I’ve produced two almost weekly newsletters for a few years now, and while I think there is something to be said for hitting a schedule[1], schedules can also mean you churn out a bunch of low-quality shit that no one wants to read. At this point, I feel like I’ve done more of the later, produced low-quality shit writing.

I’m sure people have enjoyed it because I’ve been told that people have enjoyed it, but the bigger projects I want to write just don’t happen because 1 hour on Friday morning before I have to head up and get kids to school[2] doesn’t leave much time to dig deeply into something. Right now I’ve got a project on the YouTube burnout phenomenon that seems to have come to a head in 2024. Multiple big creators have left YouTube citing a number of reasons and I’d like to dig into that.

I’d also like to finish a project on getting time to think. I’ve been serializing ideas in PKM Weekly as a way of making some progress on the project, yet I still don’t think I’ve got to dig into it in the way I want. I’m getting to brush the surface, but nothing in the depths has been touched at all.

Don’t forget I also have a YouTube channel that was producing weekly videos for most of 2020-2023, but now is down to a very slow cadence of a video a month maybe.

In the midst of what feels like a grand creative malaise, I came across this article about polishing your work. Henrik’s experience is that you should spend more time polishing instead of pushing out that next piece, which flies in the face of most conventional wisdom which says you should get out a new piece and hope that this one hits and goes big. Conventional wisdom says that the more you put out the more likely it is to find you success, more samples means more tries at the can.

What much of conventional wisdom forgets is the reason why you write. It assumes that you write so that you can become popular and only write and while I’d love this, I’ve been writing online for over 10 years and almost 4000 posts, it hasn’t happened yet. I write to improve my thinking so a good question is, does the writing I’m doing improve my thinking? If I’m merely churning out a weekly newsletter to hit a deadline with an hour to focus on it one day a week I’m likely not thinking about any deep topics. Going deep requires time that I’m currently not spending.

So for 2024, something needs to change. I expect that member newsletters will no longer be weekly. I’ll be aiming for 2 pieces a month and I’ll be dropping PKM [3] has been hovering around 470 subscribers for a year so it’s not catching on clearly” class=”js–wpm-format-cite”>weekly[3] so that I’m not rushing through 2 newsletters on Friday.

Members, I’m always interested in what you have to say about the content I’m producing and what you’d like to hear about in both topics and depth.