In mid-December, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write a blog post every day in January.
After looking at my blog, I noticed it had been almost two years since I last posted (late January 2019). Before that, I wrote one post in July 2018 and nothing in 2017.
Posting Daily
Posting every day allowed me to write a bunch at first about things from 2020 and the pandemic. Along with some things I wanted to say and others that came up.
Part of the issue was I tended to write longer posts with example code. Which needed to be coded semantically and accessibly, of course. So it took a long time to write them and then post them if I ever did. So I stopped for the most part.
Shorter Blog Posts
So I decided the posts would be short. In my mind, that meant 500 to 1,000 words. It seems most of the blog posts in January 2021 ended up being between 300 and 600 words on average.
The longest post was the first one on January 1st at 926 words. The shortest one was 197 words about a week ago.
What Were the Numbers
I went back and wrote down the number of words for each post in January. The total words I wrote were 14,789 for an average of 477 and some change per day.
NOTE – I only had to add all the words per day up three times to get totals to match twice.
It’s Tough Blogging Daily
After writing a post every day for a month now, I’m not sure how Austin Kleon and others find the time to post daily. Or have ideas most days. Occasion they skip a day or so. Either way, I have found it to be hard to do every day. It’s a lot of work to do it more than a few times a week.
Posting Weekly
After posting every day for a month, I found it took about an hour to two hours daily for each post. Some days three hours if I was working on more than one psst.
Meaning I would come up with an idea or two, outline them, maybe even write the first draft. Or the next day, finish the post and edit it. Then post it or if I was writing on the weekends or had the time started one for a few days in advance.
I think spending four or five hours a week writing a post or two would be good.
Doing so would give me eight or ten hours back. That I had been using to write, edit, and post for other things like time to read and learn to improve my skills. Say in JavaScript, CSS Grid, etc. Or maybe cooking, coding, relaxing, etc.
Or even spending time thinking about what I want to be when I group.