Making a Commitment to My Blog

I regularly tell myself that it’s time to blog again. All I need to do is write more of what I’m thinking, share more tutorials, and develop content around what people who hire my company might want to see. I need to prove value to get people to pull out their wallets, and a personal blog about some of my favorite movies and a few scattered year in review posts doesn’t cut it.

Just typing that last paragraph took me longer than I anticipated. I can spend lots of time scrolling Twitter and firing off responses, quickly exceeding the length of a post like this, but the concerted effort of all of my attention onto one topic is still challenging.

While managing clients I deploy checklists and reminders, workflows and best practice lists. I have a process for most steps of the business, and I am able to ensure that work doesn’t fall through the cracks and become forgotten, and that if I have to do something more than once, it’s written somewhere.

Doing the same when it comes to my own production – namely content and code – proves more complex. After all, writing this blog post is taking up time and mental resources, and I can’t guarantee any return on the effort.

This is where I need to consider the future. How often have you said to yourself that you need to restart your blog, or build a new website? How often does that internal reminder go unheeded, leading to more broken promises to yourself?

For me, that’s all the time. Of course, had I taken the effort every one of those times to write something and hit publish, I’d have a longer backlog of work available. As is, I’m making myself a commitment, and posting it publicly. One new blog post every day for the entire month of May.

I’ve heard that to stick with a habit you need to maintain regular practice. Usually the advice given is somewhere from one to three months, but the advice is the same: just do that thing every day in that window. Big or small, if you make a point to remember to stick with your task, it’ll eventually become habit.

I’m not sure how long it takes to make a habit to keep blogging, but my goal for the past few years has been to shift over to creating and distributing content. Working with WordPress professionally for a decade has given me plenty to write about, and it’s supplied the majority of my income in that time. That’s where some of my focus will go, as well as whatever academic takes I can have on the internet in general, and how we all fit into it.

This is my promise, surely not the first like this that I’ve made and not the last. But by putting it out there I’m allowing you to hold me accountable. Do you want to get into blogging, or ressurect a defunct blogging experiment? Let me know where to find you and I’ll keep up with your work too. We can keep each other in check, and keep one of those personal promises.


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