Writing daily, but posting when ready

Thanks Derek for acknowledging the difficulty in writing daily.
I am also considering something on similar lines, though on weekly basis. Evaluating the pros and cons, so your acknowledgment validated what I was also thinking. (I am also tracking the weekly writing started some months back by James Clear, and now Mark Manson. I think writing at weekly level too - high quality content - a little long form - can be a full 5 day job. It is too high a cost. Can be done on a project level, next 6 months or 1 year or so, at max.) But you did churn up all high quality content. Insightful, as usual. Thanks.

Really been savouring these regular posts, Derek, but I'm beyond excited about those books of yours, so yes please get back to them :)

Thank you, Derek.
I love how condense your writings are. And more than just understanding, I can "taste" it while reading. I think because you did give it time to get ripe.

I have been refreshing your blog daily eager to read your daily posts.
I can't see any difference between your daily posts and former posts. It's deep enough for me to read and ponder. I think with your daily post, if you let it rest for 12 hours, you can go though all of your writing process. It's true that it takes a lot of time than expected.

You may not be comfortable with the format, but you just sampled us the discipline of executing brevity. That's what I am buying in it. It didn't lessen the quality, just the format. You're good at it. What do you think?
☺ Thank you. That's a nice way of looking at it. — Derek

Derek, (and friends) I'm pleased at you going to a happy medium, as I am skeptical of daily posts. At least your "dailies" I retain as part of my "everyday life" building blocks for thinking.

Recently, I finally got around to bookmarking your advisor Seth Godin's blog, but I have to tell you, I don't retain what he says, and I don't like the blog very much.

The first commenter, Kumar, speculated that weekly posts can require the hours of a full-time job. It depends. I remember when Mark Manson hired a full-time research assistant. For my own weekly blog, I decided I could not afford the man-hours to do research, not when I work full-time and my blog is a hobby, with no advertising or monetary gain.

My own so-called blog is not for getting attention about my modest life or what I had for breakfast, but to write essays. (not academic, not schoolboy essays)

In terms of hours, like you, Derek, I guess I too take 3-6 hours a day, I guess you could compare it to TV: I take the same amount of writing time that others would spend watching. I call my "essay writing" my "art," and like other artists I have had to cut out distractions: My roof has no TV antenna, my TV has no rabbit ears, my wall socket has no cable. No streaming. I call this: Knowing my limitations.

Starting over a decade ago, posting weekly has been a discipline that forced me to produce, and to produce stuff of quality. This when the conventional wisdom was that you had to blog every single day lest your readers abandon you in droves. Remember?

Part of the fun for my art was getting better at it, and this required more man-hours than posting daily would allow. I think I average two days to do a first draft, and then average two days to edit and polish. Not full days, but as with any hobby, the hours just fly and I feel quite involved.

Most likely, the happy medium for posting is between daily and weekly. But unlike you, Derek, my readers expect weekly posts, so that is what I will continue doing. I have essays stacked to past Christmas, and ideas flinging into my head that I don't have time to write about. (I suppose writing may give a person an ideas brain)

It might interest other bloggers to know that I would compare to myself to the Canadian rock band Crash Test Dummies. I will have a popular essay like "Superman's Song" and then folks will become fans of that song (essay) but not of the band (web site)...
Happily, the art is its own reward.

The tension of striving for this balance resonates strongly with me. I do try to write daily, but sharing all of it would feel as inconsiderate as someone sharing every single one of the 172 photos they took from their last vacation, uncurated. Paring it down to the handful of real gems is hard, but it certainly values the attention of one's audience more.

One of the reasons I love your book, Anything You Want, so much is that it feels like the accumulated wisdom and stories of what could have been a few larger books, all distilled down to those meaningful and valuable gems. I revisit it often, and thank you for putting it out into the world.

If you were to create an email list only for those who wish to read those drafts, not yet considered worth sharing by you, I would be happy to be in there.

I completely understand your position, of sharing what you think is beyond a certain threshold of quality. Given the options now, it's all or nothing, 0 or 1, either put it for everyone or don't put it at all. Another place could create a 3rd option. People who sign up would know it's a draft/below quality threshold. My guess is that you would say even if you created such a list, it would end up forcing you to write more, even if there were an agreement with sharing less quality (in your opinion), your default to sharing only what's good would be a force to working more.

If I'm wrong and you would like to test this idea, sign me up!

I loved the daily posts, some helped me a lot, and I think they were as good as the others.

In the accompanying photo to this article, there are three eggs broken into the bowl, but the half-dozen egg carton is not missing any eggs.

Such things challenge me to consider if trivialities are worthy of the time I spend questioning: Was it an oversight? Was it intentional, and the artist has a subtle message that is being put forth?

Then, considering both the trivialities that I notice, and the mental activity that follow, I note what an incredible life I have to be able to use my mind in this way ...

Is it me or did the site change to a dark theme? :) I like this reflection Derek. That's a good idea I would like to try to: write daily but post when ready. Hope you're doing well :)

I think this is a great reflection and experiment. I enjoyed the daily but concise posts. I'm in a similar position of starting a new blog/podcast project but under a separate book deadline. So I'm writing a post in thirty minutes each morning and seeing how my style develops and to sort out the guiding principles. But I'm not publishing yet. The plan is once the book is completed then I can have a good backlog of posts and an articulated direction for the new blog. If I can sustain in beta then I can sustain it once it's launched.

