A few weeks ago I had the brilliant idea to hire myself an assistant. For years I imagined getting one of the various women with whom I’ve been involved to help me with my blog. And several women have. Sofia did. Veronique did. Charlotte did. I think a couple of others did as well, though now I can’t recall specifically. But what I really wanted was a bona fide assistant. Someone with the technical know-how to dig into my WordPress and harvest all of the draft posts that I never wrote. There’s over 700 of them. And WordPress, alas, doesn’t provide a particularly user-friendly way of navigating draft posts. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe what I mean is, I had a very specific thing that I wanted.
I wanted to see all of the draft posts I had ever written listed by title and then sorted by length and alphabetical order within the length sorting. I didn’t realize that’s what I wanted. I scoped out the project and I gave it to Cee. I told her I’d pay her hourly if she could create a Google Doc which accomplished all of this.
In my mind, this was a labor-intensive process, but not all that time-consuming. I sort of imagined it was six to eight hours of work. Cee didn’t have that much time to give to me. She told me she could give me two or three hours a week. No problem, I thought. In two or three weeks, this’ll be done.
Alas, some combination of my failure to scope the project well and Cee’s learning curve meant that after six hours, Cee had accomplished very little of what I hoped. I didn’t give up exactly. She was scheduled to spend another two to three hours of work and she told me she would do it on a particular day. That day came and went. She didn’t do any work, which is out of character for her. She’s usually pretty communicative and reliable.
But in this instance, she let me down. She didn’t do the two to three hours work and she didn’t talk to me about it. The former was forgivable, the latter less so. And in a fit of pique, the solution to this task appeared to me.
What I needed to do was to export all my drafts to an XML file, use the OpenAI whisper API to convert the XML file into a spreadsheet, and then to add a column that was the length of the content of each draft post. I sorted that table, first by length of content and second alphabetically by title, and I got this (with some redactions, just because).
This is really what I had wanted from Cee. It’s not what I told her I wanted. I don’t blame her for failing to intuit that this is what I wanted. Because I didn’t even know it. I needed her to piss me off just a little. To push me to understand.
But she did, and I did, and now I’ve got this. This is great, because now I have a very easy-to-navigate list of post ideas, all in one place. My hope is it will stimulate me. I’ll look down, find a post that feels either apropos or easy to knock out, and I’ll do so. Most likely using my little voice memo recorder and the workflow I’ve set up in PipeDream that converts voice memos into draft posts.
I still would like an assistant. It might still be Cee. My PipeDream workflow isn’t a pipe dream, but neither is it perfection. What results when I dictate a post to myself is a poorly formatted, ugly, and often much-in-need-of-editing draft. If I could integrate Cee into my workflow, if she could take my drafts, clean them up, and ready them for publication, that would be valuable. We may try that.
But for now, I’m pretty pleased with where I am.
AI note: this was a voice memo, recorded as I walked home after leaving my car to be inspected. OpenAI transcribed the voice memo, generated the title, and inserted paragraph breaks. I edited it VERY LIGHTLY after that – bonafide is NOT one word, unless you’re watching “O Brother Where Art Thou.”
And, a postcript: I fixed my workflow so PipeDream now formats my posts more better-ly.