Multipliers

For the last while I've been making an effort to go all-or-nothing on my habits. If I intend to write first thing and I don't, then I don't write anything that day and fill the space with a birdpost later. This has been challenging, but I feel ultimately beneficial in avoiding atonement; I don't fool myself into thinking I'm doing better than I am by fixing it later. Separately, though, I've decided to keep writing at the same time each day even when I'm behind, and break the connection between writing and posting. Instead of using my writing time to make up for some writing I should have done previously, I use it to write, and fill in missing posts when I have extra time.

The unfortunate outcome of this is that it sometimes takes a while for me to find that time, so I end up with a big backlog of unpublished writing that I occasionally flush out in one big go. I'm sure that's not ideal for anyone trying to read along, but it also has an unfortunate effect on the effort required to post things. Normally there are a bunch of minor things that go along with each post, formatting, a bit of last-minute editing, little drawings and so on. Those minor things aren't a big deal when I'm doing one post at a time, but when I'm doing 7 in one go it really adds up.

Years ago I was running a volunteer group that had around 150 volunteers in it, and the thing that surprised me more than anything else was how even that multiplier, modest by organisational standards, made everything so difficult. It might take ten seconds to print some training handouts, but for 150 people that's 25 minutes. If you need to have a 2 minute phone call with each volunteer, it'll take 5 hours. A half-hour debrief with each volunteer would take 2 entire work weeks. The tyranny of the multiplier means there's a lot of things you just can't do, or can only do with careful structure and planning.

But it also strikes me that the multiplier can be in your favour as well. As I write this I'm closing in on 200,000 words written on this site. I would never dream of writing that many words for a project. If someone asked me, I'd have no idea how to even think about it. For reference, A Game of Thrones (the first book) is close to 300,000 words, which I'm likely to hit sometime before April, putting me at something like one Game of Thrones every two years, or 0.5 GoT/y.

What's amazing about this is that I'm not anything close to a full-time writer. I write for about an hour a day most days. Whenever I wonder whether slow and steady progress is better than occasional heroic bursts of effort, I just try to imagine the kind of heroic effort that would be required to produce this many words. I think it would kill me.