Cal Newport is one of the great thinkers of our time, and puts most of his efforts into helping us all learn to think more clearly. His books (such as Deep Work) focus on escaping distractions to really focus on what you need to get done.
He recently shared a short quote from Hemingway on his blog that summarized much of what he preaches. It was simply:
“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”
As I’ve said on here previously, my primary purpose with this blog for now is to help shape my own thinking. If I just write without taking the time to think through things, I’m depriving myself the real value of this work.
I certainly post things on here from time to time that are basic “check out this new thing” kinds of post, but I try to put some thinking behind most of my posts. From the time I hear an idea to the time I press publish is generally a few weeks, and I’ll often combine a few ideas into a single post as my thoughts come together. When something is rumbling around in my brain, I tend to see similar thoughts that might tie in (kind of a combination of a photo walk and Baader-Meinhof).
I suppose that’s also why I throw in the “check out this new thing” posts, as writing on tougher subjects every day is hard to do (particularly while running a company and a family).
For now, I’ll try to keep at those “long periods of thinking” and hope that something good comes out from time to time!
