This was supposed to be posted in March and here it is April

“Why have I published only one post in March,” I asked the blank screen in front of me. Did I expect an answer? I sat and waited for one. I guess I did.

“You’re asking me?” appeared on the screen. “I’m a fucking blank screen. What do I know about why you can’t write?”

“How would he know what a blank screen would know about anything?” Was the response. “He’s never been a blank screen or even talked with one for that matter.”

“True,” I said. Or I thought was me that said it.

“It seems as though you often have to write a very stupid post about how you can’t write to start writing. I’m not an authority, though. It seems to be a pattern.”

“Dostoyoffsky and Tolstoy had similar problems,” someone or something added. “Afer they died, the taxidermists found that each had trunks full of notebooks in which they wrote stupid essays about how they could not write their novels.”

“Taxidermists?” I asked.

“Maybe it wasn’t taxidermists. Maybe it was the haberdashers. Or the upholsterers. Or something else.”

The Ambien was starting to take effect. I was yawning and making less sense than usual. Way less.

“I’m probably not going to finish this tonight,” I said to nobody in particular.

“Fine,” nobody in particular answered. “Go to sleep. Come back tomorrow. Minimal editing and publish it.”

I yawned again and went to sleep.

And when I woke up, it was April.

“Fuck!” I said. I better post this before May.

And I did.

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Photo: Davide Cantelli

Paradise forgotten, paradise remembered

I ended May with a flurry of writing activity: seven posts in this blog in five days. And several posts in others, too. That’s the way that I want things to be.

Then I became obsessed with making the next round of improvements to my vastly improved writing practice. What could go wrong?

I just said it. I became obsessed. I completely forgot the last significant insight I’d had: the one I wrote about in Jocko Wilnick’s three principles for success.

Discipline.

I forgot about discipline.

Now I remember.

And I remember some of the other things that I had learned and wrote about that week—but only because Past Me wrote about them. Thank you Past Me! If I had to remember them on my own, I don’t believe I could have.

So, Future Me, here’s what I aspire to help you become: disciplined.

I could probably acquire a new habit reasonably quickly if I already had discipline.

But I don’t.

But how do I bootstrap discipline?

I have an idea, and I’ll update this post and link to a new one about it if it works.

No link? No discipline.

Yet.

​

Blogging, the current state of my practice

In this post, I am going to recap the current state of my blogging practice, and some improvements that I hope to make.

This is a long, technical post, mainly for the benefit of Future Me, and the benefit of Present Me as I solved these problems.

What I do now

Here’s the way things work right now.

Open my tabs

I start by opening the tabs that I’m going to use for writing a particular post. I blogged about that in this post.

Go through my checklist

My blog template contains a preflight checklist. It’s all the stuff that I ought to have completed before I start composing the blog’s content. In theory, I can march through the process without going around in circles, as I described in another post, written, but not published.

One pass through, and I am done.

The checklist is in Markdown format so that I can use this convention:

“`markdown

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

`“

Which will render this way:

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

Enough intention

The first item on the checklist is to make sure I have enough intention to finish the post. The test at each step is: do I predict that I will finish.

Clear picture

I need to make sure that I have a clear picture of the intended result. If it’s a long post (like this one) that means that I need to outline.

So do I have enough intention to outline?

Do I predict I will complete it?

Research as needed

As I’m writing the outline, I do the research I need and drop links and quotes in the Google Doc.

I’ve got a research inventory stashed in Dynalist, and Onetab, and Pinboard and Evernote.

During the research and composition phases, I can use a Chrome extension called TabCopy. It creates formatted links in the clipboard. I can choose to do it for the current tab, selected tabs, or all the tabs in the current window.

Then I paste them into the Google Doc.

If I want to clip some texts, with a reference back to the original URL, I can use the Dynalist Chrome extension, which will give me a linked quote like this:

Maybe there’s a connection. Perhaps not. But right now I’m going with maybe there is.
From 70 Years Old. WTF!: Search results for predictive processing

There are parts of this process I can automate later.

Compose in Docs

Now it’s time to compose the content in a Google Docs, using voice typing. Like I’m doing right now. Or was then.

