The Power of Working in Public
🛠️ About this series: This is the final post in a three-part series about the different modes of working: for yourself, in private, and in public. Each mode offers its own strengths: one helps you explore freely, another helps you finish, and the last helps you connect. They’re not stages, nor opposites. Just tools—and learning when to use which is part of any creative life.
Other posts in the series:
Some work is meant to be seen.
In the earlier posts in this series, I talked about working for yourself and working in private. These modes protect your time, your curiosity, your freedom to explore or to focus. But they can only take a project so far. At some point, you need to turn outward. To make the thing you’ve been building not just functional, but communicable. Sharable. Useful to others.
That’s where working in public comes in.
Visibility shapes the work
When you make something public—even just a little bit public—you start seeing it through other people’s eyes. You ask different questions. You think about the edges of your work: what’s unclear, what’s surprising, what’s delightful?
A good example of this for me is my personal website. On the surface, it’s just a site. But because it’s public, I think about it differently. I think about how it reads to someone who doesn’t know me. I think about the feeling it leaves behind. That kind of reflection leads to better writing, better design, and ultimately, better ideas.
You don’t have to be a perfectionist to feel this. The simple act of publishing makes you more thoughtful. You start to notice the gaps.
Weak points revealed
Working in public exposes the weak points in your ideas. That’s part of the point.
When you write about something, present it, or release it into the world, the cracks become visible. Things that made perfect sense in your head suddenly feel underdefined. The act of sharing pushes you to tighten the thinking. It doesn’t just broadcast the idea—it helps you finish it.
This can be uncomfortable. But it’s also the fastest path to clarity. You realize what you really mean by noticing what others misunderstand. You improve your ideas by watching where they fall short.
Connection and collaboration
One of the best parts of working in public is the potential for connection. Publishing something can lead to feedback, collaboration, or new opportunities. It invites others into the process, and transforms a project from something internal to something shared.
But that connection isn’t guaranteed. I once ran a blog called Coding for Chemists (now archived here). I put my energy into it, hoping to make it useful. But I rarely heard about it from anyone outside my immediate circle. Maybe people used it—maybe some loved it—but I never knew. And over time, that made it harder to keep going.
Working in public can be deeply motivating when there’s a sense of response, of community. And it can feel a bit lonely when that doesn’t materialize. But even then, something changes. You start thinking more clearly. You start noticing the places where your work meets the world.
A brief note on fear
There’s a vulnerability to sharing unfinished work. You might worry it’s not good enough, or that people will misunderstand it.
That’s normal. And it doesn’t go away. But over time, it becomes easier to accept. Working in public isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being in motion, in dialogue, in the world.
Key points
- Public work helps you see your ideas more clearly by showing them to others
- The gaps and weak spots in your work become visible, and that’s a good thing
- Being visible invites connection—but absence of feedback can also make public work harder to sustain
- Publishing early and imperfectly helps sharpen and refine your thinking
That concludes this series. Whether you’re tinkering alone, focusing in solitude, or building in public, each mode of working has its place. The power is in knowing when to use which.