My appreciation for you reading this sentence right now is very real. That holds true in the moment of writing and within my intentions moving forward. At the start of this project a bit of writing on Substack happened two years ago now. During the course of starting that effort, I had not considered the amount of effort sustaining it would require. Probably the single most sustained writing project I have ever completed was my doctoral dissertation [1]. That writing process took less time than producing the 104 posts that are currently a part of The Lindahl Letter. I know some future writing projects could involve more effort, but that seems unlikely given the amount of time that was devoted to this one.
You can take a moment and reflect on the realization that we have reached the point in the program where 104 weeks of content creation has occurred. Over time the writing process ended up following a planful approach to getting things done. The structure ended up being a block of writing, links/thoughts, top five tweets, and footnotes.
Weekly topic coverage. This is the heart of what is happening. Five weeks in planning or review is what makes the magic happen. For the most part, I ended up with a backlog with a bunch of planned posts. You should always keep a writing backlog of topics that deserve attention but might not have been advanced before. This method of keeping a writing topic backlog let me work on a couple of different weeks of content at any one time. Believe it or not, this is really important to keep things moving along. Momentum in writing is a real and present element of the creative process. If you run into a bit of writer’s block, or the inspiration is not showing up for a given topic, then you can move ahead and shift to a topic that allows the creation to continue. I’m not one to sit back and brew some word tea, but switching topics and trying to mix things up with a bit of stream of consciousness is certainly an option.
Links and thoughts. During the course of the week, I end up selecting some links and from research. Depending on where I’m at during the planning and review process, these links are either very timely or could have been pulled a week or two before.
Top five tweets. This section is really just for my own amusement. Based on the data from the last two years, nobody ever clicks on any of these tweets. I’m getting so close to having published 10,000 tweets. It will probably happen toward the end in the next couple of months.
Footnotes. Most writers in the academic space are comfortable with footnotes. Sometimes it takes people a bit of reading to get used to the links, references, and footnotes that I drop into the things being published. It is something that I plan on continuing with to help provide the context that we stand on the shoulders of giants in terms of our intellectual library of thoughts and considerations. The academy lives based on the interaction of scholars. That is something that cannot be forgotten or set aside to write prose without acknowledgement of the contributions of others.
Podcast. Adding the podcast element changed my posture to working to stay a week or two ahead. A part of that change was that I had to now plan ahead for vacation windows. That five-week planning and review cycle was key to keeping the publishing streak alive for what is approaching two years.
After Post 104, I’m going to switch things up and focus more on sharing the content I find interesting in the AI and technology space [2]. Part of that is planned and was noted out in my five-year writing plan. In case you were wondering, I have included my five-year writing plan as of March 3, 2022:
Year 1: Keep a heavy machine learning focus for the rest of 2022. Finish writing a collected series of machine learning/AI essays on Substack and combine them into a manuscript, The Lindahl Letter: 104 Machine Learning Posts. This manuscript should include both Years 1 and 2 of the Substack series.
Keep writing weekly Substack posts.
Take time for the manuscript generation process at the end of the year.
That manuscript will need to be edited by a professional before the print edition goes live.
Rework last year’s speaking engagement talks into academic papers. This could be one combined paper or potentially five different papers depending on how the initial effort shapes up.
“What Is Machine Learning Scale? The Where and the When of Machine Learning Usage”
“The Machine Learning Scale Problem: Thinking About Where and When to Use Machine Learning, ROI Models, Synthetic Data, Repeatable Frameworks, and Teams”
“Applied Machine Learning ROI: Understanding Machine Learning ROI From Different Approaches at Scale”
“Demystifying Applied Machine Learning: Building Frameworks and Teams to Operationalize Machine Learning at Scale”
“Figuring Out Applied Machine Learning: Building Frameworks and Teams to Operationalize Machine Learning at Scale, V3”
Rerun the MLOps GitHub research and turn that content into a paper.
Year 2: For 2023, I want to pivot into studying sentiment analysis and modern polling methodologies. At this point, I will have written 104 essays on machine learning/AI and should probably refocus on a specific topic that is material to machine learning/AI, but adjacent to it as an area of research. It’s possible by 2023 that quantum computing will be a huge topic for research and will end up getting some attention as well.
Complete work on an automated sentiment analysis paper.
Write some sentiment analysis and machine learning essays for Substack.
Work on publishing modern polling methods essays for Substack.
Finish up writing the breakdown of modern polling paper.
Year 3: 2024 will include a return to writing about local government administration and technology. It will be 20 years since earning my master of public administration degree. By this time, my writing should be as crisp and focused as it will ever be, and my perspective on technology will be well considered from my previous work on machine learning/AI. A few topics will be considered:
Technology and local government administration
The intersection of public administration and technology
How technology influences the practice of governing
How government uses machine learning/AI technology
Year 4: 2025 will probably be the year where quantum computing has broken down modern encryption frameworks. A few topics will be covered here:
Changes and uses in encryption technology
Encryption and society
Quantum encryption
Year 5: 2026 is going to be a year where my backlog should be highly full. The previous four years of this writing plan should have created a ton of leftover writing works. A few topics that I plan on highlighting include these:
A reflective work on machine learning/AL
Did open source MLOps technology survive?
Did the serverless trend pan out in the cloud?
Pretty much everything that was a part of Year 1 of my five-year writing plan was worked on and completed. You can find a lot of that content contained in this 104-week writing project on machine learning. The future of writing things is wide open, and I’ll be starting work on Year 2 of that writing plan shortly. The last thing I’m about to work on will be moving the content from all 104 Substack posts over to a manuscript to send off to be edited.
Footnotes:
[1] Lindahl, N. P. (2010). Responsive e-government: A study of local government e-feedback methodology (Publication No. 3426428) [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/openview/5fd815b75e8efa09a64814d0e290389b/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter? A totally new writing format…
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That 2nd year of posting recap