With the stream going, I found it surprisingly easy to stay 100% focused and on task for a 5hr session. This isn’t usually a big deal for me—I’ve got strategies for distraction—but as in meditation, the process usually requires some “returning to the breath.” Here it didn’t.
Conversation
I felt obliged to narrate as I worked. I think the video would be massively less useful without that. Narration is taxing—I found I couldn’t ruminate while also narrating. So sometimes when I got stuck I’d have to switch back and forth.
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In a “rubber ducky” sense, forcing myself to narrate could be helpful. Sometimes things becomes clearer when I try to explain why I’m confused. But some mental trails are simply inchoate, and will remain so for quite some time. Trying to make them legible can damage them.
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When stuck during streams, I felt pressure to get myself unstuck much sooner than I normally would, e.g. by giving up or switching strategies. This is sometimes a useful pressure, but often not—many times I’ve broken through a block by banging my head against it for hrs (or wks).
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I felt a little hit of gratification at the end of my workday when producing these streams. My projects are all super long, so a given day rarely produces legible output—but hey, look, I published a video! This strikes me as dangerous.
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I’ve been training myself to draw fulfillment from the *process* of creative work, rather than outputs. Feeling a boost from publishing a stream seems like it would help here, but I fear it’s actually just manufacturing an output and satisfying the outcome-oriented impulse.
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I felt some hazy sense of “performing” while on stream. This is certainly bad: I need to feel totally unfettered by social expectations in my creative space. Otherwise I’ll be afraid to do hard things, or follow impulses I don’t understand. Maybe performativity would diminish.
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Tactically speaking, I’d feel hesitant to let myself get side-tracked down a rabbit hole—even though such rabbit holes are often essential to later projects. Streaming is probably more appropriate when I have a clear plan to do something concrete for many hours.
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Do people really learn anything from these streams? People certainly claimed to learn things from my earlier streams. I can believe it, maybe, but I wonder to what extent people are deluding themselves. Certainly it’s extremely inefficient: what’s the insight-per-minute?
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I can't comprehend how they can find the time to watch a 5.5 hour stream
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No signal yet on the 5hr stream—people claimed to have learned from previous 1-2hr streams. Still, I expect they jump around and speed it up.