Working with the garage door up basically means working *out loud* and *in public*. It's allowing your draft ideas a public space, prior to releasing a final, more polished product. It's an opportunity to show the creative process and to receive earlier feedback on ideas, even if it feels a bit scary. My notes here are just such an attempt.[^1] I ran across this idea from [Andy Matuschak](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up), which he summarizes here: >One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s [Screenshot Saturday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/screenshotsaturday?lang=en); it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. [Anti-marketing](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4bK6LaSBRetDzuYkeCs3A8mJ8DufTbK4o6FS). > >I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term. You can read the [snippet from Robin Stone](https://desert.glass/newsletter/week-43/) that Andy mentions above, which better explains the garage door reference while making a slightly different point about being present in the community. But I think he captures the general point well on his own. Still, I like the metaphor of the garage door, as it reminds me of long ago projects I'd work on in the garage while neighbors passed by and peaked in to see what I was working on. # Why this is useful There are a few reasons I think this is worthwhile: First, It's easy to forget that most of the creative work is done during the editing phase. When you start writing, you often don't start with a fully formed idea. It's something that gets born, reformed, and refined in the writing process itself. Because we're so used to only seeing the final product of others, it's easy to feel inferior when we're working on our own project—since we see each of the warts and blemishes. This seems especially true with social media, where we [[Social media is a highlight reel|only see the highlight reel]]. Perhaps understanding that everyone's early drafts generally suck helps someone else stay the course and complete their project. And because the idea may not be fully formed, it also means that it's still malleable—and likely made better from the constructive feedback of others. With the garage door up, others can provide that feedback, which is much easier to receive and process before you've heavily invested yourself in your own idea. As Anne-Laure Le Cunff [writes on Mental Nodes](https://www.mentalnodes.com/the-only-way-to-learn-in-public-is-to-build-in-public): >Instead, the goal should be to tap into your network's collective intelligence to create constructive feedback loops. Likewise, it also just makes it much easier to "ship your work." Simply put, if there's no expectation that everything needs to be *absolutely perfect* prior to publishing, then you've removed one of the biggest barriers to getting good things done and out into the world. And I can sometimes use some of that. [^1]: Note that this is different than *unfinished* or *half-written* notes, which are also prevalent here—at least at this initial stage. I've prematurely published a number of those notes snippets of ideas