A few thoughts follow below. Let's begin with a few of the more important principles, plus a few miscellanea that don't really belong later in the essay. Some of this is repeated later in the essay.

The purpose of the site is to help me think well1. This purpose is in opposition to many widely-used norms in online writing. I suspect that the possible upside is a lot higher than I have (naively) historically thought.

Committed writing – the sort written in blood – is an exceptional method of self-transformation.

Each piece here should durably level up my understanding. This does not mean it won't also be a transitory part of some longer game.

I think better when the stakes are higher. One way to raise the stakes is to share work with people whose good opinion I desire.

Depth over engagement and audience-building. Far better to have one brilliant, knowledgeable person respond strongly and in depth to a piece than to have a hundred thousand respond shallowly.

File systems are terrible ways to organize projects. With this site I can design an interface that better supports my work. For one thing: the site navigation and organization should help me generate new ideas, and help me see the structure in my work.

This site is an interface to my past thinking and possible future creative work. This means the organization and design of the site are first-class objects. As my understanding changes, so too will the organization, since the organization expresses that understanding. Thus, I should expect to reorganize and consolidate notes often. Both are a type of meaning-making.

Learning to think fluently is important. This means learning to identify discomfort, and learning how to respond to it. Double down on whatever makes it easy to have good thoughts2.

At the same time: there is sometimes value in being stuck. I don't yet understand how to resolve that tension.

Make the site append-mainly. If I add one new document a week for 10 years that's only 500 documents, and I can read a complete list of titles in a few minutes. Over 40 years it's only 2,000 documents. Any reasonable subset – say, the materials on tools for thought, or the future of matter – will take only a minute or so to read all the titles. That makes it possible to see and navigate my thinking more or less entire. Indeed, I can maintain complete, ordered lists even for incomplete projects.

Make it drop-dead fast and easy to include images, video, and sound. In general, reify good habits and thinking in automatic procedure. In particular: make it trivial to publish something that's in progress. Ideally, it should take order 1 second to deploy.

Good, thoughtful, supportive critics are worth their weight in gold. Bad critics damage your freedom to explore, to speculate, to be a beginner. Do what is necessary to keep bad critics out of your life.

Do gross retrofitting, not detailed. That is, it's worth doing things like bringing old work into the site organization. But it's not worth doing things like updating the design, meta-data, and so on: keep the legacy stuff. I expect that will (greatly) diminish the eventual time spent in maintenance: you want the maintenance cost of old work to approach zero, even at the expense of some inconsistency.

Meta-thinking – writing about writing, writing about thinking – has a bad reputation. So many productivity bloggers or self-help writers whose main form of productivity is writing about productivity! I know I feel sheepish when I do it – I feel sheepish about this document! But anchoring on “it's bad to do meta-thought” is a mistake. You benefit greatly from doing some thinking like this; you just don't want it to take over your life! But if it's genuinely making big changes to the way you act in the rest of your life, then it's likely time well spent.

How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?

Essays

Essays