# Inkhaven Retrospective

This will be the 30th post of at least 500 words I have written this month. (I did somewhat cheat two days ago, by making a 500+ word edit to [Legitimate Deliberation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5gBx8gpftTchu7MSs/legitimate-deliberation), which I also posted independently [as a shortform](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QoFqWHotpmQNqqKyi/abramdemski-s-shortform?commentId=G86SazHNQK5yrpLPf).)

Inkhaven has been very much what I was hoping for. I have been wanting to write more, and this certainly did the trick. I think it will be easy to hit a once-a-week target now, something I was struggling to do before.

I came with lots of drafts I wanted to finish, and outlines, and lists of ideas. Now I've got 29 posts, many of which probably would have come into existence without Inkhaven, and certainly not so quickly.

The Inkhaven posts are certainly of lower quality, for the most part, than what I usually do. I had to average at most a day on each, by design. Many of my posts are even lower-effort sacrifice posts written quickly so that I can spend more time on a few high-effort posts such as [Condensation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BstHXPgQyfeNnLjjp/condensation).

During the second week, I was feeling too exhausted to write by the afternoon of each day (but recovered somewhat by the evening, to finish up). This was partly because I tried to do so many things: in addition to posting something every day, I tried to keep my usual commitments (since a month is a long time, I didn't want to just cancel everything). In addition, as a contributing author at Inkhaven, I played a mentorship role, reviewing posts that people sent me, taking walks with inkhaven residents, etc.

If I do Inkhaven again, I might somehow take some more things off my plate.

By the end of the second week, I had learned to aim for finishing posts in the morning, so that I could mostly rest during my afternoon crash and the evening. This helped, and by week three, I wasn't crashing every afternoon anymore.

This strategy was opposite to that of most residents, who were finishing late in the evening, close to the deadline. For the first half of the event or so, I was going to bed around 9pm and getting up due to the sunrise before 7am. This gradually slipped forwards.

I didn't have as much time and energy as I'd like to get to know everyone else at Inkhaven, due to all the writing and other things. There were lots of interesting conversations going on all the time, and many interesting visitors. I'm an introvert by nature, and very prone to retreating to my room, especially when I'm feeling tired.

I also didn't make a lot of time for responding to comments. Time responding to comments was time I could be writing the day's post. This worked out in the rare case where I made a comment response into a post, but mostly I haven't read the comments. I will have to go back through the posts some time soon to do that.

I look forward to having more time to spend per post. My plan is to post once a week going forward. I still have 26+ drafts I'm interested in finishing, and a list of many undrafted ideas. In addition, I think many posts I made over the past month deserve more time and thought; I hope to revisit some of the topics.

I'm excited to see what Inkhaven might become if it turns into a periodic event.