Good morning! Hello! How are you? It’s Q&A day! What fun!
Q: You have the desire and ability to write so much every day. Do you think it helps you cope with stress/anxiety or is it more of a mechanism for capturing the moments in your life? Why do you write?
I have been a diarist since I was 15 years old. I have my entire journal printed out, bound in books on a shelf in my library. I also have a digital copy in an immensely large Scrivener file. As of January 1, it was 3.8 million words. Teenagers, as you may recall, have a lot of angst. The journal’s origins are probably a big reason for this, but the journal’s primary benefit is it keeps me sane. I absolutely equate writing frequently with staying sane. It is absolutely my therapy. It does the job wonderfully well, I think.
When I first took the (hundreds of) hours to compile the whole journal into a single digital file, I told myself “oh this is great it’s like an outsourced memory I’ll be able to look things up and remember the exact date or what I was thinking” and I have done that a few times — I did it a few times as a party trick on early-pandemic Zoom calls, maybe a dozen other times. But it turned out to not be as useful as I thought. I am still glad it’s done, though.
If we take the 10,000 hour rule as gospel (there is some debate), a side effect of writing three point eight million words is that you get pretty good at writing. It becomes easy. There are differences between different types of writing, of course, but you have the hardest part down - getting the words on the page. The journal writing has made some parts of my writing stronger than others. I can get a point down quickly, I can stay engaging, but it’s still hard for me to super deep into a single topic, and I am a terrible editor. But by and large, it’s been insanely useful.
The method of my journal writing has changed through the years. From sixteen to twenty seven or so, I wrote my journal only for myself. That was really great but over time I keenly felt the lack of an audience. So in 1992 I let one person read it and we ended up having a torrid affair and she turned out to be a druggie and it was a giant mess and I ruined my relationship and I vowed never again. Then LiveJournal came along — I was introduced to it by another girl with whom I was in smitten. The girl and I did not work out (my fault, definitely) but LJ and I really hit it off. I fell for it instantly. I had a lot “going on” in my life then, and I still needed to process it, but suddenly not only could I process recent events myself, I could get third-party insights about them. That was HUGE. I feel like my LJ friends helped me grow up. The idea of writing a journal with a readership was intoxicating, and I loved LJ. But over time, all of us became friends on LJ and I didn’t feel as free to write my deepest, darkest secrets on the internet anymore. LJ became more of a social thing. My writing turned personal again. But boy I sure missed the audience.
Since the LJ days, I’ve been writing my journal at 750words.com constantly. It’s been table-stakes for staying sane. But I have missed having a readership. I tried writing, you know, business essays or newspaper columns (I had a weekly column at the Observer for a while. They were not good.) but they weren’t the same. The Barbarian Group’s site had a blog and I wrote that and that was kinda fun.
Oh I also wrote a lot of long emails to poor friends who had to endure them. But that felt… pushy (See below).
But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the GMHHAY format on Facebook that I really found a good new balance. The secret is it’s basically one journal in two places: a public portion and a private one. When you’re writing your journal for yourself and you muse about Apple ATT or Joe Manchin or the Supreme Court it feels kind of weird. But my mind races and I like to get all of these things down. So now there’s an outlet for both the personal and the more universal and I like that. I say “universal” because some of the personal is relevant to other people. If GMHHAY became only about politics or business I would consider it a failure. It works because it’s all over the place.
Also, because I primarily view it as a journal, I don’t care if a ton of people read it. I’m not trying to be a thought leader with it. I just like to write to process things. I think my brain is a little OCD. I need to put something to paper to make it real. It galls me some of the most important events in my life didn’t get written down. There is a two-year gap in college where I didn’t journal and it kills me to this day. I’ve pieced it together through letters I wrote people (I’m one of those nutbags who used to save copies of letters), but it’s not the same.
Another thing I’ll say about journaling is that as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized there are plenty of things humans desperately want to say but absolutely should not say. Journals are great for that. Say it into the journal, lock it away. Get it off your chest. Move on.
Q: A few days ago you talked about being in 8 to 10 meetings in a week, and that particularly resonated with me. I have 35 meetings this week, but I took most of Tuesday off for Lowell's birthday; I'm averaging somewhere in the 35 to 40 over the last few weeks. I'm looking forward to having some more unstructured time but I'm not quite there yet. It's in the plan. Anyway I felt seen by that comment. Before I get to my formal Q&A questions, how do you think the meeting culture of corporate work environments shapes us in this culture (and shapes our political lives)?
