Why I Talk to Myself

Each week I sit down and re­flect on what I’ve learned. I think about which of my ef­forts have helped the Harper en­deavor, and which have harmed it. It’s not easy, but I think it’s one of the best habits I’ve built. More ac­cu­rately, it’s one of the best habits Matt has en­cour­aged me to build.

When I re­ally think about it, I’m re­minded of the orig­i­nal After the Deadline blog, which co­in­ci­den­tally also had a cat­e­gory called “Talking to Myself”. I won­der if Raphael Mudge (AtD’s au­thor) had a sim­i­lar mo­ti­va­tion.

I talk to my­self to find the weak­nesses in Harper’s mis­sion and fo­cus my at­ten­tion on what mat­ters. It is an ef­fi­cient way to get from layer one to layer five. It can help get other main­tain­ers on the same page and build a body of knowl­edge that can be linked to from any­where.

Not wor­ry­ing about keep­ing in­for­ma­tion locked-down is one of the more beau­ti­ful parts of work­ing in pub­lic. Open source code would be noth­ing with­out sim­i­larly open source knowl­edge. I talk to my­self on­line so my users can un­der­stand my in­ten­tions.

In many senses, we are not un­like moths. We are drawn to the lights of dis­trac­tion, hype, and pro­cras­ti­na­tion. For me, set­ting up check­points to stop and re­flect has been an ef­fec­tive de­ter­rent from these lights. In fact, I think each minute for which I stop and think has paid it­self back three times over in time sav­ings. If I can bet­ter al­lo­cate my time and en­ergy, I can avoid do­ing re­dun­dant work pur­su­ing point­less goals.

Bonus Points

A few of my ar­ti­cles have be­come pop­u­lar on sites like Hacker News and Reddit. We’ve got­ten quite a few Harper in­stal­la­tions from links on these ar­ti­cles. I would never rely on this kind of blog­ging as a source of ad­ver­tis­ing, but it is nice to see it help spread the word.