One of my goals for this blog is to build up a queue of posts. Ideally, it’s maybe a month’s or season’s worth of posts. This queue makes publishing here every day much more relaxing, and I can experience less worry about falling behind a schedule (which has happened!).

Until this week, that goal felt impossible to me.  

Earlier this week, I set a goal of writing a dozen blog posts in a day. As I set the goal, it occurred to me that I could refer to my journal and respond to that, instead of racking my brain or just responding to whatever I see on the internet. 

I would also write multiple posts at a time in a single document, and upload them in a batch. As I published more, I got more ideas, and on a walk I made a spontaneous decision dictate some of the ideas into my Notes app. These transcriptions serve as really rough initial drafts for me to work on.

This blog has a queue now, which feels nice. It’s certainly not an excuse to get too loose—I still plan on writing every day. But at least I can spend more time editing and thinking now.

More importantly though, it felt really energizing to do something that I’d thought wasn’t possible. 

Sometimes, “impossible” is just a problem that you haven’t found a solution to yet. That’s what this was. This meta-practice of solving a problem without an obvious solution often requires not only challenging an assumption. It also requires what Mihnea Moldoveanu and  Roger L. Martin describe in Diaminds as “expanding the search space.” They write:

Stretch goes the instinct of the diamind as it expands the search space along with the constraint space. And the way to expand a search space is to ask a new question, one that’s guided by the new set of constraints.

A lot of times, I’ve found talking to friends a really great way to expand the search space too, because they often respond with their opinions and perspectives very naturally.