The key difference is: Nothing matters but the doing, and learning from the results of what you've done.

There's nobody to punish you or praise you. There's nobody you have to defend your decisions to (at least, until you have people relying on your work), and conversely, nobody to shield you from consequences. You can't talk your way out of a problem any more than you can be forced into one.

A lot of people, when they strike out on their own, try to take the Factory with them.

They lack the structure, oversight, and punishment/rewards of the Factory; they can't seem to get anything done… and so they look for an accountability partner. Or maybe even dream of hiring a boss.

But no matter what promises you make to this third party, you'll always know that you're the one ultimately responsible.

What happens if you ignore the boss you pay? Nothing. They're actually your employee.

And if your only goal is that your accountability partner thinks you're a good little worker, well, what does that say about the importance and success of the work itself? Nothing. You replace all your real-world goals with emotional ones.

Working for yourself, on your own projects, is innately different than working at a job or for a client.

If you refuse to face and grapple with the fundamental differences, all you can do is wallpaper over them. But eventually, cracks will show. You can fight the grain, but you won't win.

Face the differences — learn to embrace them — build a new way of working with the grain, though… and nothing will be able to stop you.

The setup for the book is fairly complex.

But I think one of the keys here is that not everything has to be discoursive…

Not everything has to be sentence on sentence, paragraph on paragraph. I don't have to build a narrative case every time. I can use tables, charts, illustrations to get my points across.

I can dive into the bullet points later, expand on them later.

Like setting up a glossary of ideas — a table of contents for what's to come — rather than explicating and defending each individual element.

Here's a draft of the differences of working in the The Factory vs working on your own projects (Free Rein).

• Work backwards (JFS v1)
• Start small (JFS v1)
• Start on the atoms, not the edges (JFS v1)
• Every version better (JFS v1)

All combined.

You probably know this, but I'm disabled. I can't even say "I have a chronic illness" because I've actually got, like, five of them. I never know from day to day if I'll be able to work that day, that week, or even that month.

It's not great for the ol' productivity, as you can imagine.

But I keep working on things and I keep moving forward. I set projects down knowing I can and will pick them up again. I'll get as much done while I can and then put the project down and let myself rest when I can't.

There are four JFS principles I use to make that as easy (and likely) as possible:

1. Mise en Place (JFS v1)
2. Track Your Progress (JFS v1)
3. Leave Breadcrumbs (new to JFS v2)
4. Go with Your Grain (new to JFS v2)

In JFS v1, I recommended using Trello for these two (now four) approaches. But now I'm trying out Monday.com and I think for me, it works better.

I was able to come back to this project after two months and hit the ground running with a new post because I left myself notes like this:

Here's a bigger view of how I'm using it:

So far, I like that it's more compact.

The Status select menu functions as Trello's kanban columns would, except you don't have to move items from one bucket to another… they just change color. (Although you can have multiple buckets, and I do, for things I think I'll add to a second section to the book, or another project entirely.)

• Seeing things at a glance +
• Tools ready to work +
• Reminders of what my thinking was when I was planning +
• Making it easy on myself to do all of the above

That's how you create success — and finish projects — no matter how chaotic or unpredictable your life can be. That's the power of JFS.

The best thing is that when you see the actual ginormous lithographs up close, you see all the bits where Mucha was just like “whatever, it’s fine.”

— Kingfisher & Wombat (@UrsulaV) January 23, 2022

Today I wanted to noodle on the new, defining structural metaphors for the new, revised JFS v2. This writing is a crappy braindump. It's not a whole piece, and it's certainly not final. But it's helpful to dump the ideas on the page. This writing isn't the Work, it's the doing of the things that lead to the Work.

Am I having too much fun with capitalization? Sure. Am I gonna stop? No. It's like in crochet or knitting: the thing you're working on is called 'your work.' The instructions say "turn your work," rather than "turn the piece" or "turn the work." There's something special about that.

We grow up, are educated, and go to work in the Factory.

But working on our own projects, on our own time? That's Free Rein.

