The Road of Tribulations
The Winter came and went. Spring arrived and 2020 is now firmly settled, and what promises to be a notable and (un-)eventful year is catching up on me.
I have not written much in the last few months. When I look back at my records, only a few posts on Ethereum events amid some posts that are not very technical. You may be wondering where I’ve gone!
Well, not very far. And if I wanted, I truly couldn’t with the current situation of the world. But there are quite a few transformations that happened recently that have driven me away from writing.
You see, every Hero has its weaknesses, the side quests that interrupt his progress, the temptations that lure him to stay one more night in the tavern away from the road. And most of all, every Hero will meet powerful enemies that block his advance, at least temporarily.
That too happens when your quest is writing a blog, and in a figurative sense, I’ve found all these.
Some Self-Reflection
There are a few lessons I’ve learned in these two years about the difficulties of writing a blog. Gradually, I’ve been trying to apply a few strategies to improve the process, while I’ve also been observing what works and what doesn’t.
So I’ve decided to make some changes.
Coming Changes
Since the beginning of the year, I have been working with someone else re-designing this blog. That takes some major time from my writing to thinking on the behind-the-scenes. In time, the Coder’s Errand will look entirely different than it does now, offering, I hope, a cleaner look and more pleasing experience. Stay tuned!
I’ve also decided to make commenting easier on this blog. I always hoped my posts would attract comments and discussions, but that has not happened much. I’ve been told a few times by readers that requiring a WordPress account to comment is a deterrent, so I’ve decided to remove it. It should now be possible to write comments leaving just a user name and mail, but let me know if that is not working properly.
More Diverse Content
Every writer craves readers, and although I’ve been happy to see my numbers increase in 2019, they have gone down in 2020. That, I found, is probably related to a lower output in terms of new posts, which in turn are a consequence of more side quests and less available time or energy.
I’ve also been told that my posts are very niche and long. And one thing I miss from the early days of this blog is the freedom with which I could write. It’s a very happy feeling when you can write a post almost in a stream of consciousness, a continuous outpouring of ideas onto the paper that make sense immediately.
It’s also very rare.
I had some of it at the start, when I could write short posts based on a simple idea that did not require lots of study and research. And, I’ve found, those give me more please to write and have more of an impact with readers.
So something I’ll try for this year is to diversify my style, and include more non-tech posts, based on the experience of learning and growing professionally, within the limitations of family life. If that resonates with you, I’ll be very happy to compare notes!
Do stay for a virtual coffee and muse about your experiences in the comments. Oh, and make suggestions. One of the nemesis of any writer is to find subjects to write about, I’ll be happy to take a good idea and turn it into posts.
New Interests
Also this year, my work at Artos has changed significantly. Admittedly, it has progressed through several stages. After working in developing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and being for long immersed in Zero-Knowledge constructions and cryptographic research, I am now deeply involved in developing a blockchain over Substrate. This, in turn, is built in Rust, which means a whole new language to learn beyond a full new ecosystem.
That means I may start posting about new areas, as a I battle my way around the difficulties of a new learner and turn them into hopefully useful advice. Again, watch this channel.
Strategies for Blog Writing
When you write a blog as a side project, there is one enemy that you constantly have to battle: yourself. From the moment you go public, you make a commitment to your readers that each post will not be the last. But unless you want to recycle material or quickly cobble together a cheap post, each new post is going to take time. And time, my dear reader, is the most precious resource any of us has.
It will come as no surprise to any one with a full time job and children at home to hear that time and energy are very limited resources. When you finally finish your full day’s work, and hopefully have had your time with the family, what you can do with the little time you carve for yourself is very limited.
The little bit of mindless leisure you crave battles for attention with your needs of research, mail, news, and, of course, writing.
This, I found, is the hardest challenge of blogging. How do you keep up the flame and the discipline to write regularly?
You sit to write and feel this sapping force that envelopes you, clouds your mind and freezes your thoughts. It’s tiredness, drowsiness, the need for sleep. It’s age, catching up with you.
And if at the start I rebelled and pushed, thinking myself weak for not being able to write into the night, I have begun to listen to my body and accept my human limitations.
So I’m searching for alternatives, strategies to help me work more smartly.
Break Down Your Posts
In my case, I’ve found I often wanted to say too much. Several of my posts are very technical and very long, which is probably sub-optimal both for me and my readers: you’ll be discouraged from reading long posts; and it will take me a long time to research, write and proof-read them before they can be published.
So I’ve been trying, for sometime, to break these down into series of smaller chunks. This works much better, for a few reasons. For the same effort of writing a single post, I have several that I can publish periodically and that will be easier to read. I can also link them to read and invite the reader for several shorter sessions, instead of simply chucking it into the “list of things I’ll do later never”.
