The Optimal Post Size

No more than 5 laptop screens / 2000 words. This isn’t a magical, scientifically proven number. This is just my personal attention span, both as a reader and as a writer.

Writing

For the love of God, I can’t get anything out if my post idea is greater than that. I can’t write it in one go ¹ anymore. I get lost in tweaking and refining until my interest in the topic fades.

Btw, outline speedrunning helps so much. Although I’ve practiced a similar iterative top-down approach since forever, I still struggle with applying this advice:

DO NOT PERFECT ANYTHING UNTIL DONE

It will probably help me even more once I finally get into this habit.

Coding

The “5 screens” limit also applies to my coding work. As the source file goes over 200 lines, finding what I need suddenly requires scrolling or search. I’m starting to get lost.

Perhaps, that’s when I approach the meme limit of 7 objects (type and function definitions) that our short-term memory allegedly can hold. With its nested context, source code can overload you fast. See Cognitive load is what matters , Cyclomatic complexity .

200 lines is also a common size for your first single-file applications as you learn. Going over this mark and dealing with a more complex project (and project structure) is a separate step. I recognized it as a stepping stone even earlier than the other things listed here.

Reading

My issues with scrolling and search aren’t exclusive to source files.

E.g., I enjoyed reading “My Experience of Writing” on gwern.net . But why is it just a section buried in the middle of that huge page that discusses Markdown linters , hosting and whatnot? Are these things really inseparable? That’s what the scope of my (mental) scrollbar should be? It makes me angry because I don’t see the point.

If your web page is longer than 5 screens, I’m tempted to just skim through it instead of reading it thoughtfully. Don’t make me scroll in search of the part that I’m interested in. Identify a small chunk that covers one topic and can be interesting as a unit. Extract it and hyperlink everything.

I have such a hard time finishing books. By the virtue of being books, they are a little better at persuading me to be patient and keep reading linearly. But not for long. The experience is not rewarding. Books often drag and repeat one topic for too long. Books feel like this single thing that I must read and finish as a whole. They make me feel that there’s some context that should occupy my mental space until I finish (even when this isn’t actually true and the chapters are relatively independent).

I really prefer having smaller discrete chunks that I can reference separately, actually finish, feel good, and free up some mental space; rather than having a whole book that keeps lingering in an “unfinished” state. That’s what hooked me on blogs so much. And no, book chapters aren’t the same thing. Most authors don’t make them as short and discrete as a blog post. Most books don’t use hyperlinks and instead inline the same thing over and over. Most readers (including myself) are still tempted to think of a book as a whole, don’t reference chapters separately, and are unlikely to stop and feel satisfied after reading a chapter. See also: In praise of the hundred page idea , Why Not Write A Book .

And more

This “rule” seems to universally reflect my perception of how well the data is organized:

• The scope of individual documentation pages.
• The scope of my personal files with notes.
• The scope of my Todoist projects.

You better split that thing if you go over 5 screens.