The Factory and Free Rein run on opposite principles.

The Factory must accommodate everyone… by which I mean must be willing to shove just about anyone into a slot, and the slot has to fit without amputating too many pieces.

This is the defining principle of the Factory.

Factory work must be standardized, because it has to be graded. And it has to be graded because it must be mass-produced — just about everybody has to do it — and the only way to deal, cheaply, with massive volume is by cutting corners, sometimes called efficiency.

The Factory is removed from reality. In the real world, work survives or fails based on what it does. But finding out what works and what doesn't? That's not efficient. Inside the Factory, work survives or fails based on what the graders say about it.

In the Factory, you have to do what you're told, nothing less but also nothing more. Cost-cutting means efficiency and efficiency means standardization and standardization means the Factory has no structure or skill to deal with original output. Originality is in fact often punished because it doesn't comply with the grading rubric.

Inside the Factory, a lot of the time the work you're doing isn't even real work to begin with! You're spending your efforts on work that will never get shared, deployed, used, sold. It's produced, but it's not a product. It's producing for the sake of producing — making for the grading — the Factory perpetuating itself.

The boss's boss said "do this," so the boss tells you to "do it," so you do it, and the boss tells their boss that it was done, and the boss's boss either likes it, or doesn't. Often this is both the beginning and end of work.

(Or the Factory's projects are run by committee, meaning nobody is responsible, and nobody has the final say, and work just sort of… dissolves into the bystander effect.)

And thus because the Factory is an insular world unto itself — controlled by graders, gatekeepers — success in the Factory isn't about doing good work, novel work, or useful work, but by hitting artificial targets and pleasing those in power.

Factories turn people into widgets. You get slotted into your spot, and there you turn; your work is precipitated by some widgets, and evaluated by others. The true, real, end result of your work not only doesn't matter, it's beyond your reach; it's often hidden from you. Work may flow out of the Factory, but you're stuck inside. You produce based on rules, incentives, and punishments — praise and improvement programs. You work because you work.

But what happens when you take the widget out of the Factory?

And I'm presently stuck on the intro to the new edition of JFS.

Normally when stuck, I simply go work on something else — but in this case, I can't. The intro must be rewritten first so I can nail the metaphors and throughline for the rest of the book to feel intentionally consistent.

First draft: I talked about the invisible wall as the thing you run into that makes you stuck. You can get stuff done for work or school, but not yourself? Why? You hit the invisible wall. The wall itself represents the fact that you're trying to use existing skills (design, code, etc) in a context without all the structure and reinforcement you're used to, so no wonder you feel hobbled.

Good first draft, but it doesn't work. Not only does the natural evolution of the metaphor — take down the wall, etc — conflict with our adjacent brand (Stacking the Bricks), it's just missing… something.

Second (mental) draft: In my head I've been trying out quicksand as a replacement for the invisible wall. Pros: it's shorter, it's vivid, it's crispy. Nobody wants quicksand whereas walls are usually good. Quicksand looks just like any other place to walk but it's secretly dangerous, sucks you in… and worsens as you struggle. If you know where quicksand is, you can go around it. Much more satisfying metaphor.

I'm still stuck, though!!

And I think I've finally figured out why.

I've been trying to shoehorn multiple layers and meanings into a single metaphor.

Stuckness is complex: there's the feeling, then there's the cause.

The wall inherently sounds like a cause.

Quicksand captures the feeling of being stuck, but not the cause.

Being able to say, "I'm in the quicksand" is powerful. Name a thing and you can start to be more objective about it, and reason about it.

But then you have to figure out why you're stuck so you can figure out how to get out.

