I’ve been spending all day today trying to write my AlterConf talk.

I can’t seem to concentrate very well when writing talks, and I haven’t found a process for it that reliably works for me. The temptation to procrastinate is just too strong.

Here’s what I tried today:

  1. Go straight to making slides in Deckset. I abandoned this because it needed too much focus on structure right from the outset.
  2. Make an outline in OmniOutliner. Abandoned for similar reasons.
  3. Drew a mind map on paper. This was nice because I didn’t have to worry about what order things were in, but I ended up getting rid of most of it for being boring.
  4. Gave up trying to plan and just started writing an essay in Markdown.

I’ve had some brief bursts of inspiration with this, and I’ve actually managed to get some content down, which is more can be said for any of the other methods.

It’s not a particularly useful format though. I need to turn it into slides, and I don’t just want to be reading completely from a script ⏤ I’ve seen it before and it makes for a pretty dull presentation.

My main problem today, though, has just been a general lack of focus. I’ve spent most of it procrastinating (hey look what I’m doing right now) between short bursts of actually writing talk stuff.

I said my talk would be fifteen minutes, but I’m not sure I’m going to get there. I’m currently at about 8. My talk is the last of the day though, so hopefully it shouldn’t matter if I’m a bit short?

AlterConf want my slides for today so their sign language interpreters can get a look at it in advance. How cool is it that they have sign language interpreters?

I really need to get my shit together and actually get this thing written, though. It’s 19:30.