Excess rigamarole

Q: What’s the smallest possible version of the piece you’ve been avoiding — and would you actually write that smaller version this week instead of waiting for the real one?

This week I’m answering questions I had Claude seed for me. This one is interesting because it perfectly matches an insight I had yesterday. I’m struggling to keep up with my newsletter and writing exercises. When that happens it’s a good sign something is off and I know it. I’ve let my exercises become too complicated again. I was trying to make the exercises more rigorous, but I’ve just added excess rigamarole. The exercises need to be small enough to fit in a snapshot.

Not only would it work better as an exercise, but then I can build an actual snapshot mechanism for posting the exercises elsewhere as an image. When my AI tokens reset tomorrow I’m going to rebuild the system. It will still have a pause to jot down a plan, and a reflection at the end, but the exercise itself is going to rely more on the writer to interpret instructions.