Working with the garage door up

Created: 28 March 2024
Created: 28 Mar 2024
Last updated: 28 March 2024
Last updated: 28 Mar 2024
🌱 Seedling
1 min read

Is it really a personal-knowledge-management system if I don’t have a post on working with the garage door up?

I found Austin Kleon’s post from 2022 after Googling, but the most famous post is Andy Matuschak’s note, who I get a lot of ideas from. Recently I found this article from Waldo Jaquith, giving me an excuse to write up some initial thoughts.

I think Waldo captures the main benefit:

I’ve long worked in the open, overwhelmingly for one reason: it increases enormously the surface area for success. That might mean thinking out loud on social media, documenting ideas as blog entries, or publishing software as open source.

Separately, I find that the idea of you-can-just-do-things is tantilizing, but after a certain point it’s nice to have someone to point folks to to reach out to a human. By having a draft artifact to beat up, it can help move the project along.