Should You Write Everyday?
(I'm switching to weekly posts)
Routines are great. They help us eliminate extra decisions, they help us save time, and they help us make incremental progress towards goals.
Routines can also be annoying, boring, and wear us down.
For the last year, I’ve written a blog post every single day. Every. Single. Day.
It’s not the first time. I’ve done this in years past. For the past 5 years or so, I’ve either written a blog post every day or once a week. That’s a lot of blog posts. I don’t have them totaled up anywhere, but I’m probably just under 1,000 posts in total.
So, now what?
I think the daily blog posts are a great part of my routine. They force me to dig deep and create something. I wrestle every morning with the blank page and some days are better than others. This is part of the problem.
I’d like to get out of the “tips and tricks” business.
I’ve kept my blog posts intentionally small most of the time. The idea was that small, daily, consistent actions can lead to big things. Which is true! If I tallied up my 1,000 blog posts that are each 2 minutes in length, I’d probably have a book!
Now there’s a thought.
Truthfully, though, while each blog post had an insight or intention, none of them dove too deeply into any one thing. Recently, I snuck in a few longer-form posts that did fairly well and generated quite a bit of response.
I think the few conversations that occurred from deeper posts are worth more than the many one-way, small interactions I’ve had with readers for so long. To me, the two-way interaction seems much more important.
The only downside is that a blog post every day is a lot—not just for me. It’s a lot for anyone to keep up with. If you’re like me, you get a ton of emails already. So, anything that you let into your inbox had better be worth your time.
I’ve asked myself:
“Self, is this about you or the reader? Are you grading yourself on the number of blog posts you write or on how many people you’ve inspired? How will you know if you have a net positive outcome?”
So, in order to focus more on conversations and deeper, richer insights:
I’m switching to weekly blog posts.
I’m going to be shifting to a weekly blog post for the next several weeks to see how it impacts readers. I think Tuesday is a good day to publish.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing every day—that demand on my creativity needs to continue.
You might not know this but I’m inherently lazy. Forcing myself to do things is the only way I actually do them. This system works for me, but I’m not sure it would work for everyone.
It also means I’ll be putting more time into the private Up To Something community on slack.
Writing vs. publishing every day.
Really, for me, the demand of writing every day is a useful one. It forces the repetition of being insightful, inspiring, creative, and helpful. To me, those things are more muscle memory than they are unpredictable surges of genius.
The trouble is that no one can perform at their peak every day, which means that sometimes I write low-quality posts and hit “publish” anyway.
So, while I believe in the power of writing every day, I’m going to make most of that private. At the end of the week, I’ll have something that’s a little more impactful for you. Hopefully, I can deliver more for you in a smaller container.
But what do I know?
Hit me up with comments if you have strong feelings about this in either direction. I’m making this up as I go and it’s all for you.