As I complete each section, I’d like to review it and make sure I’m on track quickly. I haven’t yet developed the habit of doing that.

The check-in process will come later.

Clean up in StackEdit

Once my draft is complete, I copy/paste the entire Google Docs content into StackEdit.

StackEdit turns links in Google Docs into Markdown, using the format:
`“

text to appear

`“
Now everything is in plain text, and I can edit it in Grammarly.

I had been using the Chrome extension Copy as MarkDown to give me tab links in Markdown format, but StackEdit will convert the content that TabCopy puts on the clipboard.

Clean up YouTube links

YouTube links look like this when captured with TabCopy

“ [An interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNRgaCkiUA&t=756s)“
They won’t render on the page. To do that I need to use the magic number at the v= parameter in an embed embed URL in an iframe, like this:

<figure class="video_container">

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/enMumwvLAug" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"

width=100% height=300 > </iframe>

</figure>

### Check in Grammarly

Once I’ve got a clean post in StackEdit, I copy/paste the source into [Grammarly](https://grammarly.com) for spelling and grammar checking.

### Another check in StackEdit

In case I screw up some of the Markdown while editing in Grammarly, I can copy back into StackEdit for a quick visual check.

### Into blogger

Next, I copy/paste the content into the Blogger new post tab.

Once it’s there I do this:

1.  Set the title (and remove from the document)

2.  Set the tags (and remove from the document)

3.  Render as markdown using [Markdown Here](https://markdown-here.com/)

4.  (Optional) Schedule the post

And finally...

5.  Click Publish


## Some other bits

### Screenshots

To capture part of a screen, I used to have to crank up a Chrome Extension ([Nimbus Screenshot](https://nimbusweb.me/) for example).  After I’ve selected the area that I want, I download it. Then upload it to a shared folder

On my Google Pixel, I can use my Pixel Pen to capture the area that I want. I highlight the area and automatically downloads it to my Downloads folder.

Now I can upload it to my Blog Images Google Photos Album. [A link to it is here](https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOV8cTgthOV571-2hmuRzG74MFX9HJT2-Ad489D).

There’s probably an API for that. Later.

### Blog photos

To get the URL for a Google photo, I go to the Blog Posts folder, and click on the image I want and open it in the browser. The URL in the omnibar is NOT the one to use. Instead, right-click the image and choose “Copy image URL.”

