Building New Habits

While I tend to read and consume a lot of information, I tend to write for specific purposes.

There are two reasons for this:

1. Attention is limited, and there’s already a lot of great content out there that doesn’t get enough attention. Also, my kids spend the whole day shouting and talking about whatever they think of, and it feels like there’s already enough noise without my adding to it.
2. Messages are most useful when they are well-considered and tailored to their audience. This takes effort — it’s work for me to write an email, a document, a specification, because I need to put aside time to put myself in the reader’s mind and think about how to best convey the information to them. I often end up rereading and rewriting sentences and paragraphs to make sure that my tone and explanation are clear. And sometimes I still screw it up!

All that is to say that blogging (or even journaling) isn’t something that I’m used to. So a lot of this early content is probably going to be me throwing things against a wall and figuring out what’s easy to write, what’s important but harder to write, and how to get that writing out. I don’t know if writing is like a muscle that will grow stronger with use, but not practicing doesn’t seem like a strategy to make writing easier.

So, why do this at all?

Occasionally, I have ideas that are a bit more than half-baked, but are too long to fit in 2800 characters (yes, I realize I’m using Twitter wrong). I’m pretty sure the ideas aren’t the final answer, but I’d like to put them down somewhere and add them to the conversation.

This is a place for that, but also a place to practice writing; until I get much better, I expect myself to be the primary audience. Once I have some good content, I’ll probably see about having a “best of” list on the side, rather than just the list of most recent posts.

One more reason!

In addition to journaling and sharing ideas, there’s one more reason to start this. Sometimes, I end up building something sort of interesting by piecing together stuff I found in a bunch of different places. I could put these recipes in several places (GitHub repos or gists and rubber-ducking on StackOverflow being prime candidates), but there’s something about having my own site and my own formatting tools that seems appealing.