And how and why won't always be the same…

• Sometimes you're in the quicksand because your system is shocked by the sudden lack of oversight and rewards/punishment motivators.
• Sometimes you're in the quicksand because you can't imagine the future… that terrifying blankness. And sometimes it's because all you can imagine are bad things.
• Sometimes you're in the quicksand because you have an infinite choice of tasks you could be doing and choosing right now is just too hard.
• Sometimes you're in the quicksand because you're subconsciously rebelling against an impossibly large project.
• Sometimes you're in the quicksand because you're afraid to find out what it will say about you.
• And sometimes you're stuck because your subconscious knows your effort is currently wasted because you're going down the wrong path (although I hesitate to tell this to other people because they'll overindex on this one, I'm pretty sure)

People talk about fear, and yeah of course that's the feeling quicksand produces, but it's not the cause of stuckness or procrastination or avoidance.

And in my case, my stuckness is caused by trying to shove all that meaning into a single metaphor — trying to cover the feeling, the cause, the effect with just one image.

It won't fit. It doesn't help. My stuckness is a physical sensation that's telling me, "This is wasted effort, go back to the drawing board." I hear you! Which is why I haven't been trying to write any more of it, just occasionally thinking about it and picking over it, mentally, throughout the days since. Prepared for serendipitous inspiration to strike.

And strike it did:

Yes. Yes I know that feel and I wrote a whole book about it (among other issues. There was nothing in this tweet that was new to me but it reminded me of all the causes that JFS, the book, actually tackles.

And that helped me find a solution that feels right:

Instead of treating all stuckness as a monolith — which makes the intro, by nature, vague and soggy! — I can get crispy and lay out a spotter's guide to various causes (stucknesses) and how the reader will overcome each one with the rest of the book.

By modeling the core of the JFS process itself, in a way, in the intro.

Bam!! Quicksand has turned to solid ground.

Now that I know what the intro should be, I can brainstorm a list of stucknesses, outline a structure for the chapter itself, and work backwards from there to fill it out with details.

Bracing
neck braces and whatnot are important but also potentially damaging, because while they prevent dangerous movement while worn, they weaken muscles and make it more likely you'll hurt yourself in the future (unless you also do PT)… they're self-fulfilling prophecies, and a vicious cycle

Training wheels
the thing that lets you get a taste of the thing you're not able to do on your own yet; not as satisfying a metaphor as the others because it doesn't actively disempower you; the stick-and-carrot societal structure isn't like training wheels because it's not just a beginner's step, it's forever

Gutter guards, guard rails
things that stop you from experiencing the worst outcome (theoretically) — in bowling and driving, walking; same as training wheels, but fixed to the environment and not your vehicle

Scaffolding
the thing that enables you to build upwards, a preliminary structure that begets permanent structures; a good metaphor

Quicksand
keep coming back to this one, because the evocative power is just so good…

Factory
perhaps a metaphor for regular, pre-JFS life: everything is regimented, ordered, overseen, and rewarded or punished; factory workers generally don't have much personal leeway

The biggest one is, of course, "shipping" itself

"Shipping" is a metaphorical use of a term for literally putting products on ships, invented (so far as I can tell) by the tech world to mean launching (there we go again) a product or project from private (maybe even secret) development time into public view/access. But this use of "shipping" is so common today it doesn't even read as a metaphor. It just means the thing.

The second biggest one is the dinner party

The one that actually registers as a metaphor. This one is deliberate. Lots of projects fail because their makers get psyched out; their projects are work or work-adjacent, and heavily freighted with the pressure of Big Important Work Things. And when the Work Thing isn't working, people panic. And panicked people can't even listen to advice, much less take it.

Dinner parties, on the other hand, are not considered important (especially by tech-type people), and certainly not life or death. Planning a dinner party is accessible; everybody eats, almost everybody has been to a dinner party, and most have thrown one, even if it was only small. Plus the idea of a dinner failing isn't so bad. Transform the scary unknown into the known and your reader will be receptive.

The dinner party makes its entry in the first post-intro chapter and is sprinkled throughout, starring only in the backwards planning chapter. On a re-read I realized it's more integrated into the whole book than I remember, but not as consistently as I'd like.

The third metaphor is… missing

Yep, missing.

