Why I never post to this blog anymore

Perfectionism.

That’s it, pretty much. I’ll go into some more detail, but every single reason will boil down to that same single root cause.

I want every post to be an essay. Which is not possible. I barely have time to write a sentence, let alone a well-constructed and cogent missive. End result: I write nothing.

I’m spend 95% of my energy on my business. Balance? Feh. Since I became a partner a few months ago, I’ve definitely cut back on my “personal life”. Whatever that is.

The paradox of choice. When I have a thought, an idea, a photo, that I want to get down or share, first I have to decide where I should do so. I currently have four blogs: aviflax.com, my “personal” blog, intended for words which are clearly and definitively my own, and not endorsed by my family or my company; flaxfamily.com, my “family” blog, for news about or from both Elina and I; the Arc90 blog, and just for good measure, a private Arc90 internal blog. It’s not always clear where a post should go: if I’m writing about technology, it’s equally appropriate at aviflax.com and arc90.com. If I’m writing about my personal life - a trip, news, etc - it could go on aviflax.com or flaxfamily.com. Cross-posting is an OK answer, but it’s a pain. Having to make these choices is enough extra work that it can discourage me from writing anything in the first place.

I’m really behind in my correspondence. I am seriously behind in writing some people who are important to me, and I feel bad about it. Any time I consider taking some time to write a blog post, I struggle with feelings of guilt, and think about whether I should really be writing letters. This experience is taxing enough to discourage me from writing anything.

I feel as though there must be a few more reasons I’m missing, but that’s a perfectionist feeling, so I’m gonna ignore it. It’s not as if those aren’t enough reasons!

I have a few ideas to improve the situation:

Allow myself to write shorter posts. I’m thinking of adding “microblogging” to my blogs, à la twitter. I should also construct my templates to make titles optional. Titles are great for essays, but less so for quick thoughts. They require one to summarize, to declare intent. I’d like that work to be optional.

Be a little saner about work. I’m not yet sure exactly how I’m going to do this, but I think it might have something to do with leaving the office after nine or ten hours, hiring more people, zooming my role out, and being firmer about setting less-crazy deadlines.

Integrate my personal blogs. 90% of the content at aviflax.com and flaxfamily.com is relevant to both sites. So I think I need to go back to having them both run in a single instance of Wordpress, with each site just being an alternate view to mostly the same content - a filter, if you will. At flaxfamily.com you’d see more family stuff and less tech stuff, and vice versa. But from a publishing perspective it’d be a single blog.

Cross-post more often. Rather than taking 60 seconds to decide where to post a post, I’ll just cross-post by default.

Commit to a desktop editor. I’m writing this in Marsedit, and it’s really quite good. I’ve dithered on this before, liking the portability of a web interface. But the latency and the multiple steps required have turned out to be discouraging factors.
Make my blog content more dynamic and diverse, by bringing in aspects of a Tumblelog.

Allow myself to start over with my correspondence. Basically, I need to apologize to my friends, ask for a clean slate, and start over. And in the future I’ll try to be more casual about correspondence in general. Maybe I’ll try practicing five.sentenc.es. After all, five sentences is a lot better than zero.