Writing frequency and publishing cadence

2023-06-13 • 624 words • ~3 min read ⏲

Since I started my website, I published 38 posts (this one not included), which means on average a little more than once a month, but my publishing cadence is far from being that regular. In some months I managed to put out something on a weekly basis, but I've also had dry spells that lasted for several months. All the while I wrote notes privately on a more or less daily basis. This makes me wonder what causes my disconnect between the frequency of writing and publishing.

At the end of the first year of this website I tried - without success - to publish daily for a month. Derek Sivers, did a similar experiment with much better success has written a retrospective on his experience. He says he the he disliked the daily publishing cadence, because it made his writing worse and with it he broke a principle, that anything he posts is really worth the time of his readers.

On the other hand, there are people who consistently publish on a daily basis over many years and sometimes even decades. Seth Godin is one of them. He writes:

For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun. [..]

What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it.

- The first 1,000 are the most difficult

On the question what constitues an appropriate blog post, Mike Crittenden, who also publishes on a daily basis, argues that atomic blog posts are fine. He also says: There’s space for the crappy short blog post. It’s the crappy long blog post that shouldn’t exist.

Another person who makes the case for smaller blog posts is is Matt Gemmell. He thinks that the rise of social media had detrimental effects on the psychology of bloggers:

On social, content of any length at all is fine [..]. So, perniciously, our eager-to-simplify brains have decided that the converse is true for blogs: you can write only longer, weightier stuff. The sole possible outcome of this is the one I see all the time, which is that people are reluctant to start blogs because they think they don’t have enough to say. Those who do blog will often sit on pieces for too long, because they’re waiting until they have more to say — or they shelve pieces entirely, wrongly believing they’re too brief and thus somehow trivial.

Collectively, this is all a surrendering of creative output to the whims of external platforms, and is antithetical to what makes the web so useful and potent.

- Write less

Michael Nielsen in his article on his motivations for publishing his thoughts, states that his goal is to enhance his abilities to think and create. He says that he thinks better when the stakes are higher and that one of the best ways of raising the stakes is to make a document into something you're sharing with people whose good opinion you desire.

Reflecting on my personal approach, I think my reluctance to publish more often has to do with an internal belief system that holds quality as more important than quantity. But I am coming to think that this might be a false dichotomy. To get to quality one needs to practice. Public writing seems for me to be in a different category than private notetaking. So to get to quality there is no substitute for publishing. I don't intend to force a daily cadence, but I probably will try to take Matt Gemmells advice to [w]rite less, and be at peace with it., and to do so more often.