What if I wouldn’t have to work on all the things I have to work and would have as much time for blogging as I like?
What if I could follow those interesting links, read all unread stuff in bloglines, comment to all interesting posts, write myself, write on all topics that come as “would be nice to blog”, write pieces that would connect bits and pieces from other weblogs and have time to craft writing?
Would it change anything?
Probably not. I’ll always have more to read and more to write about than time to do it. Don’t know a better exercise for learning to “let go” than blogging…
Richard MacManus on something related:
I wonder if weblogs are making our reading and writing habits temporal and ‘always unfinished’ (to twist the term ‘always on’)? Having written an article for Digital Web Magazine (and I must get around to writing another one), I can confirm it takes at least a couple of weeks to ‘craft’. Whereas with my weblog, although generally I write carefully crafted long-form posts, it’s still of-the-moment and a lot of times it’s an ongoing theme I’m exploring (ie it’s not “finished”).
I would probably write more “finished” articles for my blog if I didn’t feel so much (social?) pressure to continually update my RSS feed. As it is, I only write an average of 3 posts per/week anyway, but still…
And same goes for my reading. To participate in the blogosphere you have to keep up-to-date with the RSS feeds in your circle of influence. Which leaves less time for reading “professional” and finished articles.
Although often I escape into blogging when I don’t feel like working on a larger, “finished” pieces, I guess I really need those pressures to produce something finished to take an extra effort for synthesising “always unfinished” into something “finished”.
Back to finishing something bigger :)
Tags: blog reading, blog writingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/12/15.html#a1456; comments are here.