Hello Dear Reader, thanks for stopping by and all wishes for a Happy New Year to you.
The turning of the year is a time with plenty of traditions. There are fireworks, Xmas and everything with family… Then web media is filled with articles listing the Best of Year X, The Worst of Year X and what to look forward to in year X+1. And there is the personal opportunity to check a few more things on the To-Do List and do some general cleanup in order to start the new year with a clean slate.
My checklist was topped by new lamps for the living room and closing a hole in an old, unused chimney (and thanks to the relative who let me help him do it). The new years cleanup focused on vacuum packing children’s clothes, sorting books and throwing away two big boxes full of all the cases for my CD collection, which felt surprisingly good. And then there was was the question about what to do with this blog.
2016 has not been a productive year for this blog and I keep having a nagging feeling because of that. When I come across blogs on the net I usually check if they are alive with recent and regular posting, or if they are dead without activity, and this blog has held on to dear life, but I go this a nagging feeling for a long time now, with me not being satisfied with the blog not meeting my own ambitions. At the same time, there are some perfectly good reason why I don’t get much Done on the blog:
- First I got this annoying kind of perfectionism, where I tend to delay working on a task until I sufficient time in order to produce the perfect output. Because of this, many posts never make it out of my head, or at most they became bullet outline list in perpetual draft documents.
- Second there is the matter of time, which I am sure most people with little children recognize: My (blog) productivity dropped when our second daughter was born, so regardless how great an idea for a post I got in my head, when I wake up 5:30 in the morning, then before I have picked up the kids after work, cooked dinner, read a story and served dinner and put everyone to bed, cleaned the kitchen and done the rest of today’s Work, I don’t get a lot writing done (similarly my gamer career is effectively on hold, with my 2016 PC gaming of the year being less than 24 hours according to Steam).
There just are other things that must be done first.
Still, I really like writing and even though it was only my second season keeping log of the garden and greenhouse, I already found it useful to go back and check what was done last year.
So to get some writing done I could start by going through my drafts posts:
- Finish all posts that are work-in-progress, like my Smartphone MuSCoW series.
- Add those that are missing, like the one about Disney Princesses as role models (which only has to be translated to English and have a lot of hyperlinks added)
- Delete those that aren’t interesting anyway or just not relevant any longer relevant, like the one about Microsoft’s 26.7 Billion used acquisition of LinkedIn, which filled the news for almost a week in June until everyone with an opinion had shared it (except myself, obviously, but noting that the market for mature, well-grown social networks is small, and even smaller if you want them to be relevant for your CRM business, doesn’t need an entire post). Likewise, I also missed the opportunity to comment on Microsoft joining the Linux foundation, but Marc Andreesen covered the essentials already in 1995, which is many versions of Windows and Web Browsers ago (and Windows outlasted Netscape), but as an Office 365 user I can only agree that the OS and desktop software has been commoditized.
- Keep the journal posts going for 2017.
Then, thinking back to the ambition of this site – creating some sensible content for the web when time permits, I might still get something written. Or perhaps improve my gamer stats.
Happy new year!