On Finishing Blog Posts

It seems to be relatively easy to generate about two blog posts a week if you pre-commit to doing so.

Admittedly, the quality of these posts might not be uniformly high. This is more of a concern, though, for blogs that have regular readers with high expectations. Fortunately, for us, the problem of "high expectations" is easy to fix: just write posts so that they can update their expectations downwards.

Problems do start to emerge though when we take the pre-commitment away. After all, if there is no time pressure, why not make posts actually good? We could just spend some more time on them.

Or, alternatively, use our precious time not just to try patching up existing and bad post ideas; work on something that's actually better from the start!

And then give them some more time.

Unless you start thinking it'd now be better to re-visit some of the above steps.

(This is demonstrably... not working.)

Meanwhile, if you keep not finishing things, you're more likely to enter a spiral of doom, convincing yourself (in a reflexively well-justified way), that you are fairly unlikely to finish any of them.

Conclusion: there should be more low-quality blog posts whose existence is ensured by Beeminder.

(Generalization of the principle to other areas of life is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Thus: this post hereby exists. Also:

(note the upward-and-to-the-right line on the top.)