laptop : Processing

• Freedom - inactive
• Email - open
• Chat - closed

It works to a point. I don't see the little email badge telling me I have new mail when I'm supposed to be writing or making a video; and when I don't need the internet, it's off. It strengthens the guy who is sitting outside the door imploring the guy who's inside trying to escape to just please; please stay in and do some stupid work. It is really the discipline to say, Yes, this is the context I am in now. We can no longer be as reactive as David Allen has it (i.e. what context am I in now? Oh, the office. I'll do that work). It's about creating time for contexts and magically creating your office.

Let me know if this makes sense to you. We shouldn't spend too much time talking about it (as Merlin reminds us); but it's important to realize how distracted we really are by the internet and how need to modify our way of thinking about getting work done on the computer.

To sum

I am using a three step method:

1. Define context walls within your computer that group your tasks according to a type of work. For me, I do it this way: Who I am doing the work for? Then, what kind of work is it: Production or Processing? And then lastly, what do I need to get this work done? Do I need the internet?
2. Actually block out time on your calendar to address each of those contexts. (There's a whole OmniFocus component I didn’t get into... maybe soon).
3. Configure your machine as best you can to provide you the tools you need to accomplish that work and only those tools.

Seems simple I know. It's all addressing the questions: What do I need to do any given piece of work? And beyond that, what keeps me from focusing on that work? These are not new questions. But we need to keep solving them.

OH AND IF YOU WERE WONDERING: I wrote this whole thing with Freedom running. And in WriteRoom.

Caveats

Obviously life will throw lemon curveballs your way. There is no way you will be able to stick to your schedule as described in Part 2. So it's not about sticking to it 100%. It's about the intention of setting the time.

Also, there is no magic here. You can always distract yourself. Instead, it is about making the part of you that is holding the door stronger than the part of you that is trying to get out. So, do whatever you have to do.

5by5 Studios and how to produce stuff for the internet.

For about 5 years I have been trying in earnest to make things on the internet. You Will Not Believe is sort of a collection of those things, including Star Wars Yoga (exhibited left), Not About Wine, and smaller stuff like Google Voice Poetry. And then there was the most ambitious internet project I've undertaken, the web comedy series Merry Holidays with Internet genius Scotty Iseri.

Some of the stuff I like, some of it I don't. Some of it has been internet successful, most of it hasn't.

Today I had the great fortune of speaking about what I've made -- as well as what it means to make that internet stuff -- with Dan Benjamin for his program The Daily Edition.

Dan is a podcasting phenom, going from someone who created one show to a guy who basically runs his own media network called 5by5. (He also pens the greatest list of podcasting gear that I've found on the internet. If you are interested in doing your own show, you cannot do wrong by Dan's suggestions.) All of which is to say, he is also someone who makes stuff for the internet.

It was a great conversation. You can listen to it here (as well as subscribe to the show through iTunes). Basically, it's hard to make stuff and there are literally no paths you can follow when it comes to the internet. But there are some things you can do to make it work better I think.

1. Think about communities more than you think about audience in general. The internet is simply too big and disorganized for you to throw your paper boat into it and hope it finds other boats. You got to throw you paper boat into a smaller pond. So, like what communities are you in in real life? Food, comedy, tech? Do a show or make a thing that would work in that crew.
2. Learn HTML/CSS and other basic web technologies or befriend someone who already knows them. Dan and I sort of disagreed on this, but I think my takeaway is that if you understand what the internet is made of a little better that will really open up what you can do and how you think.
3. Make stuff all the friggin' time. It's just the reality that if you aren't putting stuff out there constantly, the internet cannot aggregate around your node. Which is to say: don't be such a perfectionist. Be more of a presence.

That last point is something I desperately need to work on, as I'm sure we all do. Not About Wine's frequency has been sorely infrequent.

Or, whatever, be a perfectionist. But just be really rich too so you don't have to work.

I wish all internet links worked like they do in Instapaper

SET YOUR EXPECTATIONS: this post is about the internet and more on the geeky side. It is also 550 words - with a couple long images stuck in there - which in my estimation should take you about 4 minutes of good old focused reading and 20 extra seconds for scrolling. 4 minutes is really not that long, but on the internet, it can feel like forever.

One of my favorite web tools is a service called Instapaper. I like it because it facilitates reading, something I:

• Love
• Find very hard to do on the internet

Essentially, Instapaper allows you to save a particular web page for later reading. But more than just a bookmarking site, Instapaper specifically bookmarks stuff you want to read and optimizes that page for reading.

For instance, here is a page from The Washington Post's website:

I would consider that non-optimal as far as good old reading goes.

And here is that page in Instapaper:

Pretty sweet.

