Inaugural Post (August 14, 2011)

Eight months before a symposium paper was due, I set up a blog, Five Drafts, to establish a schedule for producing, well, five drafts of the paper. The idea was that the loose public commitment to meet the self-imposed intermediate deadlines -- and later, to update the blog with regular progress reports, in between drafts -- would help me overcome procrastination and would spur effort. To some extent, the Five Drafts experiment worked. My hope is that nDrafts will successfully adopt the commitment-via-blog technique to other academic projects. My fear is that nDrafts will instead demonstrate a virtual Peter Principle, where a successful idea is promoted to the point that it will no longer be viable. But here we go...