Build your own five bullet Friday
Have you ever looked received a copy of Tim’s Five Bullet Friday or Andrew’s The Batch and thought “hey, I could write something like this”? The first time I found myself wondering whether those formats might work as a way to capture my own readings & enjoyments week to week, I was focussed on their formulaic structures:
5 Things I’ve Been [insert verbs here]
Greetings, friends.
Here are some popular links, thoughts, and articles that have appeared in my newsletter, which is free and goes out every Friday. I cheated in this post and gave you six… Enjoy!
[5x recommendations in the format:
[noun] I’m [verb]-ing —
[object/concept/technique] from [vendor/expert/tradition].
[A description of who/what/where/why/when/how it is, and the extent of meaningful engagement I derive from it.] ]
Thoughts, suggestions, feedback? Please let me know on Twitter!
[PS section with extra ad hoc link or message]
[A short bio celebrating some of the writer’s public achievements]
Tim’s approach (above) leverages positivity and the celebration of expertise, to deliver something that inspires and motivates the reader: “Hey, I could go watch/read/learn that and easily incorporate it into my routine… if Tim’s doing it then so can I!” … the pure aspect of enjoyment itself, is infectious.
Andrew’s (below) is more relevant to interrogative study as it challenges the material with open questions that demand a substantive response:
Dear friends,
[An intro paragraph with ad hoc thought or call-to-action]
[5x recommendations in the format:
[image or gif introducing/summarising the item]
[headline]
[intro]
What’s new: […]
How it works: […][further detail]
Behind the news: […]
Why it matters: […]
We’re thinking: […] ]Thoughts, suggestions, feedback? Please send by email reply.
In each case we see a clear concise structure that helps transform potentially disparate material into a comfortable, predictable structure for readers old & new. I was inspired by this factor since, in my years of blogging & sharing topics that have interested me, the greatest hurdle has been the dilettantism that sees me doing 180-degree flips each day, reading totally unrelated material weeke to week and yet deriving a sense of enjoyment that I do genuinely want to share with the world. They don’t tend to form an overall theme. In Tim’s clever structure the enjoyment itself is the theme; in Andrew’s it is the sense that we’re asking open-ended questions to interrogate the value & quality of what we’ve been studying.
One further aspect comes into play, as to the labour required to assembled such a format each week. Personally the task of sitting down for 1–3 hours to write an email, seems ludicrous to me in the sense that:
- it’s bound to be incredibly boring and backache-inducing.
- it seems like an impossible goal to set my attention span; within minutes I’m going to be opening extra tabs and drawing connections that don’t get me any further toward the goal of actually hitting Send.
So I came up with a way of generating these emails, to the required templated structure, by means of automation. Using the following 3 freely available tools I stitched together a data pipeline that sees me writing a quick 1-minute journal each evening that then, behind the scenes, gets packaged into a beautiful mailer that sends itself on Fridays:
- Airtable: [link will be posted here to a future post]
- Google Apps Script in Sheets: [link will be posted here to a future post]
The resulting blend of human input with machine packing & distribution, has made for a deeply enjoyable nine months of using it to journal positively. Each Friday I’m presented with a motivating reminder as to what I’ve achieved & enjoyed in the 7 days prior.
There is one extra bit of labour that takes no more than 5 minutes on a Thursday morning:
Here’s a repo with the email templates and GAS code that enables you to do the same. [link will be posted here to a future post]
Enjoy!
