Day 1: My daily blogging commitment

I wanted to start blogging back in 2005…perhaps earlier, but was dissuaded by my father, an ever cautious lawyer. He didn’t tell me not to blog...he would never tell me what to do...but instead reminded me, that what you post on the internet will be there forever and that it might very well affect your future.

He was technically right, of course, writing publicly does affect our future. But it's largely positive - at least it has been for me. Like any good child, I did it anyways. Luckily, I didn't entirely listen to him and in 2007 started blogging anyways.

I've always found it difficult to keep up with a regular posting schedule. At one point, I was writing a post every Sunday and sending it out to the newsletter. This worked well for a while until the scope of work expanded to the point that my entire Sunday would disappear to blogging: researching, writing, editing, preparing images, agonizing over this and that before finally posting. I'd start earlier and post later each time. It wasn't sustainable

All that said, I got really great results from the posts. A couple of posts went viral in the mainstream media - front page New York Times, CNN interview type of thing. A techie productivity post got noticed by famous tech blogger David Pogue and the Mac productivity community. I ended up meeting a number of really cool and interesting people who reached out and found me through writing about remote work lifestyle and renouncing US citizenship. In fact, I just had lunch with one last week!

This a long winded way of saying that I want to write and ship more and I'm ready to do something about it. Today, August 11, 2023, I'm making a public commitment to publish a blog post a day for the next month. I want to build a habit of both writing and shipping quickly. Today is Day 1. This is entirely a selfish exercise done out of a desire for self-improvement.

I'm giving myself permission to write and publish about anything I want. I'm reducing friction and complexity to the minimum: just write with a 25 minute pomodoro clock, read over once, write a headline and click the publish. I'm giving myself permission to not edit for perfection or spending time looking for images or crafting tweet storms. If you want to follow along, I'll share them on the platform formerly known as Twitter and try to send a weekly email with my posts from the past week. So sign up below if you'd like to follow along. Let's see how it goes! Happy Friday and welcome to Day 1!