What I did: 2025-W13
My sub-theme for 2025-W13 (ie the 13th week of 2025 in the ISO calendar) is writing. And while I did less writing than I would have liked, I did do more writing than I would have otherwise. I created this Substack, I wrote my first essay (Just Get Started) here, and I started drafting this update. I also did some Tweeting. So I’ll consider the week’s theme to be a win.
A common problem which I have is that I daydream up these complicated, quite ambitious projects, and then I set the bar for the first version to match what is in my head. In software engineering, we would call this architecture astronauting, where you are more focused on abstraction and the system around what you are doing and then the essence of the thing which you are doing itself.
The essence of this project is to create a weekly cadence of intentionally planning my week, executing against that plan, and then sharing what I did last week. The main reason I wrote the Just Get Started essay was to give myself permission to do the rough version of this project.
I mainly write for myself. Past Me benefits by doing things, that I wouldn’t have other wise, so that I can write about them. Present Me benefits by being more intentional about the things I am doing as I write about them, and the Future me gets to reference what Present Me wrote.
March 7, 2025, was my half birthday, or as my mother calls it Ram Day. In the last six months, particularly the period from about a month before my 25th birthday to now, there has been a fundamental shift in the trajectory of my life (something that I will talk more about later).
I started being able to coordinate with myself over the span of a day (i.e. consistently completing my daily todo list) and am now working on coordinating with myself over the span of a week https://t.co/Nk2OukgkTu
— Ram Vasuthevan (12/100) (@RamVasuthevan) March 25, 2025
(This tweet is worth being expanded into an essay, but making that a blocker for publishing this essay will turn this update, which was posted a week late, into an update which was never posted.)
I am now working on coordinating with myself over a week. I have been daydreaming about this project for months now, thinking about what the best version of it looks like. But those were months of me avoiding contact with reality. I am afraid that this is going to be a failure. That I will have poor execution or just get bored and stop. But failure is a risk that you must take on when starting any project.
But I will leave with this mantra from one of my favourite intellectuals, Visakan Veerasamy:
1. Do it 100 times.
Write 100 songs, cook 100 omelettes, talk to 100 people. It never seems like a huge deal until you try it yourself. It’s manageable, and yet it stretches you, and you’ll be observably different at the end of it. Effective way to get a foothold on a new thing— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) November 23, 2020
Write 100 weekly updates. Start 100 side-projects. Just Get Started.
I found your observations about your mental habit of daydreaming grand ambitions to be interesting, and I can definitely recall this habit in myself as well. Although I certainly fall into the trap of over-engineering as much as anyone else, I also always try to focus on the concept of the MVP, and the path from the MVP to the grand ambitions. I think the best project plans have a grand ambition that feeds obsession and constraints for an MVP (like a deadline or cost). The constraints help you to find the MVP, the MVP provides a viable path to creating the grand ambition, and the grand ambition motivates.
I hope you publish more of these, or more of anything. I’ve really enjoyed reading your first two essays.