The story so far this year

I’ve (finally) been able to blog more consistently the past couple months, after four in a row in which I fell short of my goal of an average of one post per day. June I was right on target, and this month I’m running a little ahead, so far. And there are reasons I’m bringing this up.

A good June and (so far) July don’t make up for those four months: At the moment, including this post, I’m 64 posts behind target for where I should be at this point, and that means I need an average of 1.4 posts per day from now until the end of the year in order to reach my annual goal. That’s a tall order.

I know the numbers because I decided to make a spreadsheet to track my progress, or lack of it, so I can better manage the chase. It turns our that I’m a bit too competitive to just give up and accept missing the goal, even though I’m only competing with myself.

However, obviously I can’t do 1.4 posts per day—that has to be an average, and it means some days I need to do multiple posts in order to make up for the days I do only one or even none. Because I’ve resumed recording my podcast, there should be an extra post once a week or so just to promote that, but obviously that alone won’t be enough.

So, that’s part of the reason for this little update: I’m providing fair warning that some days I’ll publish multiple posts. They’ll still mostly all have some sort of commentary by me, and most of them will probably be written not long before I publish them.

The other, bigger reason is more personal: Reaching this annual goal is clearly important to me, and while circumstances made it seem as if I couldn’t possibly achieve my goal this year, I organised the data to check that assumption, found it could be wrong, and saw a path forward toward achieving that goal. Sometimes, it seems, all it may take to achieve goals is organising and determination. In a few short months I’ll know if that’s true in this case.

At any rate, I know that some people couldn’t possibly care less about the mechanics of blogging, or details like I’m talking about here, but some are interested. There also may be other bloggers who run across this and realise they don’t have to give up just because they fell into a patch of low productivity or whatever.

There’s one final reason I’m posting this: I’ve come down with yet another winter plague, and I don’t know that I’ll feel well enough to blog this week. I’d already written this post for a time I might need it, so… here it is.

The truth about blogging, as with so many other avocations, is that if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing. It just seems to me there’s no reason to kill the fun because of, in this case, falling behind in publishing posts, not when I could find a way forward. And, blogging is still fun for me; that’s the most important thing of all.