After seeing the Francis Bacon: Man and Beast exhibition at the Royal Academy I’ve been thinking about the way that Bacon repeated himself frequently in his paintings.

Giving unnecessarily detailed responses to pseudoscientific crank claims.

Some years ago, I set myself the rule that I would only read one book at a time. This turned out to be a terrible idea.

Part of Ultraworking’s work cycles process involves defining a plan at the start of a work session and then making regular pace checks to see whether there’s anything you need to adjust in order to hit your goal. One of the adjustments that often comes up is asking whether it would make sense to “re-scope”. This just means adjusting the scope of your goal for the session.

I’ve been writing about my writing process, breaking it down into steps in order to think about the parts separately. This process of breaking the work down into discrete steps is helpful in other contexts as well. I benefited a lot from doing a similar thing with music while I was working on the Nosferatu soundtrack. The steps were different, but the principle of creating a repeatable process got me through the project with a lot less pain than I would have had without that structure.