We've got a metaphor for the entire act (shipping) and a metaphor to reframe the scary aspects of planning and executing the act (dinner party) but nothing at all to  reframe or even discuss the fear, uncertainty, doubt, resistance, procrastination, and self-sabotage that comes before, during, and even after the act.

When I re-read JFS, it feels like it's missing something to ground the entire thing… and this is it.

What will the third metaphor be?

That's what I've been hung up on.

My first burst of inspiration went something like this — focusing on the way that it feels:

DRAFT
It feels like there’s an invisible something between you and achieving your goals — it’s blocking you, freezing you in place, holding you back…

• You know how to get things done, but you… don’t. Can’t.
• You can see your way forward — you know how projects like this work — but you can’t feel your way forward.
• You’re doing things — creating momentum — but you somehow never seem to make any real progress.
• You feel like you ought to be getting a hint now and again, like a feeling you’re on the right path, but you pick up nothing but radio silence.
• You’re stuck, frustrated, and tired.
  And worst of all — because you can see no real reason for this stuckness — you believe it’s a personality flaw. That there’s something wrong with you.

But there isn’t.

Let me repeat: There is nothing wrong with you.

The invisible wall is real.

It’s not creative block, it’s not “resistance,” and it’s not self-sabotage. It’s not in your imagination and there’s nothing wrong with you.

That right there? That’s the crux of this entire book. There’s nothing wrong with you. And I’m going to prove it to you, if you let me, by showing you how to get what you need to achieve the things you want.

The wall is where we begin.

(This is a draft… don't pay too much attention to the actual quality of the writing, hey? Just the metaphor!)

And I think that feeling is accurate!

However!!

A wall is a bad metaphor for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that a wall metaphor would necessarily involve metaphorical tearing down, probably even brick by brick — because walls are made of bricks — and my whole build-your-business brand is Stacking the Bricks. Just that one little thing. Whoops.

What's the "competition" do?

Other books frame this enemy as The Resistance, or The Lizard Brain (aka primal fear). But let's unspool those metaphors, because metaphors are important: both The Resistance and The Lizard Brain are framed as things that live inside you.

And I disagree with that premise, fundamentally. Fear and resistance are inside us, obviously. But why? How'd they get there? Because of an external circumstance that is so everyday that we don't notice it at all.

Resistance and fear are symptoms, not causes.

I want my third metaphor to reflect the cause

Because even in v1, I discussed the cause explicitly:

JFS v1
The bottom line is this:

• when you’re a child, your parents tell you what to do... and then they either reward you, or punish you
• you go to school... and your teachers tell you what to do, and then they either reward you or punish you
• you go to college and... you pick your classes but somebody else tells you exactly what to do, and then they reward you, or punish you
• and finally, you get a job... and yet another chapter in the People Tell You What To Do And Reward Or Punish You Saga

Skills depend on context. A skill divorced of all the "support" (rules, rewards, and punishments) of the context in which you learned it isn't the same. Doing it for yourself isn't the same as doing it for work.

Just Fucking Shipping means freeing yourself from the structures that both drive and punish you…

…structures that enable you in the moment, but disable you when you're outside them.

JFS is the path to becoming truly independent. And that's tough to boil down into a single, punchy metaphor like a dinner party.

The feeling is like a brick wall you can't see, but that metaphor's out.

The feeling is also like quicksand — and that's a metaphor I've used before to great effect, in 30x500. Quicksand works here; the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. (And, like quicksand, it's not really… real.) But it doesn't carry the implication of context lost, or building structure.

The function is like culture — living abroad often means having to re-learn the most basic of daily assumptions and interactions. But I'm not sure how approachable that is as a metaphor. Most people haven't picked up and moved to a culture not their own.

The popular/cliché metaphor fish out of water is designed for this, and people understand it, but do they really feel it?

This essay doesn't have an answer

Because I'm not done thinking about it yet. No amount of rule-following (write 1,000 words a day!!) can force a creative epiphany, alas! But here I am, talking it out, thinking about it, hopefully stirring up the compost of idea-generation so it'll germinate something when I'm not looking.

