Blog Milestone/Schedule Shift
.Today marks five years of posting to this blog at least five days per week (it was every day for the first year). Well over a thousand posts, on an eclectic variety of topics. When I started, in August 2006, my intent was to blog every day for a month. I did that, then kept on going, but after a year recognized that I needed some breaks in a week.
I’m quite proud of having posted that regularly for so long. That being said, it’s time for a change. The new schedule is a minimum of one post per week, posted Sundays (or earlier, but that effectively means Sundays).
Five posts to one post is quite a change, but it’s necessary. For the last several months I’ve been having more trouble posting, more trouble writing. I’ve found it a chore to have to do so. I’ve procrastinated on posts even more than usual, resulting in my staying up quite late for posts that don’t show any signs of having been pored over.
Worse, the necessity of posting five times per week has been hindering, rather than helping, me post on certain topics—any topic that might take a longer time is pushed aside on any given day, because I need a post for that day, and that takes priority over the fact that the longer post might have been more interesting, both to write and to read. I’ve found creative writing harder to do within the context of the blog for similar reasons, and at the same time I haven’t been doing it outside the blog, either. I need time and space to do it, and blogging five times per week clashes with that too strongly right now.
The intent behind the blogging schedule was partly that having a commitment to post would push me to write the things I wanted to write—faced with that commitment, the things I had in my mind that would otherwise go unwritten instead would become posts. For a long time that’s how it worked. Now, however, the posting schedule is pushing aside things I want to write about. While I could approach this by “trying harder”—directly battling procrastination, and summoning greater amounts of discipline—I’ve been trying that already and it hasn’t been working so well.
Over the last several months, due to a combination of these factors, blogging has seemed more of a burden, and it’s become far harder for me to do it while at the same time I think the quality of my posts has been declining. This is hardly a positive trend, and for all these reasons I’ve decided to change the schedule.
So, one post per week. More if I feel inspired, but probably one per week. I’m not giving it a minimum word count, but I expect that this one post will be longer than most of my posts, as I hope to do some in-depth exploration now that I’m freed from the necessity of posting five times a week. Despite pleas from some of my readers, none of my frequent post topics are off-limits, so whatever type of post you personally don’t like is more or less guaranteed to show up in the once-weekly posts in future.
Thank you all for reading, I hope you’ve found interesting some of the content I’ve posted over the last five years, and I hope you’ll stick around for the weekly posts to come.
18 Nov 2011 at 16:13
well done on five years of at least five times a week, and including the one year of every day, it’s really impressive and you’ve accumulated a huge body of work in that time, honed your skills, and given a great deal to the world. here’s to the more relaxed schedule, and hoping it will help you do more of what you want to do.