Peanut Buttering

think think think waitaminute DO

I felt really happy with how my 2024 letter turned out. But that's made me hesitant to make a new post, because now I feel somehow obligated to live up to that quality bar. This is a bad place to be, so I'm forcing a post out to overcome that barrier.

The inciting incident was that I took some time this evening to tweak this website's layout. It was actually quite fun, and I got a sense for how people can feel a woodworker's craftsmanship over the fit and polish of their personal website.

But how can I justify spending time on that when I could have spent that time actually writing?

I can't. The same way I can't justify researching optimal nutrition and workout routines over actually spending time in the gym, or reading the Nth productivity article instead of actually working on concrete tasks. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Well, give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend twenty hours over the course of three weeks just researching axes.

How unfortunate that these superfluous activities are so plentiful, so tempting, so easy to spend time on. Thankfully I've gotten better at noticing and interrupting this cycle when it happens.

And so here I am. Clicking "post" to earn one more point in the battle of doing things vs. overthinking them.