"Start at the beginning" is necessary for retelling a finished story, but it's not necessary for writing that story from scratch.  

And, in fact, it's a great way to ensure your story never gets told at all.

Think about it: The intro is basically a sales pitch. If the intro isn't good, people won't buy the book. Or if they do buy it, they won't read it — and an unread book is an unloved book, and unloved books don't spread. If your intro isn't good, your book is doomed.

No biggie, just an entire future's worth of pressure crashing down on you as you stare at the blank page.

The natural urge is to cram it all in, write the perfect opening sentence, perfectly set the stage for all that's to come.

Which is hilarious, because of course that's impossible at the beginning. You, the creator, don't know all of what's to come. I don't care how detailed your outline is!

Books emerge out of chaos and action, refined.

Real bookwriting works like this:

• you create your plan
• you start writing
• you discover a lot of your ideas don't work at all when put to page…
• and new ideas emerge from the motive power of writing itself

And that's fine! As long as you know it. It sucks hard if you believe you've set down every step in a golden path from which you cannot deviate.

I've learned all this from long experience.

I didn't write the JFS v1 intro first; I started on chapters where I really knew what I wanted to say. The intro I left for close to the end. I knew better.

But now I find myself in a different situation and it calls for a different approach.

Producing the second edition of JFS isn't a matter of editing a little here and there. It's more like major surgery.

What got me here won't get me where I want to be.

One of the big things I want to add to JFS v2 is thematic consistency. It's not that v1 is very inconsistent, but its lack of intentional consistency undermines its power.

There's real magic in hearing the subtle beats of the same ideas carefully reflected, page after page. And that magic doesn't happen by accident.

I've got to set up those powerful themes up front.

I know what those themes are, in a meaningful sense… but I don't know their crispy final form — the exact words, the turns of phrase — until I've actually written them.

And I can't go editing the rest of the book — I can't make it consistent — until I've got them in hand.

Rewriting the intro first has to happen.

Because the intro is where that thematic consistency will be set up.

And it has not been easy.

I've stewed awhile. I've re-read my notes. I've stewed some more.

One day I felt a glimmer of a framework coalescing in my mind, so I sat down and banged out a new version. I framed the crispy new idea of an invisible wall between you and your goals. I set us up to talk about the way our society prepares us to fail at our own projects. Those are two key ideas lurking underneath every chapter in v1, but which I never explicitly surfaced.

I thought it was pretty good, if in need of editing!

Then Alex came along and poked a bunch of holes in it. And he was right! That didn't mean I was sure how to fix them, though. I had a few thoughts but they were too snarly so I let it drop to the back of my mind and stew some more.

Only now, weeks later, have I figured out exactly what I'm going to do. Pretty sure.

I'm going to have to write it again to find out.

Sometimes that's the process!

But if it's this hard when I'm working from an entire book's worth of content, and tons of notes, and long experience… it sure as hell won't work if you're starting from scratch.

As I close-read and marked up the shit out of my own book last summer, I started pulling out what I called Universal Truths. These are the core little grains of wisdom that underpin the entire thing… The kinds of things that could become a mantra, a t-shirt, or even the subtitle of a book. Sometimes they were just a throwaway line. Sometimes I never fully expressed them. Such is the nature of first versions.

They emerged naturally when I wrote the book — which I did at a furious pace — but in v2, I'm going to sprinkle them throughout with intention.

I've gathered them all together, now, though, and here they are.

NB: This list is a work in progress. It's messy. It's not in order. It's incomplete. It's too long. It's repetitive sometimes.

And all that is right on target! Every Version Better. I will let them simmer and then I'll Cut Without Remorse.

