Good morning friends! I am feeling better this morning, or better enough to actually be interactive and mostly functional. Right now we have this weird thing happening in Oklahoma that is a perfect reminder that as a state we just get the weather patterns that are left over from the rest of the country. The air is filled with smoke from fires but said fires are happening in Canada and the Pacific Northwest but the current wind patterns are causing it to hang over the middle of the country. As a fairly severe asthmatic and one that is particularly susceptible to smoke, it has been destroying my lungs. For reference in 2005, there was a house fire down the street and that was enough exposure to send me to the hospital for five days. Yesterday was a day of rest and lots of Benedryl to try and halt the allergic reaction causing my lungs to stop functioning.
The results are that I feel more like a human being, but yesterday was not so much. As a result without really meaning to, I made the tactical decision just not to worry about blogging. I made a comment on Twitter given that the largest chunk of my vocal readers have a presence there where I sheepishly half apologized for not posting.
It felt strange that the key proprietor of Blaugust was taking a day off during the running of the event. I was rapidly presented with a chorus of my friends telling me that it was perfectly okay to take time off from blogging and that maybe it was a good lesson to present to younger bloggers. So here we are this morning with a post I did not intend to write on a subject I did not think to cover. The thing is… my friends are completely correct. Your health and wellbeing are far more important than maintaining a schedule. As a result, Uncle Bel is going to tell you a story.
The Grand Experiment
I am going to be completely honest with you, but right now my legacy in blogging seems to be the fact that I am more prolific than most. I am not necessarily known for the quality of my posts, but instead the quantity of them. Sure there are true daily bloggers that completely clean my clock when it comes to posting count, but people keep returning because I have things to say and keep saying them. This was not always the case and in fact, for the first four years of this blog, I was extremely irregular in my posting patterns. In 2013 I decided I wanted to change this and proposed what I then called The Grand Experiment where I force myself to sit down every morning and write something. The idea was simple enough, that not every blog post needed to be this epic tale and there could be straightforward “day in the life” style posts along the way.
In that first year, I made a total of 257 blog posts, which was over a hundred more than I had made to that point in the first four years of blogging. The more I wrote the easier it became to summon forth something to talk about, and honestly the more the barriers lowered in talking about my real life. I had always tried to keep my readers at arm’s length and never really talk about anything that I was going through. When you are blogging every day it becomes exceptionally hard to do that, and bits and pieces of my real life came through in this new journal format. Thing is, years after the fact I am very glad that I opened up because I can now use my blog as a way of determining when exactly which events happened in my life.
The Double Edged Sword
The challenge with blogging every day is that it becomes extremely difficult to stop blogging. You feel like you are a failure if you miss a day and for three and a half years I managed to crank out something new every single morning. There were a lot of days that I did not want to make a post and probably would have been better off not making one. The thing is I didn’t want to let that ball drop so I keep juggling and eventually reached this place where I felt like I needed to purposefully drop it in order to keep my own sanity. I’ve been so good about marking the passing of specific milestones, that I find it funny this morning I had to search for the exact point when I purposefully broke the streak. The history of daily blogging was looming over me and it felt like pressure pushing down on my shoulders. My ultimate fear was that if I did not break it on my own… I would potentially have a longer break when burnout finally caught up with me.
Instead of daily blogging, I shifted over to a format of blogging every weekday, which gave me a bit of a break on the weekends to recharge my batteries. The truth is I actually landed on a format where I took Saturday off because Sunday ended up being a quick posting of that weeks AggroChat which was more or less a required thing. In general, this was enough of a break to make me feel less pressured to keep things going. Even then however there are days when I just can’t bring myself to post like yesterday, and I need to be better about giving myself room to allow those days to happen. I did start out yesterday feeling like a bit of a failure for not summoning forth a blog post, but my friends came to the rescue and dispelled that myth.
Give Yourself Breathing Room
So while I absolutely think setting a schedule for yourself and sticking with it is a key trait in blogging, you do have to give yourself a bit of wiggle room. I am a daily blogger of a sort, but I give myself the leverage to determine which days I actually make posts. I try and follow a weekdays format, but occasionally there is going to be a day where that just doesn’t work. Yesterday I was sick, other days in the past I have been too busy at work or just didn’t feel like I had anything to add. Those days are okay and natural and it is important to let yourself have a break every now and then. Blogging is about the marathon and not the sprint. Ultimately we want you to be a voice that is around for the long haul and not someone that is going to be super active and then disappear forever. Breaks I think are key to that longevity.
