Working in Public as a Writer: Using Blog Posts as Reporting Memos
The worst thing about an essay that takes more than a day to write is the painful procrastination. Oftentimes, I don’t have the knowledge to bang it out all in one go. I need to come back to the essay day after day. How do I maintain the momentum of daily publishing, while working on longass longform essays that challenge my brain and stretch my writing ability?
Enter the reporting memo.
The reporting memo contains notes to myself on my daily progress as I research a topic. Instead of my current haphazard method — a few lines in my bullet journal, a note in Ulysses — I’ll sit down each morning to write a reporting memo and publish that as my daily challenge blog post.
Each post/memo will contain snippets of my research, summaries of books or documents I read, and syntheses of interviews I did with sources. It distills the key insights from the day before, reminds me where I left off, and keeps me accountable to stay on track.
Thanks to the this practice, I’ll no longer working on essays and research projects in a vacuum; each memo/post greases the wheels for the day’s writing and moves the longer piece forward. Each one adds another LEGO block to my body of work, whether a week’s research turns into an amazing essay or not. Worse comes to worst, I’ll have a week’s worth of blog posts that showed my dead-end progress.
Finally, committing to publish a daily memo prevents me from taking on commissioned pieces that don’t align with my interests or my “beat”. If I can’t write about a topic every day or care about deepening my understanding about a field, then I should turn down a request, even if I get paid to do it.
In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You computer scientist Cal Newport wrote about his “Research & Reference Bible” — a notebook where he would attempt to explain computer proofs from memory. He did this deliberate practice every Saturday to stretch his understanding of fundamental topics in his field.
In the same way, I’m using these blog posts as reporting memos to help me understand the web3 space (my current interest) and share that knowledge incrementally.
Right now, I can’t even explain what web3 is or point to all the ways it’s different from web2.
But maybe that’s a topic for another memo.
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