For me, this whole write-something-every-day thing has been enlightening, exhilarating and exhausting all at once. It’s only become exhausting recently though.

Writing something every day is one of those goals every writer has but may not have the fortitude to achieve. I’m no different — I’m likely going to give up on this goal in the very near future.

It’s not just about being exhausting, however. There are nights where you just want to veg and play video games rather than throwing something together for the blog. There are times when you don’t have a fully formed opinion and you sort of puke it out into existence. Or you create filler pieces to get through a few days.

That stuff is all par for the course, I think.

It’s the other impacts that have me wanting to pause.

For the first few weeks, I had ideas. I had a backlog of things I wanted to write about — things I wanted to spout my opinion about. My writing goal was fresh and inspiration was at an all-time high. At that particular time, I had more time on my hands as well.

But over time, I came to prioritize short blog posts because they were easy to publish. The shorter the post with the shorter the complete thought, the better.

I have fallen away from photography, as it takes quite a lot more time to setup lighting, shoot the photo, edit the photo, and publish the photo. Not that this post requires a photo — and not that every post requires a photo! — but I’m writing at 10:08PM on the day prior and the last thing I want to do is pull out the camera for a quick photo. I’m not the greatest product photographer in the world, but I’d classify it as a strength and should highlight it more often than I have.

I have found I’m writing about half-baked ideas for the sake of writing. I’d like to comment further about the 14-inch MacBook Pro’s display, I/O, and Windows 11 on ARM performance, but I haven’t had the chance to sit-down and formalize my thoughts, let alone write them out. I’ve been scared of putting something together only to miss an important detail.

And more than anything, I am finding my quality to be receding. The faster you need to put something together, the more reliant you become on conversational writing.

Conversational writing is great! I love reading posts where it feels like I’m having a direct conversation with the writer and somehow the writer knows exactly what I’m thinking at that point in time.

But I also want to be tighter. More concise. More considerate of readers’ time. More articulate.

I want one post to be one idea. The next post to be the next idea. And so on. Complete ideas, too. Not just some half-garbled thought process that ends in a “Dang, I was naive,” or “Yeah, I tried that for two weeks and then it just didn’t work for me.”

So, in reflection: This three month daily writing habit has been an amazing experience. I’ve learned what I enjoy writing about. I’ve learned what I don’t enjoy writing about. I’ve learned what happens when I need to crank something out for the next day. I’ve learned what happens to my growing list of ideas that get put off for another week.

I’ve also learned that I really enjoy meeting this particular goal. It’s a bunch of fun to hit the publish button, check off the task in Things, and go about the rest of the day looking for another idea for the next day.

Hopefully an extra off-day or two each week will provide enough time to hash out some of the bigger and deeper ideas I have brewing.

And hopefully those off-days don’t result in off-weeks and off-months like they did in the past.