David R. MacIver's Blog

Some notes from behind the scenes

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/some-notes-from-behind-the-scenes.

Hi everyone,

With apologies, there isn’t going to be a “real” newsletter today. I’ve been having a rather terrible week, for reasons, and it’s left me somewhat emotionally unprepared for writing anything particularly complete, so here’s a scattering of thoughts on what’s happening with the newsletter at the moment and directions it might be going in.

Oh no it’s happening

So you remember back at the beginning just over a year ago when I wrote life as a nonproductive act? Note the following paragraph from it:

I said in my opening post that I didn’t know where this newsletter was going, but I’ll tell you this: Wherever it ends up going, if I become a productivity guru I will consider that an extreme personal failure, both personally and ethically. If you see me heading in that direction, I’d appreciate it if you call me out on it and/or unsubscribe.

Then on Wednesday I wrote an article about inbox management and subsequently realised that I have become what I hate.

Now, in my defence, the reason I wrote about inbox management was that a) I’d had a bunch of conversations recently about how anxious inbox management made people and b) I needed something quick that I could dash off because I’d failed to complete the article I wanted to write (which I may or might not write for this coming Wednesday).

Nevertheless, this is a bit of a wake up call. The newsletter has got very productivity self help recently, and I think I need to take a turn for the weirder.

On Twitter when I pick up a whole bunch of followers from a topic I don’t plan to talk about again I immediately segue to talking about Stargate. I don’t think I’m going to take that approach on the newsletter, but I make no promises.

Questions I’m thinking about

I’m currently attending something called the House of Interdisciplinary Autodidacts, which sure is a name. It’s a group of people getting together and talking about our experiences of and strategies for self-learning across a range of disciplines.

This latest one we were talking about questions of interest. I wrote a long list of questions of interest before the call, and they mostly cluster in the intersection of three things:

So e.g. questions like:

There were others as well. One of the things I’m not sure about is how genuinely interdisciplinary any of this is - I find it hard to know where discipline boundaries are, because I’m coming from so far outside the disciplinary boundaries.

The community I’m most interested in exploring some of these questions in is of course the new Overthinking Everything discord server (you can sign up here if you haven’t seen it already). It’s small, but I’ve been enjoying it so far, and there been some fun mini experiments in it, and we’ve had some great conversations so far.

I didn’t know you wrote about programming

I liked to an old piece of mine about programming languages on Twitter and someone said “I didn’t know you wrote about programming” in response, and ouch.

If you look at my current interests, they’re very solidly in the humanities. Some of how I talk and write about things is very programmer shaped, but that’s more an accent than use of the knowledge I spent over a decade acquiring.

This seems a shame - even more so than my exit from mathematics or the more-or-less failure of my PhD, really - and I’d like to avoid it.

The plan with post PhD life was to wait until I felt a spontaneous desire to start programming again. I’ve been at the stage of having some ideas I felt interested in playing around with for about a month, but haven’t yet seen fit to put code to computer yet on any of it. This interaction might be the prompt I need to actually motivate me, we’ll see.

I doubt there will be any programming content making it into the newsletter - it’s not really the right audience for that - but one thing that I do need to think about it is how to fit it in around my other work. Between coaching and writing I currently almost have a full time job (two days of coaching per week, two days of writing). I can compress that a bit, but it’s hard to compress.

I expect it will be manageable, but it might require me to reduce the amount of effort I put into the free newsletters a bit. Details to be determined.