That Was The Whatever The F%@k That Was: 3rd May 2023 to 28th July 2024

Note: In order to break the habit of perfectionism and ship more work, I have decided to publish posts even if they are not fully complete. In that spirit, this post is incomplete and I will add more things to it soon.

It’s been a long time since I published the last edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Novelty can drive motivation for some time. TW3 was a new project I had started and I had a lot of gusto in the beginning, but creating every post was taking me upto two full days to write (I know 😔). It started taking a toll on the time and energy I had to fulfil actual work commitments. With work piling up, I missed one week, then another, and then one more. You know how it goes…I lost the momentum and things died down. This exercise started giving me more regret and guilt than enthusiasm, making things even harder. The perfectionist in me wanted to go back and write backdated editions for every week—and the pending list gradually became so large that I could not have finished it even I put aside everything else and started writing TW3s full time. The work became too overwhelming to even begin.

An idea came to me as the new year dawned—one that comes to everyone around that time—to start afresh. I planned to write a year in review post that would also include all the stuff that I would have added to TW3 editions, thus bringing me up to date. I even wrote a first draft but an important project came up before I could complete it and my plans got waylaid again. Over time, with work becoming more hectic and urgent personal issues coming up, that draft became laughably outdated. And here we are.

From a certain perspective, the 1st of January is as arbitrary a date as any other to start something new, so why can’t I choose 10th August? Jab jaago tab savera, as they say. I’ve decided to start writing the TW3 series again—for my own sanity more than anything else. I won’t say that this time would be different. It’s quite possible that my writing efforts get interrupted again. But I’ll try to ease the burden of writing such posts this time and not be such a stickler for maintaining continuity and polishing work. I might write one every two weeks instead of every week (I’ll have to think about a more appropriate name and abbreviation) and I will start publishing incomplete drafts even if they’re far from ready. Real artists ship, right?

An aside: Interestingly, Ankur Sethi, the person whose weeknotes inspired me to start the TW3 series also restarted his series a few days back after a long hiatus. Maybe there’s something in the air this August.

Work in Progress

This post is incomplete. I’ll add to it soon. Please feel free to bug me on Twitter (I still feel odd saying X) on @4rchi7 to take this to some level of completion.

PS: This idea to publish posts in an incomplete form has pretty much been lifted directly from Maggie Appleton’s website.