Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Private writing

Two things I’ve learned over the past couple of months of daily blog posting:

  • I have a lot to write about
  • I might have too much to write about

Since I use this space to help myself think through some things, I found that I sometimes have a tendency to write about things that maybe I shouldn’t write about publicly, either for personal privacy reasons, or for professional courtesy reasons. Thankfully, I’ve been able to hold myself back so far.

To help suppress such urges, I’ve also recently resumed private journalling, a practice I haven’t revisited for quite a while. Basically just a document where I can dump my own thoughts about things that are probably inappropriate for public consumption. So I get the benefits of writing my thoughts down without any possible privacy issues. So far the need for private journal entries has been few and far between. Between the blog and the private journal, it should be a lot easier for me to take a look back at what I was thinking at any given point in time, should the need arise.

The last time I did the private journalling thing was with a service called 750 words, which was pretty good. It inspired me into a daily writing habit for a bit more than a year. I should probably go through those sometime and see if I can’t mine them for blog posts.

As for this blog and the daily posting thing, I have to admit the past week or so has been challenging. The week of Christmas is usually busy as there’s last minute gift buying and family visitors and holiday meetups and such so I don’t always have the time and/or energy to write posts. I thought about breaking the “daily posting” rule a few times, but somehow managed to keep it going. The problem with requiring myself to post every day is that it violates “You don’t have to be on all the time”. While writing this post, I considered loosening the commitment for the New Year, something like “post every day, unless you really don’t have time or energy”, but that’s pretty much how habits are broken. I do still find the practice fruitful, so I will continue it for the time being, as much as I can.

Posted by under post at #Writing
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