Apple & Technology : My other Blog
Micro.blog isn't part of the usual pipeline. Everything else in this operation runs through a draft app first — Ulysses, iA Writer, whatever I'm testing that week — with Ghost waiting at the far end for the finished piece. Micro.blog skips that. You open it, you write in the box that's already there, you post. No draft app in between, because the whole point of the platform is that there isn't supposed to be one.
So the habit this week wasn't about a tool at all. It was about a clock. Have the thought, publish the thought, and don't let more than thirty minutes pass between the two.
I've had ideas all week that I would normally have let sit — jotted in a note, meant to come back to, mostly forgotten by Thursday the way most jotted notes are. This week I made myself post them instead, right when they showed up. Wednesday morning it was a line about an app update that changed one setting I'd wanted changed for months. Nothing to say about it, really, just noticing. Old habit: write it down, save it for a slower moment, decide later if it's worth anything. New habit: post it in nine minutes and move on with the day.
What struck me wasn't the speed. It was how much editing normally happens in that gap I skipped — not editing the sentence, editing the thought. Given an hour, I'd have asked myself if the observation was interesting enough to bother with, whether I'd already said something like it, whether it fit anywhere. Given nine minutes, none of that questioning had time to happen. The thought went out roughly the shape it arrived in.
That's close to how we used to run a fruit stand. A peach that's ready Tuesday morning is ready Tuesday morning — hold it back hoping it improves by Thursday and it just gets softer while you wait. Speed to the stand was its own kind of quality control. But we also culled. Some of what came off the tree wasn't bad, just not ready to be looked at yet, and a customer builds an opinion of the whole operation from what's sitting in the bin in front of them. Publishing at the speed of a thought gives up the culling along with the delay. You can't hold the soft ones back if you're not holding anything back.
So what's lost in that gap, closed down to nine minutes instead of a day? Mostly the chance to find out a thought was wrong, already said, or not worth a reader's ten seconds. A day of sitting lets a bad idea show itself as bad. Nine minutes doesn't. I posted five things this week that would've been quietly deleted under the old system, and I can't tell you all five were worth posting — only that they're out there now, doing whatever an unedited thought does once it leaves the porch.
What I didn't lose was the noticing itself. If anything there was more of it, because I stopped filtering ideas out before I'd even finished having them. Whether that's a fair trade — more raw noticing for less quality control — isn't something I can answer from one week of it. I know the fruit stand's answer. I'm less sure it's the same answer for a sentence.
From the Field:
Six Colors — sixcolors.com
Daring Fireball — daringfireball.net
Consumer Reports (Tech) — consumerreports.org
For deeper dives: MacSparky (paid membership) — macsparky.com
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