I think Paul Graham hit on something very smart with the maker vs manager essay. But I find most people are a bit of both. IDEO’s T-shaped people or something. Graham focuses on the disruption meetings have for makers, which is fair, but there’s an inverse for managers. Most managers still want to make. It’s a mess.
I don’t think there’s any one single way to solve it. You must be brutal. Relentlessly protective. Find a way to carve it out. From 2016-2020 I managed this because Timehop was in NYC and I was in NC and the whole company had an incentive to do the meetings when I was in town, so almost all my meetings were crammed into Tuesday and Wednesday. That went out the window when the pandemic hit but I had the new excuse of childcare so I carved out mornings till lunch, and lunch, for no meetings. I have Jane for part of that time, but it still gives me a guaranteed time each day to work on work product. I’m not sure what the post pandemic situation will be. I’ll probably just leave those blocks in my schedule and hope for the best. They do get broken, but at least it makes people THINK about it a bit.
I’m not one of those people who think meetings suck. I think if you want to get 10 people all on the same page, there’s nothing more efficient than a meeting. At Timehop we have rules around meetings but we’re not SUPER great about following them all, but at least we know to keep meetings short.
I do think there are some people in business who equate having a meeting with getting work done and those people need to be avoided at all costs. They are more abundant — even percentage-wise — at large companies. It’s part of the reason I stay at smaller companies. But if, like, I had to do a year at some giant company or government, I would macro time-box it — I’d accept that for a year this is all I am going to do, and I am going to get out and recuperate afterwards. That’s what I did at Tumblr, for example. Not that it was big, but I knew the work would be all-encompassing. And it was. But it was time-boxed in my larger life.
Q: I'm sure this is documented somewhere, but I'm curious to know your writing routine to get so much out there daily PLUS garden, read & think.
Q: How do you find time to write every day, parent, work, support your mom, and stay up to date on politics and music and stuff? What are your strategies for managing time or how do you allocate attention for your various interests, responsibilities and projects?
It was September 15th of last year that I wrote a detailed analysis of my routine, so you can see how I carve out time for different things. I bet if I re-read that now, the specifics would change. But the MO wouldn’t. I’m neurotically scheduled in my own head. Some of this is having a job, some of it is having a toddler, and the parental belief that kids need structure (along with free time). But I’ve been like this forever. I even schedule my downtime, my relaxation, my X times a year freakout-don’t-leave-the-couch-for-two days. I carve out the time, and then I do the thing even if it’s not good. I make shitty podcasts, some boring GMHHAYs. I half-ass a redline on a contract. I don’t do everything perfectly, but I accept that. I focus on staying on schedule and getting things done. I am a BIG believer in small, frequent bouts of work that, over time, make something larger.
Also I just googled “Rick Webb writing habits” and found this piece I wrote about my book writing habits that I had completely forgotten about. Which is a lovely segue into the next question.
Q: I've noted some pessimism about your sense that you'll write another book. Why? Is it real or just this moment?
Mainly because I cannot find the time, right now, to work it into my schedule. Okay that is maybe 50% of the reason, because obviously if I’m writing this GMHHAY every day I could use that time for a book instead. I am severely despondent about being unable to sell Which Half is Wasted to a publisher. I put it on the back burner and I think I know how I would re-attack it to make it better, but I am not mentally prepared to try again. It really hurt to fail at it.
Then I tried my hand at fiction and it was terrible. I have a great story idea and structure but I can’t write fiction because I can only write in one voice — this voice. I was just thinking the other day I should ping my comic book friend and try and convince him to do a comic of it. Or something. Or a film treatment.
Honestly, I’ll probably try again after Jane’s a little older and I’m out of this job. Maybe try and finish Which Half is Wasted, or just start some small little single-topic book. Maybe finish the Laguardia book but the pandemic fucked that all up. I don’t know. I just know I can’t do it right now with all that IS in my life.
Oh wait, I got it.
With the pandemic, I need more immediate satisfaction, and the satisfaction I get from even a few people reading these GMHHAY posts is much more valuable to me than the delayed-a-few-years gratification of writing a book. Yeah that’s probably it.
Look at that. Journaling just lead to an epiphany.
