I started 2012 with a promise to blog five times a week. I created the plan, shared it here and made a start in January. I stuck to the rhythm with lots of enthusiasm for most of January & about half of February. And then I started missing posts. Slowly but surely I missed sharing an episode of Culture is Everything TV here or responding to an Ask Tristan question there. My rhythm was quickly becoming ancient history. And it worried me. But it didn't worry me enough to regain the lost momentum.
For the last 3 weeks I've taken a deliberate break from blogging to understand why I lost that blogging momentum. Why did I slowly let myself become less and less disciplined until I was only posting once or twice a week? Why did I dread the thought of sitting down to write? Why did I let it bother me?
Well, the answer to the question "why did I let it bother me?" was easy: I was compromising one of my personal values. Respecting everyone by always doing what I say I'll do is not only a core value of The Physio Co, it's one of my own values. I'd promised to post 5 times per week and I wasn't living up to my own expectations. I'd let myself down and I'd let you, the reader down. For that, I'm truly sorry. I hope you can forgive me.
The other questions were much harder to answer. I asked myself whether I really liked writing. Maybe I didn't want to write any more? I asked myself if I was happier when writing or not writing. I asked myself whether I'd be happy never writing another post again. And then I figured it out: I really didn't like the rhythm I'd created! My loss of momentum was because of that structured, blog-five-times-a-week plan. The plan just wasn't fun for me.
You see, I first started blogging on 1 January 2011 with a goal to blog about one thing that I learnt or found interesting every day for a year. And I loved it! In my first year, I wrote over 200 posts and even won a blogging award (thanks SmartCompany!). And then, in 2012, for some reason, I decided to create a different rhythm, a more complex one. And this complex rhythm was where my loss of enthusiasm started. I've only posted 51 times in almost 6 months!
So, from now on, it's back to what I love: writing and speaking about what I learn and what fascinates me. I promise to post at least a few times every week. And I promise to write from my heart . It's back to basics for me. Stay tuned..
(And of course, if you've got a question or comment, please drop me a line down below!)