I've been keeping this blog for closing on 2.5 months now (first post was April 26th). It started out more ad hoc, then targeting three posts a week; now, I aim for one post per working day. This should be the 40th post.
In my first post, 'On Microblogging', I said this would be
Somewhere for me to put out smaller, singular posts with, honestly, less filter and polish. That's key for me -- the further I get into editing or second-guessing what to put, the greater the activation energy to actually getting any posts out, ever. So I leave filtering as an exercise for the reader.
...
Sometimes, I need to turn my brain inside out and shake it. That's not always going to be advisable or pretty, but it's certainly An Image. ... This, as ever, is more for me than anyone else
All of this still holds true, but I put it more succinctly in a later post
In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally.
I think 'thought sketches' is exactly the right way of describing what I post here. I'm toying with the idea of distinguishing between those and doing more polished posts intermittently, but I don't feel I have the bandwidth or workflow for that right now.
Maintaining this blog has been good training of the mental muscles -- striking a balancing of finding something to think about on the page each day, and getting better at making a thought sketch more like an actual thing (without losing the sense of roughness that constitutes a sketch). I guess: even if your intended output is a rough sketch, if you do lots of them, what constitutes 'rough' for you should, in theory, decline over time.
In keeping with the exercise, I've avoided drafting multiple posts ahead of time. That would be more time-efficient, but remove the element of practice that this is meant to provide. Given that goal, if it becomes too much burden to find time for this daily, it would instead be better to cut back the number of posts in a given period, rather than trying to 'batch' my work on it.