If you put a photo in a Google Doc using Insert -> Image -> By URL and then use that URL. When you copy/paste the Doc contents into StackEdit, StackEdit will convert it to Markdown format:

```markdown

![](image URL)

with the text blank.

You can also paste an image URL into StackEdit using ctrl-shift-g. If you select some text, then that text will be used as the image alt-text:

![text you selected](image URL)

Modified image format

You can do that according to the rules in this postenter link description here.

Copying to blog photos folder in drive

I set up links between the Download folder and Google Drive Blog Post folder:

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/Media/Blog\ Photos/ blogphotos

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads/ downloads

So from the Linux shell, I can copy files. For whatever that’s worth.

Blogus interruptus

If I can’t finish a post in one session, I’d like to preserve the tabs without cluttering up my browser. So I can use the OneTab extension to save all the tabs, and then later restore them all at once.

What happens next

Here are some things I want to add to the project—in no particular order:

• Open windows for transcriptions
• Combined editing tool with
• Voice typing (with correction of words like quote/endquote and so on
• StackEdit (JS library)
• Grammarly
• Programmatic replacement of common spellings
• Timeboxing and time notifications

​

Automating AutoBlogger

I started out trying to write a post. Failed.

So I worked on writing a post analyzing my failure.

Failed

Actually, not exactly.

Writing is thinking. I thought a lot about why I had failed. And at last understood why I hadn’t finished the first post, or the second, and many others.

So that was a win.

Why I failed

I had an idea but didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to write. So I kept on writing thing after thing, exploring the space, hoping I would find the answer.

I didn’t check to see if I was on track—which would have been hard since I had no track: only a destination, and no road to get there.

I thought some more and looked for other things that often went wrong. Like starting to write something, but not having enough intention to persevere.

I decided that a checklist would help me. So I designed one.

Then I realized that this was not the first time I’d written a blog post complaining about not writing and analyzing my failure to write.

So I went an found the earlier ones I’d written.

Holy crap!

Failure -> learning; learning -> forgetting

I looked back over the many posts I’ve written about my blogging failures. Each one captured a bit of wisdom.

I’d learned from my mistakes. Yay!

Each post had a bit of wisdom, hard-won. And then forgotten.

Or forgotten by my meat brain. But I’m a cyborg. I’d retained the memory in my cyber brain.

Limitations of meat

My meat brain is limited. And aging is making it worse.

But my cyber-brain is—for all practical purposes—unlimited. And technology is making it better.

I’d improved my writing process by picking suitable new technologies and putting them together into a workflow. So why not make that better?

Why not automate more of my writing process.?

And then, I thought: why just writing? I’ve got lots of things that I’ve learned, practiced, and then forgotten. The tools for automating them are at hand. I can learn them.

And then I thought: why not even further automate waking up?

So I started coding something.

And that put me in discovery mode. I discovered a whole new generation of coding tools and techniques that have emerged since the last time I played programmer—just a few years ago.

Down the technology rabbit hole I went. I disappeared for more than a week.

Now I’m back, with a lot of problems solved, a backlog of posts to write, and burning desire to increase my productivity and to use the available technology to overcome some of my biological deficiencies.

AutoBlogger improved

The last time I dove into my blogging workflow, I wrote Authoring, improved, which was an improvement over High productivity blogging workflow. Right? Sure.

Some things stuck. And some things deteriorated. In particular, I lost my ability to use Google voice typing to write drafts.

So here’s Rev 1 of the better process:

I click a button that will:

• Open a tab with a new document—a copy of my blogging template document—and put it into my Google Docs BlogDraft folder
• Open a tab with StackEdit
• Open a tab with Grammarly
• Open a tab with a new post page in Blogger

That would be a great start.

So I built it.

And here’s a video of how it works.

Transcription workflow

Next: When I’m writing a post, I sometimes want to pull quotes from a YouTube video and put them in the post.

Here is the workflow that I have used and that I’m going to automate next.

I made a video of the procedure.

I start with three tabs open: the YouTube video, one for the conversion program (I’m using one called Online Video Converter and one for the transcription program (I’m using otter.ai).

I start in the YouTube tab and select the URL.

I go to the conversion tab and paste it in the conversion program. Then choose format. I’m using mp3. I click and wait. Then click download and it.

Now I go to the Otter tab and import it. And after a while, I have my transcript.

So I used the same programming technique to open the video converter and the transcription program tabs and carry out the rest of the procedure manually. For now, at least.

I’ll post a video of the improved tool, later.

Programming workflow

That’s going to be my next deep dive.

The plan is:

1. Describe each technology that I am using with plusses and minuses
2. Put together a workflow description
3. Solve each problem that I find

​

Discomfort is a bug and a feature.

Once again I’ve arrived near the end of the day with lots to write about and nothing written. And today I’ve fallen into whining about it.

