I found Vicki Boykis’ recent talk at RStudio Global very inspiring (I will post a link to the talk once it becomes available). In the talk she encouraged everyone in the audience to create and tend to their own “public garden” - meaning some online platform or website that they control - as a way to combat a modern social media ecosystem optimized for sorrow and outrage. She proposed trying to set the goal of writing one 200 word blog post per month. I think there is immense value in setting such a (relatively) humble goal. Aiming for only one 200 word post per month sounds reasonable even to those of us who are totally over worked and over burdened in countries where the pandemic is burning through our society like a wildfire. Having at least 2400 of your own words out in the world by the end of the year could at least make people feel more connected during this time. Therefore I am asking you to take the #BoykisChallenge with me and to write and share one 200 word post per month.

Currently I am in a pattern of spending my isolation days going from working on my computer screen to distracting myself and “doom scrolling” on my phone screen. To try to break out of this I am going to try write more on my phone. So far I have been using Notion which has a decent on-phone writing experience, it’s free, it’s delightfully not social, and it conveniently tells me tells me the current word count. I am happy to talk to folks about how and where to write, and if you want to join me in this challenge please let me know!