Changing my mind, all the time

I do this every time.

Writing at length about a topic I care about supercharges my brain. I have an idea, blurry at first, that becomes clearer and clearer as I write about it. When I’m finished, the idea is clear, mature, and the newly published post makes a lot of sense. I should then be ready to start writing the next one, and move on with my life.

Except I’m not. My brain, apparently unaware that the drafting phase is over, keeps on analysing the initial idea well after the finished draft is online. And guess what? The torrent of thoughts my brain keeps pouring over me, and I end up changing my mind, making the post I just published already obsolete.

I’m still not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it is a sign of good health for my little grey cells, but on the another hand, I feel like — in some ways — I’m telling lies to my readers, as they visit the blog and read something that is not the actual opinion I have on a topic.

For instance, let’s say I have an idea about how an app is great at doing something specific. I draft my outline, write a few paragraphs, keep thinking about it during the next few days, jot down more details into the drafts which in turn feed material to my brain, and I eventually come up with the rest of the post. Once the — painful — step of proofreading is done, I publish the article, feeling a great amount of joy and happiness, as I close the lid of my computer.

Sometime during the next couple of hours — or couple of days if I’m lucky — my brain realises that this app is actually not that great for doing that specific thing, or that there actually is a much better way of doing it. I look back at my blog post, with the ink still not completely dry, feeling like an idiot.

Sometimes I’ll try to stick to the initial idea just to make the blog post “more real” for a few more days. But it usually doesn’t last. “Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way,” and I do something completely different than what I just wrote.

I’ve done this a few times already.

How I use Drafts as my text editor? I remember reading my freshly published post and realising that my set up was way too complicated. I think I stated using another text editor the next month or so, making the rich Drafts post — that I really like — a relic of a not-so-distant past.

How I am not comfortable using read later apps and how I want to “read in the moment”? This one took me only a few days to realise it wouldn’t work. I’m now a happy user of GoodLinks, something you’d never get reading an article written days before buying this read-later app in the App Store.

Which brings me to my latest epiphany.

Remember my post on how I love Cultured Code’s Things and how it was my only exception in the whole “separate work from life” app situation? Well, of course you’d remember this post as it is barely two weeks old. But you already know the rest. Yes, I put back the separation between work and life, so I now only use Things on my work computer. Again.

Did I write this Things post for nothing then? I’d say no. There is a silver lining. My blog is getting something out of this: new things to write about. Imagine if I were to change my mind while in the middle of a draft: nothing would ever get published on the Jolly Teapot. I would start writing something, realise it’s not longer relevant before it even has the chance of seeing the light of the world wide web. It does happen quite a certain amount of drafts, but most of the time, ideas end up published. In a way, it’s fortunate that it normally takes my brain a few days after publishing to realise that something isn’t quite right with my article.

I started drafting this post earlier this week (writing this line on Friday 22nd), and guess what happened this morning? I almost managed to change my mind again on how I should use Things.

What I wondered was if I could actually use Things on my personal Mac, sync it to my phone while using Things without any cloud backup on my work computer. I would still use the same app at work and outside of work, but at least my tasks would be separate. But at the last minute, realising that not backing up my work to-dos was too big of a risk just for the benefit of using Things all the time.

In short, I came very close to rendering this draft obsolete even before it was finished. That should teach me not to let drafts linger for too long in the “Ideas” folder.

And remember, this post may or may not already be outdated.