Thanks for this Derek. I recently reached similar conclusions. I committed to publishing posts every Tuesday and Friday, and maintained that schedule for a couple of months. But ultimately, like you, I was rushing my content, forcing my ideas, and the time it was taking to write my articles was detracting from my other (also important) activities. I will be interested to hear what you eventually settle on.

I really appreciate your content, and get a lot of value from it, but I was even finding it difficult to keep up!

In my opinion a great art is never done in a few hours, simply because you have to take varied points of view (even when the creation is for a unique audience) to finally settle somewhere in a sweet spot

Good decision! I wasn't entirely convinced of the daily-writing approach. Sometimes I wondered, if you were breaking your own "don't be donkey - think long-term" rule: the long-term being finishing your books, but hey, I don't know the full picture.

Your blog is such a safe haven in the www.Thank you for that!

Very interesting conclusion. I always had this struggle with blogging, but I did want to write and share more. I decided to try something new - which is just write daily on my computer and then see if I can convert some of my thoughts into a blog post or two.

I setup this simple bash script which just creates a new folder daily to organize my notes and opens an editor. Now, any time I want to capture something I just type `journal` in shell and it gives me an editor with to today's folder where keep two files: journal and notes. Journal contains my daily thoughts, and notes are some random things I might find interesting, e.g. some links or some other stuff I find online. Journal file is simple text file, I just add a timestamp at the top and start writing. Sometimes I write multiple times during the day. In that case I timestamp accordingly.

I'm pretty excited about this setup. It's private, gets auto-committed to git and lets my thoughts flow. Very curious to see how this will work out in a year.

Hello Derek,
I’d like to read your newsletter!

Kind regards from Berlin!
Karmen

Dear Derek,

I could not agree more with your statement that posting every day had become a fulltime job, it should not this way. The posts become driven by a sense of "have to" and because there is something important that you would like to share. Writing to me is like knitting or crochet, one only shows the final product all the in between is irrelevant for the larger public, I save that for those who are interested in learning the craft. I just stumbled on your site and likes the ideas, please continue but on your own terms.
Sincerely,
Margret

I love the overlap between this and the answer you give in your FAQ about becoming a better writer. When you don't know yet what "ready" looks like, releasing a post every week is helpful in getting feedback about what ready looks like and not overthinking your own work. Later, once you've developed a writing process, you'll know ready when you see it. Naturally creating a release cadence that works for the writer.

Hello you-all.

The actual statistics for starting a blog, given the fearsome blank page, are this: Many people set up a site and never compose, or compose one draft but never post it... seriously. This I know from a friends who tried to blog, and from a Word Press team leader's book. (Scott Berkun)

No wonder I'm getting helpful follow ups from WP for my new blog.

We blog partly for love and attention, but remember that, except for folks you know in real life, your blog will not be noticed for a long time, because cyber space is so vast. So don't expect any comments at first. I guess you can always post re-runs down the road. Also, only about one visitor in a thousand comments. Seriously.

As for frequency, for me to post somewhere between weekly and daily, I have, along with my new WP blog, (started on July 1) a new plan: I post on the fives, meaning six or seven posts per month, instead of the old four. I can commit to such a thing because for a decade I did weekly posts on my old (blogspot) google one, stopping at "My five hundredth post."

Besides being annoyed at google, I switched blogs because my new site will be shorter in length, (nothing over 900 words) and different in writing. I guess this will mean posting two days in a row at month's end. Maybe I can "pull a Derek" and be playfully experimental.

I came to the same conclusion, and what I have been doing is using a Zettelkasten method (with DevonThink3 software and database). So everyday I write into it, and publish when ready.

Hi Derek

Just discovered your blog through a link from Seth Godin's blog and have enjoyed the articles I have read so far.

You make an important point in this article on posting frequency.

It's good advice.

Best wishes

Dennis Mellersh

Great thought -- I resonate with the idea. Thanks for sharing!

Consider this.
You are not the one deciding what’s worth reading. We the readers are. Quality is in the eye of the beholder. So don’t judge your work too harshly. Let us do it.

Anti-chameleon it’s my favourite!

I love the simplicity of your blog. So simple yet, so deep and infecting me to the very core of my being. Thanks so much for sharing just the authentic "You" Derek. I found your blog while reading Tim Ferris' post. Gee! I have a lot to thank him, too. Stay well always, not only through the holidays but in the days to come.

Hello everyone, Update:

I now deeply appreciate Seth Godin's blog, but I still can't retain it. (Probably because a topic is not relevant the same day I read it)

I have been posting every five days on the fives.

Today I posted "Achieving 200 new exciting delicious essays" where you will see links to terrific web essayists and their philosophies for essays and blogs. At seanessay.com

As above, here's the specific essay address: seanessay.com/achieving-200-new-exciting-delicious-essays/

(To save Time Travellers the bother of searching my archives)