Beating the Hare or How Not to End Up in the Mental Ward

I worry a lot. I worry that I don’t write posts often enough. I worry that I don’t comment enough on other blogs. I worry that I don’t make enough real comments at social networks, instead taking the easy route of quoting part of the page.

But going slow is just going slow. Yes, you can kill yourself to gain momentum or you can go at your own rate. But slip up once will you are killing yourself making sure you are keeping up with a minimum you have set up in your head, and it can send you in a tailspin. Falling short of a goal once makes the second one easier to give up on.

Maybe there should be another way to look at the issue of noise online, of keeping up. You can only move so fast. And running at 100% all the time may not really be 100%. The 100% may explain your stress level, but is that 100% making it to your work or is it getting lost in the twists and turns of trying to do too much.

I have consistently gained subscribers and traffic here at a nice slow rate. The rate has not changed much, but I post less often. I once posted daily and now it is weekly at most. And this last couple of weeks, with only two posts, I have gained 25% of the subscribers I have now.

And yes I realize that if I posted more often, I would create more content for search engines and subscribers alike. But I don’t panic as often. It doesn’t help anyway.

You can be the turtle or the hare and eventually reach the finish line.

And traffic on the internet sticks a bit. So while this blog has never crashed as a result of having a post Dugg, I can be relatively sure that I will have more traffic and subscribers here next month than this one.

Sometimes the invisible takes precedence. Right now I am in a developing mode and I’m running with it. More internet real estate is always a good thing. And when a job or my day job takes me in that direction, the rest of my day sometimes follow. The structure of my network is changing. I am cleaning cobwebs and fixing gaping holes. And then once spring cleaning and development is done for a bit, I will have a much better platform to work from.

It goes around in a cycle that turns exceeding slow with a full-time job and a family, but the knowledge, traffic and spread builds with time, whether it be one post a day or one post a week. The key is to find the cycle that keeps you interested without burning out. Pushing yourself is good. Goals are good. But a nervous breakdown isn’t. Creating a schedule that eats up your whole day leaves no room for new knowledge. This is a diverse and intricate landscape and knowing how the parts work helps you to see the whole more completely. It also helps with boredom.

An hour a day is better than 16 hours a day until you burn out because you have had no results in a month. And the next time you are beating yourself up about getting a blog post done and keeping up the promotion of your blog or site, turn time back to about a year ago. Who were the bloggers that were going to the top of the blogosphere? Are they still moving in that direction?

Any day  you wake up is a good one and any day you are here making progress is a step in the right direction.

Stability and putting one foot in front of the other beats hype.