The hidden cost of writing Notes without a System

Random Notes don’t compound they evaporate

When I first started writing online I fell back on my University and school training. I came to this through the lens of someone who has gone through the UK education system.

At University I studied literary works from the likes of Herodotus, Cicero and Plato. I thought that the quality of my writing was determined by my lecturers and those marking my exam papers.

I treated short-form writing with contempt at first, I just wrote it off as something for dopamine addicts with short attention spans. When substack brought out their notes feature I was indifferent at first but I couldn’t ignore it forever.

When I finally decided to start studying and writing short-form consistently I realised that nothing had prepared me for it up until this point. Even though I had written essay after essay at Uni that had no bearing on short-form.

I started pumping out random thoughts. Asking questions, posting pictures. At first, it felt like freedom, the ability to publish quickly without pressure. But that freedom gradually turned into fatigue. I was frustrated by the inconsistency of how they performed I found myself often asking “what is the point? Am I just posting for the sake of consistency? Like what I am actually dong here?”

But over time while riding the short peaks and deep emotional valleys of attention and what felt like social ostracsim I settled into the real reason I was here in the first place. To find my voice to share my values and to contribute something of meaning. It was at this point that I started to develop more of a structure for my short form writing and see how each piece should fit organically in to my long form pieces and my voice as a whole.

I realised the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t writing enough Notes, the problem was that I was writing without direction. Because random Notes don’t compound they evaporate. They blur into the noise. They leave no trace, no memory and no reason for readers to return.

That’s when I began to see Notes differently. Not as fragments scattered into the void, but as a scaffolding for my voice. A system that could multiply resonance instead of wasting energy.

Notes as Scaffolding

When I think about Notes, I often come back to the process of learning a foreign language. At the beginning, you can’t write essays or tell stories. You can’t even string together a flowing sentence. First you need scaffolding. Things like the grammar, the sentence structures and the basic vocabulary that will one day allow you to improvise with fluency. Without that architecture, you’re just making noise.

Short-form Notes work the same way. Most people treat them as fragments, stray words and phrases tossed into the feed. But if you approach Notes as the scaffolding of your creative language, they become something else entirely. They become the daily practice through which your voice is assembled piece by piece.

Just as a language learner drills conjugations and sentence patterns, a creator builds their worldview through short form. Each Note is a kind of exercise: one to test your rhythm, another to clarify an idea, another to sharpen your tone. On their own, they may feel incomplete, even clumsy. But together, over time, they give you the muscle memory to speak in your own tongue.

And here’s the paradox: the Notes that disappear into the void are not wasted. They are the equivalent of muttered sentences in a second language, awkward, embarrassing, maybe even humiliatingly bad, But they are the only path to fluency.

Without the scaffolding of this early work you will not be able to push through and get to the next level.

So the real work of Notes is not visibility. It is the structure of alignment architecture. It is the process of teaching yourself to think in your own language, until resonance becomes inevitable.

The Beginner Pitfalls

The silence of early growth is difficult to endure. It presses on the nervous system in ways that trigger old instincts. The same ones that once warned our ancestors against being exiled from the tribe. Neuroscience shows us that social rejection activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. That’s why a post ignored can sting like a slap, and why creators so often reach for quick relief.

This is where the Discipline Spiral begins. A dedicated article on the Discipline Spiral will be coming in 4 weeks time but for now think of it like this:

Instead of pausing to examine alignment, beginners double down. They confuse output with progress, mistaking exhaustion for devotion.

So they chase visibility in all the wrong ways:

– Dropping links into comment sections, hoping someone will click.

– Sending cold DMs begging for subscribers, hoping someone will care.

– Mimicking the voices that already “work,” hoping no one notices the imitation.

Each of these is a form of performance gymnastics, driven not by clarity but by fear. They are survival strategies masquerading as growth strategies. And like all survival strategies, they might work for a moment, but they erode you over time. Because when you contort yourself to be seen, you abandon the very process that would have made you worth listening to.

