Half finished articles

Since starting this personal site, I’ve mostly been writing monthly retrospectives about my projects.

I’ve also written a couple of articles about other topics - like when I resurrected shouldigrowabeard.com or one of my first posts retiring my 2012 Macbook Pro.

But there’s several other posts that I never finished for one reason or another. Usually it’s because I got bored of writing it, or I don’t really have new insight, or because I can’t find the right narrative.

By writing this post I can finally ditch all of those half-written articles and forget about them. They’ll be done in the sense that I’ll never see them on the shelf of articles-to-finish again.

The State of Instagram

The biggest of the incomplete articles was ‘the state of Instagram’ where I discussed the level of spam, lazy content, disguised ads, and engagement tricks that plague the platform.

It went through a couple of iterations. The initial post was about ‘hidden instagram ads’ where meme pages would put an ad in the middle of an album. But on top of that, the ad itself is disguised as a meme.

After a few weeks I had found so much more shady stuff to write about - bot farms, shady engagement tricks, non-native ads targeting vulnerable people on a platform known for being a breeding ground for teen’s poor mental health. So I decided to put it all in one post.

But I could never find the right things to say without it getting boring or uninteresting. In short it was a sort of exposé of the shady stuff that goes on on the platform. None of it was that surprising to me. Though I don’t know about anyone else.

That was back in mid 2021. And by now, although that stuff is still rapant, it has evolved a little, so my research is dated too.

My Recipe for Focus

The next post that never made it was my ‘recipe for focus’.

I had seen a few articles on this topic before, where people would share their routines and habits for being productive. I decided to do the same because of course I have some unique insight into being productive right? Not really.

My key takeaways were to remove distractions, block out time, practice, and experiment. Groundbreaking I know.

There were a few things I talked about that I hadn’t seen in other focus / productivity articles. Like discussing different types of distractions and how to avoid each of them - visual distractions, audible, physical.

The key one was to be mindful of phyiscal comfort before starting a block of work. So you can continue in a flow state without getting interrupted by the need to pee, drink, or to put on a sweater because it’s cold.

Half finished articles article

That’s this.