Even better, the service syncs with my nifty phone and so provides me a mobile library, also optimized for digital based reading. Here's that page on my magic phone:

The Issue with Hyperlinks

I've discussed internet-based reading previously on this internet site.

For more of that kind of material go to the top of the post and click on "Musings". And if you noticed that I am trying to avoid using links here, you WIN.

Specifically, how challenging I find it to focus, and some things that might help encourage focus.

One weapon that distraction uses in it's war against focus on the internet - possibly the very bullets themselves in that war - is the hyperlink.

I love hyperlinks from a conceptual standpoint, but my holy god I hate them in practice. Conceptually, the idea of pages being linked along intersecting multiple axes is mind-blowing. The problem, of course, is that in practice it is also: mind-blowing.

Our minds simply do not work that way. If I am reading something and then hit a link inserted into one of its paragraphs, I do not experience some incredible god-perspective where I now hold the two pages simultaneously in my head. And I cannot somehow grab the meaning of the link and hold it as I continue reading the original piece. AT least not in practice. In practice, I am reading something and then I click a link and I am reading something else; an interruption, plain and simple.

If someone interrupts me at a party, the first conversation is usually not enhanced. It is simply put on hold or ended. Yes I can return to it, but it has been compromised, broken up.

So a link is sort of like a door you have to decide whether to open.

We all have our way of handling links. I am a serial "open in a new tab" kind of guy, essentially creating a reading queue. But usually by the time I finish the first piece, I forget why I wanted to read the second piece

How Instapaper Handles Links

When you click a link in Instapaper, however, it gives you the option to "read Later" or "open".

NOTE, and this is a big note: links only work this way in the Instapaper iPhone and iPad apps. When reading in a desktop browser, links work the way they do in most other sites - which is to say: non-optimally with respect to reading. I wonder if there might be a way to achieve how the links work in the app using Javascript...

If you click "read later" it adds it to your Instapaper library. I love this. In most cases, it is exactly what I want to do with respect to links, which is say, "I like the look of that link, but I am reading this now." It helps you prioritize the thing you are actually reading rather than toss it aside with one click.

It is not perfect, obviously. It still creates a reading queue that you need to get through, and as you are reading it perhaps a lot later, it does not necessarily explain the original link. BUT: it recognizes that my mind actually works pretty sequentially. I do one thing followed by another thing.

Comedy Web Series about the Holidays and Bad Customer Service

NOTE: this post is 593 words long and contains two videos, each of which are around six minutes. Doing some math, I would say, this one's gonna take you a good 15 - 17 minutes.  You got that?  But again, 12 of those minutes are slack-jawed video watching.

As as followup to my last post; the web series I have been working on with Scotty Iseri premiered this past Wednesday.  It is a Christmas Carol spoof about bad customer service.  I am very proud of what we did here and while I am bummed that it's kept me from putting out the next Not About Wine episode, I sincerely hope I can continue doing this kind of work.

There's a lot to be said here about doing creative work that mostly uses the web for its distribution.  In some ways, what we are doing here is a very traditional video project - episodic, no audience interaction, linear - and in this way, it may not be that successful.  There's a lot of episodic, non-interactive, linear video out there - on the web and otherwise - and ours is no better than what's already out there.  In fact, in many ways, it is much worse.  You have to watch it here, on the web, for one.

Unless of course you are super-fancy and have an Apple TV or a Boxee Box or a Roku XDS Streaming Player and can play internet videos on your television.

But what was so exciting about working on this project with Scotty in the coffee and beer heaven that is Portland, OR is that even while making something fairly traditional, we were doing it in extremely untraditional ways --

• All of it was shot on prosumer XSLR cameras - cameras you can reasonably buy.
• Our budget was very low for what our product looks like.
• We relied on a network of people from the net to help write, promote, and act in the movie; not people from the film and television industry.
• The project was funded entirely by Zendesk, the help desk software company that I work for.  No production company, just the advertiser.  This is either awesome or horrible depending on your point of view.  I think it is in between.

-- and it was these ways that made me feel like we will be making more web-native projects soon.  Since we aren't relying on traditional processes, we don't need to make a traditional product.

A Holiday Special

But for now we are tackling the most traditional of structures: the holiday special. We wrote this story to be funny and to satisfy two themes:

1. Customer Service - this was the "brand message" that Zendesk wanted the entertainment to carry.
2. Holiday stories - we were releasing it in December.  Seemed to make sense to take advantage of that.

We are spoofing both of them.  The basic idea is that there is this Scrooge like character who has created all the bad customer service experiences we all hate -- hold music, phone trees, hipsters who work at coffee shops. In this story, he is forced to experience at an absurd level all the bad customer service he spawned.  This drives him to drink heavily.  

