On Blogging Daily
Having been inspired by Seth Godin and Fred Wilson, I blogged every day for 528 consecutive days straight between 2011 and 2013. Blogging back then netted for me a very positive experience. Aside from building a body of work and keeping the writing tool sharp, the blog opened professional doors, had a positive impact on a handful of work environments, and brought with it a pretty awesome audience that engaged with my writing on and offline. I would have kept up with it had I not embarked on a rather demanding job that hurled me 62,683 miles through 13 countries across 17 time zones on six continents over 131 days without a single day or weekend off. 18 hour days under constant duress and limited connectivity kicked blogging to the back seat. That job took me months to recover from and I seldom blogged again.
Reflecting on how powerful my blogging experience had been, I committed to blog daily again in 2017. And while I’m proud of the discipline I’ve had to exhibit to keep up with it so far this year, I’m afraid to admit that this round of blogging daily is far less fulfilling than the last.
First, blogging every day competes with other writing I’ve committed to for this year. When faced with the choice of writing for my personal projects and writing a daily blog post, I’ve been forced to take on the blog post per my commitment. The net result in many cases has been hastily or spitefully written pieces that lacked a genuine reason for being other than the pursuit of a quota. Even with the best intentions, I’m the last person who wants to pump wasteful noise into the world and felt dirty posting in these moments.
In that vein, I’m eager to put even more meaningful content into the world. This time around, I keep finding myself taking on much deeper subjects than a daily cadence of writing will allow. Some of the subjects I want to tackle in a single post take far more than a full calendar day to research and draft. I confess that I wrote this post and the past three last Tuesday so that I could free up time to write the beefy post I’m excited to share with you tomorrow. And while I could get into the habit of batch scheduling daily posts like I did this week to help reserve energy for more meaningful posts, I’m struggling with whether or not to let quality give quantity the boot indefinitely.
Finally, my blogging platform of choice is doing me or my readers no favors. While Medium is an especially beautiful experience and a really strong community full of great writers, I’m afraid it’s done precious little to help my readers find, keep up with, or build community around my daily writing. My old Wordpress blog drove much greater engagement and repeat readership than Medium has in nearly six months. I have no doubt that I’m failing to take advantage of the tools offered by Medium and am very open to hearing suggestions from readers on how best to capitalize on this platform. Regardless, the Medium community is far more fit for more thoughtful and involved writing and I’m very excited to continue to contribute bigger pieces.
In the meantime, I’m on the fence with whether to keep blogging daily at all. It’s not an easy decision to make when reflecting on how well the exercise treated my last time and reluctance to quit a willpower exercise by giving up on this year’s goal. Maybe a simple change of platform is in order, but that won’t solve for my desire to dig deeper into subjects. Perhaps posting weekly will suffice. I will need to give this a few more days to process and welcome any thoughts or feedback you have. Either way, I very much appreciate your readership and am excited to share with you soon a few larger pieces I’ve been working on for a while.
