TLDR: I want to post to my blog at least once a week for the rest of the summer.

I’m a big fan of CGP Grey’s theme concept over traditional New Year’s resolutions with more concrete goals. But every once in a while, specific goals have been really effective for me. 

Heck, my whole career effectively changed because of a set of New Year’s goals I made in 2019. To refresh my After Effects skills after a long break from having kids, I set out to make a short animation once a week. I also set a goal release an iOS app to the App Store by the end of that year to bootstrap my Swift knowledge after joining an iOS team at work.

Both goals eventually converged into my animation heavy app Dark Noise, and I’ve been a side-hustling indie developer ever since.

I find goals that require a regular cadence of output to be really effective for me. The deadline, even self-imposed, of a once a week animation really forced me into a habit of regularly doing the work.

In the last 4 years I’ve been running my podcast Launched with a self-imposed deadline of delivering an episode every 2 weeks. This really forced me to push off my natural (incredibly strong) procrastination and get things done.

Since announcing the semi-hiatus of Launched this year, I haven’t had that kind of regular motivation to keep pushing myself on growing outside of my normal job. And honestly, I really miss it. I notice myself getting slower and struggling more to be productive even in the day job.

So I want some kind of lightweight recurring goal to kickstart my creative output again. I’m not ready to commit to the grind of a regular podcast schedule (yet 😏) but there is a particular skill I’ve been wanting to grow lately: writing.

Writing is a pretty important part of my job as a Developer Advocate, but I’ve found I really struggle with it. Particularly with speed. I write painfully slowly. I have enough taste to recognize that what I’m writing is bad, but not enough skill to get it to the point of sounding good. So I just get hung up writing and rewriting sentences trying to get it sounding right before eventually getting distracted with some other task I know I can do. And before I know it, hours have gone by and I’ve barely eked out a few paragraphs.

The Summer of the Blog

So, I’m going to make the rest of this season my Summer of the Blog. My goal is to post something, anything, to my blog at least once a week. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be shipped. And it can even simply be linking out to something else I’ve made like a podcast episode or a video.

I’m setting the bar pretty low here because I want it to be easily achievable. The real goal is to get into the habit of regularly publishing, and force myself to put words down with a hard deadline that they have to go out.

I’m calling it the Summer of the Blog because I want to publicly commit to maintaining this through the end of the summer, which Google tells me ends September 22nd.

After this all bets are off because my children’s school starts back up and my fall conference travel season kicks back off. I’d love to keep the pace up after that though, but I’ll have achieved my goal if I make it that far.

What will I write about? I don’t know yet! I have a lot of blog posts rolling around in my head that I’ve never taken the time to write. The goal here is building up my writing muscles to get over writers block more than building up some kind of audience, so ultimately I’ll write about whatever I’m passionate about.

It’s absolutely killing me how long this post already is and I want to spend the next few hours trimming it down and hopelessly flaily to get it sounding better. But I’m not.