“I’m wasting my life,” I whine.

I want to write.

But I don’t just want to write. I want writing to be easy. Some parts are easy. Some are not. I want all of it to be easy.

When something isn’t easy sometimes I go looking for an easy way (as I wrote yesterday) and sometimes (like today), I whine.

The injustice of it all!

It should be easy.

Or should it?

If something is automatic, an automaton does it. AutoWriter writes. I don’t. And things are not easy or hard for AutoWriter. It’s a machine.

If it’s not automatic, then it’s probably not easy. If it were, I would have automated it.

But if I’m fully present it’s neither easy nor is it difficult. Neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. If I’m fully present, I’m beyond duality.

Discomfort is a feature. It means I’m not on automatic.

But it’s also a bug. It means I’m not fully present.

​

Decision, intention, prediction

Here’s the bottom line for this post:

Intention comes from decision. If an intention is strong enough, it will lead to action. To control action, start with decision, and test with prediction.

Here’s how I got there:

On October 21 I wrote this post, about Predictive Processing and correctly predicted that I would publish it. On October 25, I wrote this follow-up prediction. Then over the next 25 days, i published 21 posts.

Maybe there’s a connection. Perhaps not. But right now I’m going with maybe there is.

In some other posts, I wrote about intention. How intention makes things happen. But clearly (as I considered here) intention is not enough.

So now here’s my insight: prediction is a test of effective intention. If I intend something, let me test it by predicting the result of my intention. If I predict failure or unlikely success, then there’s something wrong with my intention.

I may intend an outcome. I may want it. But that’s often not enough. Right now I intend to take another sip of coffee, and I intend to have someone give me a million dollars. I predict that I will taste coffee in the next minute or so. And I predict that no one’s giving me a million dollars any time soon.

Result: I correctly predicted coffee, and correctly predicted not getting a million.

I predict that I’ll achieve what I intend much more frequently if I take the time to predict success or failure and adjust my plans and actions according to my prediction.

There may be times when I want to carry out a plan even when I predict likely failure. But in general, when I predict failure, I should change the plan or abandon it entirely (an extreme change in plan.)

Here’s the bottom line for this post:

Intention comes from decision. If an intention is strong enough, it will lead to action. To control action, start with decision, and test with prediction.

Is this post good enough? What I decide determines what happens.

If I decide this post is not good enough, then I predict that I’ll keep writing it, intending to make it better. If I do that, then I can’t confidently predict when I will publish it.

I’m not going to decide that.

If I decide that I’ve captured something useful in this post (I have!) and that it’s is good enough (I can decide that!) then I predict that my intention will shift—from improving it to publishing it. If that happens, I predict, with high confidence that it will appear in my blog within the next half hour.

I’m going to decide that.

It’s 1:35 as I finished the first draft.

It’s 1:45 as I’ve finished tweaking it and checking it in Grammarly.

It’s 1:49 as I finish my last tweaks, and convert from markdown.

I predict I will now publish it.

​

Intentional failure

What now?

Intentional failure

Yesterday I realized that I had not posted anything. I was once again having problems getting a post written and published. My punishment: write a post about why I’m having trouble and expose my behavior to the world.

Or rather, expose my behavior to the strength of my analytic ability. Figure out what was wrong. Teach myself (and anyone who reads—-like Future Me) what to do when this happens.

TL;DR: everything that happens comes from intention. If what I want to have happened has not happened, then I need to fix the intention. If I’m not fixing my (failed) intentions, then my metaintention needs fixing.

Intention redux

The last post I wrote was about intention. If I’m not completing a post, then there’s something wrong with my intention. So what went wrong today?

When an intention appears in consciousness, it might starts as a mere desire. An intention’s got to build some muscle to result in action. It’s got to compete with other intentions. And it’s got to overcome inertia. We might describe inertia as the default intention: to do nothing or to follow whims.

An inention has to include—or give rise to— a plan.

Without a plan, an intention is an oversized whim.

“Post” mortem

I didn’t publish the post I intended to write because my intention to do so was inadequate.

My failure to publish was an intentional failure.

What did I intend to do? I wanted to “write a post.” “What post? I never decided. My intention was vague.

I did start writing something—so I had enough intention to start. I didn’t finish. Why?

I did not intend to finish. To publish.

I did, kind of, intend to have it be published—I suppose. Memory is vague as was the inention.

Stuff came along. Other intentions arose and passed away. Some were unconscious, and some were conscious.

Some led to action. Others led nowhere. Perhaps those intentions are sitting around waiting for the right moment.

I had no intention to decide what intention to follow and what to abandon.

One way to describe the situation: my intention wasn’t strong enough to maintain itself in the face of the distractions around me (which lead to other intentions) and problems that I faced when writing.

