Since last fall, I’ve been considering relaxing my firm commitment to the weekly cadence of publishing the blog. I started the blog as an experiment and committed to shipping weekly for at least a year. Having now written weekly for over two years and shipped over 100 posts, I consider it a highly successful experiment. I have had a lot of fun with it. It’s catalyzed many interesting and unexpected conversations with family, friends, and professional contacts, and been excellent validation for how highly I value synthesizing thought in writing. Looking back at my initial goals I feel I’ve satisfied all of them.

The motivation for writing the blog has always been intrinsic. More recently, the number of times I have started to feel writing the post is a chore has grown to a higher proportion than I would like. It’s certainly not a burden every week, and I never expected writing a weekly post to feel exclusively joyous as no meaningful work ever really is, but the ratio is currently too lopsided.

This past week, I didn’t ship for the first time. It wasn’t a mistake or unintentional. I simply decided, I don’t want to ship something forced and it’s time to make a change. My biggest fear with dropping the weekly commitment, and what has prevented me from taking action to date, is sacrificing a hard and fast rule means I run the risk of de-prioritizing writing and it never happening. The perspective I’ve seen shared by professional authors on writing is unanimous: great writing cannot be achieved unless practiced often and consistently, and it’s not exclusively a joy. Sometimes it sucks and that is part of the process. But I am not a professional writer, and this is only a creative passion.

So with that, I am dropping my commitment to ship on a weekly basis but will maintain the blog and ship something when I have an urge to do so. I’m not certain how frequently that will be. This decision feels right and as with all experiments, I’ll change course over time as needed. Thank you to everyone who has engaged with me on the content. That has been a motivator for me over time.