Resuming snippet writing?

About two month ago I encountered a snippets dry spell. At the time I didn’t foresee writing snippets at the same rate I had been leading up to that point. Sure enough, over the two months that followed I only wrote a handful of snippets. March saw two simultaneous Peer Learning Groups, and April lead into a period of intense virtual ping pong playing and lots of real-life hiking.

We wrapped up the Peer Learning Groups, a largely asynchronous low-commitment activity, with a virtual synchronous meet-up and coworking session. During these I produced these two snippets about what I learned for my PLG sessions: one on Laser Eye Surgery, one on Oil Pricing. I think this could be the trigger that brings me back into the pattern of writing snippets again, though I’m not certain.

Setting out to write snippets once more, I have a handful of half-baked ideas about what to write about: sleep, ping pong, virtual reality, hiking, the list of ideas from February¹, yet more snippets about Browserflow and Roam Research, machine learning research, PLG and other online learning ideas, and pandemic coping are all on my list.

When I sat down today to pen a snippet, I initially thought I would write about my ideas for using virtual reality table tennis for group coaching sessions. It felt funny though; I wasn’t sure why I was writing it. Was snippets a place to collect good ideas I may want to share with people in the future?

This snippet is me taking a moment to reflect on why I write snippets, to reload my old reasoning back into memory, and to see if it still makes sense to me.

I had a few early reasons. Learning to communicate was a big one early on. Avoiding the addicting nature of social media was part of why I chose to write here, rather than on another platform. Feeling like I was writing for no audience, and the freedoms and desires that I found came with that, was a bigger reason for continuing on this platform rather than another. All of these continue to ring true, though there is one key way in which my writing deviates from its stated purpose.

When I set out to get better at communicating, one of my motivations was for communicating research. I’ve hardly written about my research at all! I don’t want to make a big change here; I like the type of topic I tend to select for snippets, and I like the expectation that I’ve set for myself that I can write about anything, with the bar set extremely low. That said, I will make a small mental adjustment, and add to my internal Potential Topics List writing about my published research.

So, with this snippet, I hope and intend that I am resuming somewhat more frequent writing. This is a non-promise, a mere “aspirational intent” like the one I made about biking back in October. That one worked out though; I continued biking regularly well into the cold season, so I’m optimistic that this one will pan out positively as well.