One Year In

A reflection on a year of regularly writing irregular writing

Let’s get the big announcement out of the way: I swept the entire suite of Data People Etc. awards this year. Best Author, Best Post, Best Publication Title, Best About Page, Most Posts That Make You Wonder What Is Wrong With This Guy. The list goes on.

The publication itself did well this year, too. Data People Etc. is now valued at nearly $10 a month, based on a single pledge from a new subscriber. It has 1314 readers overall, half of whom open any given post. It boasts a brand one reader described as “free-style” which is tantalizingly close to the target “unhinged”.

It’s not a participation trophy if you call it something else.

I was invited to talk on three podcasts this year. I spoke at Coalesce, the first in-person event I’ve attended since the pandemic. I was even invited to a secret lunch once with important and accomplished data people, where I got to introduce myself as, “Stephen, a guy from Ohio who occasionally writes a blog.”

I’m grateful that folks have enjoyed my writing, and I share this in part because I want other aspiring writers to see what modest success looks like. (You can see granular post stats here.) I’ve worked hard on sending out what-I-perceive-as-quality writing into the world, and I’ve been rewarded for it.

I don’t take that for granted — I’ve spent plenty of time speaking into the abyss. I did my tour writing random unread articles on Github Pages. Worse, I completed a PhD, a structured program to make you unintelligible to as many people as possible. You get the degree when literally no other person understands you anymore.

But speaking to a community has its own traps — chiefly, the “achievement” trap. Airflow’s Problem, for example, reached the top of Hacker News, tallying 40,728 views. What an achievement. My next post had some of the worst metrics of the year, at only 1239 views. What a failure.

Subscription stats for 2022. Most jumps can be ascribed to a couple big posts and reshares from publications like the Analytics Engineering Roundup.

Would this publication be more successful if every post got 40,000 views? Should I be focused on expanding my subscriber base? Would my life be better if Joe Biden called me ten minutes after each post and asked, Does your Very Important Point warrant federal action?

No, no, of course not. This is just how creation works: you create the thing, and sometimes it takes off, and sometimes it doesn’t, and you hope that the fruits of the creative process and whatever rewards you get from its reception are worth it.

I bring all this up because this publication was a new year’s resolution — last year’s resolution. The creative process was always worth the work because honing that process was the goal. I wanted to write more and better.

But last week someone asked, Where do you find the time to write?

And I realized, I don’t find it. I steal it.

I steal it from disposable social media time (yay!) and I steal it from precious family time (boo!). I steal it from sleep and I steal it from leisure. This past year, I’ve stolen a lot of time — when I factor in 22 posts, along with revisions and discarded drafts, that comes out to around 40,000 words, or 130 pages of writing.

From the outside, I published a randomly themed article on a random day of the week at random intervals. But this irregular output was disconnected from my process — I wrote nearly every day, and discarded drafts when they bored me. I sat in my 4-year-old’s bedroom and drew pictures most nights. I have spent a lot of wild creative energy to move this Substack forward.

But life is full of opportunities and opportunity costs. To keep Data People Etc. sustainable, it needs to have a clearer relationship with the rest of my life.

My objective is to use this space as a wet lab for ideas. There’s a mad science to the mixing of Nietzsche and North Star metrics, or creating a religion out of graphs. Often, I expect to write in one direction and end up somewhere else entirely.

The other pleasures — honing my writing craft, engaging with readers, financial or reputational rewards — are important, too. But they are secondary. Left unchecked, I see a future where they introduce too much business into what is meant to be a creative pursuit.

So to make Data People Etc more sustainable as a hobby, I’ll be making a few changes in how I maintain the publication.

• I’ll block off breaks from writing, but attempt to post more regularly during active windows. If I publish in a given week, I’ll publish on Monday. January will be my first break.

• I’ll optimize for efficient rather than quality writing. You’ll see more short and technical essays. To improve my craft, I need to have a better sense of the relationship between effort input and output at small scales.

• I’ll create occasions for longform writing, and incentivize others to participate. (I’ll have more to say in a future post.)

I am also withdrawing from Twitter, LinkedIn, and some Slack communities I’ve been a part of for the past few years. I’ll still cross-post my articles for the reach, but don’t plan to spend creative energy there.

Instead, I’ll be focusing on Substack, and experimenting with it as a more complete social media venue. My hope is to engage deeper with ideas and writers, including those outside of the data profession, and to excise low-value habit loops of feed-driven platforms.

For me, 2022 was a time to start things. 2023 feels like a time to focus, turn down distractions, and practice discipline. A period of wandering is coming to a close. I’ve found a trail; it’s time for a thru-hike. I’d love for you to continue to walk with me for as long as you enjoy it.