Turns Out I Was Just Busy

I wrote the below as a bit of a rambling, rough-as-guts piece more akin to a diary entry (I actually don’t keep a diary as such, so not something I do often). I then felt there was something interesting here I could share, and my AI really wanted me to “lead with the hook” so you don’t get bored and click away. 😉

TL;DR

I thought I had writer’s block, or a lack of motivation to write. It turns out I was just busy. This sounds obvious, but the point is that it wasn’t, and in thinking through the problem I realised that many of us now have data that can quantify what used to be gut feel.

Dear diary

I feel that I used to be able to write more when life was “simpler” - technical topics felt easier. No (or very little) human angle. Just getting straight to brass tacks. No pissing around.

I found myself literally asking my AI assistant this morning “how does one write?”. I explained that life feels a bit “fucked” at the moment. Economies in the toilet, lay-offs everywhere, elections dominating the news. Disruption and uncertainty in my professional life - all adding up to feeling like I don’t have the energy to write. I also can’t think of anything “worth” writing about because who wants to read some post on how to measure AI effectiveness in a platform team when you’re just trying to hold things together for your teams (let alone yourself) through these anxiety-inducing times?

On the other hand I want to write. Both selfishly because I enjoy it, but also because I’ve had more people tell me over the past year to keep writing, and how much they enjoy it, than I ever thought possible. I told my AI that I thought I must have a combination of writer’s block and imposter syndrome, plus a lack of motivation to write, and the response was pretty interesting…

My AI system doesn’t write for me. It’s set up to act as a coach more than a sycophantic assistant. So, knowing that I’m quite data-driven, it started by examining my blog’s commit history, all the posts over the past year or two, then scanned my daily journals.

The data suggests that, counter to my assumption, I don’t go through dry spells when life gets chaotic. I actually tend to write more during periods of uncertainty and change. The thing that does impact my writing is time to think - i.e. how busy my calendar is.

It found that I was writing fairly regularly while my meeting load was sitting around ~20/week, and then we had some team changes and a couple resignations within a few weeks, resulting in me picking up additional responsibilities - at which point my average meeting count jumped to ~33/week (and hasn’t dropped). This aligns with my writing effectively stopping (although I still logged a few ideas with my AI system over that time - just never got to writing about them).

So how am I managing to write right now? Likely because this week has been turbulent and today (Friday) is fairly quiet as a result. Just the right mix of “stimulus” and time.

SELECT * FROM dave

The point, or my realisation anyway, is that I can easily use AI to mine data from my calendar, my daily journals, even the database from my vibe-coded gym tracking app. Based on this I can quantify the relationships between things like general mood and gym session frequency, meeting load and deep thinking/writing time, etc. You’ve probably got the same stuff lying around without even thinking of it as data: your calendar, commit log, Strava account, notes app. Try pointing your AI at them and asking it to find non-obvious correlations, and see how they compare with your own assumptions.

I’m hoping, with this data in mind, that I can at least try to keep these things more in balance. If anything it’s encouraged me to include more detail in my daily journals (what I’m building in my workshop, general health “stuff”, what I’m reading, what’s top of mind at the moment based on the news or family life, etc) - not because I’m a big journaler, but because (as a crusty DBA at heart) I like the idea of having all of this unstructured data which my agent can easily consume and summarise for me in future, exposing new and interesting correlations (and the odd causation, no doubt) which aren’t obvious to me.

So, I guess a “Dave database” for “Database Dave”? Thank you, I’ll be here all night…

Cheers,
Dave