JFS v2: Writing In Progress

Why I'm blogging my new book & you're invited

Amy Hoy -

How do you work when shit hits the fan?

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.