Project Summary
Learn to post on CF forums. This includes following the rules, posting medium to high quality stuff, and posting with reasonable frequency (at least once a week).
Goal
My goal is to get back into active participation in CF and learning + applying CF philosophy in my life. Posting more frequently is the next step up from reading regularly without posting. Posts I write should follow the rules, not be onerous to read like some of my previous posts, and avoid personal details unless relevant to CF and the point being made in the post.
Part of this project also includes learning to write more like I speak, which will help improve the quality and frequency of my posts. I aim to post at least once a week.
Why: My lack of ability to post well gets in the way of my ability to discuss and learn CF, which ultimately hurts my quality of life and learning.
How I will judge success and failure: I will judge after 30 days (around April 17, 2024) by looking at my posts and checking that they match the above criteria.
Bigger picture goals: In the long-term I would like to be capable of successfully executing larger projects that are related to philosophy and self-improvement. Starting small and building a series of successes (or failures that don’t take long to get through) will help me get there. I would also like to be capable of participating on this forum and contributing positively to it.
How this is relevant to CF: It’s relevant to CF because it will help me learn CF better in the long run, and contribute to the forums more effectively over time.
Plan
My plan is to start by posting about things I’m learning or things I find interesting. This will make posting easy. Then my goal is to find ways to link those things to CF or apply CF to them. I don’t want to force myself to learn a lot of CF initially as that might make it harder for me to post often. As posting becomes easier, I can then learn to read and write more about CF related articles.
I think this is a relatively small project, although it’s not a Mini Project since I can’t complete it in 3 days. I’m allocating at least 2 hours a week to this project. I’m confident I can succeed at posting, but I am not confident I can succeed on overall quality and following the rules for every post (especially with CF relevance). I hope for an error rate of 20% or below, so that at least 80% of my posts meet the above criteria. If my error rate is much higher than that, I might pause posting, or declare the project a failure and restart with more achievable criteria.
I haven’t thought of any error correction mechanisms other than running my posts through the rules if I suspect they break the rules somehow.
The main risks are that I stop posting for some reason like real life distractions, but I think 2 hours a week is fairly achievable even with that in mind. Another risk is that I get burnt out, in which case I can post about it and reduce my time investment to e.g. 1 hour a week. This can gradually be increased later.
Other People
I’m not asking for help from others at this time. I don’t think this project offers much immediate value to others, but it builds up to offering more value later as I improve at posting. I will complete the project independently if no one participates. I am sharing this partly to hold myself accountable and partly for any encourage anyone might offer along the way. Any criticism related to my posts not matching the criteria I set out near the beginning of this post is appreciated. If anyone sees ways for me to transition this project into other projects to help me get better at CF, that would also be appreciated.
Context
The context is that I have quit FI/CF multiple times in the past, mostly silently, and the most recent time that I came back, my posts were of poor quality. I then spent about a year not posting at all until now. I’ve been reading FI related content since August 2018. I’m prioritizing this over alternative projects because I think this is a pre-requisite to me being able to do any CF related projects that involve posting here. I’m doing it right now because I have free time in real life and want to dedicate some of it to learning CF. I haven’t done much so far, other than my posts in the distant past.