Status: 23 Feb 2023

There’s a work philosophy in Dan Charnas’ Work Clean which boils down to “slow down in order to speed up.” The mistakes you make by trying to get things done fast often end up costing you time in the long run, because things will end up needing to be redone or you’ll have to double-handle things somewhere along the way.

It’s a good philosophy, and one that I’m thinking about a lot as I go back and fix the various mistakes of earlier this week, which include setting up print copies of a book using the wrong type of paper and needing to adjust all the cover layouts once we discovered the mistake.

I’m also thinking about it with regard to rough drafts this week. February through March is typically the stretch of the year where my normal writing process stops working for a bit, since my ramshackle “make it up as I go along” approach tends to rely on having lots of thinking time and writing time to iterate work in various formats and pick up mistakes. I don’t have the spoons for that at present, given the various other stressors that kick in, but it always makes me twitchy about not working fast enough. My anxiety brain keeps pushing me to write all the words right fucking now, so I’m reminding myself that slow doesn’t mean that I’m doing it wrong…

ON THE DOCKET

There are no meetings or mentorship sessions today—a rarity at the moment—so I’m I’m about to knuckle down in the long stretch of uninterrupted time to get some freelance design gigs cleared. Today’s all about interior layouts for a book and mailing off cover samples that have been sitting on my desktop for longer than they should have been.

PETER M. BALL INBOX: 37

BRAIN JAR INBOX: 14

BRAIN JAR SUBMISSION QUEUE: 15

Expect minimal movement on all of these this week.