So far, so good

New months give us another chance to reboot. We humans like neat starting and stopping points in what we do, and some of us like to use beginnings—of weeks, months, years—as new beginning points. Well, I do, anyway.

My blog year started out well, but it’s been all downhill for the past couple months. I have a goal of an average of one post per day over the year. I use an average because I know there are times I can’t blog, for whatever reason, but there are other times I can catch up. Spread out over a year, I can make that average, though I could never consistently achieve actual daily blogging. Clearly.

This goal matters to know one but me, I know, but it is a goal I have, nevertheless. And that’s why it matters, why I track my progress, and why I talk about it.

So, in reply to my post on Saturday, Roger Green commented: “And you are REALLY below par for the year. This is your 111th post, and we've had 121 days because of leap year”. He was pointing out that not all posts have to be significant (and the one he was commenting on wasn’t), and he knows that annual average matters to me. He was right on both counts, of course.

January was a good month, with 33 posts in 31 days. When short February was done, I’d published 35 posts in 29 days. March was a bit of a slide, with only 26 posts in 31 days, but, even so, I was still ahead, with 94 posts over those 90 days.

And then came April.

April was not a good month for me. I was frequently very busy, which is not new, of course, but I was also under the weather several times during the month (beginning in late March, actually), and I just didn’t feel up to blogging even if I had the time. So, only 17 posts in 30 days erased my buffer of posts and put me in deficit, as Roger pointed out.

On the other hand, in the final 7 days of April, I published 10 posts—nearly 60% of the entire month’s total. That’s a sign that I was feeling much better by the last week of the month.

This is my second post of the month (so far, so good …), and I have at least two posts pre-planned, almost Roger-like, except those two posts aren’t actually written yet. I may even have another one later today.

Goals are good things to have, but sometimes they’re missed. When that happens, we move on. Sometimes that means starting fresh, and the start of a new month provides the perfect opportunity to do that.

Like I said, so far, so good.