Tag: Consistency

Long Absences

You never intend to step away for very long. A week goes by, then another. Without realizing it, a month has passed.

It can sometimes be hard to keep up a weekly blog. I don’t know how the daily folks do it – Seth Godin says it’s just consistency, but does that mean it’s easier to show up everyday than once per week? Maybe… It’s harder to push off to tomorrow when the deadline is always midnight. I’m not impressed by the folks whose job is to churn out multiple pieces of content per day. Creative burnout aside, there is a difference between being paid for the content and doing it without pay.

Excuses are easy, especially when they are real. Yes, I didn’t set time aside to write, but I also had a major deliverable due at work. I even set up auto-responders on my emails to manage people’s expectations while I was in focus mode. These are reasons, but they do not excuse the absence when you know what you are getting yourself in to.

And when you return to the notion of an update, you feel the need to write something profound to offset the time away, but the ideas feel crusted and not worth sharing. Instead, you hide away, and figure you’ll get back to it next week, meanwhile the feeling of panic and dread increases at the thought of delivering that perfect post.

But next week comes and goes.

There is no magic solution beyond showing yourself compassion, resetting the clock or counter, and shipping the next thing by trying again.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Enough Blog Words to Fill A Book!

fountain pen on black lined paper
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve hit a couple of milestones recently. For instance, last week I hit a nice big milestone in Duolingo when I hit 600 consistent days of doing lessons.

I wouldn’t say I’m particularly fluent in German, but during my trip in October of last year, I was able to follow some of the conversation going on around me and put into practice the lessons given by the app. I was able to manage thanks to small, consistent daily micro-lessons that expanded my vocabulary a bit at a time.

Something similar happened for this blog as well. From time to time I check-in on the site’s stats and analytics. I don’t have any plans or intentions to seek monetization, so I only check in on things out of a sense of curiosity rather than seeking optimization. I originally set up this blog as an exercise to see if I could keep a consistent weekly writing schedule. At the time, I had the aspirations to go back to school to become a paramedic, and so I also had intended to use this blog to apply the concepts I was learning to help me reinforce my learning. I’ve since abandoned that path, and so the blog largely remains a project to force me to come up with something to post on a weekly schedule.

I was looking at the stats last week and felt a sense of satisfaction for hitting a couple of milestones. First, it appears that I have not missed a weekly post in the last three years (I might be late posting, but I still get something up). Also, I’m happy to see that overall my words per post are trending upwards, though I hope this means I’m providing more meaningful, nuanced posts rather than just being verbose.

Then, I decided to check on how many words I had written for this blog.

YearTotal PostsTotal WordsAvg Words per Post
20163717,660477
20175428,625530
20185226,545511
20195232,210619
202033,0751,025
Sum108,115

As it turns out, I had written the rough equivalent of a book in the four years I’ve been at this. Beyond the urge to create something and a desire to force myself to “write more,” the steady drip of a weekly schedule has now pooled into a large body of words.

I take a lot of inspiration from Seth Godin, and I learned from him the value of consistently showing up and putting in the work. It’s not about creating high quality giant pieces of work from fiat, but instead the slow, plodding, steady work of creating a little bit at a time. When you look back, you see the vast distance you’ve covered by forcing yourself to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Not everything is going to be good – in fact, most of it will suck. But, over time you get better at the work, and sometimes you can find the good stuff emerging from the mediocre.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan