That Randy Brown

The Content Backlog

I don't write much of a commentary on events. Most of the notes I write are about things I have learned. Because I do not write much on a specific event that happens, outside my learning, most of the notes I write are not time-bound--they can be relevant (or irrelevant) at any time.

Because my notes aren't time-bound for relevance, I automate my publishing schedule. I just write or refine notes, push them to GitHub, and they eventually publish. I do this on the advice a friend gave me: build the life you want. My goal has been to model the approach Stratechery takes: write once a week, focusing on a deep and meaningful topic. Probably minus the 'deep and meaningful topic', since most of my notes are whatever I happen to learn, and most without necessarily deep or meaningful content connections--just the things I'm thinking about and doing.

Recently, this has become something of an issue though: 52 notes is a lot of notes to write, and the idea that a note I write might not publish for over a year is almost undoubtedly unsustainable. Having a year or two of backlog would be a huge accomplishment, but it's a chore for a long time, with little yield. The upside: I see myself writing a lot more (like this note) and thinking a lot more about writing. The downside is that there are a lot of notes that are trapped until the balance of the odds shifts in their favor.

Lately, I've been thinking about the balance between building runway and benefiting, and I think this falls into the same mental model. I wonder if a more sustainable model might be to grow the runway as I build and benefit--to write at least two notes a week for a while (right now I write 4 or 5), and let one article publish. In this way, I sustain part of the benefit now (my site gets updated) and store some of the benefit for later -- I build capacity to skip a week or so and go on vacation.