In this episode of Reflective Practice Radio, Matthew and I sat down for what we thought would be a conversation about building in public and daily blogging. It turned into something much deeper.
We explored how I’ve been publishing a blog post every single day since January 1st. I walked through the entire workflow, from voice journaling while driving to automated uploads to WordPress. But the conversation didn’t stop at mechanics.
We talked about what happens when platforms are designed to exploit us rather than serve us. We discussed how to distinguish between what people actually need and the problems they say they have. We explored how to measure ourselves against our values and why that matters for building software.
The thread that connected it all: how do we build for humans, not users?
The Daily Blogging Experiment
I shared my morning reflection about the newsletter I started last August. I published weekly for three months without missing a beat. Then I started the daily blogging experiment in January, and the newsletter dropped off for two months.
The daily practice has been valuable. It forces me to reflect for at least twenty to thirty minutes every day. I voice-journal my thoughts, run them through my workflow to create a draft, and then refine it before publishing.
But here’s what surprised me: two weeks after publishing a post, I’ve already forgotten about it. A month later, I have no recollection of writing it, even though I spent a meaningful amount of time reflecting on it.
That made me wonder about spaced repetition and how I might tighten that feedback loop.
The Mechanics of Consistency
Matthew asked the question that people often wonder about: how do you publish every single day when others struggle to get one post out every week or two?
The answer isn’t about sitting down at a blank page and asking, “What should I write about?” That’s the blocker most people hit.
Instead, I get the raw ideas out first. I voice journal while walking or driving. I don’t care how it comes out because nobody will ever hear most of it. I just need to get it out of my head.
Once it’s out, I can put distance between me and the original thoughts. When I read through the transcript later, I have clarity. Then I can refine it.
But I don’t refine it to magazine-quality perfection. I just get it to “good enough.” Because the why matters more than the polish, I’m doing this to see what’s in my head, analyze it, and revisit it later.
The Workflow That Removes Friction
I walked through my full process: voice journaling into a recording app, AirDropping to my Mac, using MacWhisper to transcribe, moving it into Obsidian, cleaning up the transcript with a Claude Cowork skill, drafting the post with Windsurf, reviewing with Grammarly, generating images with Gemini, and uploading to WordPress via a workflow that handles categories, tags, and image references.
The key insight: I’ve spent three months identifying and removing friction points. When I found that dropping images in Obsidian broke my workflow, I built automation to handle it. When categorizing and tagging became tedious, I created workflows to do it for me.
Every day, if I got out of bed and lived that day, there are things on my mind. Sometimes all it takes is five minutes to voice whatever I’m thinking about. If I do that a few times during the day, I get to choose which one I want to spend more time on.
That’s why it hasn’t been hard. The hard part is holding myself accountable to the process: voice it out, work through the system, identify friction, remove it.
Living Content vs. Ephemeral Posts
We talked about how my process creates living content. I post to Blusky, Facebook, and LinkedIn with a link to the blog. When people respond, I save their comments in Obsidian with the original post.
Later, when I’m reviewing those posts, I can see what resonated with whom and why. That gives me follow-up material. It helps me understand what to explore deeper.
Matthew contrasted this with how social media works today. Everything feels ephemeral. Posts have a shelf life of minutes unless they go viral. People aren’t seeking meaningful engagement. They’re seeking metrics: likes, comment counts, shares.
The platforms reward engagement optimization rather than genuine conversation. LinkedIn’s playbook is notorious: don’t put links in your main post because they’ll suppress it. Put the link in a comment instead.
I’m not playing that game. I’d rather have one conversation with someone genuinely interested in the ideas than chase algorithmic favor.
The Incentive Models That Shape Us
Matthew made a crucial point: how we engage with the world is shaped by incentive models. If social media rewards inflammatory content, that’s what gets created. If platforms reward doom scrolling, that’s what they’ll optimize for.
We talked about LinkedIn’s pattern of sending emails that don’t show you the message, forcing you to click into the app. They want you to land on the timeline. They want you to scroll endlessly.
It’s an anti-pattern, but it rewards them. Their application is free, and they have to monetize somehow. So they weaponize psychology to keep you in the app.
There are books about this. Whistleblowers. Companies hire psychologists to study human behavior so they can exploit it.
But here’s the thing: if we’re going to engage in these spaces, we need awareness. These forces are acting on us whether we know about them or not. Awareness gives us a fighting chance.
Writing Stories for Humans, Not Users
I’ve been thinking about how we talk about stories. I don’t want to think about user stories anymore. They’re human stories. There’s a person there, not just an abstract cartoon.
When I see patterns like LinkedIn’s email behavior, I imagine somebody somewhere wrote a story for that feature. What does that story look like?
“As the owner, I want an email sent out without giving our users the full message so they’re forced into the app to doom scroll.”
If those stories made it out to the timeline, people would see what companies really think of them.
Matthew mentioned there’s literature about this. Companies weaponize psychology. But just as these patterns can be used for evil, they can be used for good. We should find the positive patterns and build software that contains them.
