It’s a bit late and I should maybe be going to sleep but I want to get back to writing because it has been a long time since my last post and I just want to get back to it before I start procrastinating.
I have been travelling a lot during the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t been able to write every day. I have written a bit, but not for my blog. This means that publicly, for the 100 posts project, I haven’t written since 21/03, i.e. for two weeks. It also means that my fear about sharing things that are too intimate was indeed nothing to worry about. I guess it could still be the case that I only have things to say about intimate topics, but at least I’m making strides in keeping the writing for myself and for my blog as two separate things.
Finally, it also means that my original estimate of completing the 100 posts in 130 days may be too ambitious. It has been 15 days since my original post, and this is my third post, so I have a 115 days to write the other 97 posts, or about 1.2 days per post. I will change my estimate to 200 days. That’s much more than my most pessimistic estimate when I started, and I still think writing two posts a day could be too optimistic, specially given that I’m still behind due to the lack of posts in the last 14 days.
However, I’m not taking these estimates too seriously, they are more of a loose attempt to keep track of how long this is taking me and to give myself some sense of urgency and avoid procrastinating. I’m happy to keep extending these estimates for now if that’s what is necessary, and I like the ritual of reviewing how long this project is taking and how much time I’m spending on it.
One might think that after 14 days without writing my motivation for this project could have wavered. I certainly seemed to expect that in my first posts. However I would actually say may motivation has become stronger. I’m really happy with the decision to focus on just blog posts, and I’m really excited to see what I will feel after being 100 posts more prolific. I’m looking forward to experimenting, to talking about different topics and figuring out what my talking points may be after actually revisiting them in public a few times, not just because I think a lot about them in my head.
Apple released a new immersive sports video last week, and from what I’ve heard it is a bit of a mess. It has a lot of cuts, and, according to Ben Thompson from Stratechery, “while the format is immersive, the video itself isn’t”. This is the first immersive video Apple releases since the Vision Pro came out in late January, and as Thompson says, that may be the problem here. Releasing just one video every couple of months, if at all, doesn’t give you the opportunity to experiment enough to figure out what to do with a new medium. Thinking about this, I have become more convinced that I want to write my 100 posts, and try to be very prolific, if only for a short time. There are lessons to be learnt while releasing stuff that you won’t be able to learn by being a perfectionist. I have known that for a long time, but I still have to internalise it.
There’s many bloggers, like visakanv or Thompson, that I deeply admire. Reading them often makes me think that I want to be a blogger myself, or at least that I want to make things in public, however I’ve always strained to actually do it because of the many anxieties around it. Even if I have started a few times, I have always struggled to maintain the motivation for longer than a few pieces of content. I’m still at post 3, so it’s hard to tell if this time will be any different. However, it does feel different for me. The constraint to just write posts, the goal to just focus on being prolific, and the fact that I’m not hyping the project up or making it excessively complicated and public – all these factors make me think that I can do it this time. After all, “becoming a blogger” is horribly generic and without a clear milestone, but “writing 100 posts” is genius because I can just focus on the blog posts. Whether I keep posting after 100 or not, is just a matter of how the project goes and whether I still want to write once I have built the habit.