One of my least favorite words is "overthinking." I firmly believe that whatever someone's problem is, thinking too much can never be the problem.
We all know people, maybe even ourselves, who have thought themselves into circles about relatively simple decisions. Clearly this person has a thinking problem, but the problem isn't that they are thinking too much: it's that they aren't thinking well.
Let me prove it to you by contradiction. Say you are worried that you are overthinking an issue in your life. How in the world are you supposed to be able to evaluate this claim? The only way is meta-cognition: thinking about your thinking process. Through meta-cognition you may come to the conclusion that you have been doing too much unproductive thinking. But it would be impossible to say that you were doing too much thinking because the only way you were able to determine that you were thinking too much was more thinking!
This word "overthinking" feels appropriate when someone is doing too much of unhelpful kinds of thinking. Thus I propose we replace it with a new word. Let's say, you're "thinking poorly." Ok, that's a bit harsh. Maybe "thinking in circles" is a better metaphor.
Now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's do some reflections on my process of reflecting.
I set up this research schedule for myself 4ish months ago. I've learned a lot about how I work in that time. For the most part, I've liked this schedule. Let's reflect on what I don't like:
- non-informative logistics around post production and publication for podcast episodes
- feeling pressured to reflect, record, edit and publish reflections all in the morning on mondays
The pros of my current process:
- re-reading my last reflection and journal entries from then until now is really useful
What value does recording, editing, and publishing my research recap podcasts provide for me?
None, save when others listen to it and then contact me to be friends
In other words, I gain all of the value from simply doing the reflection in text, minus the people that listen to the podcast that wouldn't read my bi-weekly text updates. Recording it on audio is simply for audio-based people.
Ok, so that's pretty clear that audio episodes are a waste of time. I could replace them with a bi-weekly newletter. Maybe a tinyletter, like Glen Chiacchieri has
TODO undo last two commits and then duplicate a big file and see if you can see it on github pages
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/git/handle-big-repositories-git