Day 008

#100Days

Strong focus on timeboxing. I haven't respected it that much recently...

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Figured out some quite interesting today.
It's about the relationships between ideas we like to call attention to, and the context that they come from (or the context where they were born).

It's quite obvious if you think about it, but when you are new to writing, you don't take that so much into consideration. I have listed many topics and ideas I'd like to write about, but I haven't put so much thought into contextualizing them.

Today I could see my internal mechanisms in action: I was super excited about a topic, started writing about it, and after reading what I wrote I could see how much it was not communicating everything I intented to.

Right after looking at it and asking myself what went wrong, I could see how much context was missing, and how important its contribution is.

The context in which and idea is born or taken from is very relevant. But we have this habit of oversummarizing ideas into one or two sentences, considering that they would cause more impact than the whole thing. This is mistake. You need all the preparation in order to achieve a successful transmission. The audience must be properly introduced to whatever topic you are presenting. This makes a big difference.

Of course, these days of social media are usually all fighting for attention, and in response people tend to split their attention span into (sometimes too) small chunks. Would you stop to watch a video that is 8 minutes long? How about one that is 20 minutes long?

For text form it can be even harder. Looking at this text I just wrote I can easily understand how hard it can be. Lazyness takes over, we want instant gratification. Only instant messages, that count on already existing contexts can be successful. If you want to introduce something that has no context set, and you do the proper contextualization, then you need readers that are willing to read what you wrote.

And this is an interesting point for practicing good writing. When you write well, it gets easy to read your text. Then people tend to spend more time there.