Two minutes and forty seconds to get here. I timed it.
What happened in that time?
I had an idea for a new note. Though I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to write about. Speed, roughly. My own pace, but also perceived speed and how quickly we should move in other people’s expectations.
In my perfectly optimised productivity world, it takes 2:40 to start writing. What filled those minutes?
Terminal open, navigate to blog directory. New post command. File created. Directory change. Editor launched. Even filled out the frontmatter — title, description, date, tags, category.
Under three minutes to writing readiness. Not a record, just average. Getting there took considerable time investment. I publish these notes with the static site generator Hugo and I’d rather not calculate the hours I’ve sunk into making it this smooth.
Suppose that startup time was only one minute instead. Would I have written 100 notes this year instead of 60? Doubt it. It’s not about speed. It’s about having something to say and wanting to write it.
Everything moved slower these past weeks. More sluggish. Homeschooling slowed me down and I missed several deadlines. Frustrating. Often I’d have only fifteen minutes, trying to wrestle some coherent thought onto screen in that brief window.
Sometimes so hectic I forgot to start the timer. Or interruptions stretched the actual work time far beyond what it should have been.
Constant stop-and-go. Constant restarting and reorienting. It simply costs time. How much of that should I bill my client?
I could add those hours and hope my customer understands and pays. But that’s not how I operate. Unfortunately. So I torture myself wondering what’s reasonable to charge for work done in extreme fragments.
It comes down to my expectations and the client’s. Mutual trust. I know how long a job should take, and often enough I write down fewer hours when something took longer than I liked.
Probably too nice. Others don’t do this. The plumber would think more like a business owner. Bills everything on that invoice. Travel time home for forgotten tools. Time spent meaningfully crouched by the van drinking coffee, smoking, making calls. Seems to work.
Early in my journalism career, my editor said we couldn’t print articles with little disclaimer slips explaining why the piece wasn’t as good as we’d hoped. Readers don’t care about that. Clients want it fast but also good. When both work out, I’m pretty much alone with my internal narrative.
Maybe the answer next time is: Sometimes it just takes longer. But everything turned out fine, didn’t it?
This somewhat rambling note ends here.
After rereading and quick corrections, I publish with ./deploy, add to git repository, commit with “new note: How fast should something be?” then push to repository. Takes about a minute.
This post started in German on reinergaertner.de — yes, 1997, I’ve been doing this a while. The translation was AI-assisted. Any remaining awkwardness is authentically bilingual.