Committed bloggers post once a day, at least, where causal blog posters have sporadic posts over various lengths of time but strategic bloggers have a post ready every Tuesday at 1pm, or whatever they have scheduled. I am firmly in the second camp. Ever since I hiked in Japan, I have struggled to post, or even tweet, on a regular basis even though I write every day every hour. The worst part is I have dozens of posts ready to go, in my backlog.
Somehow I’ve managed to write a considerable amount of content that will never been seen. I’ll have an idea, write it out and then say, “Perfect I’ll send this out tomorrow.” Procrastination doesn’t come easy to me, otherwise my web clients would not be as happy as they are but for blogging, or drawing, there’s a problem. I’m the client. This is a common story, harsh self evaluation prevents movement, but with small ideas like blog posting there’s a unique twist.
Procrastinating on a novel or a movie is easy. You can easily talk yourself out of a huge undertaking and still avoid having to release. with something as small as a blog post the “it’s not done” is so much sharper because it is done. It might even be scheduled but rather than release we end up doing a little edit here, pushing back, maybe this post isn’t good to release now, there’s a new idea I should explore… The twist with smaller work is the procrastination comes at the end, rather than the beginning.
Though the procrastination might come at the beginning or end the lesson is the same. Don’t count on a plan or even what you’ve built already. Publish the post, send the email, take action and watch the small steps build into the bigger journey.