The rise of Social Media platforms providing microblogging capabilities with increased post character lengths and thread features may have repressed the discipline of many bloggers publishing on their blogs regularly. Blogging was never dead, however, and probably never will! Blogging on your site will likely always remain the best way to write, elaborate on ideas to share thoughts and perspectives in a much broader way with the peace of mind of knowing your content is yours. And I, for one, intend to make this medium my de facto platform for sharing carefully curated content for the ages.
More consumption than creation
I work in an industry where winter is the busiest period. On any given workday, the working hours could stretch past 12 hours, and between dealing with the technical aspects, engineers, clients, and 50–90 miles of driving, I’m often left exhausted, mentally and physically. All I wanted to do on most nights was to sit back, listen to music, catch up on my RSS and podcast feeds or, if the mood struck, watch some TV. Consuming content was even somewhat of a challenge on some days after work, let alone creating content.
I was fortunate enough to have ten days off work during the Christmas holidays. I spent the first five days in a complete mental shutdown from anything work-related. Coming out of that much-needed recuperation time, I spent a morning evaluating my work processes and creating robust plans to be more efficient with my time at work. The aim is to be more proficient in dealing with anything energy-sapping as effectively and efficiently as possible. I’m hoping the positive outcomes will significantly reduce my current levels of exhaustion that prevent me from engaging in some out-of-work activities, such as blogging and publishing.
Expanding the mediums
Moving into 2024, I plan to fill the exhaustion-free times by expanding my reading material and mediums. I currently read far more blog posts than I do books. I set out recently to expand the number of personal blogs in my RSS feed. Thanks to the recent App Defaults trend — which now has over 300 bloggers on the list — it is helping expose more bloggers, and the number of personal blogs on my RSS feed has quadrupled. Love it.
Creating more
I was fully aware of the time commitment required to consistently write and publish content regularly to the blog when I decided to launch this site back in April of this year. Rather than setting a publishing timescale, which I may not be able to fulfil all the time, I was comfortable deciding to write and publish as and when I could, regardless of the time elapsed between published entries. I couldn’t end the year however on just 9 blog posts. This blog post marks the tenth entry published since launch, which — for the sake of rounding numbers up — averages out to around one blog post a month.
The plan now is to spend more time writing, polishing drafts and publishing as much as possible. The problem I had wasn’t the actual writing process. I frequently empty my thoughts into the Apple Notes app, with additional snippets as points of reference to make it easier to retain the train of thought to elaborate and expand them into a fully fleshed-out blog post later. Finding the right energy and clarity of mind to sit and formulate my brain-dumps into something coherent has been challenging given my workload over the past three months.
Therefore, I have laid out the following plans to help improve production and publishing content to the blog:
- Establish uninterrupted 30 minutes of writing daily whenever possible
- Schedule time to regularly revisit and edit brain-dump drafts
- Maintain a minimum of once a week posting but only publish when it feels right — no set day of the week to publish
I hope to engage staunchly in this exercise to build a good momentum that will eventually turn into a regular habit. While I'm not aiming for literary perfection, I want to produce clear and purposeful content worthy of both my time and anyone who reads it.
I love reading blogs. The more personal the blog in terms of the writing style and the look & feel, the better. So if you have a blog, join me in making more of an effort in writing and publishing. And if you currently don’t and have been sitting on the fence, now is a perfect time to start.
Happy Blogging!
