What I'm doing here

Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again. Winnie the Pooh said, “I always get to where I am going by walking away from where I have been.” What I’m doing here now on this site has a lot to do with where I have been.

Twenty years ago, I got hired to start what became one of the web’s biggest tech blogs about software and personal productivity. Lifehacker was all about how to get more stuff done more efficiently with digital tools. In 2005, for a certain kind of achiever, refreshing a web site to learn about how to do more faster was an irresistible way to procrastinate.

In fact, I was the site’s target audience: always trying to get more done faster. Seven days a week I and my eventual team hustled to publish a dozen posts a day, cover new software releases in near-realtime, and write the most clickable and SEO-optimized headlines possible. It was a wild time, building a new media brand, focused on growing an audience. We got paid based on our posts’ traffic, so we wrote for broadest appeal, Google searches, and the Digg homepage (it was 2006). Our efforts paid off. We built the site’s audience from zero to a million readers a day in four years, which was a lot of traffic for that time. It was my childhood dream to be a writer someday, and Lifehacker’s popularity meant that I was earning a living in New York City publishing my own words. A Carrie Bradshaw fantasy.

Looking back, I’m proud of the work I did at Lifehacker. Not because the material holds up–it doesn’t. I’m proud because it was some of the hardest and best work I could do at the time. The work I did came from a place of genuine enthusiasm for all the great software blossoming on the web and on mobile. I loved trying and writing about it all, even when I was exhausted.

Eventually, I felt I’d done everything at Lifehacker I could do. I wanted to spent my time making the kind of software I loved writing about. In the years following, I got to do just that. But I never lost the itch to blog.

Now, with a little time and space, I’m reconnecting with the things I’ve loved to do. When I thought about starting a new blog, I often imagined what Lifehacker of 2025 could look like, and I came to the same conclusion every time. For me, it just doesn’t work anymore. At its core, Lifehacker was about using software to get more stuff done more efficiently. Lists of “tips and tricks” to “upgrade your life.” Twenty years later, I know that while productivity and efficiency are capitalism’s driving values, they are not mine.

I love making stuff on the web and appreciating stuff other people have made. I want to get in tune with the creative impulses that we all have inside of us, and figure out how the lucky people who are able to do it turn their ideas into a tangible things.

Back in October of 2024, I wrote:

Lately I’ve noticed a clear and consistent pulse of an old feeling I haven’t had for a long time: I want to share more of how I think, what I learn, and what I like online. That is, I want to give it back. But not on cookie-cutter content platforms where we’ve all signed up to work a data entry job feeding an LLM. On my own webpages, on my own domain names, with my own code. Let’s do this.

So here I am, returning to my favorite form on the internet, a blog: chunks of the written word, in reverse chronological order, with lots of links and quotes.

It’s absurd to start a blog in 2025. The world moved on from blogs a long time ago. I’m an internet grandma shaking her fist at the TikTok/Instagram/YouTube sky and muttering about how back in my day, we wrote words on our own web pages. It’s likely that no one will read this.

Still, I believe the web is the greatest publishing platform of all time. After years of writing books, magazine articles, tweets and social posts, I know that writing a good old-fashioned blog that I own is most fulfilling for me. I want to write about ideas that matter to me a couple times a week as I am moved, for a small group of engaged readers (hi Mom). That will be more valuable and way more fun than constantly-churned, broad-appeal content designed for exposure to millions.

So this is my pivot: from productivity to creativity, from quantity to quality, from broad to niche, from frenzied to intentionally-paced. My aim is not to angle every post to potentially go viral so that thousands see it. My goal is that once in awhile, a person who happens upon anything here clicks away from their tab feeling a bit more curious, interested, open, creative, inspired, or hopeful.

That’s what I’m trying to do here. We’ll see how it evolves.