Massimo Curatella

Category: Posts

  • Reflecting, Again, On My Daily Writing Habit Practice

    I am establishing a new habit: journaling and free-flowing writing but privately. I feel very distant from the urge of publishing my thoughts. Weird. That’s the reason why I started this idea of publishing daily for a year. But I am struggling. All of my behaviors hint at me not wanting to do that. I am creating any possible situation and excuses not to post. In the last few weeks I’ve been writing my daily blog post with the same mood of checking my bank account balance before paying taxes. It’s profoundly unsettling. Still, I am managing to do it, every day. I am missing 60 days. And I see this time as what separates me from a new phase of my creative life. But which one? What is going to happen after the 15 of November 2021? It became stupid, shallow and childish, I won’t find much value from these rushed posts. And, maybe, that’s the lesson I was looking for.

    Well, sick of this parade, I’m carving back my space for private writing. It’s a different need in a different context. I have nothing to demonstrate to anybody. I can go with the flow, careless of hurting somebody, especially the spell-checker (fuck it!). I have different goals. Or better, I am still looking for the same thing: continuity. But a different kind of it. While here, on the blog, I am striving for keeping the daily streak, rather indifferent to the quality, the outcome, the feedback, again, just to check the boxes, when I write in my journal I can really hear my voice. I can be in a safe space with my thoughts. It’s there, now, that I want to grow a thinking practice. Rather than always vomiting spontaneous and seldomly related thoughts, I want to  extract threads and build upon them. That gives me more sense of purpose and meaning. It’s going to require time, and hard work and I am not sure it might directly impact my public articles soon but I feel more compelled by that kind of creative practice right now.

    Until my next flow of conscience.

  • Hypothetical Backwards Remediation

    I write daily and I find immense benefits in writing but it is hard and harder. Yesterday I missed my day and I feel liberated. I am tired of publishing bullshits only for the sake of checking the day. Now I have to understand if and how to catch-up for that missed day so I have a double problem: filling in yesterday’s in addition to today’s one. Why is that making me bored? Isn’t that what I wanted? I committed to publishing daily for one year, 60 days are remaining and I am not going to stop now.

  • Morning Golden

    Writing in the morning, first thing, is nice. Especially if I don’t set the goal to publish it. I feel more free to go in the flow, to listen to my thoughts. I can even writer longer, up to one hour continuously.

    I am not concerned about not making immediate use of the morning writing for blog posts. I can feel a deeper work, aiming at creating the foundations for something more robust and long-term.

    That is why, here, I am left with the metawriting, the writing about the writing that happened. It’s still positive and useful. And I am honoring my daily commitment to publish.

    So far so good.

  • Happy Writing About Writing

    I woke up early to write. And without worrying about any audience or any goal. I time-boxed to one hour. I felt good and free. I find useful what I wrote. But it wasn’t appropriate for a short post. So this is a meta-post, it’s how I feel about the fact that I wrote, today. I hope I can repeat this experiment.

    This is post 309/365.

  • A.I. isn’t as Advanced as I Need It, Yet.

    I would definitely love AI to write this post. What if it knew what I know, how I feel, what I want and what my goals are here, and it wrote this post for me. What would it write?

    If I could ideally separate my thoughts from my feelings I would have done some research on my interests and I would have isolated a nice, specific, little topic. I would have defined it according to several sources. And I would have explained at least a couple of possible applications or real examples. That would suit me.

    When can I get such technology?

    I need it now.

  • Curated Writing

    Today I made an experiment. I am not going to publishing anything I am not going to feel comfortable with.

    That’s it.

  • The Daily Pain of Writing

    The more I keep on writing daily. The more I feel like I don’t want to do it. I have made a commitment. I will write and publish daily on my blog for one year. But I have less and less will to do it. Sadly, if I go back to read my first articles, I find them better compared to what I’m writing right now. I feel different from that time. Initially, I had no idea what it would take to write and publish daily. But I had a lot of enthusiasm. It felt new. I felt a lot of energy. And it was frustrating but also fun. In the last few weeks. I feel like it’s a chore. I always do it at night when I am exhausted, and I really don’t want to do it. It is clear to me. I’ve been reporting to myself that it’s a bad habit. And so this is what happened. A good habit that would fuel my creativity and would represent a challenge to demonstrate my capability of being coherent and consistent became something which is repetitive and flat and devoid of energy. I need to accept that. Because I never set the standard for the quality of what I am publishing, my commitment was only to write every day. I’m doing it. But I’m not satisfied with the quality of what I am writing. What is coming closer, is the end of this year of blogging daily. So I’m wondering what will happen when I don’t have the need to write daily. Will I ever write again? And what will I write?

  • Estimation and planning

    When estimating a change request you need to be careful with the remaining planning . If you underestimate the time needed you risk negatively affecting the entire schedule.

    Possible solutions.

    Take more time to estimate the new task.

    Ask for more time.

    Procrastinate the remaining schedule.

    Ask for help.

  • Trust is Expensive and Delicate

    You build trust with continuous investments during long periods of time. You cannot decide when it’s time to earn it. The others are deciding.

    Reducing trust is too easy and it might be difficult if not impossible to rebuild it.

    Working to build trust is a slow and careful process requiring focus and resources, continuously.

  • The Value of Experience

    The experience I made in a technical field came useful today when I had to explain to a peer how to face a certain context. I realized I had a clear vision about the problem, its ramifications and how to approach them.

    I always feel like I need to study more and know more and I tend to undervalue the vast knowledge i have gathered on the field. Not having those notions written and organized doesn’t make them less valuable.

    I only wish I could create objects out of my experience, to be more effective and flexible when sharing it.