The Tweets

What was this about again?

You can find the original announcement here and more specifics clarifying the format (or the lack of it) here. Here’s the short version:

• Put up a piece of content everyday between 1st October and 30th October, with the possibility of skipping one day per week;
• Post a link to your content on Twitter with #exportober
• That’s it, actually. 🤷‍♀️

Psst. It’s quite fine to sign up even if you’re reading this after the 1st of October. The automated tracking exercise here will stop after the 15th of November, so you can be a part of this by just contributing in this window. It certainly does’t have to be daily and it doesn’t have to be 30 things, although I found those to be useful default targets to work with for myself.

The Tweets

Sign up!

While you can participate simply by using #exportober in your tweets, it’ll be great if you could explicitly enter your Twitter username in the form below, so we can check in on each other! 🤝

While I’m not going to write a Twitter bot that will send you daily reminders over DM, I do hope to create a separate page for each registered participant at the end of the challenge that shows off just their entries in one place, so it’s helpful to know who you are 😀

Is this for me? #whybother with #exportober

In general, I imagine only you would know if this is for you — this may not be a priority or a point of interest for you right now, but if you’re reading this, possibly your interest is at least mildly piqued?

What this is about is setting aside some time for yourself and to participate alongside friends who’re in it for fun and profit:

We often avoid taking action because we think "I need to learn more," but the best way to learn is often by taking action.

— James Clear (@JamesClear) September 23, 2020

• The fun bit is in the making and sharing.
• The profit bit is the hope that we trick ourselves into making this a bit of a regular habit for life.

Longer term, you may or may not want to be sharing or publishing on a daily basis. But hopefully, longer term, you are engaged with the process on a regular basis.

Personally, there’s almost nothing that I do consistently on a daily basis, not counting the things one needs to do continue being alive. I’d like to see if I can change that a bit¹, and apparently doing such things bit by bit — and with some public commitment — is a good idea, hence the micro-nature of the challenge.

So overall I’ve gotten to a point where I’m just afraid to even think about putting something together because I think it’s an unrealistic commitment of time.

I’m also really bad at chunking - everything I do of this sort manifests at the wrong end of an all-nighter 🙈

— Neeldhara (@neeldhara) September 19, 2021

I want to be in, but I stoop no lower than meaningful masterpieces…

Hmm. One way that you could still make this work for you is to build out your masterpiece bit by bit. If it’s a tutorial, you could plan it out in advance and work through one coherent section a day. If it’s a sketch, you could share your partial progress as you go along, and even put it together in a timelapse at the end? That would be great to see!

There are some types of long-form content that aren’t naturally amenable to this type of chunking; say you want to put together a video exposition, make an origami sculpture, or crochet a Klein bottle. In this situation, you could either use the challenge to document your process and progress; or you could just claim to engage in #exportoberlite with a reduced frequency of production — say once a week, or one masterpiece at the end — you’ll just have to still tweet it out so I can catalog it ❤️

I really don’t like the illusion that there is one process for making and that it involves writing every day. Thinking is work to. So is reading. So is doing things that seem unrelated to writing. Our brains are always thinking about what we’re making, whether we’re typing or not

— ChristianAntonGerard (@CAGerardPoet) January 25, 2020

Also, while on the subject of masterpieces, there’s the parable of the pots. On the other hand, everyone does have their own process, and the idea isn’t to force a format: this process is temporary, flexible, and optional 🙌

This sounds like fun, but I have no idea what to make.

Oooh. Maybe just ping on Twitter if you are in this situation. I do imagine that there are folks who have more ideas than they can handle, so if you have the bandwidth, it’ll even out nicely! For some starter inspiration, just in case it is useful, here are some of the post types that I’m planning for the duration of this challenge, in roughly increasing order of desperation:

1. Trying some of the Chai and Why? experiments and documenting any accidents learnings.
2. Puzzles and programming contest roundups.
3. Lecture notes for classes/talks I’m teaching and/or attending.
4. Highlights from whatever podcasts I’m tuned into.
5. Clean up draft essays from previous lives.
6. Random doodles. And VSCode keyboard shortcuts.
7. Hot takes on inconsequential debates.²

I also have a few black holes nurtured over time — I’m looking at you, all my Read-It-NeverLater apps, the starred section in my RSS app, my YouTube watchlist, and relatives. Maybe about time to go down some of these rabbit holes with the excuse of commentary to follow.

So yes, that’ll be all for now! Let’s see how this goes 🤞 Meanwhile, please hop on and spread the word for all of us? Thank you! 🎉

PS. You might be curious about what participating will look like. I’m trying to setup a separate page for each participant in the challenge that will pull in all your tagged tweets. I’ll share a preview soon!