But there is still the temptation of writing the whole series as one post first, and then break it down. This is probably not the best way, as it still requires concentrated work at first. All it gives me is the slack to go a few weeks without publishing new ones. And that is probably something I want to avoid.
Make it a Habit
The reason I say so is because regularity helps discipline. Once something becomes a habit, you don’t resist it anymore, it becomes part of your routine. For that reason, it is better to have frequent small chunks of writing time, than an irregular big burst.
The latter will be inconsistent over time, and lead to excuses to “do it next week instead”. But of course, making it a habit is hard if you don’t have a fixed block of time you can dispose of.
The Time to Write
The lockdown we’re currently going through turns out to be the ideal opportunity. Since I’m working from home anyway, I can use the commute time to write my blog, instead of doing it at night when I’m already exhausted.
This is something I’ve only recently started, and the results are mixed. Again, the children factor. I see from mine and my friends’ that young children can be really good and regular alarm clocks, except for the frustrating aspect you can’t set your wake up time and it invariably tends to be earlier than what you’d like.
But turning that game around, what I can do is to set my alarm even before that and eke out 1 hour of the day before I even start. The necessary compensation is to sleep earlier, but that is an improvement for my health anyway, so I’ll take it.
There is another slot I could use, the one from the return home, but in practice, I can’t rely on this one. Yes, there are days when I can blog for another hour after my work day, but most of the time I just need to tend to the needs of my family.
Again, another discovery in this lockdown period, is that time with you family is precious, and should not be squandered away in name of work, paid or otherwise.
Have a Post Calendar…
With effectively such very small slots for producing any work, it’s important not to waste it with more or less trivial decisions. This includes not having to choose what to write about, by making a plan ahead of time. This also has the benefit of creating an easy place to store the interesintg ideas as they come.
Simple as it is, I have not been able to make this work very well. Ideas can often get stale. Posts that once I thought would be interesting have languished in the pile overtaken by new ideas that seemed more exciting. And long posts that end up requiring long research are notable culprits.
Still, I think this could work if the posts were more balanced in size and if I had a more regular writing period. It’s a tool in my box that I may revive again.
… And a Planner
Another thing I started trying recently is a more formal way to plan my tasks. The easiest approach is to use a Weekly planner. It’s still very early days so I can’t say how this works, but it ties nicely to the discipline of daily writing.
The reason I’d rather have a weekly planner than a daily one is that this enforces a routine. Writing time has to be taken out of free time available for other things as well: family, house chores, general administration, exercise, etc.
You can’t do these everyday, so it’s wise to divide them in a repeating period that is long enough to accomodate all of these and short enough that it can be frequently repeated.
Just like in school, with your regular division of subjects, the week seems to be the ideal division.
On top of this, I’m also using a Kanban board to capture all the things I have to do their priorities, the time I spend on them and several other things. If nothing else, it has prompted me to work faster, and focus on closing tasks, which must be a good thing.
Less Perfectionism
The last one is one of the hardest: allow a post to be less than perfect. Of course, no post is ever perfect, but you, the writer, may strive for it to be, until you just desist.
Perfectionism is often out of place, in situations where it can lead to over-working with diminishing returns. Perfect is the enemy of good, and I do have the tendency to read each full post 2 or 3 times after I’ve finished it, to iron out typoes, render a phrase in a new turn, or checking links and readability.
But my biggest time drain is probably the search for a meaningful picture that can illustrate it. I get it, pictures are nice, they give the reader something to rest their eyes and intrigue them. Hey, and they also are good with search engines.
Yes, but you have to ensure you have rights to publish them, and Creative Commons repositories rarely have anything related to, say, Zero-Knowledge or programming concepts.
So, I’ve decided to spend much less time with that search, and forego obvious connections between the image and the text. I’ll just pick something related to nature, open spaces or the night sky… Something that can make the reader rest and dream a bit while contemplating the though of reading some long prose.
And likewise, fret a little less about the text quality. I can’t really bring myself to completely abstain from this checking, but I have to reduce it. If you are a confident writer with the same difficulties, I’d advise you to the same.
Summary
I’m obviously not the first writer to struggle with procrastination and writer’s block. But that does not mean I should feel well with it. The strategies I listed above are, at the moment, just things I intend to put in place.
I don’t know if they’ll work but eventually, at some point, this blog will lose steam. After, nothing lasts forever. I just want to postpone that while I feel I still have things to say.
If you are a writer yourself, you may have faced similar problems. What have your greatest difficulties been? How have you dealt with them?
Let me know in the comments, and as always, if you appreciated this post, please hit the like button below.
Thank you for reading. Farewell, and happy coding.