Tim Urban of Wait But Why, in a post that I can’t find right now says that if you want to write a successful blog you should “always be jabbing” which is a boxing metaphor he basically uses to mean that in between the really good well researched and well thought out posts it’s good to try to write frequently even if you don’t have a huge amount to say. Clearly since I’ve not written a post in about 2 months, I’m not doing very well at exercising that theory. I think one of the big reasons for that is that I’ve just come to the end of quite a long lapse in my battle against Internet addiction. That’s also why I’m writing this now at 1am, because I’m 4 days into a concerted effort to spend a lot less time online after having a “wake up” moment. One of the side effects of this is that because my head is clearer my brain is much more active and so I’m having trouble getting to sleep. So I got up, made a cup of tea and decided to write a blog post on whatever came out of my brain.
The other thing that Tim Urban says is that basically in the early days of writing a blog a lot of your posts will suck, but don’t worry because you’ll get better with practice. This post definitely qualifies as “practice” but at the moment I don’t see it as much different to (from?) an extended version of writing thoughts on facebook, but this feels much more expressive and liberating. A huge amount of what I see people posting on facebook now is links to things that other people have said or created rather than the poster’s own thoughts, and it seems like when I share a thought it often gets no response. That’s probably 50% people reading it and thinking “whatever” and 50% Facebook filtering it out or it just getting lost in the noise. Writing things on here I seem to care a lot less if anyone is reading it (party because I’m pretty sure no-one is).
Anyway I’m feeling really good to have a clearer head and be a lot more conscious and decisive about how I’m spending my time. It turns out giving myself the space to get bored means that I’m much more often thinking “what shall I do now?” rather than just defaulting to scrolling my feed and reacting to notifications. What hasn’t helped is that for the last 3 months I’ve been working on building up some FB groups as a way of promoting my business, and it’s really easy to get stuck in a loop of responding to the next notification and the next and the next, interspersed with needlessly checking how many people have joined so far (every 10 mins). So I really have to use a lot of self control to try and limit how many times a day I check what’s happening with that while still making the progress with it that I want.
Useful link: How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step