On July 11, 2024, I started my third newsletter.
My first, The Inclusive Leader, lasted a month or two back in 2018. The second was daily, co-created & -curated with others the Works Council. This lasted four to six months.
v1. 500 Words
9 posts.
I started with intent to:
- publish consistently, daily;
- decrease cognitive load by limiting length; and
- authenticity over polish—write, then publish.
As I wrote daily, I was finding the nominative deterministic length to feel not quite right. I felt like I needed to write an article every day, feeling more like a performance than developing a personal, sustainable writing practice.
After writing and publishing for nine days straight, I switched things up.
v2. 500 Characters
58 posts.
I needed to decrease the friction of writing to build the inertia of a writing practice.
I lowered the threshold to 500 Characters, sustaining it for 12 weeks with more than 25k words written at the half-way mark. It felt good. I wrote what was relevant to me at the time, where my head was at. I played around with different writing styles, structures, and content.
Then, life happened. Things changed.
I started a new contract which came with a slew of new things. New rhythms, new ways of working—rituals disrupted, inertia lost.
v3. Weekly Wanders
1 post; with my new newsletter system, Buttondown.
Finished uploading the archive from Substack today—owned by technofascists cheering on their bro, Elon Musk, during an ongoing administrative coup. Choosing to divest.
It was to be a summation of things I wrote during the week. But, again, the vibe was off. I couldn't get the name right, it's purpose. I know & knew it was a newsletter that I wouldn't be able to sustain.
I need to align this newsletter writing with the practices I've been cultivating as I craft & grow my website.
v4. Craft & Practice
Weekly propagation of thoughts & links from my digital garden.
I'll share things from my digital garden. (Change /links/ to /soil).
I wrote about it in 500 Characters, on (date): (link).
I've been thinking about it for a while. Listened to Emergent Strategy podcast episode where they discuss soil as a way to frame what you ingest.
Curative intentionality. With reflection, and meaning.
- Soil is filled with my intake: links to things I'm reading, reactions, bookmarks. Chaos organized by tags and emergence.
- Journal has notes & thoughts of varying completeness. They help link ideas over time; tending to and nurturing them.
So far, those are where I am with my site. Isn't this about newsletters?
A weekly update on happenings in my garden. Curated summation of things I'm cultivating.
Proof of work. Growing over time. At a pace of practice flexible for life's events.
What I tend will change over time, as I move through my own seasons of inrerests Each , and necessities of life, and
I'm a digital gardener.
A 2026 Update
This was the further evolution and eventual name.
I originally wrote this on 27th of March, 2025. Today, 22nd of March, 2026, I'm at the following stats for Craft & Practice (next newsletter goes out next Friday!):
- 11 posts, switching to monthly posts.
Also:
- have a logo & identity system developed
- have the url redirecting to the newsletter itself
- becoming more regular.
However, I've found that I do need a more frequent and consistent cadence—once a month is too long of a wait between posts...but also...I should/could maybe have a different newsletter, and this one goes out monthly but the others are on a different, separate cadence.