This post marks the one year anniversary of publishing Dave’s Take. I am thankful to have started. While I have some gripes with the weekly cadence, described below, the experience has exceeded expectations.
Having a weekly publishing cadence forces a trade off between quality and consistency. There are several topics I would prefer to share more comprehensive reflections about but know doing so would require either investing more time each week, which I’m presently unwilling to do, or taking multiple weeks. And I’m certain if I were to give up the weekly cadence, a host of other priorities would supersede writing and the likelihood of me finding the time to expand on a meatier topic would be low. The weekly commitment ensures I ship, no matter what, even if additional time would allow for a more complete thought or a higher quality final product. I’ve accepted that and plan to continue to publish weekly. Perhaps in the future, I will dedicate more time to bigger topics.
Now that a year has passed, what was initially an anxiety-inducing weekly event has become part of my regular weekly rhythm. At the onset, I had roughly ~50-60 ideas on topics I believed would make good content. I pre-planned those to avoid a scenario where I started the week having nothing to publish. Throughout the year, I used ~3/4 of those pre-planned ideas. The other ~1/4 I felt compelled to write about spontaneously.
I expect as the number of pre-planned ideas dwindles, the content will skew more towards personal reflections; however, I spend a lot of mental energy on professional related topics and will continue to incorporate those ideas.
One unexpected, though seemingly obvious on reflection, learning is that the writing is much more enjoyable when I do it for me. When I feel like I’m writing for some person or audience, it tends to feel forced. If I get a kick out of what I put on the page, it’s an enjoyable effort. This will be the lens by which I continue to publish.