One of my coworkers, Luca Sartoni, is trying an experiment this month: every day his goal is to publish a post on his blog but spend no more than 10 minutes writing it. He sets a timer when he begins and at the 10 minute mark he puts a quick final polish on it and hits publish.
I really like that approach because it forces you not to overthink things. The majority of recent posts on this blog took a long time to prepare (I’m looking at you, backpropagation tutorial) and while I enjoy writing longform technical posts like that, if I limit myself to those then it’s unlikely that I’ll post very often. This year, for example, I’ve only published 8 posts which is less than ideal considering I work for a blogging service :).
I’ve tried this before, but always wind up falling back into the trap of spending too much time on the posts which leads me to not write very often. So lets try this: Joel, Ryan, and Adam, oh great coworking buddies, if I go more than a week between posts or if I start only publishing long posts, I’ll buy you all coffee next time we meet up. Hold me to it!
Matt Mazur 
It was kinda difficult at the beginning to letting go. If you are used to long formats, with a lot of research and very precise directions, it can be difficult to limit yourself to 10 minutes. Many of your posts will bomb. As soon as you get used to that, the magic starts, and you finally feel free to press publish way more easily. I have never felt so relaxed about blogging :) Keep it up!
Big props to Andrea Badgley, who introduced me to this experiment.
Thanks, yeah, I’ll admit even the three paragraphs in the post above took about 30 minutes to write, hah. Hopefully as I write more often I’ll get over that habit of revising each post 5 times before finally hitting publish :).
Looking forward to it! I did NaBloPoMo a couple of times and it was HARD.
A post a day is a bit ambitious for me given me track record of less than one per month, but if I can keep up with one per week maybe that’s something I’ll try one day. Seems crazy hard though…
One per week seems like a perfectly reasonable goal to me.
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