P2Daily: An Experiment on Performance

I’ve been doing something interesting on Pirates Prospects this year.

I don’t know how interesting you feel the weekly article drops have been. That has been a fun task for me, pulling together a group of articles to bombard you with every Tuesday morning. This is the tenth week of this new format, and the fun and interesting part has been how I handle the workload.

For each of the past ten Mondays, I’ve had only a clue as to what will show up on P2 on Tuesday. I go over the excellent submissions from John Dreker, Wilbur Miller, Cody Potanko, Anthony Murphy, and anyone else who has submitted an article that week. I usually fill in the blanks with 3-4 articles of my own, all written on Monday.

I have some clue as to what those articles are going to be. For example, last week I had a lengthy, exclusive discussion with Pirates’ farm director John Baker, and knew that this discussion would produce a lot of my work this week. I even knew the lead article topic for this week before I even started writing last week’s articles. Likewise, I know next week’s article topics, but haven’t yet written the articles.

The interesting thing has been a personal experiment: Trying to replicate the same level of production week after week, regardless of the circumstances.

My life is typically chaos. I write about baseball for a living, with no boss, and free reign to cover whatever area of this niche I wish to explore. Lately, there have been more reporters covering the minor league system, due to a lack of alternative options for coverage. This has been great for me, as I used to have to do so much more work to find out all of the information that is out there right now. That has helped to lessen the chaos, but I still lead a largely unstructured life, even with less to cover now.

I had an idea with this new article drop format. What if I treat this like a Major League player preparing for a regular game?

I started thinking about this concept last year, after writing the 10th Anniversary Prospect Guide. If I’m pressed to do so, I can stick to a daily routine, even though I’m going to inevitably get migraines.

At my best, I operate outside of time. I don’t care what the clock says. I go until I’m out of energy, sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, drink water constantly, and in this chaotic format I am at my healthiest and most productive. I might be up until 3 AM several nights a week, and I might never do anything before 10 AM on any day. In general, I listen to my body, and it tends to tell me that a west coast schedule is more natural for me, despite always living on the east coast.

That led to a question: How do I simulate what an MLB player must do, showing up at a specific time, on a specific day, with his best stuff, every week?

So, each week for the last ten weeks, I’ve turned on the laptop around 6 PM EST, ready to write 3-4 articles, while editing the other 3-4 for that week. By the end of the night — usually between 1 and 2 AM — I’ve got the entire article drop posted.

This experiment has been more of a short-term thing. There’s some adrenalin involved in working up to the deadline, and my procrastinating self knows no other way. However, this will be something I explore in the upcoming edition of the Prospect Guide, following up on last year’s book as I explore the performance demands of the baseball jobs I analyze for a living.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s article drop! Next week the experiment ends, as I’ll be writing those articles ahead of time this week. That will be to allow for a large block of time to work on adding all of the Spring Training notes to the Prospect Guide, along with doing final edits to John Dreker’s history book.