What a year of writing in public actually did

A year ago I started publishing instead of keeping notes to myself. The honest summary is that it changed my work more than it changed my audience. The clearest effect was on my thinking. Writing something down for a stranger forces you to close the gaps you skate over in your own head. Roughly a third of the pieces I started were abandoned halfway, and every one of those was abandoned because the argument fell apart under its own weight — which is a good outcome, just not a publishable one. The second effect was on the work I get asked to do. People arrive already knowing how I think about a problem, so the first conversation starts much further along. Two things I expected did not happen. Nothing went viral, and I stopped minding. And writing regularly did not get faster — it got easier to start and just as slow to finish.