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Andy Matuschak

7 Sep, 8 tweets, 4 min read

@metaLulie

@metaLulie Not a solopreneur but similar situation. Trying to work non-coercively, I’ve found it useful to understand my monkey-brain proclivities. Monkey has inertia, finds it hard to get started, easy to continue. Monkey wants easy gratification in the moment, meaningfulness in hindsight.

@metaLulie

@metaLulie Very concretely: I find routine incredibly helpful. I’m not rigid about it—I’m happy to change it upon reflection—but everything is easier with well-considered defaults. It’s simply *true* that if I start my morning on Twitter, I will p>0.7 get no deep work done that morning.

@metaLulie

@metaLulie I’ll regret it: in hindsight, Twitter was fun for the first 10m, then I got unwittingly sucked in, and it wasn’t really that fun. So I start my day with the internet off. Sounds like coercion, but doesn’t feel that way in the moment. It feels like “oh, right… thanks, past me.”

@metaLulie

@metaLulie Dewey: “It may be a loss… to escape from [control]… only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice… A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom. Actually he is directed by forces over which he has no command.”

@metaLulie

@metaLulie Scheduling “endorsed Twitter time” can relieve the pressure. I know I can’t think/focus well at midday, so happy to do “unfocused” activities then. I can get a bit of optimizer’s pleasure from delaying: I’m being responsive to my body/mind by matching activities to its capacity!

@metaLulie

@metaLulie If I have strong urges to Twitter in the morning, it’s often b/c I don’t believe I can do whatever I’m trying to do, work-wise. Maybe I have a meeting scheduled, so not enough time to go deep. Or I don’t believe in my own approach. Helpful to notice this and fix those problems.

@metaLulie

@metaLulie What’s the motivation to do work at all? Wonder at discovery; feeling of power at having shaped something out of nothing; a sense of having traced the seams of the universe; memory of satisfaction for past achievements; excitement for what’s possible.

@metaLulie

@metaLulie How to stay in the habit after a holiday? Automated routine really helps me. Partial notes on details here: notes.andymatuschak.org/z3ruCqbkUjU7U8…

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More from @andy_matuschak

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

10 Sep

@robin_____sloan

A bit of fun: this GIF is a "legendary" @robin_____sloan Amulet (8 8's).

base64: R0lGODdhBgAJAPEAAEeEqvij+U6wk386YSwAAAAABgAJAAACD4RvERciC9pjMDooq0KoAAA7

hash: B36F0888888889A57D77E14E9B8D4B95E11C6B6C0B48FB0D7F5E634B2D129623

opensea.io/assets/0x2a212…

@robin_____sloan

@robin_____sloan I was unable to reveal the amulet via the smart contract, alas, since the text is specified via `string` rather than `bytes`, and UTF-8 encoding rules muck up the string. But/so:

Title: "A picture worth a thousand words"
Carbon offset URL: dashboard.cloverly.com/receipt/202109…

@robin_____sloan

@robin_____sloan (Hope you don't mind the subversion, Robin… can a GIF be poetry?)

Read 5 tweets

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

8 Sep

One reason we don't have more interesting, quality structured text editors: it's *really* hard to implement table-stakes editing operations well, particularly on web.

In this video, I attempt to arrow up/down and shift+up/down to select inter-line in 8 outliners. Very yikes.

Roam was the only web outliner which got arrow up/down navigation mostly right, though with some unexpected glitches at EOLs.

None of the web outliners support interline selection. OO doesn't either. Bear does great but ofc isn't really structured. And org-mode wins the day.

This sounds so nit-picky and trivial, but I think the difficulty of getting basic editing ops done well in simple outline UX illustrates just how painful it is to make a structured text editor nice enough to live in.

There'd be a lot of value in finding a good abstraction here.

Read 4 tweets

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

3 Sep

Funny how much sheer pleasurability and inspiration matter for habits. Ever since I got a new piano, my old practice time goals (which I often struggled to meet) feel comically low. Now somewhat effortlessly 3 months ahead of target… gotta ratchet up the goal!

Making the habit more pleasurable is an oft-suggested strategy. I think it'd be pretty enabling to assemble a wiki-style database of per-habit pleasure/inspiration-increasing strategies!

Something about this feels wrong. Like: why should I come up with ways to make myself to want to play the piano more? Shouldn't I just naturally want it?

Yet: deliberate practice is unpleasurable! (Ericsson et al '93) *Playing* is, but need much of the former to get the latter.

Read 4 tweets

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

2 Sep

"In intellectual work, it’s much easier to get twice as fast than twice as good." radimentary.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/yod…

Interesting to consider when this is an effective strategy. In many design tasks, simply being able to generate (& discard) more alts will produce better results. But…

… this is probably only true when the problem can be solved with something like pre-existing approaches. Inventing wholly new representations needs 2x-good > 2x-fast.

In most software tasks (but often not the interesting ones), 2x-fast is usually higher-leverage than 2x-good.

Reminds me also of experiences learning piano. For years, was trying to move as fast as possible onto harder repertoire. Then had a great teacher who made me slow way down, play stuff from years ago, focus on musicality. 2x good was much more rewarding than 2x fast.

Read 5 tweets

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

20 Aug

It’s quite rare for software to offer both a real local file format and also substantial cloud/SaaS behavior (ie other than syncing). Usually it’s one or the other—if the cloud has active behavior, apps are thin clients which don’t expose an accessible on-disk format (eg Notion).

@withorbit

The troubles are well articulated here: inkandswitch.com/local-first.ht…

I recently finished re-architecting @withorbit to expose an on-disk format, thought I’d write a bit about what I learned.

@withorbit

@withorbit It’s hard to pull this off, as I&S describe. You need to design a file format which syncs efficiently and reliably, which is already tough. Gets tougher when your SaaS is an active replica with its own public API, and when you layer on indexing/querying, migration, sparsity.

Read 15 tweets

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

17 Aug

A consistently valuable interface design prompt for me: how would I do [X activity] with paper/pen/physical tools? The answer is often so much more fluid and improvisational than typical UI idioms and "data structures" tend to produce!

If I "highlight" something on a computer, it needs to represent that with a literal start offset and length. But annotating a physical document is often intentionally vague and gestural—attach a sticky to the general vicinity of an area, shade a line down the margin, etc.

I can improvise purpose-specific solutions with a physical highlighter: draw a box around something; make special marks in a personal code; write big-font marginalia. Most interfaces permit only pre-set verbs and a small surrounding space of creative repurposing.

Read 4 tweets

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