I followed a link in a newsletter to an article about how to build anything extremely quickly, which felt like bs at first, but is actually just a very simple technique the author calls “outline speedrunning”. It starts with two steps.
- Make an outline of the project
- For each item in the outline, make an outline. Do this recursively until the items are small
The remaining steps are how to actually build the project, which is to say by speedrunning through the build as well. Then there are some examples. But what I really like are those first two steps.
I admire people that can take a look at a project and outline its steps in detail. It requires patience and foresight, and I’m impressed when I see people on our team do it. I tend to operate a little more chaotically, feeling my way around a project as I go. It’s worked out well, but not all projects fit that way.
So the speedrunning part of outlining was appealing because it’s a way to do it without getting in my own head about it. Just sit down and do it. As a first round I did a bit of outline speedrunning for a new project I’m working on.
I think it was kind of helpful. I kind of like this outlining speedrunning.
Donald Hall on the essential third thing in love.
most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.
Notes
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