Universal Truths

• As long as there’s been stuff to do, humans have procrastinated.
• If it's stuck on your hard drive, it doesn’t exist.
• JFS is a muscle, not a talent or a personality trait.
• Winners pay attention to their own pain points.
• The “natural” way to work is often wrong.
• Context is king.
• Resistance is for a reason.
• Right tool, right process, right result.
• Guilt won’t get it done.
• Goodies won’t get it done.
• "Don't should on yourself"
• Carrots, sticks, and tricks don't stack bricks.
• Learn to trust yourself, and the rest is easy.
• Satisfaction is the best motivator in the moment.
• Love is the best motivator long term.
• Tiny wins drive big wins.
• “Pressure” is a warning light, not fuel.
• If you can plan a dinner party, you can ship your project.
• You don’t need perfect, you need progress.
• Everything is iterable. Nothing is done.
• A great project both starts and ends with people.
• Nothing is for everyone.
• Use is value. ^
• Deadlines are a tool to help you get what you want.
• Limits create clarity.
• Focus is a container, deadlines are a frame.
• Infinite choice is not your friend.
• Make it crispy. Make it clear.
• A clear picture makes an easy target.
• As you move forward, keep thinking about going backwards.
• Working in stages makes big projects possible and small projects easy.
• Nobody likes a mystery casserole. Get crispy.
• Know when you’re done, and you’re halfway there.
• Over-ambition is a form of self-sabotage.
• Start small. You can always go bigger.
• Divide your exposure to risk. Multiply your chance of success.
• Finishing things gives you more energy to finish things.
• Atoms are the smallest fundamental unit of work.
• You’ve got enough to do already.
• You Ain’t Gonna Need It.
• “Little details” are their own projects.
• The riskiest time is before you ship.
• More projects have died on the vine than ever shipped and failed.
• No one will know what you you know (about your omissions, etc).
• Great projects grow over time.
• A mistake isn’t a failure, it’s a lesson.
• “Failure” isn’t a permanent state, it’s an opinion.
• Don’t judge your first draft by someone else’s finished result.
• You can’t chew with someone else’s teeth. Chew your own food.
• Learn from recipes.
• Borrow, don’t steal.
• You choose your difficulty setting.
• The fewer moving parts, the better.
• Take on risk intentionally, or not at all.
• The less you have to pause and think, the more you can do.
• Procrastination is a sign to clarify and simplify.
• Something will always go wrong.
• Half a project, not a half-assed project. (who said this?)
• No plan survives contact with reality.
• You will have to cut something.
• Make your hard decisions in advance.
• Drop it like it’s hot, and move on.
• Feelings are a decent feedback mechanism, and a really shitty driver.
• If it’s gonna rain anyway, might as well use it to water your garden.
• Feedback is a gift.
• Prepare for the worst.
• When your roast is ruined, order a pizza.
• You can’t build a reputation and never risk it.
• The longer you wait for more, the less you’ll ever get.
• Your next launch.
• Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent. — Kathy Sierra
• It’s tough to be creative while you’re struggling.
• To become a JFSer, you’ve got to get comfortable with being at 80% done, forever.
• Reap the rewards of progress along the way.
• “I forgive myself, now I can study.”

Did any of them particularly resonate with you?

Do you remember taking away a truth when you read JFS v1?

Avoid failure and you'll eventually build success.

Second Product Syndrome is dangerous and one of the key risk factors is overstuffing the product.

That's why one of the most important JFS Principles is Cut Without Remorse.

And so, after a few weeks of letting all those notes compost in the back of my mind, I re-read them — the whole book! — and found myself on a precipice. There was a lot of brand new stuff I had just casually decided I just had to include.

The thing about that new stuff? It's good stuff. Stuff people need to know! Stuff that is highly relevant to JFS the book, as well as JFS the experience. I still want to write, record, or otherwise create that stuff and make it available to people who could really, really use it.

But that doesn't mean I should let it interfere with shipping JFS v2.

Internalizing the principles in JFS doesn't mean you'll never find yourself veering off course. JFS helps you make the hard decisions to get back on.

