It’s rambling time.
At this point it’s become clear that I’ve put a demanding workload on myself. I believe I have mentioned that I have a full-time job. Obviously, that sucks up a lot of time and energy. This past week was particularly difficult. Without being too specific, an issue arose where I was called on to completely reimplement a process that already existed, and which would have worked fine if those using it had been using it correctly. But because those who needed to use it were angry that it did not perform certain tasks for them automatically, it fell to me to redo it from scratch in a way that didn’t require users to change their behavior.
Imagine there is a river separating a village and the people who want to visit it. The water is shallow, so they could ford it. There’s also a bridge over it. They could use that. But instead, they want the entire river re-routed around the village so that they don’t have to bother with the river at all. This scenario is a good metaphor for what I had to do last week.
When my job is moving along at a comfortable pace, it doesn’t really bother me. At the end of the day, I feel like I accomplished something, and I still have energy enough to come home and do everything else I want to do. I have a son to look after (and make sure he does his homework), dinner to make, books to read (two at a time, lately), work to do for The Artist’s Way, and then my daily posts for this blog. While I have yet to miss a post, a few days this past week were a particular struggle because I hadn’t had time to think about topics, and actually writing the posts was far more troublesome than usual.
I certainly prefer it when I have had time to think about what I want to write. I know it’s going to be a bad day when I’m sitting down to write my post and I have no idea what I’m going to say. It’s not even writer’s block so much as my brain feeling completely empty. With a block, you know something is in there, you just need to knock it loose. This past week, however, it was more that there was nothing to knock out at all. I was grasping at anything to write, and coming up empty. As a result, posts may have been of lower quality than usual. Then again, maybe no one noticed. It’s hard to tell since I don’t get a significant amount of feedback. (This is certainly not a hint for people to post comments.)
I don’t plan to change the blog format or reduce the schedule. Some posts may become shorter–I’ve noticed that other blogs tend not to produce quite so much material on a daily basis, at least not if they are run by one person who is doing it as a side project. My posts average about a thousand words, but some days I am putting out closer to 1500 or 2000. It’s very taxing and I may need to find a way to get my points across with fewer words, and perhaps more reliance on external links–no need to repeat what other people have said better, right? (One could say that about this entire blog, of course.)
At some point I may well change the schedule, but that time is not now. I am not sure what, if anything, I will change in the near future. Naturally, I will post about it, regardless. I also plan to set up a twitter account for this blog, but then that might just be one more obligation I don’t have time to manage. It doesn’t make sense to set one up and then use it solely to post a link to each day’s post. Twitter is pointless unless you’re interacting with people. A friend also pointed me to some stuff about search engine schemas, which are what you use to produce those nifty info boxes you see on Google results and so forth. I had no idea there was something specific you could do to make those appear, but now I know! I may investigate integrating some of that with this site. I’ve determined there are WordPress plugins that help with this, which would probably make it a lot easier to attempt.
Finally, I have had some amusement this week by virtue of my Bernie Sanders post getting a lot of traffic. Almost all of it came from Facebook so I’m guessing somebody shared it around. No idea what they said–appropriate referral information is not available for that. But interesting nonetheless. In any case, that post is now the single most popular one ever made on this site. It’s an odd feeling. One might come away from that thinking I hate Bernie Sanders or his supporters, even though I don’t. That’s a topic for another time, though.
It now occurs to me I could have said something about Valentine’s Day. I will pass along a good link: Maybe you should just be single.
Have a good week!
