That period before a launch is always stressful. This time is no exception. It’s occupying my entire head almost 24/7 no matter whether I try and leave work on time or whether I’m there for twelve or fourteen hour days. It doesn’t make any difference. It’s just there in my head and it probably will be until a couple of weeks after it’s finally launched. C’est la vie. It’s the nature of the beast.
In real life, of course, people can sense when you’re busy and don’t feel particularly upset if you aren’t able to give them the time that you would like to. They might not be thrilled about it of course, but they understand. But the signals that I can give off in public through my weblog are less clear. Has he just abandoned the thing? No. Why doesn’t he have anything interesting to say anymore? Well, I do! Probably more than ever at the moment. I just can’t find the headspace to work with to write them down. Why isn’t he commenting on that thing that’s so obviously one of his core interests? Well, it’s because I’m not commenting on anything – the only creative thing I’m able to do outside work at the moment is doodle in Illustrator.
What I need is some way of actually ambiently reflecting my personal weather – without all that clunkiness of actively choosing states of mind. What I actually need is some way of representing that I’m just really really behind… A first suggestion – some way of representing the number of unread posts I have in NetNewsWire at any given moment (currently way over six hundred). Except that my path of posting tends to be more circuitous than that. NetNewsWire posts get opened in browser tabs if they look interesting, read thoroughly and then (if they’re not something I want to follow-up upon) they get immediately closed. The number of open tabs reflects pretty much exactly the number of things I actively want to talk about at any given moment. If there are lots open, it probably means that I have a lot I want to write about and no time to do it in. Except that doesn’t work either, because in addition to the six hundred things in NetNewsWire I haven’t filtered and the fifty tabs I have open at the moment, I also have four folders in my bookmarks called “State of Play 1-4” that were the sum total of all the things I wanted to talk about and had open in Safari but then had to store quickly so that I could install a Max OSX update. That’s another two hundred discussions I really want to get involved in – that I want to contribute to. And then there’s the four or five little projects I have on the side that I’ve been trying to write up but have been incapable of doing so.
So six hundred unfiltered posts, fifty open tabs representing fifty filtered posts to talk about, two hundred bookmarks representing two hundred even more filtered conversations to get into, plus four or five multi-page documents (one around 6,000 words) that have been growing in the sidelines that I’m unable to push out into the world in any effective way. That is the index of how busy and behind I feel. That is the measure of my total absence of cerebral RAM. Do you now understand why I’m not posting that much?
4 replies on “On representing the backlog caused by an absence of cerebral RAM…”
Cerebral RAM shortage
Empathising strongly with Tom Coates right now :p
You shouldn’t worry, many of us find it hard to be creative enough just to get out of bed in the mornings.
Know exactly what you mean… Been there, done that, bought the mug…
so delete it all. if you haven’t gotten to it all by now, then it probably isn’t as important as you think.