Another thing I’ll say is that mom really thew a wrench into things, and it was complete mental chaos for me for like a month as I adjusted. But the other day I realized I have adjusted, and it’s easier now. But at first? Forget it. It takes time for the neurotic schedule to absorb a new reality. I get anxious and stressed. Writing helps then more than ever, though, and I make a point even when I’m super upset or stressed to write, because it’s the only thing that’ll calm me down. But yeah, that was hard.
Gardening exists because I am a terrible exerciser and knew I needed to get outside and it gets me outside and moving. It’s a lot more physical labor than one would think.
Q: Have you drafted any principles that guide the way live? I wondering if you have an explicitly written them down and I missed them.
I have a Scrivener file on my desktop that is titled Philosophy and I try and throw little notes in there when one hits me. The idea was that someday, in the future, I’d have time to flesh it out, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I would like to get better at this. But no, you haven’t missed it.
Q: What from pandemic times are you going to keep doing? What from pandemic times are you most ready to stop doing? What's the first non-work place you'll travel to post-vaccination?
I am going to keep these posts going, definitely. I have them (of course) all in a scrivener file and there is a day where that will end, and they will become a book. I’ll power through the editing (or get Lisa to do it) and sell it on my little store to 12 people and call it a day. Oh, I guess that means I WILL write another book. But even after that, I’ll keep writing them.
I hope I keep gardening but that is going to depend on my professional life.
I hope I never fill another dishwasher again or clean another counter, but I suspect i will. I AM going to start eating out, every night again, though. I miss it. Okay maybe not every night like we used to, but a lot more. We never really managed to make dinners an awesome thing during the pandemic.
If it’s up to me, the first place I go is Tom and Jerry’s. But I suspect the first place I actually go is to Alaska, either to accompany my mom when she returns, or for a service we are tentatively planning for my dad in June ish. I don’t feel the need to be there for a service, per se, but I feel an aching, profound need to stand in front of his little ash urn niche at the cemetery and say my goodbyes and have a good cry.
Q: What are ways death by cop looks like in Alaska? Have you done any research into how common it is?
This stuff is so real and raw up there and even the ones that happened decades ago I am still hesitant to talk about. I don’t feel like its my place. Others are in a lot more pain over them. I will confine myself to one from 1986 or so, where my friend was forced to hole up in his house with his father, who somehow got the cops called on him, and a lot of guns. A firefight ensued. My friend was killed.
A more recent one was… just terrible. But essentially you give the cops no choice but to shoot you. Come at em with a gun. Shoot at them. That sort of thing. As you may have heard these last couple days, getting a cop to shoot you isn’t actually that hard.
Fairbanks was consistently among the highest violent crime and suicide rates in the country, but I haven’t done a ton of research of late. Looks like currently Fairbanks has a violent crime rate higher than 94% of US cities, and it is a lot better now than it used to be. Alaska has the second highest suicide rate in the nation, though Fairbanks seems to be in the middle of the pack.
I would say, though, that line was kind of… not a throwaway line but maybe made it seemed exaggerated. Two or three suicides by cop seems like a lot to me? And what I was really talking about was suicide in general, of which there were and are many, many more up there.
Q: You have spoken about your desire for coffee grounds to balance out the compost, but you don't drink coffee. Can you not simply buy a large can of coffee (say, Folger's), wet it, and add it to the bin? Is it not economically feasible to use coffee *just* for compost if you're not also drinking it?
Yeah, that seems wasteful. In any case, this issue is on hold currently since my mom is here, and she is a coffee drinker.
Q: When you sell stuff at discogs is it one by one or can you sell chunks like “Depeche Mode Collection” with 20 cds in a bundle
One at a time, sometimes two. One time I sold, like, 50 CDs to this guy in China, he didn’t get them, I had to refund them, six months later the CDs were returned to me. It was a nightmare. I don’t do many international orders anymore, though, since Discogs messed up their shipping policies.
Let’s do a mix. LADIES MIX. I love that Julie Delpy album. Had forgotten all about it, it came on randomly last weekend while gardening. She really is a treasure. And I’ve recently been kinda into late period L7 — I had no idea they were still making albums. But I guess you get an old song on this mix. Don’t worry, new L7 is coming.
That was fun! Will do it again some time. Thank you thank you thank you. But for now, I am off. Day off, gardening, etc. etc. WOOOO!
Whoops forgot the Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1E10iiE7oNK9xZCDbTv9ve?si=N_uQ8gi8Qo-8AaYgmnoozQ