Three Years of Blogging 🥂

Three years and counting! Keeping up a habit for this long is quite uncommon for someone who gets as easily distracted as I do. Especially with a mind as busy (we'll get to that).

Writing is still treating me nicely. It allows me to thoroughly explore my mind. I never expected that writing would do this for me. As a matter of fact, I have only learned this after writing for some time. In the very beginning, I actually believed that all there is to write about was web accessibility—alias my favourite topic at work back then. When I launched my blog, I was very strict with myself—I didn't allow myself to write about anything else—but luckily, I soon realised how stupid that was. To this day, I still like to write about accessibility, user experience design and software altogether, but I equally enjoy writing about travel, digital minimalism, insomnia or writing itself. When I think back to the time I started out, it's hard to believe that there ever was a time when I had no idea what to write about.

Today, much rather, it's the other way around—I have too many ideas what to write about.

At first glance, this really doesn't sound like a problem. However, having too many ideas does turns into a problem when you have so many ideas that you can't decide which one to focus on.

This happens in my occasional intense phases of inspiration, oftentimes triggered by travel. When I was travelling solo in England last year for instance, I was in said state of mind—one thought chased another and it was difficult to focus on one idea at a time.

Here is a stream of my thoughts and ideas back then:

• I thought about the feeds and the endless content that keeps on appearing on my phone. I wrote a first draft of My Mind is a Mess, which I let sitting in my notes for months before finally publishing it in January of this year.
• I wrote Stop Throwing Stones, which I published a few days after my trip.
• I wrote a bit about solo travelling, but haven't finished writing it to this day.
• I noted down that I need a 26 litre backpack (obviously, not all my ideas are writing ideas).
• I wrote down an idea of of what could make a nice blog post: "Writing a travel diary", which I haven't thought about ever since.
• I wrote down more ideas that I wanted to think about: Speech-to-text, walking meditations, internet friends and internet hate.
• I thought of a potential sequel to The Mystery of the Duck Costume, about trusting software and how that is changing in times of AI (can we still trust software?).
• I thought about "European/Continental English" (English for people who pick it up as a second language) and how that completely differs from the English spoken by native speakers.
• I wrote a draft about empathy (I suppose because I felt disturbed by someone on the train), that I still haven't published to this day.
• I wrote Skype Dial Pad.
• When I was heading to the airport, I received an email by WizzAir that made me furious, as they cancelled my flight very short-term. After returning home, I had part of this experience written up in a post I called "Designing for Empathy". Not published to this day.
• When there was severe turbulence on the plane, I was quite sure that I was about to die and wrote a short essay about my fear of flying. I actually considered publishing it, when Kev recently wrote about his own fear of flying, but in the end, I decided against it.

More often than not, the reason why my writing ideas never turn into blog posts is my high standards. "Designing for Empathy" could have been such a sweet design analysis of the WizzAir experience combined with a great story. It never saw the light of day, because I wasn't happy with what I had produced up to that point. Then, probably everyday life interfered and I assume that some stupid work topic put me in a bad mood and I just went on with my life.

Another reason is that often I don't think things through to the end. Take my potential blog post about solo travelling for instance: I wrote about how difficult it is to get back in the spirit of it. How in the first days, I felt lonely and how it wasn't fun at all. Only after a couple of days by myself, I remembered that you needed some time to adapt to the solitude and how suddenly, solo travelling turned out to be very exciting. I even remembered one of my first solo travel adventures in Japan that I wanted to write about too. But I didn't even get to that, because another idea popped up and I just stopped thinking about this topic altogether.

There's some ways I can deal with these problems. When it comes to my perfectionism, I'm trying to pick up Oliver Burkeman's Seventy per cent rule. Instead of perfect, the aim is "good enough". But easier said than done, am I right? Concerning the velocity of thoughts in my inspiration phases: well, I just need to think things through. Now that I have identified the issue, it's a lot easier to do something about it the next time it occurs.

With so many ideas in my notes, it also really helped to finally organize them and transfer them to my drafts folder. I also used this opportunity to come up with categories for my blog posts and build a blog post filter).

Anyway, it's been three years of blogging. Three years! Which leaves me only with the words I say every year: starting a blog is the best thing I ever did on the internet. Still.

Peace. ✌️