# November Retrospective

Throughout November, I’ve been keeping up with the [Inkhaven](https://www.inkhaven.blog/fall-25) mandate to write and post a blogpost, of at least 500 words, every day. It’s the last day of November, so how’d that go?

First and foremost: most of my blogposts from this month are pretty mediocre, by my own standards. Not necessarily bad, plausibly worthwhile, but I am not particularly impressed by them.

Largely, that’s because (unlike the Inkhaven program proper) I did not set aside the entire month for post-writing. I worked most of the month, took a vacation in the last week and a half, and none of that time was primarily focused on writing. The large majority of posts were low-effort in one way or another.

About a third were long standing denizens of my drafts area. For those, I mostly got them done by abandoning whatever vision I originally had for the post, instead filling in only what was already in my head, just enough to make the post shippable at all. Thus posts like e.g.:

*   [Moonrise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/27vdN22r5PCPZzQud/the-moonrise-problem), which is one half of a really good post on AI alignment
*   [Where’s The Capital](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HpBhpRQCFLX9tx62Z/where-is-the-capital-an-overview), which is a minimal viable writeup of a project from years ago
*   [How I Learned That I Don’t Feel Companionate Love](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hds7xkLgYtm6qDGPS/how-i-learned-that-i-don-t-feel-companionate-love), which is a pretty cool post but also most of it was posted earlier as a shortform
*   [Status Is The Game Of The Loser’s Bracket](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a3K9LEW7WZhr2nHMh/status-is-the-game-of-the-losers-bracket) or [Snippets on Living In Reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4TwtqcaifcJpi3Xfd/snippets-on-living-in-reality), in which I took a bunch of thoughts on a common theme and just… skipped the step where I weave those together into a single narrative

On the bright side, the drafts section of my tabs bar has shrunk considerably.

Several more posts were quick writeups of small research ideas or whatever else I was thinking about. There’s value in that sort of thing, and I do endorse writing those, but they’re not the sort of thing which most people (even on LessWrong) should read. [Stat Mech of Interfaces Under Selection Pressure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3PMS8wXGviHEvz5Z/toward-statistical-mechanics-of-interfaces-under-selection) and [Zen of Maxent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qEWWrADpDR8oGzwpf/the-zen-of-maxent-as-a-generalization-of-bayes-updates) are good examples.

In hindsight, I don’t think it was worthwhile for me to try to publish a post every day of November. Maybe it would have been as a full time project, but definitely not on the side. The stress cost more than the value produced. I definitely don’t think I will do this again, at least not without a very different approach (like e.g. taking the whole month off from all other work).

Should I have just stopped earlier in the month? Ten days in, I already pretty strongly expected that it wouldn’t be worthwhile in hindsight. But there’s an awful lot of value in seeing through precommitments - both for oneself, and for reputational purposes. I very tentatively endorse having stuck it out, even though the costs exceeded the benefits in this particular case. But I do still feel like I want to give a tiny little fuck you to the precommitment, which is why this post is exactly 499 words.