When I restarted this little writing project, I set a goal of 2 posts per week. Yesterday was the last day of my fourth week, so I thought I should take a moment to grade my little experiment. For the purposes of this exercise, I’d previously decided a week starts on Sunday, and a blog post should contain at least 300 characters of text I wrote (e.g., block quotes don’t count). Anything else is what I’d consider a micro-blog post and not part of my personal goal.
The post you’re currently reading is my eleventh in less than four weeks. I’m quite pleased with that. Eleven posts with more than 10,000 combined words in 25 days is probably some of the most prolific blogging I’ve ever done. But for how I defined my goal, I haven’t managed to stay within the parameters.
This project kicked-off mid-week, but I still managed to publish 4 posts before the next Sunday. In my second week, I hammered out three posts on separate days. That all tracks for the excitement that comes from a new or revived hobby.
But, like always happens with a new or revived hobby, the shine wears off at some point. In my third week of this experiment, I only found the time to publish one post. The same ended up true for Week 4. Luckily, I know what the problem is.
I currently have about 10 unfinished drafts of posts sitting in Drafts. Some are further along than others, but collectively, it’s approximately 5,500 unpublished words. So, basically, about a third of my writing this month never even got published.
I had started and probably could have finished my post about new data centers and still hit my weekly goal, but I had a hard time letting go and calling it done. I don’t use LLMs to write, but I did ask Claude at one point to review what I had written and it said that what I had resembled two different essays shoved together.
Instead of taking that feedback as a sign to publish them as two posts I redoubled my efforts to make it one much longer, but hopefully cohesive one. I don’t know that I succeeded. I certainly didn’t feel that way. Finishing it and publishing it felt like a chore by the end. I just wanted to be done with it.
If I’d published them as two, separate, lighter posts I think I would have gotten them up faster and been able to be happier with them. It was the fact that it grew so long that made me have a hard time letting go.
I’m still going to keep my posting goal at 2 per week, but the thing I’ll try to consider more is to publishing faster, shorter and earlier than I might think I should because the alternative is not publishing at all.