I’ve not put up anything here since the start of the month. So whatever happened to daily posting?

In part, life got in the way. A sick child, an interesting business meeting that overran by a couple of hours, a deadline and suddenly days had gone by without anything being done on the blog.

That was only part of it though. Some of it was intentional– honest! I wanted to see how things went without the discipline (or perhaps tyranny) of the daily post. The answer is that, as far as my work is concerned, they went very well. I found that on actual work days without the daily post my output roughly doubled.

That seems disproportionate but it is accurate. These posts are short and they rarely take more than an hour to write but that’s not the whole story. There’s dealing with comments, which I enjoy but which takes up a lot more time than I imagined. I have to think about what I am going to say, then I have to check it to make sure that it’s not too horribly spelled or punctuated.

And that, in some ways is the key. It’s not so much the time as the interuptions. I am notified by email whenever someone comments and I feel compelled to respond. It breaks my concentration, and it always takes me time to return to the flow afterwards. Sometimes quite a long time. It chops up the day and makes it bitty.

Blogging itself takes up headspace. I often find myself thinking about topics for the blog or responses to comments rather than the projects I was working on. I can wrench myself away and back to work, but it is an effort. When you are as lazy as I am, that’s the last thing you want.

I’ve often enjoyed posting and, whining aside, the comments and the interaction have been fun. But there were times when I was forcing myself to do it , simply because I had made the commitment. It was useful discipline but it was not fun.

Blogging also provided me with an excuse to procrastinate when I should have been writing. I was meeting a public commitment therefor it could be justified.

It’s been an interesting experiment. It has left me with enormous respect for those people who manage to blog every day or even just on a regular schedule.

The daily posting started as one of my usual over-reactions. Oops I only posted 8 times last year, let’s compensate for that by blogging every day. It was like those times when I decided to compensate for Xmas season overeating by going on a hyper-strict diet combined with a heavy exercise program. The intentions were good but the likelihood of failure extremely high.

I’ve decided that last year’s once every 6 weeks posting schedule is too little and once a day is too much. I’m going to aim for one post a week, probably on Wednesdays with extra posts as and when I really have something to say or rant about. Like today.

And now it’s time to put this up and get back to work.

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