I play this character. DO NOT WORRY - I went to one year of acting school so everything will be FINE.

Below are episode one and two of the series.  WATCH THEM.  And then go to the Merry Holidays, Please Hold page to sign up for further episode notifications. That way you won't miss the part where I grab somebody's boob and get punched in the face.

OH AND ALSO: we have a thing where you can win an xbox 360 with Kinect as well as some Threadless t-shirts.

Episode 1: The Fred Talks

Episode 2: The Evil Three

Not About Wine Delayed By Demon in Christmas Sweater

While I am trying to get a new episode of Not About Wine out every week, I have been unable to work on the upcoming episode because of people dressed like this:

I am working on a 12 episode comedy web series with Scotty Iseri - the Barton Fink looking genius behind Scotty Got an Office Job. We wrote the series for my employer, Zendesk, and are currently shooting it in Portland. It includes:

• jokes about bad customer service
• a fake Ted Talk
• multiple geese
• a redemptive Christmas Carol spoof
• the above demon in a christmas sweater
• Lawrence Lessig and Leo Laporte singing a Creative Commons Christmas Carol

You know STUFF LIKE THAT.

The upshot is that there will not be a new Not About Wine until after Thanksgiving probably. BUT: it's a doozy.

The web series -- titled Merry Holidays, Please Hold -- will premiere on Dec. 1 on http://zendesk.com. More soon.

Solo Work vs. Social Work, and why the internet feels so lonely

Photo courtesy pfctdayelise

One of the problems I experience with respect to working on the internet - or through the internet or whatever - is that the internet requires people to feel complete. The idea of audience looms over every web page because on the internet, "audience" is so immediate. The act of writing and the act of publishing are nearly simultaneous.

And more: I write/publish a blog post and I know exactly how many people have viewed it. I am made hyper aware of my audience. And also, there is the sense that because it's out there -- on the internet -- there is a potential for so many people to see it.

And so I agonize immediately. When it's silent on the internet, it's oh so silent.

NOTE: it is almost always silent.

AND MORE, AGAIN: there is the issue of participation. On the internet, all these immediate, potential readers can do something. For instance: I am working on something called The Not About Wine Home Game. Why? Because just doing a show that has listeners is not enough. Or it feels that way at least. I have a facebook page and a twitter account and an email address. All of these are two-way communication tools. It's haunting when one side of the conversation is silent.

Of course I am also working on the Not About Wine Home game because I think it will be fun and cool. The promise of the internet with respect to "community" and "engaged audience" is real and special. But it is also daunting and overwhelming is the point.

Taking stock real quick: different than other mediums, internet-based work (creative or otherwise) has an immediate connection to audience. This seems to be because:

• The act of creating and the act of publishing are so close together
• You have very specific data on the activities of your audience
• The audience can usually participate in some way

This is very different from more traditional creative mediums (or means of distribution maybe is a better phrase?). When I write a short story not intended for the internet, for instance, the audience is pretty abstract. In fact, in traditional publishing it must first pass through an editor -- an audience of one -- before it can even get to an audience. When writing a short story or a novel or a play, your audience is very far off. You should just be focusing on the work.

What I mean is that my writing of a traditional short story occurs in a space filled pretty much with the writing itself. The reading of it by others seems so far away. And so I write and then I am done writing and I look back over what I have read and I think, "Was what I just wrote any good? Did I enjoy that process or arrive at any interesting thoughts?" and so on.

In this way it has a moment of solo satisfaction - which is to say: it can be satisfying on a purely solo level.

Not so on the internet. When I write something for the internet, -- including this very post right here -- I am all too aware that it will be readable (by the potential millions of the internet) in like fifteen minutes.

Even if I don't hit "Publish" here when I'm done, the very fact that I can creates a feeling in me that it needs to get out there. I'm thinking about all the readers I can get. I write in a space of reading.

OH AND YES the kid in me who studied contemporary philosophy in college is totally loving and totally ashamed of loving the meta-palooza of writing about thinking about audience in the hopes of getting an audience.

Which is to say that the satisfaction of working on the internet is so tied up in the social aspect of it that it skips -- the work does -- right over any solo satisfaction I might derive from simply having created something I like. I like this blog post, but if I check my analytics tomorrow and less than 100 people have come to my blog because of it, I will be sad. It will be unsatisfying.

And so I am resisting hitting publish right now. I am trying hard to enjoy this blog post for what it is - something I have written that expresses some thoughts previously unarticulated for me. Thoughts I like. I will try and hold off for a day maybe? I wrote this yesterday is what I am saying; and for that one day, I wrote a satisfying and successful essay. After that? I'm not sure. That depends on others.