Looking at my archives, I was blogging regularly from 2005-2009, mostly because I was really active in competitive MTG during that time. Starting 2010, my blogging activity started to taper off, with less than 60 posts until 2015. I tried to revive the habit around mid-2016, posting at least once a week, but the writing slowed down again around April this year (coinciding with one of the more busy periods for me work-wise). Starting in October I had a bit more free time so I decided to fire on all cylinders again. Instead of the previous 1-2 posts per week I was going for in 2016, this time I would go for posting every day. Not even every weekday, but seven days a week.
I tried this, as an experiment, back in October of 2006, but I didn’t last the month with the habit (though I did continue to post regularly for the next few years).
This is kind of secondhand-blog-linking, but the post [Seth Godin Explains Why You Should Blog Daily] (https://www.cjchilvers.com/blog/seth-godin-explains-why-you-should-blog-daily) explains well the advantages of posting daily:
“Everyone should write a blog, every day, even if no one reads it. There’s countless reasons why it’s a good idea and I can’t think of one reason it’s a bad idea.”
“If you know you have to write a blog post tomorrow, something in writing, something that will be around 6 months from now, about something in the world, you will start looking for something in the world to to write about. You will seek to notice something interesting and to say something creative about it. Well, isn’t that all we’re looking for? The best practice of generously sharing what you notice about the world is exactly the antidote for your fear.”
- Seth Godin
The first fear of course, is: do I actually have enough material, enough stuff to write about on a daily basis? The article above mentions that the mere act of committing to daily writing means you will naturally tend towards notcing more things and having more opinions and thus more things to write about. But I was skeptical, since I had tried the regular writing before and it didn’t really stick. One thing that helped however was that since 2016 I’ve been regularly listing down blog post ideas. I got this idea from James Altucher’s post about becoming an idea machine where he recommend’s thinking of 10 ideas daily. I did start out writing 10 blog post ideas every day, but that tapered off after a while because I was only posting a couple of times I week, I had far too many ideas!
Not all of those ideas would be good enough to be posts of course. I wrote up a few posts first, creating a buffer of posts that could be scheduled in advance. I started posting daily on the second week of October, and have kept it up since, I’m at more than 60 posts now, so the habit has already stuck longer than the last attempt. I find that between the long list of post ideas I already had (some 600+ in total), my daily walks and the fact that I’m a voracious internet reader, it was actually quite easy to maintain a continuous stream of posts to write.
I don’t spend too much time on each post, maybe 30 minutes at most, sometimes much less. On a good day I can knock off up to five posts. I find that most of my recent posts clock in under 1,000 words, which I think is perfectly reasonable. I think my increased participation in internet debates back during the 2016 election period also made me more willing to post opinions online.
If you’re writing to become a “professional blogger” of some sort, or otherwise trying to optimize for engagement or such, daily posting might not be such a good idea. The front page of this blog changes every day, and I don’t have a search function at the moment, so it’s not straightforward to find something you miss.
I of course write mostly for myself, though I do appreciate it when I find out people are reading the blog. I prefer posts that I can look back to in a few years to remember what was going on with me at the time. I try to write about things I’m doing, shows I’m watching, projects I’m trying out, games I’m playing, opinions on current events, and generally random thoughts going through my head and so on. I find that the daily writing, like the daily walking, helps improve my thinking processes. And it often encourages me to be a bit more experimental - I can try things out and even if I fail, the floor is that I have a story for a blog post. There is also less pressure for new posts to be super deep or meaningful or otherwise with my daily blogging, there is no room for perfectionism to get in the way.
I don’t know how long I can keep this up on a daily basis. I’ll try to revisit this after a year maybe to see how far I’ve gone.
See Also