An End to Daily Posts
I said at the start of the year that I wanted to get out of the habit of publishing a blog here every day, and since then I have struggled a little to find the will to stop. I think the biggest part of the reason I have not wanted to stop is that I’m worried if I don’t write here every day then I’ll never write here, and I think it’d be a shame to only post 3 or 4 of these a year, as tends to be the case with the longer posts that I am more proud of. With that being said, this isn’t really serving the purpose it once was, and I don’t think holds much benefit for me any more, especially as I am so pressed for time, I think there are higher ROI activities to build daily habits around. I still plan on writing every day, just in my journal, rather than publicly, where I can let a little more of my neuroticism out on the page, and am much happier to write about my relationships and my job; ultimately the two things that are most often on my mind, but that I am reluctant to write about much where anyone might read it.
I really don’t want to abandon this blog though, and I certainly have high hopes that a reduction in quantity will simply mean an improvement in quality. I have various ideas for longer, essay-style posts that have been rolling around in my brain for months now, but that I’ve never managed to find the time to sit down and write, and the hope is that I can spend a little bit of time each day working on one coherent piece of writing, rather than so many disjointed and, frankly, uninspired and uninteresting ones. Another part of the reason I postponed stopping the daily posts for a couple of months is that I am very comfortable publishing completely worthless trash if I am doing so on a daily basis, but if I am only posting every so often then now I expect whatever I do post to be of a higher standard and actually have some kind of merit to it, which adds pressure to the whole process and forces me to answer the question of where I want to set the bar for my own writings. I still don’t have a particularly good answer to this latter question, but I do have something of a plan. My goal will be to write (at least) two posts a month, one of which is a monthly update with how training is going, what I’m working on, what I’ve been thinking about and any other personal miscellanea, and the other will be a long form post about something that I think is important, either to me personally that I have personal experience with, or some other topic that I’ve spent a good amount of time learning about, thinking about, and then choosing to write about. With this being said, my calendar in March is alarmingly full, so who knows when I will be able to find the time for these things, but that is at least the initial naive hope.
A small part of me is sad to not be committed to maintaining my streak, which I think is decently impressive at this point, but I am predominantly relieved. I’ve felt for a long time that what I’ve written here has been very low quality, and it’s become progressively harder not to feel a little bit embarrassed to have my name attached to it. I am instead excited about all the things that I actually want to write about, but haven’t been able to muster the energy to do so - hopefully the rearchitecture of my blogging schedule will let me find more fulfillment in what I write here and maybe even produce things that I’m proud of.