A 43F oldie and a goodie (h/t Bill Nalen), this is Merlin writing about Neal Stephenson’s decision to be a poor correspondent so he can make time to be a good novelist:

As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), “I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.”

Like it or hate it, Neal Stephenson’s position is clear and well-articulated. If a bit pitched, it’s a stance I admire, and frankly I think it’s an only slightly more extreme version of a position every maker needs to define if he or she expects to create the time to keep making anything.

Myke Hurley and I talked about this topic last week while I was a guest on his new show, CMD+SPACE. I shared about why choosing to be poor at email correspondence has been one of the most painful decisions I’ve had to make in my career as a full-time writer for this website.

Greg McKeown:

Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.

Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.

Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.

Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

And, per the aforelinked E.B. White example, Phase 2 above should also include that when we have public success, it leads to more external demands on our time and attention (though perhaps that’s what is meant by “more options”).

(Via Kottke.)

Letters of Note:

In March of 1961, nine years after the publication of Charlotte’s Web, author E. B. White received a letter from a young fan named Cathy Durham who wanted to know when, if ever, his next children’s book would see the light of day.

Little did Cathy know that White hadn’t written another book yet because the fan mail he was getting after writing Charlotte’s Web had been taking up most of his time and creative energy.

Click through for the letter White wrote to Cathy as well as the letter he sent to Cathy’s librarian.

Klint Finley tries to break down Amazon Glacier’s convoluted and mysterious pricing for data retrieval.

Who knows where they came up with that name, but Glacier is a new, extremely low-cost data storage service from Amazon. The reason it’s so cheap is because it’s meant for archiving and long-term storage of data that you don’t expect to access very often.

Storage costs are just $0.01/GB. That’s 9.3x cheaper than Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage and 12.5x cheaper than their Standard Storage. And Glacier gives you get the same data durability and reliability of the Standard Storage (99.999999999% durability).

The first thing I thought when reading about Glacier was, Hellooooo Arq. I already use Arq to backup my most important files to Amazon S3, but it’d be stellar if I could use it backup my entire MacBook Air while also reducing my S3 bill. A complete backup of my Air to Amazon’s rock-solid, encrypted, redundant data centers would only cost me $2.50/month. That’s crazy!

I got in touch with Stefan Reitshamer, the developer behind Arq, to ask about Arq’s future support of Glacier. He’s done more reading than I have about just exactly how Glacier works, and it won’t be as simple as it may sound.

There are a few factors that make the storing and retrieving of data on Glacier not as straightforward as it is on S3. The biggest factor being the retrieval cost. There’s a discussion on Hacker News about it and it’s not quite clear just how much it would cost to retrieve all your data, but it looks like it wouldn’t be cheap.

Cal Newport writes about his daily “shutdown” technique. It’s not unlike what Aaron and Dave talked about on episode 6 of their Home Work podcast, which spurred me to start a new habit of jotting down the mental loose ends of my day and basically debriefing myself so that when I step away from my computer for the day my mind is clear.

(This of course should not be confused with trying to kick out the top idea in your mind.)

Jason Fried:

Change is important. When we were growing up, we got summers off from school. Summer vacation was change. It was something to look forward to. A few months of something different really meant a lot.

We grow out of a lot as we grow up. One of the most unfortunate things we leave behind is a regular dose of change. Nowhere is this more evident than at work.

Work in February is the same as work in May. June’s the same as October. And it would be hard to tell August from April.

To step out from behind the curtain for a moment and be transparent with you guys, what Jason writes about here has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve been learning to navigate ever since I took this site full time.

I haven’t taken a complete break from this site since I started it 18 months ago. Even on vacation I steal away for an hour or two every day to read and write a bit (and I’m not talking about recreational reading and writing).

Because, in a way, I don’t work for myself. I work for you, dear readers and members. And if I don’t visibly show up every day by posting something, there’s a sense that I’m not working.

Of course, in reality, I doubt any of you are thinking that. But that’s what I assume you’re thinking even though I should know better.

I know how to invest my time in the long-term growth, innovation, and quality of this site. But often it’s the short-term expectations or the seemingly urgent events that take hold of my attention. And, if not that, then it’s the fear that taking a complete break from work (or taking time away from publishing something in favor of working on a different project) will be perceived as laziness. What? Nothing new on shawnblanc.net today? I thought this guy was full-time. Sheesh. What a bum.

In short, I wonder if I would do better, more challenging, and more exciting work if the value and consistency of that work was not measured in 24-hour cycles.

My thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I have heard nothing but great things about version 6, and many of my tech-savvy friends have begun using it. If you’re in need of a sturdy and classy website and you don’t want to self-manage everything, you should definitely check out Squarespace 6.

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Loren Donelson:

Since I’m noodling a move back to iOS, I thought I’d make a list of things that I’ll miss about Android — things that might make my shiny new iPhone 5 end up on Ebay.

His list is spot on for several of the things I’ve found Android does better or makes easier than iOS. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention Notification Center which I find to be far and away more intuitive and usable on Android than on iOS.

Chuck Skoda, astute as usual:

[Twitter] should have a vision for what the future of communicating and sharing looks like, and be building it.

But from the looks of it, they aren’t. They’re just trying to protect what they’ve already built.