I’m at the Back to the Blog event at Duke, organized by Anton Zuiker and Cara Rousseau. One attendee just asked how to find time to blog, which is one of the most common questions I’ve been asked over the past five years. I have a number of standard responses:
*Look for content you’re already creating, from white papers to long emails, and repurpose them.
*Look at what you’re doing that isn’t working and stop doing it to free up more time.
*A blog post doesn’t have to be a white paper; a short, interesting post or a link to another post your audience will find useful is enough.
Yet I still do most of my blogging “the little I do these days” late at night. I have a job where I could easily justify blogging during the workday, but I don’t. I write after my wife and son go to bed “or sometimes before they wake up”. I’ve always done my best creative work late at night, whether on this blog, my book or presentations for work.
I wonder if that’s one of the reasons people feel they don’t have time to blog, because writing is a creative and personal activity that we want to do well. I have to be in the right mood to blog well and enjoy it. I don’t feel that way about other work-related tasks. It’s not as though I’ve ever thought, “I’m too tired to come up with a clever formula for this spreadsheet.”
One of the big challenges I’ve set for myself is to blog short items more frequently, but I don’t. Instead, I post more to Facebook “which leads to another question for another time”.
I have abandoned some of the niceties I used to observe on this blog, notably posting photos and adding links. I used asterisks above instead of the HTML for bullets. “Did you notice? Do you care?” Those things don’t take that much time, but they take enough time “and are hard enough to do by mobile” that giving them up feels freeing.
But still it’s easier to post to Facebook, and I do it more often than I post here by a factor of, what, 100? I wonder how much of that is because blogging feels like Writing, with a capital W, and writing is a skill I respect and don’t want to devalue.