Another way to describe it: I never intended to publish the post. I intended to start. Sometimes that’s been enough to get me to the end. Once I start moving, the momentum often is enough to carry me through.

Yesterday it wasn’t.

Now I have a more precise and stronger intention: to write this post AND publish it.

This post will be published because I intend to maintain the necessary intention to the end.

That intention—to maintain my intention—is itself an intention — a metaintention.

Going meta

Yeah, I love meta.

What’s meta?

From Meta - Wikipedia

…a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.`

The original sense of meta (as in metaphysics) is that meta X is beyond X. But now meta means, more often, X about X. Metadata is data about data. Metalanguage is language about language. Metamemory is memory about memory. Metacognition is cognition about cognition. And so on.

Metainention is intention about intention.

So my problem is the lack of metaintention. Not just any metaintention, but some specific ones.

Metaintentional requirements

I want to undertake projects with intentions that are sufficiently developed to carry the project through to the end.

I want to monitor my intentions, intentionally choose among them, ensure that they are sufficient to the wished-for outcome, maintained to the end.

Those are wants. To turn them into intentions I need to make sure that the wants are strong enough and to provide a plan that will result in my developing and maintaining the desired intention.

I need to develop new skills: awareness of intention—or its lack; and awareness of attention—or its absence.

The current state of those skills: conscious incompetence.

The next state: conscious competence.

The goal: unconscious competence.

Becoming competent

I need to periodically remind myself to check the state of my intention until I do it without a reminder.

When I am suddenly conscious—without a reminder—that I’m being inattentive or operating with inadequate or improper intention, I need to take a moment and be grateful to whatever part of my mind projected that awareness into consciousness.

I need to learn that when that awareness appears, or when I check my intention that I need to take action.

I need to energize intention when it is weak. I need to restore it when it fails. I need to develop new plans when old plans are inadequate.

To maintain that intention I need both intentional awareness and metaintentional awareness.

Any time I am working to do something, I need to be aware of the state of the underlying intention.

This has been adequate to get this post out.

Let’s see if it’s good enough for another one.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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Breaking out

I’m in a rut. It’s a nice rut. A comfortable rut, but a rut. It might even be an upward-trending rut. But…

A rut is a rut.

Get out of the rut is not a goal. It’s a constraint or a criterion. It’s a condition to apply to a goal or strategy: “does this get me out of the rut.”

So what’s the goal? And what’s the plan for getting there.
My goal has two parts. What do I do and how does that impact the world.

What I do: First Draft

I do things, and I write about what I do.

The writing is essential. If I’m doing things and I’m not writing about what I do, then what I do is just about worthless. Not completely worthless, but almost. Because I’m relatively worthless.

Hear me out. I’m not down on myself. But in a world with 7.5 billion people, compared to the worth of the whole, each of us is not worth much. If I do something privately, then what I do might be valuable to me, it’s worthless to the world.

But I have potential! My potential impact on the world is unbounded. Look at Buddha. Look at Jesus. Look at Einstein, Freud, Marx, Hamilton. All nearly worthless individuals who made a difference to the world.

Writing is my chance to make what I do potentially worth a lot.

Writing is my chance to make what I do meaningful.
Jordan Peterson: “Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

RIght, Jordan. I’m signed up.

What I do: the second draft

I do stuff and produce a record of what I did and how I did.
It doesn’t have to be writing, but it has to be something.
Video, podcast, software, along with blog and book.

If I don’t produce something, then I’ve wasted that part of my life.

By Deutsch’s definition, every such product is an embodiment of knowledge.

So what I do is create embodied knowledge.

The meaning of my life

I’m a collector, organizer, disseminator, and creator of knowledge.

I’ve made collecting knowledge “for future use” an end in itself. Setting that goal has been an error.

In my analysis, the only reason to gather knowledge is to disseminate it. I can spread it in its original form, or organized with other knowledge, or as part of a new creation.

Collecting, organizing and creating knowledge may be satisfying, but they are not meaningful. Getting knowledge out where it can make the world better is part of what I define as meaningful.

Dissemination is the goal.

Are there other sources of meaning?

Yeah, I guess.

Solving a problem—which means applying knowledge to the conditions that create and maintain a problem is at least a little meaningful.

Having a conversation and communicating some knowledge is meaningful.

But the potential is limited.

Creating something and sharing knowledge is had unbounded potential meaning, but its actual meaning depends on what I do to spread that knowledge.

Do what is meaningful: Part II

This line of thought leads me somewhere I’m not happy to go.

Once I’ve produced something, then promoting it is one of the most meaningful things I can do.

What?

Writing is hard enough, but promoting what I’ve written?

Where do I even start?

Stay tuned.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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