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Really enjoyed this, Dan, particularly the footnote on the ? of asynchrony of typing/thinking while writing. I'd love to instrument this for myself. I type at 110WPM; writing a ~5k word essay (involving original ideas) consistently takes me 5-6hrs, or 13-18WPM.

I probably rewrite most sentences at least once, often two or three times, but that's still far below the 110WPM. I don't think I really can "think while typing." Typing is probably just "dead time"; if so, and if I rewrite ~2x, then I burn 90m "just typing."

And so if I could increase my typing speed from 110WPM to, say, 150WPM, I could reduce that 90m to 50-60m. The whole thing is still taking me circa 5 hours. One thing I notice is that doing this roughly consumes "a day's creative work"—i.e. I can't do *another* thing afterwards.

Not because I don't have time, but because I'm "spent" in some way. I wonder how much reduction from 5-6h would be necessary before it no longer felt like it consumed the "slot" for primary creative work for the day.

7:50 PM · Oct 15, 2021Twitter Web App

Another aside, while I'm rambling: for "high-stakes" or "important" essays, I'll often spend tens of hours writing a few k-words. Most of that time is spent refining my understanding of the idea. That does involve typing (lots of notes); wonder how typing-speed-bound that is.

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The real question here, I suppose, is: how to become faster at the non-typing parts of the process? I don't really understand the processes at work there very well at all, much less how to optimize them!

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More (sorry): design can be pretty well modeled as a search process. The key params determining execution time are how good you are at selecting subtrees and how rapidly you can test them. Getting just a little faster at rendering (or mental vis!) makes a huge diff in the latter.

Michael LaCroix

@mjplacroix