I got up this morning, made myself a large cappuccino, and logged on. So far so good. I usually start the day like this and it suits me well enough. I checked my email (just one rejection – not so bad) and then started scanning the blogs I subscribe to. It took me two hours to get through them all.
Two hours!
Part of the problem is that I like blogs. I love finding new bloggers. I like the way all these people pour out their thoughts and ideas and my feed reader grabs it all and serves it up to me. It takes me so long to get through them not just because I subscribe to so many, and not just because I actually read them all, but because, when I read them, it sparks off loads of ideas of my own and I just have to comment. It’s fun. It’s stimulating. And there are so many clever, articulate people out there I want to talk to.
Trouble is, I’m not getting any work done. The two hours I spent on this could have been used to write some of my new novel, or the three short stories I’m working on, or to get on with building the gazebo (or a dozen other things that are waiting for my attention).
So, with a grim expression and a hardened heart, I went through my subscriptions and hacked away at them until there were only the barest essentials left. There are still 50-odd feeds I’m subscribed to, but at least I no longer have 200-odd! It took a while, I admit (unsubscribing is a much slower process than subscribing – part of the problem no doubt) but my mornings should be freer because of it.
Now I’m moving on to rationalise the rest of my day.
I guess even the best daily newspaper / magazine in the world can get too long. I find it hard to keep up with the bloggers who post frequently, I found myself getting a bit fretful that I wasn’t keeping up with someone who writes 3 posts a day – then I realised I have to work!
200 blogs? Hoohah, that’s a few. 50 is still plenty. Yeah, the internet is a distracting place, isn’t it?
Graham, I’m with you on this! I got home 96 minutes ago and I’m still working through a backlog of posts and emails and feeds and whatnot. I love it and love what people have to say, it’s one endless conversation. But… I’ve decided that I’m going to have to block in dedicated online time and log off for the rest of it. It’s not good for the health either! You’re right to prune things back. Sometimes I think we are what we choose.
And by no strange coincidence, all three of your blogs (Em, Isaac and Jason) are still in the 50 I’ve hung on to!
I must say, Emma, that frequency of blogging was one of the criteria that weighed against certain blogs (iO9 for example). In general, I’d rather read one thoughtful and thought-provoking post a fortnight than three bits of fluff each day. (Isn’t that why God invented Twitter, to get all that stuff out of the blogsphere?)
I also hung on to my daily Dilbert, XKCD and APOD. Man cannot live by bread alone!
PHEW! I must confess that I was worried there! I love you stopping by at my place, in my mind, you are one of the first people I ever connected with online, so you’ll always be special to me.
I’m with you on the more thoughtful less often thing – less pressure on us and more oompf in the posts.
@Jason – You keep writing posts I am dying to respond to but don’t have time right now – they are so thought-proving I want to respond properly! You know, you even made me think about setting aside a Paperback Jack time every weekend to write back! (Tho this weekend is out… damn)
Thanks Emma. And I’m going to keep stopping by at your place until you’re such a big-shot author that you don’t want to mix with the hoi-poloi any more.
That made me laugh. Stick with my blog until I am such a big shot author that I can afford to visit Australia! That would be cool. We could get drunk together and wax nostalgic about your pre-Wordpress days, when the world was young and anything seemed possible. How does that sound?
Sounds great. I’ll keep reading the best-seller lists so I’ll know when to expect you
Hey, thanks for keeping my blog in that list
I’ve made a goal this week to shorten my blog posts (they’re becoming marathons!), but I’m still going to be updating daily.
Love the new banner, btw!
Isaac, the banners rotate at random (one of the features of my template) so I don’t know which one you liked!
As for blog frequency, you are probably right to aim for daily posts. Blogger lore has it that you won’t generate any decent search engine traffic to your blog until you have over 200 posts there. From my own experience, it seems to be true enough. It itook me about 2 years to reach 200 posts at the rate I was blogging. (I’m now at about 315, I get 500 unique visits a month, and approximately a third of those are from Google searches. Visits per month definitely increase during periods of frequent blogging and drop off during quiet times.)
The banner was the one with the books in the background and the dog with his nose in the camera. I’m surprised I haven’t noticed the rotating banners before now.