Tag Archive for 'writing'

Why do I have such a hard time writing consistently?

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on October 22, 2008
. 3 Comments

It’s been days since I’ve posted here. I’ve been sick, which is partially to blame, but not completely. I have a ton of stuff starred in Google Reader and elsewhere that I’ve wanted to write about - even just quick “Linky” posts. But it feels like there’s the gravitational field pulling me away whenever I start to think about writing something. Email to read, work to do, feeds to catch up on. Maybe I’m just having a slump. This blog isn’t dead or dying - never will, if I have anything to say about it. But maybe Paul Boutin is on to something - my activity on places like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. have definitely had an impact. His point is that if you blog for the fame, recognition, link love, and money, it’s getting harder and harder to be “successful”. But I never have written for those reasons. This is a place for me to write my thoughts, and I don’t care a whole lot about who reads them. I mean, I love traffic, links, and feed subscribers, but for me, I love them because they represent people I interact with. People who are part of my network, my community. My friends. That’s the payoff for me. If I cared about ad revenue or page rank or how many hits/subscribers I had, I would have given up a long time ago.

So, I’m sure my muse will come back soon. Where are you, muse? :-)


I want to write more. Do more. Hack more. Learn more. So I gotta read less.

Published
by
Josh Bancroft
on June 3, 2008
. 6 Comments

There aren’t enough hours in the day. I’ve been trying to juggle several side projects, plus all the stuff I have to do at work, plus all of our family stuff which is ramping up for summertime, and still keep up with all of my sources of information crack - RSS feeds, Twitter, books, etc. And it’s not working. A couple of things are crashing down around my ears. Something has to give.

I read a LOT. I used to be subscribed to over 1500 RSS feeds. That was WAY too many. About a year ago, I cut it down to around 500 feeds or so. But that was around the same time that Twitter really exploded in my life, proving itself invaluable for not only connecting and talking with people, but as the fastest conduit for breaking news, the most efficient source for answers to questions, and general serendipitous gems of things that were interesting and made me smarter. So I think the overall level of information overload stayed about the same.

Today, I decided action was needed. Drastic action, maybe. So I went and pruned my Google Reader feed subscriptions down to around 250 - I cut them in half. I have a pretty structured system for organizing feeds into various attention tiers (which I really should write about one of these days, but I haven’t had time - see my problem!? ;-) ). But even that wasn’t enough. So, after backing up my OPML, I got out the machete. Chop chop!

I feel pretty good about what I have left. I have a serious disorder - FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I’m always afraid that something cool or interesting or significant is going to happen, and I’m not going to be among the first to know about it! I had to battle that tendency, and be ruthless about what I really needed to keep in my aggregator, and what I could get rid of. We’ll see how it works out.

I pacified my FOMO by reminding myself how effective tools like Twitter, TechMeme, and Digg are at letting the interesting/cool stuff bubble to the top. A few years ago, there really wasn’t anything like them that information addicts like myself could rely on. Now that they’ve matured into what they are today, I’m more comfortable relying on them, and not needing to subscribe to the many, many sources of news myself. It was funny and ironic to tell myself “I don’t need to subscribe to that feed. I’ll just go to the site if I want to see what’s new.” Me, Mister Orange RSS Shoes, lives in his aggregator, etc. You can laugh now if you want. ;-)

Anyway, I hope to force myself to have more time to write (long form, as in blog posts, and maybe other stuff - 140 character microposts on Twitter don’t really count as writing!), and work on some side projects. I’ve been getting the itch to do more programming and hacking. I want to sit down and teach myself Python, or PHP, or build something cool on Google App Engine or Amazon EC2 or something. Create. Build. Hack. Teach. Do.

And as much as I love reading, something’s gotta give, so we’ll see how long I can last on this feed diet…