Here's a real convo I had with Alex about it…

amy: @alex i know you've got a ton of shit on your plate but when/if you have the energy, i wanna float a (small) idea past you

alex: im about to get on a call but float away

amy: ok so as i make a list of all the stuff i wanted to ADD to JFS… i got to thinking… it's too much.

part of what makes JFS so great is it's short and sweet

granted there are actual holes in the process it teaches, and those i should fix, and it needs better bookend content and examples

but maybe all the "troubleshooting" stuff i'm coming up with, the mental mindset lessons, actually belong in a companion edition

aka… the unstick me book

not saying they should ship together (but they could, since i was planning on writing this stuff for book1). but having a third book could be good for us AND it is obvious cross-promo opportunity

alex: very into it, and totally agree that the ADD stuff would be great as its own thing slash complimentary thing.

amy: ADD as in adhd?

or me capitalizing "add" for emphasis

i guess both work rofl

alex: oh sorry lol

i misread. i still agree.

fixing vs adding

amy: i think there should still be SOME mindset and troubleshooting content, but not a huge freaking list of everything that occurs during a project

alex: totally agree

<time passes>

coming back to this a bit and I'm excited about a standalone troubleshooting guide.

Sometimes a product is really two products — but if you try to jam them together, you may end up with zero products, because it's too big, to complex, too unwieldy to ever finish.

Or after shit hit the fan, after you've turned the fan off, and taken a power washer to it… but things (aka life) are still hazardous and, um… slippery?

How do you go from cleaning shit up to getting shit done?

That's my topic for today. Literally the thing I spend all day thinking about. And I have ideas. And this very essay is part of executing those ideas.

An honest assessment

When things go to shit, the first and most important tool in your arsenal is honesty. To build a solid structure, you need a solid foundation, and to build a solid foundation, you need to know what kind of ground you're dealing with. To rebuild a work life — or a life, period — you've absolutely got to have an honest appraisal of where you're at, what you've got, what you need, what you want, what you can and can't do. The alternative is structural failure. There's no other way.

So, here's me. What's gone wrong, why, and what I'm doing about it.

There are two major opposing forces in my life right now:

• 2020 was the worst year of my life (and boy I've had some doozies), and the repercussions have been long-lasting and far-reaching
• I want & need to get work done including (not ironically) the second edition of my book, Just Fucking Ship

Since catching the coronavirus in February 2020 and suffering through almost a full year without in-person healthcare followed by repeated drug anaphylaxis, months-long side effects, hidden gluten exposure, and other unfortunate events, I've worked incredibly hard to recover, and identify and heal my panoply of new and resurging/emerging health problems so I could function again.

Finally, after over a year and a half of lost time, it's worked. Well, it's working. Much of the time.

I want to work. I want to do things and have done things. I need to do things.

But.

My pain points, enumerated

I've spent quite some time thinking about my current structural issues…

I've lost my "sea legs." And I'm still so much more tired, mentally, than I was.

Getting started is harder. Not in an ADHD way, but more of a nothing works the way I've grown used to way. I'm still not back to "normal," even though my normal was already diminished compared to healthy people's.

And there's so much ground to regain. Sure, I've climbed huge hills before — I love a challenge — but this is the first time I've been kicked down the hill first. The early pandemic devastated our business. We're ok, but I hate fighting the same battle twice only to end up in the same place as before. (Seriously, this is a thing for me. This is why I hate gardening.) It's demoralizing. I thrive on challenge, excitement, and possibility and I am struggling mightily to find it right now.

I have far less tolerance for frustration. Or, to be completely honest, negative feelings, period. Channeling frustration, doubt, anger, irritation and impatience in a productive manner… that's the essence of executive functioning and your girl's field of executive fucks is fresh out. I am spent. But — and this right here is a key difficulty — these feelings are an inseparable part of the act of creation.

I feel disconnected from my work. And by that I mean I feel disconnected from people I serve with my work. Because I literally have been: I haven't been able to do emails, or sales, or even lurk on forums and read much for months and months.  You know I invented a whole research method for studying and understanding my audience? My entire creative model depends on doing this stuff! I load lots of interesting findings into my brain, shake it up, and see what floats to the surface. But I haven't been able to do it in ages. My inspiration tank is empty.

