One Blog Instead of Two

Last year I started a blog called cjrcyl.es. This was around June and I finally launched the blog in September. It took me a long time to launch the blog, mostly because I was concerned with getting everything just right. I read a couple of good books about blogging and was trying to follow them to the letter. The main idea for cjrcyl.es was to document my entrance into the sport of cycling as a beginner, thinking that there would be many people in my shoes, trying to find a good source of information to help them enter the sport of cycling. A secondary purpose of the blog was to begin building a small venture focused on cycling deals.

Since I started this blog, I’ve been struggling with what to do with cjrcyl.es. What I’ve learned is that when I started cjrcyl.es, I was really looking for an outlet to write and also to begin building the cycling deals venture. I thought that combining them would be the way to go, in order to consolidate two efforts into a single focus.

Now that I’ve been writing this blog for over a month, it feels like a good time to revisit that strategy. I’ve been toying with the idea of dumping cjrcyl.es altogether, although my unrelenting impulse to finish what I’ve started has kept me from doing that. I also feel that the cycling deals venture has potential and I’d like to bring that to fruition.

I’ve tried to split my writing between cjrcyl.es and this blog, which has helped me understand how much I enjoy writing for this blog and how little I enjoy writing for cjrcyl.es. I’m starting to realize that part of the attraction of cycling to me is the ability, if you please excuse the pun, to LITERALLY just roll with it! I discovered that trying to force the analytical and documented structure of the blog on top of it detracted, rather than added to my enjoyment of the sport.

As of yesterday, I’ve decided to stop writing for cjrcyl.es and concentrate all my writing energy on this blog. I’m going to keep cjrcyl.es and focus it completely on the cycling deals idea. The split feels right and seems to align with the original goals I had when starting cjrcyl.es. It took starting this blog to help me realize what those goals were, namely, to develop the cycling deals business and give myself a creative writing outlet.

Toward the end of last year, I was fighting the motivation to start this blog, telling myself that it would be just another drain and distraction on a limited set of resources, i.e. time and mental energy. In addition to being a really mentally energizing excercise for me overall, adding the blog to my list of responsibilities actually helped bring focus to what I was trying to accomplish by starting cjrcyl.es.

This goes against the general approach I’m trying to adopt this year, which is to “subtract from” to streamline, rather than “add to” to complicate, the to-do lists in many areas of my life. For now I’ll have to leave the reconcilation of that conflict for later.