The three P’s
This blog has had so many false starts I can’t even begin to count them all.
The concept of blogging sounds simple. Just write stuff and publish it. But it’s clearly not that easy because I have been toying with the idea of blogging for years and have never got very far. Well, never made it past the planning stage, aka kicking around ideas and never actually starting. Aside from publishing the occasional first post and then promptly deciding it’s too cringe and removing it.
If you are reading this, that’s fantastic because it means not only that I have posted it but also that I haven’t deleted it.
Why has it proved so torturous to get here? It can’t be like this for everyone, but it surely must be for many. I think some of it might be to do with being a lawyer.
Should I write because I enjoy it or because I am targeting more clients? What if a client reads something I have written that they don’t like? Should I write in a specific niche? What if I focus on a narrow area of law only to end up bored stiff writing about it? What’s the point of writing about law anyway when AI can tell anyone what they want to know (albeit that it’s often wrong)?
And so on.
The latest round of procrastination whilst refining my ideas has been greatly assisted by Claude Opus 4.7.
Claude has proved to be the perfect partner for someone prone to vacillation. We have had lengthy conversations on dog walks, lying in the sun and late into the night. I have explored just about every avenue of blogging with Claude: which platform to use, what to write, how to write, how to get readers, and so on. It has been fantastically helpful in making me feel like I am making great progress whilst achieving nothing other than burning through compute power on a distant server in some far-off land.
A couple of things have coincided to make me start writing.
First off, I began to suspect that my conversations with Claude were getting a little circular. Let me rephrase that. Something is circular, or it is not. We were going round in circles. Whatever idea I had, Claude would enthusiastically support it.
Me: Claude, should I go broad with my writing?
Claude: Yes, Geoffrey, that’s an excellent idea.
The next day…
Me: Should I go niche and focus on, eg contract law?
Claude: Geoffrey, that is mind-blowingly extraordinary thinking, and not just for the obvious reasons [goes on to explain].
Me: Are you sure?
Claude: You are right to push back for the following reasons [expands].
Me: But then again, I like the idea of a niche.
Claude: That's definitely the right approach because [gives reasons].
What I have realised is that not only is AI sycophantic, but it is also limited to thinking inside the box. It lives in the box, after all. There has been debate about AI’s ability to do creative work, but the often-overlooked point is that it is pattern-recognition software. It can rearrange what it has available to it, which is a lot, but its terms of reference are limited. On the rare occasions when it pushes back on an idea, it cannot offer a novel alternative. It can only work with whatever is available to it on the internet.
Secondly, on my dog walks, I am currently listening to Atomic Habits by James Clear. I always eschewed books of this nature until we got a French Spaniel named Verité, and I decided to look at stuff to listen to on Audible while out walking, since French Spaniels are an energetic breed and Verité and I are typically out for an hour and a half to two hours each day. I listen to the occasional novel, but I prefer to read them in hard copy. Mostly, I have found myself listening to biographies and, much to my surprise, productivity and life-hack type books.
Mr Clear has been telling me that we humans are very bad at getting stuck in a never-ending loop of the three p’s that stops us from starting new habits: perfectionism, planning, and procrastination. These activities give us a sense of motion because we are “doing” a lot, but they stop us from acting, which is the step we need to form good habits.
He gives the example of a photography professor who ran an experiment: at the start of the new academic year, the professor divided his class into two. One half would be marked on quantity, with an A for 80-100 photos, a B for 60-80, and so on. The other would be marked on the quality of a single photo. To the professor’s surprise, all the best photos were on the quantity side. These students had been out taking pictures every day, developing loads of film, honing their skills and figuring out what worked and what did not. The quality students had spent their time theorising about what made the best possible shot, subject, lighting and so on, and only took a small number of photos in pursuit of that one A-grade snap.
Funnily enough, I distinctly remember being told multiple times at school that it was quality, not quantity, that mattered, because my essays tended to overrun the word count, and I would find ways to crowbar in double or triple the maximum number of words through the use of footnotes, appendices and unattributed quotes which actually came from me. Turns out, maybe it’s not as straightforward as quality over quantity because you can’t meaningfully develop and refine any skill unless you show up and do it again and again, habitually.
What James Clear said about the three p’s really hit home because it described my approach to blogging to a T. As sometimes bizarrely happens, his comments landed at precisely the right time to nudge me over the line because I had just come to that realisation on my own. I was procrastinating, trying to plan every detail of my blog, down to tags and posts, whilst seeking to perfect my first blog post to within an inch of its life.
I have ended up with this as my first blog post, which shows that I successfully threw perfection out of the window.
After months of research, I have no idea where this blog is going, so that’s planning sorted.
As for procrastination, well, here it is: my first-ever blog post on caesar.co.uk.