First drafts and standards

[00:00:00] You're listening to The Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] On this podcast, we've talked about how your first draft is never the best work you can do. We've talked about it a few times and here's the thing: once you really realize that your first draft is never your best work, and you start to really see yourself improve with revisions... you raise the bar, your standards for your own output start to go up.

[00:00:49] You expect more out of yourself. This can have all kinds of different effects on you depending on who you are, your nature, and maybe even your situation. For example, the kind of podcast recording that I would be okay with maybe a couple months ago for either of the podcasts I have is different from what I'm okay with now, and there's an interesting kind of dichotomy there.

[00:01:22] When the podcast, or really any work you do is more a labour of love or something that doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on your life, it can be difficult to figure out how much work and effort it makes sense to put into it. Contrary to popular belief, I think that better work does in fact take more effort.

[00:01:45] You may know more, you may be able to do certain parts of the process faster than you could before, but still your effort goes up too, maybe in a different way than before. But yeah. So, uh, I build websites and over the course of my career, the kind of website I'm capable of building and the kind of website I'm interested in building have both changed dramatically from the simple website to far more complex websites with moving parts.

[00:02:18] I can do the basic stuff pretty fast, but instead of just being comfortable doing those basic websites faster, I always find myself pushing and trying for more complex and more interesting projects. Projects that will keep me engaged, but which by their very nature take longer to do. My standards for what I wanna do and what I'm capable of doing have changed.

[00:02:46] I don't work less hard. I work just as hard or even more maybe, uh, but I just concentrate my effort in different areas. In a lot of way, I put far more care and intention into my work now than I did before because I know more, and maybe I even know better. Sometimes all of that can also be paralyzing.

[00:03:14] When you expect more from yourself, sometimes you might not wanna do the work because you know how much more effort you'll have to put into it. I've certainly been there. It's a weird place to find yourself in because now you know that you won't be okay with your first draft, and so you'll have to do a second draft - more work before you yourself will be comfortable with what you produce.

[00:03:36] I don't think everyone is like that. I think for me, that certainly comes from my perfectionist tendencies a little bit, even though I'm always working to fight those. The curse of caring, the curse of getting better is that the stuff never lets up. It's ongoing.

It was a heavy day for me. And the heaviness of the day eventually got to me and I fell asleep in the middle of a conversation and definitely napped for a good three hours in the evening.

[00:04:10] But I have an excellent spouse who has been having to take care of me a lot recently with the heavy kind of crazy days I've been experiencing, although thankfully he is excellent at it and loves me. I am very lucky in that. And, uh, yeah, it is connected, I promise, in my head, anyway. so that's what's been on my mind today.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.