Rambling on blogging motivations and energy

It might be obvious, but I really enjoy writing on my website. Why would I do it otherwise? I’m not looking for earning money with this website and I don’t care about becoming a “well known blogger”. As I’ve wrote before (4 years ago already!), I blog for myself (and I even recently thanked myself for doing it).

I know other people sometimes force themselves to make a habit of posting daily (or close to). And while I’m impressed by such devotion and motivation, this isn’t what I want for myself. I only write when I want to and don’t impose myself a schedule.

This is the main reason I don’t participate in any of the many blogging challenges. Truth be told, I really enjoy these challenges, such as WeBlogPoMo (in May), Junited (in June), JulyReply (July) or the next one in August: Blaugust. They are not all “monthly” challenge, like the 100DaysToOffload which has been running for multiple years now. Such challenges are great to really transform writing to a habit. And I’m sure there are others I’m not aware off. The point being I do like them because:

• They show the blogosphere is still alive and vibrant;
• It (re)motivates old bloggers to restart writing;
• It motivates new people to create their blog/website;
• It brings mutual inspirations and often start group discussions (my favorite one);
• Raise chances of seeing new interesting content in my feed reader or via mastodon.

But I don’t participate in them… It may sounds paradoxical, but I do not want that pressure for myself. Blogging, for me, is a fun thing to do, same as managing my homelab or sometimes coding some stuff. But any of these activities takes time, energy and motivation. And my day job and other IRL activities also takes time, energy and motivation… And sometimes they take too much of these things to have enough remaining for blogging and nerd related activities.

Side note, it is also true (to some extent) about reading, but it depends on the complexity of the books I’m reading. That’s why I often have multiple books in parallel, always trying to have a simple one for those days. If I don’t, I often have some manga to read anyway as an easy read.

Others may disagree, but for me, blogging is time and energy consuming. Maybe it is because I can’t write short post and always end up writing longer pieces than I expected (again with this post), maybe it is because I don’t write in my native language, but for sure it does require some motivation and a even more energy. Motivation, most of the time, is not the problem. I always have many drafts (more or less advanced) or todo for new posts and I often think about stuff I want to write about during the day. Sometimes I even add some bullet points to the post I want to write about at the end of the day thinking it will then be “just” a matter of adding more words around these bullet points.

But the reality is, at the end of the day, if my day job was long and/or very intense, or if other activities took too much times, the energy remaining at night to open my editor and start adding words is too low. Even though I may want to, I don’t feel energized enough to actually do it.

And that’s fine! As I said, blogging mainly for myself without following any rules makes me very ok with nights I don’t want to do any writing, devops or coding. Even though I thought about it a lot during the day. I always managed to remove this fake pressure from myself and just write when and if I wanted to.

Of course, it means that this blog has a very chaotic schedule. There are months where I publish a post every 2 or 3 days, and months where nothing happens… So what? Most of the (extermely) limited number of readers of this blog (if not all) use RSS feeds to follow new content. So the only things happening really is just my blog will not appear in their reader for a while. And I can (very easily) live with that :D.

I do admit that I still want to write somewhat regularly, not like previous years where I could have 6 months without a post. But the minimum I want to do is 1 post a month, which is reasonable. This year started well, and as I do not count the break during April / May due to my data loss, which was really an good reason for the break and an exceptional (at least I hope so) event, I’m way more active than my “minimal plan”.

There are days though where I’m not completely toast but still tired. During those days, to evaluate my motivation and energy, I force myself for 5 minutes. After just 5 minutes, I’m allowed to just stop and do something else. One of two things can happen during those 5 minutes: either I didn’t write anything (or just a couple of sentences), and in that case just stop because it will go nowhere. Or I just didn’t notice the 5 minutes mark and kept going. In those later cases, I usually realize after 15 or 20 minutes that I have many words already written and that usually motivates me enough to keep going and try to finish the post.

That’s it. By doing this 5 minutes exercise, I most of the time keep going :). There are (many) days where I don’t even go through this 5 minutes challenge, specially when I really don’t feel it or if I feel energy-less. But as said, I’m very ok with it, because I know at least a couple of time during a given month it will work and I’ll be able to keep this site “alive”.

This post you are reading actually started like that, with me being motivated but tired after a long and intensive work day. Well, 45 minutes later, I’m writing this conclusion and will probably publish this post in the next 30 minutes or so. So I guess it worked this time!

My only advise (and that’s also for my future self reading this) is: don’t forget you do it for the pleasure of doing it, for yourself first and not for an audience or “fame”. Remove that pressure and don’t do it on those days you feel it is will be a chore for sure. But when hesitating, just try and throw some words and you might be surprise how quickly you may have changed your mindset.

I certainly didn’t plan to finish this post today when I entered the “5 minutes test period” and clearly didn’t expect to write such a long rambling post… But here I am :).

Take care!