Glad you’re feeling better, Bel. 🙂
And while not at all the main thrust of your post, inquiring minds would like to know, what are the ‘Normal’ and ‘1%’ tags above your tweet?
As to the topic at hand again — 100% agree with the sentiment of allowing yourself to take a break to look after yourself as needed, that your own health > blog schedule.
The only thing I will quibble with you on is,
“So while I absolutely think setting a schedule for yourself and sticking with it is a key trait in blogging, you do have to give yourself a bit of wiggle room”
Hi, I’m Nait. I’m here to demonstrate you can pants it. Pants it all! The schedule! The content plan! The whole lot. Big, baggy, billowy pants, too. Way more wiggle room in those bad boys than you might imagine. 🙂
Of course, having said that — Time to Loot is now my 4th major attempt at operating a blog and the first one to last longer than a year of sustained posting. So maybe not the best example. Plus, there will be some people that having a schedule will considerably help out in sticking to it.
I’m just suggesting that if planning and scheduling isn’t your thing, exactly, that it need not keep you from throwing your hat into the blogging ring. 🙂
Glad you’re feeling better. I totally support the idea of any blogger taking as many breaks as they need. Unless it actually is your job, this is supposed to be something we do for fun so if it isn’t fun, don’t do it!
That said, one thing no-one ever seems to mention in discussions like this is that while there are times when you won’t feel like blogging, there may be other times when you’re really in the mood for it. That’s when you write a few extra posts! If you’re in the groove one day and you have two or three ideas, don’t save them up for another day – write all the posts! Then you can either bank some for later or post more than once in a single day!
That latter, as far as I understand the criteria, also would get you past the particular Blaugust problem of having missed a day. The various badges relate to the number of posts in 31 days, not the number of days you posted. Not that I’m advocating playing catch-up if you do miss a day, but if it’s important to anyone, it is an option.
hugs I’m asthmatic although not severe, but I do have a pretty nasty allergic reaction to smoke too. Although for me it makes me sick as I also have non-allergic rhinitis and the combination is not pretty.
As I was one of those people who gave you a gentle poke for worrying about blogging while feeling so ill I won’t repeat myself 😛 I will add my own thoughts to blogging from my perspective as a disabled person. I can’t keep up a routine. I can’t even get my end of month update on time (it’s ended up the middle of the NEXT month quite frequently :D) and it took me a very long time to come to terms with that. I’m not sure what the turning point was for me but I eventually just had to mentally chuck out the preconceptions of what a blogger was “supposed to do” and do what worked for me. I’m sure my blog probably suffers for it, but getting four day long migraines trying to keep up with it just isn’t a cost I’m willing to pay.
I’m always working on something even if there’s not a post going out. If I’m not able to write I’ll be prepping the graphics for posts, making notes or tidying something up. A blog takes a huge amount of work and doing small bits when I don’t feel up to doing the big bits lessens that feeling of failure considerably.
If there is some new habit or practice or skill that is important to you then I do think it is really valuable do it every day. And it is really valuable to do it no matter what, no excuses accepted… because for the average human if any reason to skip a day is acceptable, that often becomes just the start of a slippery slope that in short order leads to the whole thing fizzling out.
But… at some point the thing becomes so ingrained that you can then safely skip odd days, and you won’t fall off the wagon permanently. (Though you do still need to stay alert that it doesn’t become more than the odd day here and there, and that the reasons you accept for skipping don’t become lamer and lamer!)
Like with your writing I think it’s good to not necessarily put too much more onus on things than “do some every day”. For example “write a post every day, however brief” is likely to be doable, while “write a thousand well-crafted words every day” is likely to come unstuck when any number of things happen in real life.
This goes for all kinds of things… writing, exercising, music, productivity practices etc.
It’s a lesson I have to keep reminding myself about!
I am not necessarily known for the quality of my posts, but instead the quality of them? Heh… I think one of those should be “quantity”.
I love reading what you write, but I’m patient. You have to always take care of yourself first.
fixed 🙂