The tragedy is not that these tactics fail to deliver growth. It’s that they succeed in severing you from your own voice. They train you to chase external cues rather than internal clarity, to measure resonance in applause rather than in alignment. And once that pattern is embedded, it is very difficult to unlearn.

This is why so many burn out before their work has had a chance to mature. Not because they lacked talent or discipline, but because they mistook desperation for dedication.

What To Do Instead (Visibility, the Sovereign Way)

The way out of the spiral is not to double down on brute-force discipline but to step back and create a rhythm that serves your voice. Most people scatter their efforts, posting at random, hoping that something will land. The result is a feed that feels incoherent, a patchwork of thoughts with no throughline. Readers can’t follow the story, because the writer hasn’t written one.

Here is what has been instrumental for me and what might be a good starting point if you are struggling to find your voice and build traction.

1. Batch, Don’t Scatter

I used to try and write notes in the moment. I thought that if they were fresh immediate insights that would somehow make them more authentic or more valuable. There are two problems with this:

I. Stress

It gets stressful when you don’t feel inspired but want to post something. You either end up posting something mediocre for the sake of it or you don’t post at all.

II. The magic is in the edit.

Initial thoughts and ideas are usually not as good as you think. When you come back to something the next day with fresh eyes you can see where the writing could have been improved.

III. The fix

The simplest fix is to write a weeks worth of Notes in one sitting. Set aside ninety minutes each week and draft them all at once. In doing so, you create coherence and rhythm. Ideas build on each other. Notes echo across days. A narrative arc emerges not just noise, and you can come back to them each day and make tweaks or adjustments depending on how you are feeling.

If your short form and long form compliment each other (which they should) then the easiest place to start is to pull notes from your long form articles and vice versa.

2. Consistent, Not Constant

Discipline is not about exhausting yourself. It is about rhythm. Many creators who I first met when I started began incredibly strong posting three to five long forms a week and 3-5 notes per day. The ones who are still here have all scaled back, they post a lot less now than they did in the first few months.

I went the opposite way. I began with just two articles a month. Later when I started short form I began with just one note per day. But as my direction sharpened, as my voice grew clearer, my output expanded naturally. More did not come from force; it came from alignment. Consistency means showing up in a way that you can sustain, not burning yourself out in a sprint you’ll abandon.

3. Clarity Before Community

Guest posts, cross-promotions, go lives, engagement groups, all of these “growth hacks” are premature if you don’t yet know who you are and who you want to attract. The temptation to grow fast is strong, but growth without clarity is wasted.

Your first task is not to gather people but to build the architecture of your message and the fastest and most fulfilling way to do this is through intentional short form writing. Alignment first, community second. When your voice is steady, the right people will find it.

4. The Emotional Turn

Obscurity feels like exile, but it is in fact apprenticeship. Those early days of silence are not punishment they are just a natural part of the process. A buffer between your fragile beginning and the harsh weight of visibility.

You are not being ignored. You are being refined and if you have a massive ego this process can be extremely humbling. Every Note, every post, every word in the quiet is chiseling away at something beneath the surface. What feels like emptiness is the slow architecture of a voice that will one day hold its own.

Attention is addictive, and once it arrives, it will change how you see your work. The temptation to pander, to edit yourself for approval, to perform for the algorithm all of that comes later. Which is why this moment, this quiet, is sacred. Learn to stand here without flinching, and nothing will shake you when the spotlight finally arrives.

The creators who last are not the ones who grow fastest they are the ones who learn how to create without applause. Alignment before audience. Voice before virality.

If you can hold the silence, if you can keep writing when no one is listening, you will eventually emerge with something more valuable than followers: you will have a voice worth following, and when clarity comes, community follows.

I will go more in depth in the next letter but for now consider writing a weeks worth of notes in one sitting. Take you next long for letter and use that as the basis form which to pull all your notes from.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your day.

Ben,

P.s

If you’re tired of spinning in circles, unsure of your voice, and ready to finally build a foundation you can trust, that’s exactly why I built the 15-Note System.