It's harder for me to hold an entire project in my head. I don't mean all the to-do's and things, but rather the mental model of how the project works. This is the way my brain usually functions: I set up mental models and run them for different scenarios. I'm getting better in fits and starts but my mental model engine is still sluggish and difficult. I especially struggle with large volumes of words or lots of interlocking parts (aka software features).

Some of my work triggers anxiety, sometimes. And I think that's related to one, being unable get my arms around the work because I can't hold the model in my head and two, the memory of how it felt to watch our business nosedive and the pressure I feel to regain that ground we lost over the pandemic. (In early 2020, we lost about 30% of our revenue in a matter of weeks; I was too sick to do anything about it so just had to… watch.) The anxiety isn't constant, it's not even consistently about the same stuff, but it happens from time to time and I've never been an anxious person so I'm finding it… novel… to deal with.

But my work — researching, thinking, planning, creating, helping — makes me happy. That's something I'm genuinely missing in my life. And the longer I go without doing it, the harder it is to get started.

So. This the ground I've got to build on. These are my problems, my challenges, and my pain points. I want to get work done and these are the things stopping me.

My goal now is to design around these pain points, to serve and accommodate myself.

My fix design in progress

Here are some of the things I'm doing to tackle my specific problems:

• thinking about things (and making notes) when I'm too tired to do — it's actually work and it's helpful, and it isn't too demanding, and usually by the time I've been taking notes for 10 or 15 minutes, I'm either fully worn out, so I correctly judged my energy level, or I find myself pumped up and do more than I thought I could;
• taking notes in visual format — I've been drawing chill, non-detailed diagrams and notes and stuff (in Miro); it's less to load back into my brain than paragraphs or bulleted lists;
• writing down my thoughts in detail — when I'm getting serious, writing out the project variables, ideas, and possibilities down rather than trying to hold them all in my brain and make them spin;
• writing for fun — take the weight of expectations off the activity entirely, and just enjoy it while stretching my tired and achey brain-muscles… yay infodumping!
• working in lo-fi — and I've deliberately made my aforementioned new personal blog look like 1994 so that it continually communicates no expectations, even to me;
• backing into the work — when I don't feel like I can face a screen full of text (or worse, an empty screen demanding text), I've been using Otter.ai to speak, record, and autotranscribe my thoughts into a format I can then edit
• reviewing my notes when stuck — a little mise en cerveau that always helps me re-load the project "program" and remind me why I'm excited;
• and now… exploiting a format I find fun — here I am writing in an actual blog engine, and not a text editor.

The overall thrust is that I'm giving myself easy ways to get into the work, permission to do a little or a lot, with external support for my poor, beleagured brain. And in a comfortable and supportive environment.

It's this last one that I alluded to in the headline today.

I used to write a daily blog for years, you know, right around the time "blog" was coined. I've done a lot of my best writing in the text area in Movable Type, or Wordpress, or Campaign Monitor. There's something about the New Post screen that dials in my brain. There's something about knowing it's about to go live that brings out the showman in me. I love performing.

And hitting Publish on a post — even if nobody sees it but me — instantly transforms my writing in my mind from "words I just put down" to "finished product," and suddenly I can see all the edits I need to make.

This is in every way opposite to the app I have been trying to write in, Ulysses, which feels not urgent or lively at all, and which doesn't even have states.

I'm simply too tired to swim upstream when I could float along in the lazy river instead.

Welcome to the book blog!

So here we are:

It's a little unorthodox, but I'm going to write JFS v2 on this blog. (And I'm going to write about writing JFS v2 on this blog.)

It'll get there when it gets there. I'm not putting a deadline or schedule on this in any way, shape, or form, because I simply can't right now and I never deliberately set myself up to fail.

I invite you follow along live! You can use RSS or the email newsletter. Thank you for buying version 1!

And I'd love to hear from you about your breakthroughs, challenges, and strategies and whatever else is on your mind about productivity, shipping, and mental structural engineering.