This blog needs a schedule. Or I need a schedule to post consistently.
It’s not because I find myself sitting around, looking for a void to sink my time into. My time is occupied.
A job occupies my time. Freelance projects like filming/editing a real estate video, a talking pig, and web promo featuring a bearded friend all carve out a nice slice of free time. Then there is writing a second book while re-editing the first one. And staying current with the goal of reading one book a week for the entire year.
If you charted the hours of sleep I got per night over the course of the last six months and drew a trend line, you’d get a nice little bunny hill to ski down. If sleep is food for the brain, the CFO of my brain would be running around screaming that we’re all going to starve.
I was originally going to start posting daily, but I’ve decided on 2 posts a week – Tuesday and Thursday.
I have 155 posts labeled at “Drafts” on this blog right now. Most of them are just blog post titles that I no longer like. If I’m lucky I’ll find 5-10 worth developing into a blog post. I don’t have a large amount of free time and I don’t have many ideas in the holster, ready to go. So why commit to writing on a consistent basis?
Whatever doesn’t get better, generally gets worse.
You probably remember nothing from Spanish you took in high school. I don’t remember much, except for the teacher crying one day. It’s because after those classes, I never practiced again. Ride a bike every day for 3 months and then take 3 months off. You’ll be noticeably worse when you get back on (and sore the next day). Physical decay is easy to comprehend and experience. Mental decay is much more subtle.
Your mental capacity is not in a fixed state. Creativity is a muscle. Just like any other type of muscle, in order for it to grow stronger, you need to push yourself on a consistent basis. Spurts of 2 weeks of steady writing and one month off are too inconsistent. Whatever isn’t getting better is getting worse.
Going further, do I ever have nothing to say? If I said I was going to call you at 10:00pm every night and ask for you to tell me something interesting that happened to you or that you noticed earlier that day, would you have nothing to say? Someone wrote a hilarious and entertaining book about going to a convenience store to buy a pair of shoelaces over their lunch break. Having nothing to write about isn’t because nothing happened. It’s a failure of observation.
Why publish twice a week instead of daily? Diversity. I’ve been hitting daily writing targets for a 2nd book, which I want to continue to do. I also have other writing projects I want to be working on and those can’t really be public until I’m finished with them. If you want to become a better at anything, you need to practice daily. Drip, drip, drip – it adds up. There is no overnight success.
Today onward, I’ll be posting every Tuesday and Thursday.