This post is really great—well done! I really admire the analogy and think that it works well; its definitely altered my thinking about self-care. How long did it take you to write this?
I appreciate the kind words. I am glad the analogy works for you!
Overall I would guess this took 12 hours of active work and probably some thinking sprinkled over 2-3 weeks. This is how it went down: I woke up after 1.5 hours of sleep with clarity about this ‘obligation’ part above. Eg. why do I feel pressure to improve. Quickly grab my laptop to take some notes with the plan to go to bed again. Start writing. Feel more clarity than ever before—I can put my thoughts into words. Get into flow state. 80%-90% of the post above were done after 3.5 hours of this. Writing roughly 600-700 words per hour (which would put me into top writer category if I could do this frequently). Spend 2 more hours on formatting, doing the graphs, fixing typos, adding headlines, moving some sentences around, adding emphasis, etc. Reach out to ~5 friends and people in the EA community to provide feedback. Go to bed after 6 hours of still sitting in bed with laptop. Then I received very helpful comments over the next ~5 days. Grammar improvements, clarifying questions, word change suggestions, and recommended readings. Concept of ‘Slack’ got added through the discussions in the comments and the emphasis on how noisy your energy/capacity can be. This was another ~3 hours. Then I didn’t do anything on the post for 2-3 weeks. Occasionally small comments would trickle in. I would read over the draft a couple times. Having it at the back of my mind.
To be honest—At this point my motivation to finish it was low. In a way I already got the exchange with people in the community and my friends. And writing it out helped me understand certain thought patterns. But I got the feedback that it was useful to some people who have read the draft. And I liked the idea of sharing something + experimenting with blogging + improving my writing (through exposing it).
The last wrap-up took probably another 3 hours till I hit ‘publish’ here on the EA forum. This included linking to more resources. Including some more feedback. Redoing the graphics because there are some small formatting issues when copying over from google-docs to the forum. And it included the decision to not improve the section ‘Problems that arise when you are aiming at the facilitative stress zone:’ . Even though I think it contains most of the value, it is a barely structured list. But I didn’t want to spend 80% of the time optimizing the last 10-20% of work. So I just went with it.
This post is really great—well done! I really admire the analogy and think that it works well; its definitely altered my thinking about self-care. How long did it take you to write this?
I appreciate the kind words. I am glad the analogy works for you!
Overall I would guess this took 12 hours of active work and probably some thinking sprinkled over 2-3 weeks. This is how it went down:
I woke up after 1.5 hours of sleep with clarity about this ‘obligation’ part above. Eg. why do I feel pressure to improve. Quickly grab my laptop to take some notes with the plan to go to bed again. Start writing. Feel more clarity than ever before—I can put my thoughts into words. Get into flow state. 80%-90% of the post above were done after 3.5 hours of this. Writing roughly 600-700 words per hour (which would put me into top writer category if I could do this frequently). Spend 2 more hours on formatting, doing the graphs, fixing typos, adding headlines, moving some sentences around, adding emphasis, etc. Reach out to ~5 friends and people in the EA community to provide feedback. Go to bed after 6 hours of still sitting in bed with laptop.
Then I received very helpful comments over the next ~5 days. Grammar improvements, clarifying questions, word change suggestions, and recommended readings. Concept of ‘Slack’ got added through the discussions in the comments and the emphasis on how noisy your energy/capacity can be. This was another ~3 hours. Then I didn’t do anything on the post for 2-3 weeks. Occasionally small comments would trickle in. I would read over the draft a couple times. Having it at the back of my mind.
To be honest—At this point my motivation to finish it was low. In a way I already got the exchange with people in the community and my friends. And writing it out helped me understand certain thought patterns. But I got the feedback that it was useful to some people who have read the draft. And I liked the idea of sharing something + experimenting with blogging + improving my writing (through exposing it).
The last wrap-up took probably another 3 hours till I hit ‘publish’ here on the EA forum. This included linking to more resources. Including some more feedback. Redoing the graphics because there are some small formatting issues when copying over from google-docs to the forum. And it included the decision to not improve the section ‘Problems that arise when you are aiming at the facilitative stress zone:’ . Even though I think it contains most of the value, it is a barely structured list. But I didn’t want to spend 80% of the time optimizing the last 10-20% of work. So I just went with it.
Awesome! Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I’m in the midst of writing of first Forum post right now, and this is super helpful.