The Five Types of Value
I’ve been talking to people at Improving about the different types of value that stories should convey. We often focus only on business value, but that’s just one of five: business value, customer value, user value, societal value, and alignment value.
You want to hit all of those. If you get high business value by making users stuck in a vortex of trash, what about user value? Customer value? What does it do to society? Do they all align?
If business value is high but societal value plummets, alignment value asks: Who is asking these questions?
Matthew had an idea for a product: measure every website or social media platform by that measuring stick. Business value would always be in the green, but alignment, customer value, and user value would plummet when plotted on a chart.
People could decide whether to continue engaging based on those ratings. If such a tool became popular, website owners would start valuing those metrics. They’d need to raise their alignment value.
Building for Temporary Needs
We talked about browser extensions that add features to NotebookLM, like organizing notebooks into folders or downloading all sources at once. These extensions cost money, but those features might be built natively in six months.
At first, I wondered: why would I pay $50 for something that might be free soon?
Then I realized: if it saves me time between now and then, my time is worth it.
From a business perspective, maybe their model solves problems for six months, generates business value during that period, then moves on to something else.
Matthew pointed out that with AI driving down software costs and increasing the speed of development, such a business model isn’t crazy. But you’d have to constantly look ahead, always identifying the next tool.
I offered a shift in perspective: instead of looking for the next tool, look for the next need.
From Problems to Values
I used to think we needed to find problems to solve. Then I shifted to understanding needs first. But why stop at needs?
If there’s a need, there’s an aspiration that sparked it. If there’s an aspiration, there’s a value the person wants to live into.
Whatever someone says is a problem, there’s a need behind it, an aspiration, and it comes from their values and identity.
The sooner we can get to those values, the better equipped we are to help people live into them, not just solve their problems. We can anticipate what they’ll need next based on what they value.
But that raises a question: how do we know what people’s values are? How do we know what our own values are?
The Work of Identifying Values
A few years ago, I read Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. There’s an exercise with a list of about 120 values. You have to get down to your two main values.
I highlighted ones that resonated. I ended up with 35. That’s too many. I set a goal to identify my 10 values, with two core values and eight supporting values.
That exercise took hours. I had to ask myself why I highlighted certain values, why I dropped others. It triggered deep questions.
When I’m working with other people, that’s the kind of exercise we need. If people can’t articulate their values, we need to talk about them. We need to understand them before we can plot the way forward.
For companies, values are often on their websites. That’s a starting point. But a company is just a group of people. We need to find out who those people are and what their collective values are.
Living Into Values
Matthew pointed out that it would be easier to organize society if values floated above our heads. I mentioned a Simon Sinek video where he talks about how companies have values on the walls, but they’re nouns, not verbs.
It’s great to say those are your values, but what do you do that shows they’re reflected in your actions? Is what you do in alignment with those values?
At Improving, our values are involvement, excellence, and dedication. We have journal prompts to reflect on how we’re living into each value.
I think about how I’ve been living into the value of dedication. I write out a list of things, then ponder whether something is involvement or dedication, or if there’s overlap.
Once I’m doing things that align with our values, I ask: what else could I do to live into that?
Measuring Against Values
Matthew made a key point: identifying your values is a snapshot in time. It’s something we have to continue doing. Not every day, but every so often, to measure where we were versus where we are now.
I’ve been leveraging AI for this. I created a markdown file outlining Improving’s identity and values, as well as my own. When I come out of a meeting with a transcript, I feed it through and ask it to analyze how I’ve been living into those values.
It gives me insights. It shows me how what I did during the meeting aligned with my dedication to my personal value of making a difference.
Matthew said you cannot hold yourself accountable in a serious way if you don’t have anything to measure against. We have to track this information. We have to reflect and put what we reflect on into practice.
If we come out of a meeting and realize we weren’t in alignment with our values, something has to happen. If it continues, someone else will see it before we do, and then we have a problem.
Tools That Work Only If We Do
We talked about how AI acts as a mirror if we give it enough information. Mirrors help us see ourselves.
These tools only work if we do. They only work if we’re doing the work. If we’re giving them the information they need, they’ll paint an accurate reflection of who we are. If we give insufficient information, that’s what will be reflected.
These tools are only as good as we are.
I mentioned tools I’ve lost trust in because they ask me for data but don’t give it back to me so I can perform my own analysis. They’re saying, “I need that data, but for me, not for us.”
I’m pushing data to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Blusky. They’re tracking a bunch of stuff. I want that data. I want to query my system and find clusters of comments so I can see what people are interested in.
That data is all there. It’s my data. Can I get to it? I doubt it.
Matthew mentioned there have been pushes for companies to let you export your data, like ChatGPT conversations. There is a way, but it’s not straightforward.
I exported my full ChatGPT history and closed my account. They don’t make it easy. That’s unfortunate.
At least with the things I can control, I want to be able to do that and show people what they can do with their own data.
We covered a lot of ground in this conversation. If you want to hear the full discussion about daily blogging workflows, the psychology of social media, and how to measure yourself against your values, watch the full episode.
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