Two weeks of blogging

This should be my 14th blogpost now and is the end of the period of time I committed to doing the posts for. I now need to decide whether I’m going to carry on, stop completely, or amend the frequency with which I post.

Firstly I’m going to reflect on how it’s gone so far:

• It’s quite nice having produced lots of different posts
• I enjoyed being forced to come up with an idea everyday
• I enjoyed practicing summarising and describing things
• On some days I put much more time into the post than others, depending on how much time I had. I really enjoyed having to come up with interesting ideas and write good quality posts.
• More recently, I’ve had less time to work on the posts, and have started coming up with the idea and writing them in the evening. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the posts have become poorer quality and more random.

In the next few weeks it seems likely that I’m going to become much busier, and I’m uncertain how well I’ll be able to balance different commitments. It therefore makes sense that I stop blogging as frequently for the next couple of weeks, and then decide what to do once I understand my new schedule better.

Perhaps something like a 3 day process for blogging would be acceptable. Day 1: choose a topic, day 2: do research, day 3: write the post. But a whole day to choose a topic seems unnecessary. Perhaps every other day. I think there is a risk that if it doesn’t become a daily fixture it becomes harder to remember and motivate myself. But if I just treat it as another task in my schedule, it should be doable. Ok, looks like I’m going to publish a post every other day, specifically on: Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. On Saturday I’ll review where to go next.

I’ll briefly think a little more about what exactly I like about writing the posts. I think producing something concrete is nice. I think what’s also key is the finality of publishing a post. There’s a clear point at which the post is done and you move on. Often I’ll write google docs that just sit there, but publishing a post is a more concrete achievement. I’ve also enjoyed trying to think up topics. Even my back up ideas of “explain a random EA concept” or “summarise a reading” are pretty useful exercises. However they’re likely to be things I’ll be covering in some upcoming projects. Maybe the blog should then move towards being more about personal thought or observations. I’ll guess we’ll see if I can come up with more original ideas next week.